Page 4 of Desired

"I didn't ask for help."

"Nope." The hammer rang off the pin, twice, three times, short controlled strokes, and the bent steel came straight under it like it had just been waiting for someone to insist. "You want to grab the latch end? Or you want to watch me do the whole thing, that's fine too, I'm told it's something."

"Told by who?"

"Mostly myself," he said, without a shred of shame in it.

She grabbed the latch end, because the alternatives were standing there being an audience or laughing, and neither one was going to happen. He counted off two and they lifted, and the difference was humiliating. With him on the hinge end the gate went up like it weighed nothing, level and easy, and he walked it over the pin and dropped it home with a clunk of metal finding metal, and it swung. It swung. Nine days of dragging it through the dirt and the thing floated open on one finger like it was showing off for him.

She hated the gate too, now. Everything out here liked him better.

"Mason," he said, and put his hand out over the top rail. "Royston. We're the next outfit over, west of you."

The name went by her meaning nothing, one more Texas name in a county full of them. She looked at his hand a beat longer than manners allowed, then took it. "Lauren."

His hand was warm and hard-calloused and it closed around hers carefully, the grip of a man who knew exactly how strong he was and throttled it back for company, and the warmth went up her arm and settled somewhere south of wise, and she took her hand back on schedule and her pulse kept right on shaking it.

"Lauren," he said, trying it out. "Lauren what?"

"Merritt."

Something crossed his face when she said it. There and gone, half a second, a stillness that shut the grin off from behind, and then the grin came back like it never left. Doing the math on the dead man, she figured. Small county. Everybody would've known her grandfather, or known of him, the old man on the falling-down place who kept to himself.

"Sorry about your granddad," he said, and it came out plainer than anything else he'd said, no shine on it at all. "Didn't know him well. He kept to himself. I'd see him at the feed store maybe twice a year, and he never once bought anything he couldn't carry in one trip."

It shouldn't have gotten to her. It was nothing, a feed-store detail from a stranger, and it was also more information about her grandfather than she'd gotten from any living soul since she was five, and her eyes went hot without permission and she turned and made a production of testing the gate latch until that was handled.

"So what is this," she said, when she could. "Neighbors show up with hammers out here?"

"Out here that's about all neighbors are. Somebody who shows up with the right tool before you knew to ask for it." He said it easy, leaning a forearm on the top rail, all that charm idling like the truck. "You'll want to oil those hinges. And that windmill's one hard blow from lying down in your tank, if you want the list."

"I have a list. It's got a waiting list."

"I'll bet it does." His eyes went past her, up the drive, over the sorry whole of it, the roof and the paint and the dead garden square, and came back to her, and there was something in them she couldn't name and didn't try. "You fixing to stay?"

"I'm fixing to sell." She said it like she'd been saying it to herself since Denver, flat and settled, a done thing. "Soon as the place won't embarrass the realtor."

He was quiet a second. A held beat, longer than the question deserved, and she couldn't read what was in it, and she decided it was judgment, some cowboy opinion about city women who sell family land, and her chin came up to meet it before she'd voted on that either.

"Well," was all he said. He straightened off the rail and collected his hammer and his channel locks, and she was not disappointed that he was leaving, and she'd have said so under oath. At the truck he turned, one hand on the door. "It's a good gate. Old ones like that, they hang straight for fifty years if somebody minds the pin." He tipped the hat, the whole insufferable inch of it. "Ma'am."

"That's not my name either."

"No," he said, getting in, and the grin was the last thing in the window as the truck rolled off her land.

She stood at her gate, her gate that swung, rust on both hands, and realized she was smiling, and stopped.

Five minutes. She'd known the man five minutes and her face was already off making decisions without her.

By the time she'd washed up and burned a grilled cheese and eaten it standing over the sink, the sun was going down the way it did out here, huge and unembarrassed, throwing gold across a hundred and sixty acres of everything she had left. Coyotes started up somewhere off toward the caprock. The house ticked and settled around her, and from the kitchen window she could just see the gate, hanging plumb in the last light, shut and latched like a kept promise.

It annoyed her more than the broken one ever had.

Because here was the thing about men like Mason Royston, and she made herself lay it out straight, the way she used to sit down with the shop's books in a bad month and read what they actually said. Charm was currency. Men like that were rich in it like other people were rich in money, and they spent it the same way, everywhere, on everyone, because it cost them nothing and it bought them the whole world smiling back. The hammer, the gate, the feed-store line about her grandfather that got her right in the sternum. Ten easy minutes out of his afternoon. It was the nicest thing anyone had done for her in a year, and that said a good deal more about her year than it said about him.

She dried the pan and put it where the pan apparently went, her hands already learning this kitchen against her direct orders, and she thought about his hands on the pin, the two short strokes and the steel coming straight, competence just lying around in him like loose change, and she allowed herself to be irritated by exactly how good that had looked. Then her hand remembered his closing around it, warm and careful and holding most of its strength back, and the heat went up her arm all over again in an empty kitchen hours later, and she said "stop it" out loud to nobody. Fine. He was something. Nobody was arguing that. She could think a man was something the way she could think a storm was something, from indoors, with the door shut.

Because whatever a man like that wanted, and men like that always wanted something, it was never you. She'd learned that one early and paid the full tuition. It was what you had, what you could do for them, what you were sitting on, and the wanting lasted exactly as long as the having did. Or it was simpler than that, just sex, a good time with somebody new in a county where that was rare, and at least that one was honest. But she didn't have time for a good time, which was maybe the saddest sentence she'd thought all week. And Lauren Merritt had her grandfather's worn-out house, a dead garden, a scummed-over tank, and a gate that finally shut. Whatever the men of this county were after, it wasn't here.