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So I’d been wrong. For three years.

It wasn’t payback. It had never been payback. He’d sat at the end of my drive with blood under his nails and loved me enough to leave.

For about three seconds I felt it, all of it, and I thought my legs were going to go.

Then I got angry. A different kind of angry, one I’d never felt in my life.

“You son of a bitch.”

He stood there and let me.

“You don’t get to decide that.” I stepped in close. “You sat out there at the end of my drive and you decided what I could handle. For me. Without asking. You took three years off me, Switch. Three years of me thinking I was some payback lay for a man whose father got a raw deal. Three years of crossing the street. And you called that a favor.”

“Sav.”

“No. It’s my turn.” My chest was heaving. “I knew what you were when I took you home from that funeral. Everybody in this town knows what you are. I buried my father. I’ve been up to my shoulder inside a mare pulling out a dead foal in the middle of the night. I’ve shot horses I loved because it was the right thing to do. I’m not made of glass. And I thought the worst of you for three years, and I was wrong, and that’s partly on me. But most of it is on you.”

He was breathing fast. So was I.

Out past the fence the dust from Dale’s trailer had finally settled on the road. Two horses, gone. The rest might follow before the month was out. I knew what choosing him was going to cost me. I could see it lying out there in the dirt.

“I’m the one who decides what I can live with,” I said. “Not you. Not ever again. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Then hear this. I’m choosing. And I’m choosing you.”

It hit him. All the way down.

He stayed where he was. He was waiting. For once in his life, Switch was waiting on me.

So I went to him.

I took his face in both hands and pulled him down and kissed him, and a groan came up out of his chest. Then his arms came around me and hauled me up against him so hard my feet came off the ground. He kissed me like it was the first time and the last time both at once. Deep. Desperate. His hand in my hair, the other spread wide across my back, holding me like I might vanish if he loosened his grip. I kissed him back with everything I’d been holding in, every bit of it, until I couldn’t tell anymore whose breath was whose.

When we finally broke apart, he kept his hands on me. He was shaking.

“Say it again,” he said.

“I’m choosing you, you stubborn asshole.”

He pressed his mouth to my temple and held it there.

His phone buzzed in his hand.

He glanced at the screen. I watched the man who’d just held me like that disappear, and the one who’d broken a man’s fingers at my round pen come back.

“Camera,” he said. “Culvert.”

The feed came up on his phone and I leaned in to see over his arm. Infrared, silver and grainy. Two utility trucks crawling down the switchbacks from the mine side, and behind them a dark SUV with its lights off.

“They’re clearing it,” he said. “Cameras, whatever they’ve got stashed. They know we’re coming.”

He was already dialing.

They came fast. Gage first, then Havoc and Preacher and Deacon and one more I didn’t know, a line of headlights coming up my drive with the engines so loud every horse in the house paddocks threw its head up.

“I’ve got the house,” he told Switch.