Page 52 of The Fire Line

“No.”

“Tess.”

“I booked it.”

“Then I’ll—”

“Harris.”

He stopped.

She stood and picked up her purse. “I open tomorrow. You don’t owe me an explanation, but don’t make me stand here while you invent one.”

Fair.

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“You rarely are.”

That got another short laugh from him.

Tessa had every right to be angry. Instead, she adjusted the strap of her purse and told him to drive safely before leaving.

Harris remained long enough to look at the crooked bedspread and his jacket on the floor, evidence of a plan that had worked for perhaps thirty seconds. Then he picked up the jacket and switched off the light.

He had drunk enough that driving immediately would have been stupid, so he stayed put. There was an all-night gas station a short walk down the highway; Harris bought two coffees there and carried them back to the motel lot, where he sat in his truck with the windows down while enough time passed for the second to go cold.

Semis crossed the parking lot at long intervals, their headlights sweeping over the pumps and motel. Somewhere beyond the highway, sprinklers clicked across a narrow strip of landscaping, and wet dirt briefly cut through the smells of fuel, hot asphalt, and cigarettes.

Harris lit another one.

The attraction to men was not new. He had known about that part of himself for most of his life, and nobody else knew.

Nobody still alive, at least.

A boy changing shirts when Harris was sixteen. A ranch hand one summer who watched him long enough that Harris spent weeks making sure he never watched back. A man in a Billings bar who bought him a drink and rested one hand on Harris’s arm in a way that left no room for misunderstanding.

Nothing had happened. Harris had continued with his life, and then there had been Claire.

He had chosen her without hesitation, loved her, and wanted her. There had never been anything false about the way he felt when she climbed into his lap or caught his hand and pulled him toward their bedroom. He had not spent twelve years wishing she were somebody else.

Men had existed beyond the life he chose, roads visible from a distance that led somewhere he had no reason to go. Harris knew they were there and kept driving the direction he had already picked.

Until Navarro.

If the problem had simply been that Harris wanted a man, there were ways to solve that without involving Navarro at all.

He could have driven farther—to Bozeman, another county, somewhere nobody knew his family or cared where he lived. There were bars. Apps, probably. Places where men went specifically to find what Harris had spent his life avoiding.

He could make it anonymous and contained. Something physical. Something that happened once and remained wherever he left it.

Except tonight had removed the last useful excuse.

This was not pressure that needed somewhere to go. It was not novelty, or proximity, or Harris finally noticing a part of himself strongly enough that any available man would have done.

Tessa had made that clear.

Harris did not want an anonymous man.