Page 103 of Forbidden Protector

"Give it time." He watches Holt get tackled by an eight-year-old with total, gleeful surrender. "I've known him since we were twenty-two, and he never laughed like that in any of it. Miles didn't do that. You did."

We're back on the road inside the hour, Miles's drawing of a black truck with too-big wheels riding shotgun on my dashboard now, a second one to keep the refrigerator company.

"Tell me something," Holt says, once Butte's gone small in the mirror. "You know everything about me. The Army, the ranch, the family. I don't know where you learned to throw a rope over a fence post like you were raised on one."

"Choteau. Until I was twelve." I watch the Big Belt Mountains come up blue on the horizon. "My parents split that year. My mom remarried, moved to California, and decided the desert suited her better than snow ever did. I don't talk to her much. She sends a card at Christmas that always has a beach on it, which feels like a joke she doesn't know she's making."

"No brothers, sisters?"

"Just me." I say it easy, because it stopped being a wound a long time ago, mostly. "I went to the University of Utah. Accounting degree, if you can believe a woman who almost failed statistics twice built her whole career on numbers."

"I believe it. You've been running numbers on me since an airport curb."

Holt's thumb moves once over my knuckles, slow, like he's marking down every fact I hand him somewhere I can't see.

"I decided I wanted the Bureau at twenty. Sat in a career fair in Salt Lake bored out of my mind, and a recruiter mentioned financial crimes, and something in me just locked onto it like a dog on a scent. Never wavered since."

"Twenty's young to know."

"Some people just know right away." I look at him, and I let him see exactly what I mean by it. Something in his jaw does the thing it does now when he's trying not to grin and losing. "The rest of it: my friends are river people. I guided three summers on the Colorado out of Moab before the Bureau. Ran the Yampa in high water once and nearly lost a raft full of Boy Scouts, which is a story I will tell you in full only after several drinks."

"Can't wait. What else?"

"Skied Alta and Snowbird every winter I could afford a pass. Trail ran the Wasatch until my knees started sending invoices." I watch a hawk work the thermals off the interstate. "I had a whole life before Rimrock, Blackwater. Turns out it just needed a trailer to move it."

"Good thing I've got a house with a mountain view and entirely too many dead things on the porch." His hand finds mine on the console, easy, certain. "Plenty of room for a trailer's worth of you."

"Hoover already voted. He did it the day I named him."

"Hoover doesn't get a vote."

The Front comes up ahead of us an hour past Butte, granite going gold in the late light.

Somewhere in front of that ridgeline is a house with a key already on my ring and a mountain view I've been dreaming about since a loft window in March.

"Ready to go home?" Holt asks, threading his fingers through mine on the console as he takes the exit off the interstate onto Highway 89, the last stretch running straight for Rimrock through the dusk.

"Yeah." I mean it more than the word carries. He said home, easy, like it was never a question.

And under it, where his fingers are still laced with mine, the same electricity there's always been, running straight down to my core. "I'm ready."

PART TWO: HOLT

Left-handed, I miss the steel plate at a hundred yards by a foot and a half.

I reset, breathe the way I taught men to breathe half a lifetime ago, and try again.

Second shot's closer. By the fifteenth I'm hitting more than I'm missing, which isn't where I used to live and isn't nowhere either. Nobody needs me to shoot anything on this ranch anymore. I'm doing it anyway, because some morning down the road there might be a reason to, and I'd rather be a man who can than a man who used to be able to.

I'm resetting for a sixteenth try when her arms come around me from behind, chin hooking over my shoulder, close enough that I catch coffee and that shampoo that makes my cock jump every damn time.

"You've been out here an hour." She presses a kiss below my ear. "Ready to saddle up, cowboy, or are you going to keep making that poor steel plate pay for something it didn't do?"

I sling the rifle and turn in her arms instead of answering. I've been sitting on this surprise for a month, and I nearly ruined it twice before I ever get her on the horse.

The trail starts behind Gunderson's bench and climbs straight into pine, the timber closing in cool and dark within the first quarter mile.

Nobody comes up here. That's the whole point of it.