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EPILOGUE
EVE
I stared at my hands and tried not to watch Kyle and Sienna orbit around each other. Seeing them together–seeing any of my family loved up–hurt like hell, though I was happy for both of them. For their love, their togetherness...their bump.
All I could think about was Archer’s continued absence.
I knew he had a lot to do after Simon’s second traumatic appearance in our lives. I knew he had so many loose ends to tie up in Texas before he headed north, and those ends just kept on fraying, keeping him there.
I knew there was more, and more, and more...but after months had passed the second time around since I last saw him, I had the right to feel abandoned.
Does he even love me that much?
The red stone and diamond necklace linked around my throat said he did. The antlers, and the red stone represented Red Hart, our constellations depicted above in clear, white diamonds. The piece must have cost a fortune to create, but money had never been a thing between us.
Neither of us needed more than we had, which was plenty, through the effort of hard work and in Trav’s and my case, our birth. But it was the time he took to have the necklace craftedjust for me that healed together a few of the fresh fissures that threatened to shatter my heart.
I was still studying my chipped fingernails when Kyle and Sienna climbed into Kyle’s truck and left me alone on the drive after their congratulatory breakfast announcing their happy news. They kept it between themselves for a while, still in that honeymoon period after all the tragedies they survived. I appreciated that, and even managed a real smile when they announced their date for their little bundle of joy with a due in late May. But beyond that, I couldn’t dredge up excitement for the occasion, letting Rachel and Natalie take up the pom poms on that one, unable to quell the sensation that while everyone was happy, there was also something terribly wrong with the world.
The sort of oncoming tragedy that was personal and had nothing to do with everyone else.
It was doubly hard with Christmas encroaching yet again, as everyone knew of my tree and decorating addiction, and kept asking when I planned to start hanging the ornaments.
Short answer: I wasn’t.
I knew Trav wanted to have a huge get together at the ranch over Christmas week, but the need to socialise long deserted me. He was off helping Rachel for a few weeks with her work, and though she planned to open a second surgery on Red Hart land, that wouldn't happen until after January. Jude had already headed north with Natalie for the season.
With the hands filtering away for the winter, looking for better pay elsewhere, and Gage and Brit opting to take a holiday for her to teach him somecity ways, I was left mostly alone on the property.
As Kyle’s truck disappeared along the drive, the trail of dust taking him all the way to the paved road beyond the mountain’scurve heading south to Longside, a shadow stepped out from the house.
Dressed in his habitual all black from head to toe, he merged with the shadows like he was one of them.
“He’s gone, then.” Pierce’s frame filled the veranda, tall and foreboding.
And the only company I had who didn’t push me about Christmas, or filling the place because I’d be lonely, or anything else.
Hell, he even attended therapy sessions with me to cater for the emptiness I felt inside my hollow stomach, the reason I couldn’t celebrate with Sienna, why I could barely look at her.
“They’re gone,” I repeated softly.
Pierce said nothing, though his presence, as it had for the last months, was reassuring. What started as a strained, neighbourly relationship filled with disasters on both sides transformed into something else over the last year after he lost his father. I stayed near him when his temper broke through his cold facade that he showed everyone else, uncertain if he planned to hurt himself, and we’d lose him like we did Jack, if for different reasons.
Now, he kept that same watch over me, and for that I was grateful, even when his gaze rarely left me, and I sensed the hunger in him he never acted on. Once, that might have scared me, but the girl who was tortured by Simon Haldon wasn’t the same girl who came back from Texas last season.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I didn’t need to look at it to know the message came from Archer with an ever blown out timeline of the date he’d start back north, and increasingly empty promises of leaving Texas behind for good.
Or maybe it was a pipe dream, and that would never happen. I made the trip south for him once and had been unable to stay. Maybe asking the same of the career Texas Ranger was asking too much.
Peirce checked his watch. “Five minutes until your therapy call, Eve,” he said in a low voice.
I nodded, turning on my heel and making my way slowly back into the house. Everything hurt, from my cheeks to my toes. Everything ached, as though the cold, for the first time ever, eked into my bones, and nothing could warm them.
This winter will be different.
I paused beside him. “Are you coming?”
He never touched me, never offered more than a few short words. But having another body who understood my sort of hurt and coldness nearby mattered.
Pierce said nothing more as I continued inside the big house. After a moment he followed me in, shutting the door softly behind us to keep out the icy cold mountain air that whipped around the yard. The fire Kyle insisted he set before he left did nothing for me. I wasn’t sure what we were keeping in, exactly.
I didn’t have to be alone. But I knew I would. No matter how long Archer took to come back to Montana, I would wait, though I knew he’d find things different here when he arrived.
Don’t take too long.
I left his message unanswered, placing my phone face down on the kitchen bench, and headed for the small downstairs library for my call. I knew without looking back that Pierce would follow me there, too.
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