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Her brother parked near the corral and got out of the truck, giving her no time to even panic before he called, “Hey, you two okay? Is something wrong?”
Silas finally straightened but he stayed near the fence. “We were… arguing.”
“Yes, arguing.” Tess smoothed her hands over her hair. Brilliant. Silas was brilliant. Aiden knew firsthand how fired up she could get during an argument.
“Arguing?” Aiden let himself into the pen with them. “About what?”
She took a hard swallow before attempting to speak. “Silas thinks we should let the horse run free again. And I think she should stay a few more days. So we can be sure she’s fully healed before she tries to rejoin her herd.”
“You know what?” Silas snuck out of the pen, not even glancing back at her. “You’re right. She should stay a few more days. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Okay. Well, good. Yes. Thanks.” Tess tried to sound stern but she still seemed to be hyperventilating.
“I should get to the office.” The man was already ten feet outside the pen and moving swiftly away. “I’ll see you two around.”
“Yeah, I’ll be there soon,” Aiden called to Silas’s retreating back. Then he turned to Tess. “Did he tell you about his contract job?”
She tore her eyes away from Silas’s amazing cowboy butt and tried to concentrate. “Um, a little. We didn’t really have too much time to talk about the details.” They hadn’t really had much time to talk at all before she’d mauled him with a kiss.
“He’s so damn stubborn,” her brother grumbled. “I don’t understand why he’d want to go back over there.”
“I guess it’s what he feels he needs to do,” she said weakly. Sothiswouldn’t keep happening. The kissing and the wanting and the acceleration from zero to sixty in the span of ten seconds.
“We should try to stop him,” Aiden said.
A shudder ran through her thinking about Silas walking back into danger.
“This assignment he’s going on won’t be the same as the ones we went on as a team.” Concern hollowed her brother’s voice. “He won’t have the same level of protection going in.”
“I know.” Nausea churned in her gut. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t love another man who was willing to give up his life in a fight for someone else. That conviction and dedication was one of the things she’d loved the most about her husband. But she’d feared it too. She feared it more now that she’d lost him. “I’ll talk to Silas.”
But she already knew she couldn’t force him to stay.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Silas trudged across the meadow, dragging along a whole new set of regrets behind him.
As a solider, he’d been taught to never let down his guard because that was when you always got into trouble. But when it came to Tess, he didn’t seem to have a guard. He couldn’t guard himself against touching her or kissing her or letting himself tell her how he felt about her. He should’ve told her he was leaving because he needed a new challenge, a change of scenery. Instead, he’d let her see his inner conflict—that he wanted her, that he was running from his own desires. What good would sharing that with her do either of them?
If he needed any more confirmation that he was doing the right thing by getting the heck outta Dodge, that kiss was it.
He banged through the door of Cowboy Construction and slammed it hard behind him.
“Easy, man,” Thatch said from his desk. “We don’t need to waste money and supplies fixing something you break around here.”
Silas marched straight to the punching bag they’d hung in the back corner of the office without acknowledging his friend. Nothing like a few hook shots and uppercuts to work out some tension. He slipped on a pair of gloves and went to work punishing the bag.
“What is wrong with you?” Thatch had abandoned whatever building plans he’d been going over and joined him at the bag. “Watch it or you’re gonna break your hand.”
“I’m fine.” This wasn’t his first rodeo. He took a few more good shots, already breaking a sweat.
“Does this knock-down, drag-out session have anything to do with Brad coming over to Tess’s house?”
The question stopped him cold. “What’re you talking about?”
“Okay, I’m just gonna say it.” Thatch backed up a step first, wise man that he was. “You got all weird at breakfast that morning. When Brad said he was going to Tess’s house later. Something’s up with you. It’s like you’re secretly in love with her or something.”
Well, shit. Silas held his expression neutral but it wouldn’t do him any good. He and Thatch and Aiden had learned to communicate without words when their lives had been on the line.
