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His tongue found mine and my vision went soft at the edges, pleasure arriving so fast and so total it bordered on vertigo. He kissed the way he did everything — thorough, unhurried, devastating — no fumbling, no negotiation, just that same terrible patience turned to a new purpose, his mouth moving over mine like he had all night and intended to spend it, and I came up onto my toes without meaning to, chasing him, my hands fisting into his flannel hard enough to pull stitches. The palm at the small of my back spread wider, pressed me in, held me the way he'd held the filly — completely, gently, no possibility of falling — and it burned through my shirt like a brand, and I felt every one of his fingers, and I wanted the print of them to stay.
He made a sound into my mouth. Low, half-swallowed, dragged up out of somewhere deep in that broad chest against my hands — the sound of a very quiet man losing an argument with himself — and it did something to me that no touch had ever done, turned my knees unreliable, pulled an answering sound up my own throat that I'd have been mortified by if there'd been anyone left in me to do the mortifying. He tasted like coffee and honey. His beard was softer than it looked. His heat poured over me and into me and I burned in it gladly, lifted to my toes against a body that could have folded mine up like paper and was instead holding it like something fragile set down on a reinforced shelf, and somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped being able to tell his heartbeat from mine.
When we finally broke — and it was mutual, and it took a long time, and neither of us went far — he brought his forehead down to rest against mine, and we stood there breathing like we'd pulled another calf, wrecked and ragged, my hands still full of his shirt, his hand still spread across my back, the steam settling around us in the gold light.
I could hear his heart. Actually hear it, this close, thundering away inside all that stillness like something kept in a barn, and the barn around us had gone very quiet — the calves settled, the lamps humming their one note, the whole long room holding its breath with us.
And I stood on my toes in the circle of the biggest hands in Montana, and I searched myself the way I'd searched that tangle of legs, thoroughly, by feel, in the dark — and there was nothing in my body that was afraid.
And that was exactly the problem.
I stood there with my hands flat on his chest and his heart going like a run horse under my palm, and the realization came up through the golden fog the way cold comes up through a floorboard: I wasn't scared of him. Not even a little. Not anywhere in my body. Six-foot-five of the biggest man I had ever seen, both hands on me, my toes barely on the concrete — and every alarm I had spent three years installing was standing silent. And the last time my body had voted yes with this much confidence, with this exact swooning, certain, downhill-water feeling, it had elected Derek Kane.
The thought arrived complete, the way the bad ones do. No preamble. Just there, sitting in the middle of the warmth like a stone in a boot, and everything after it happened fast.
Because this was the feeling. This precise feeling. I knew it the way you know a smell from childhood — the lit-up chest, the safe like a locked door works in reverse, the whole-body certainty that said this one, this one's different, and I had felt it before, on a second date in Bozeman with a big charming man who ordered for me before I'd opened the menu and I'd thought it was romantic. Eighteen months of charm. Eighteen months of exactly this narcotic glow before the first door closed, and I hadn't seen a single one of the doors closing because I'd been standing in this feeling the whole time, warm as a heat lamp, sure as anything. Feeling safe was the anesthetic. I had said it to my own windshield four days ago, out loud, like a woman who'd learned something. That's the mechanism. That's what it feels like right before.
And here was the part that made my hands go cold against his chest: the problem was never the men. The problem was the instrument. My judgment was the thing with the crack in it — the gauge that read full when the tank was empty, the thermostat that stuck. Every animal on this ranch could be right about him and it wouldn't matter, because I wasn't an animal, I was a woman with a record, and the record said that this feeling, this exact feeling, was what I felt while walking into the building that burned down.
I stepped back.
Out of his hands, out of the heat, one step onto the wet concrete — and he let me go. That was the thing. He let me go instantly, completely, both hands leaving my body the moment my weight shifted, no half-second of holding on, no fingers trailing, no reflexive tightening of a grip that had every physical right to tighten. His hands returned to his sides and hung there open, the way they'd hung at the edge of the bog, and he didn't follow, didn't lean, didn't ask, just stood against the wall in the settling steam and let three feet of country reassert itself between us like he'd been holding it in trust the whole time.
Which did not help. God, it did not help my case at all. Derek had never once let go first. I stood there with the evidence pointing the wrong direction and I struck it from the record with both hands, because the nice ones are the patient ones, because eighteen months, because the instrument was broken and every reading it gave me now was inadmissible, even the true ones. Especially the true ones.
"I—" My voice came out of me in pieces. His eyes were on my face, steady, and there was something in them that wasn't hurt yet but knew where hurt was kept, and I couldn't look at it. "It's late. The calves — the twins need — I have to—"
I didn't finish it. There was nothing to finish. I turned and I went, and the old skill took over, the best one, the one that had saved my life once already: when the room turns, you're already gone.
Down the barn at just under a run, past pen after pen of sleeping trouble, and Biscuit came up out of the straw by the office door like she'd been fired from something, scrambling, nails skidding on the boards, falling in behind me as I hit the side door and the cold took me full in the face. The yard was black and silver, stars all the way down to the mountains, my breath tearing out of me in white rags, and I crossed the frozen mud with my heart going like a trapped bird and the footbridge rang hollow under my boots — ices after dark, mind it, said his voice in my head, even now, even running from him he was taking care of me — and then the porch, the door, inside, and I threw the bolt and put my shoulder blade against the wood and felt it hold.
Biscuit had made it through before the door shut. She stood in the middle of the dark cabin looking at me with her one good ear up, and I stood against the door breathing like I'd pulled a calf, and my mouth — my traitorous, ruined mouth — still tasted like him. Coffee and honey. The exact sweetness I put in my own cup, carried back to me on a man's kiss, and I scrubbed the back of my hand across my lips and it didn't do one thing about it.
I paced. Stove to window, window to bed, four steps each way because the cabin only had four steps in it, and the box-breathing wouldn't catch — in-four, out-four, and my heart just ran straight through the counts like a heifer through a downed fence. My back still burned where his hand had spread across it. I could feel the print of every finger. I wanted the print of every finger, which was the whole indictment in one sentence, and I got Clover down off the crate and sat on the edge of the bed and held her up so her one good eye could see how serious I was, and I said the rules out loud, because saying them out loud was the maintenance, because the rules were the lines and the lines were the point.
"Never again a man whose hands could end me." My voice shook on it. I said it again, steadier. "Never again. I have a record, Clover. I have a documented record of being wrong about exactly this, and the more right it feels, the more wrong I am." Biscuit had come to sit against my shins, warm and gray and grave, watching my face. "New life. Small life. Safe life. I built it out of nothing in four days and I am not — I am not going to hand it to the first pair of enormous hands that's gentle with me, that is the oldest trick there is, that is the only trick there is."
Clover regarded me with her one good eye, and the ear that was barely there anymore, and said nothing, which was somehow worse than arguing.
Because my body wasn't cooperating with any of it. My body sat there on the edge of the bed still glowing, still lit up from "little one", still leaning into a palm that was a hundred yards away across a frozen creek, and I got up and went to the window because I couldn't not.
The barn light was still burning. Amber through the cracks, one lit building in the whole sleeping valley, and I couldn't see inside from here, but I'd have bet anything — the truck, the rabbit, everything I owned — that he was standing exactly where I'd left him. Against the wash stall wall in the settling steam, hands at his sides, not following, not calling, letting me go the same way he'd let me come, and a man like that would stand there all night rather than put one ounce of weight on my side of the scale.
I pulled the curtain.
I went back to the door and pressed my forehead against the cold wood, and Biscuit came and leaned her whole weight against my legs.
"Don't let it happen again, Biscuit," I whispered. "You're the only one I can trust."
She thumped her tail once against the floorboards.
Chapter 7
Boone
I gave her the whole east end of the barn, and I did it without saying a word about it, which is the only way a gift like that can be given.
It took most of the first day to build. Not the work of it — the work was nothing, a man moves a few tasks around and nobody's the wiser — but the geometry, the careful working out of where a body my size stood at every hour of a twelve-hour night so that a woman who'd run from my hands never had to pass inside the reach of them again.
