Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 43512 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43512 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
Her chin lifts, stubborn and brave. “I’m not helpless.”
“I know.” My thumb presses once against her pulse. “That’s why I’m asking, not ordering.”
It lands. She nods once.
I release her and jog through the dark.
The ranch is a map in my head; my boots know the path without instructions. The night air turns colder as I hit the open stretch toward the south fence. A flashlight beam skims the ground—mine, low and red-lensed. The horses stamp and snort, because they feel trouble before people do.
I reach the damaged section we repaired this afternoon. My stomach goes tight. The new post is tilted. The wire is slack again. And someone has left a small pile of something at the base—glinting faintly in the light.
Metal shavings. A cut tool mark too clean to be careless. This isn’t random. This is a message.
I crouch, fingertips hovering, not touching yet. I check the lines and snag my finger along the wire.
Fuck.
Somebody is studying our patterns.
Somebody knows this ranch like the lines of their own hand.
Somebody is confident enough to come back after we put on a show in town.
I scan the tree line as blood drips from my fingers.
Behind me, the house light glows warm and unaware. Delaney is inside it. Her parents. The life she came back to save.
A low, hard rage settles into my ribs.
Not the reckless kind.
The focused kind.
“I don’t know who you are,” I murmur into the dark, voice so quiet it’s for me alone, “but you picked the wrong ranch.”
I rise, thumb my phone on, and call Gray.
“Second hit at the south line,” I say. “Clean cut. Deliberate. We’ve got a planner.”
A pause.
Then Gray’s voice comes cool and sharp. “Copy that.”
I stare out into the night, the wire humming soft as a warning.
Whoever is doing this thinks they can scare the Colemans into selling.
Thinks they can use this town’s kindness against it.
Thinks Nash Hawthorne is just an old heartbreak with a cowboy hat and a history.
They’re about to learn I came back different for a reason.
And this time?
I’m not leaving anything I love unprotected.
FIVE
DELANEY
Nash comes back in the house like a storm with a heartbeat. The screen door slaps behind him and my mother gasps so hard I think she might swallow her tongue.
“Good Lord—”
Daddy is already halfway out of his chair. “Son, what happened?”
Nash lifts one hand like he’s calming a skittish horse. “Fence wire,” he says, low and steady. “Clean cut. Whoever did it was gone before I got there.”
Then I see it.
Blood.
A thin line down his forearm, darker where it’s pooled at his wrist. Another smear across the side of his hand like he tried to wipe it away and decided it wasn’t worth losing time.
My stomach flips in a way that’s not entirely fear and not entirely something else. “Sit,” I say.
He looks at me like he’s deciding whether to argue.
“Now,” I add, voice turning into the Delaney that can make a room of stubborn cowboys fall in line.
He sits.
Daddy starts asking questions—where, how long ago, did you see a vehicle, did the alarm ping twice, should we call the sheriff—but the words blur because I am focused on the cut and the man attached to it.
“It’s not bad,” Nash says when I step closer.
“It’s bleeding,” I say.
He tilts his head. “That’s how cuts work.”
“Don’t get cute with me, Hawthorne.”
My mother presses a hand to her chest like she might swoon. “Delaney, honey, towels are under the sink—”
“I’ve got it.”
I take Nash’s wrist.
The second my fingers wrap around him, electricity snaps up my arm.
Not romantic electricity. Not exactly.
It’s that primal, protective jolt that says mine in a way I haven’t allowed myself to think in years.
He lets me pull him down the hall toward the guest bathroom.
It occurs to me about three steps too late that I am dragging a very large, very rugged, very wounded man into a small enclosed space where the air will be too warm and the proximity will be too loud.
The door clicks shut behind us. A single light buzzes overhead. And suddenly it’s just wound care and history and the faint scent of his soap mixing with the cedar-and-night smell he always carries like a signature.
“Hold your arm out,” I say.
“Yes, ma’am.” The tease in his voice lands softly, like he’s trying not to spook me.
I clean the cut with antiseptic.
He doesn’t flinch. Of course he doesn’t.
The cut is shallow but wicked—wire is cruel like that, a thin blade that looks harmless until it isn’t.
“Someone cut it again,” I say, more to keep my hands steady than to rehash what we already know.
“Yeah.”
“On the exact section we repaired.”
“Yeah.”
I glance up.
For a second he’s not joking or guarded. He’s all the way present, eyes dark and sharp. The scar at his cheek catches the light and makes him look carved out of trouble.