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My breath caught in my throat, and I scrambled to sit up, only belatedly realizing that I shouldn’t be excited. I shouldn’t be hopeful. My brain realized it, but my heart was still living in a fantasy land.
“You came back,” I said, smiling in spite of myself as Boone and Cade stepped inside my room.
They were dirty and they looked exhausted, but they were there. And I was glad to see them, even though I probably shouldn’t have been.
Daisy Lynn and Becca looked even more surprised than I had been, and I could tell from the looks my friends were giving me that they weren’t sure if they should stay or go.
“It’s okay,” I said, still smiling. “I should probably talk to these guys alone. We have some things to discuss.”
The girls nodded and both gave me a hug before slipping out the door and closing it behind them.
“I didn’t think you’d come back,” I said once the three of us were alone together.
“We’ll always come back,” Cade said, frowning. “But… did your uncle not tell you?”
“Tell me what?” I asked, shaking my head. “I haven’t seen him since… well, since I ran past him and came up here. Becca said he was out in the pasture, but I honestly don’t know.”
Cade and Boone exchanged a look, and then Boone spoke. “We didn’t want to leave, Janessa. Especially not like that. But we had an emergency. There was a fire at our ranch.”
“Oh, no!” I was up out of bed and in his arms before I’d even finished speaking. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been acting like a spoiled brat while you guys were out dealing with that? I didn’t mean…” My voice trailed off as I realized what I was doing. I took a step back and let go of Boone. “I’m sorry. We probably need to have some sort of boundaries now, I guess.”
“No,” Boone said. “I don’t want boundaries.” He reached out and grabbed me by the waist, then pulled me close to him again. “Fuck boundaries.”
Cade hadn’t said much so far, but I could see him grinning from the corner of my eye. He was clearly on board with Boone’s new feelings.
I was, too.
I just didn’t know what those feelings were, exactly.
“We found out while we were back home that we weren’t the only ones,” Cade said. “There have apparently been fires and poisonings spreading up and down the state.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, my body trembling in spite of the fact that Boone was still holding me tightly.
Cade looked over and Boone shook his head. “It means that someone is waging war on Bliss.”
Things almost felt like they were back to normal as the night passed, but after we’d all had dinner and everyone had gone to bed, there was still one thing left for me to do. There was still one important issue that we’d left unsettled.
I walked across the yard, my path lit by the full moon that was shining down on me. I felt the same surge of nerves and excitement that I’d felt before, the last time I’d made this same trip from my bedroom to the bunkhouse in the middle of the night.
This time was for different reasons, though.
I still didn’t know what to expect. I was still more than a little surprised that Cade and Boone had come back at all, even after they’d promised they would. And I still didn’t know what that meant for us—for the three of us.
But I was about to find out.
“Hey, beautiful,” Cade said, his bright smile gleaming in the moonlight as he met me at the bunkhouse door and ushered me inside. “I was wondering if you’d forgotten about us.”
“You know I didn’t,” I said, giving him a quick kiss as he pulled me close. “I just had to wait for my uncle to go to bed before I could come out here. Were you guys sleeping?”
“Not at all,” Boone said, emerging from the other side of the room to give me his own quick hug and kiss. “There’s no way we could go to sleep without talking to you first.”
I felt a little sense of relief at his words. Not because I didn’t want both of them to get some rest—God, they’d already been through so much in the past twelve hours—but because just knowing that they’d wanted to stay up for me meant they thought this was an important conversation to have, right?
I was going to take it as a good sign, anyway.
“I shouldn’t have run off before,” I said, still feeling more than a little guilty about the way things had ended the last time we’d all been out here together. “I was just… I heard what you said and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to handle it.”
“You don’t need to apologize for anything,” Boone said. “I’m sorry you had to hear it like that. And I’m sorry I was such an idiot. I was scared and I didn’t know how to handle it, either. So, I guess we had that in common.”
