But my hands remembered the feel of him, just like a guitar remembers a callus. It was ingrained.
Instead, I shoved my palms into my pockets and turned my face away. “You didn’t have to,” I said.
He shrugged, an easy movement, but there was something genuine in it. His shoulders rolled under his shirt. The fabric pulled tight across his chest. “Maybe I wanted to.”
I felt that like a hand on bare skin.
The tiny admission settled between us like a dropped stone, making the kitchen feel too small. The humming fridge, the tick of the wall clock, and the faint rush of wind outside all seemed louder against the quiet of that line.
I took another sip of my coffee, feeling the heat thaw parts of me I’d kept iced for so long. My hands were still shaking. I held the mug tighter to stop it, and the ceramic heat pulsed through my palms and into my wrists. I let it.
“So, what now?” I asked finally. My voice was steady enough to pass. Barely. “We go back to being strangers who occasionally borrow each other’s shampoo? Or…”
My mouth went dry at the end of that sentence. I hated that he could still make me nervous. I hated that I wanted the answer, yet I was scared of it at the same time.
“Or we try to be adults about it.” He sounded careful, like he was navigating glass. Like one wrong word would send me bolting back up the stairs and slamming a door between us that he would never open again. “We talk. We set boundaries. We’remarried and there won’t be a question about that in anyone’s mind.”
My laugh was bitter. It came out louder than I meant for it to. “Is this your version of grown-up talk?”
“Maybe.” He looked at me hard. He did not look away. His gaze did not flinch or soften or turn into a joke. He let me see whatever was in there. “Or maybe I don’t want either of us to pretend we didn’t need each other last night.”
I stared at him.
There it was. No swagger, or smart mouth. No armor. Just that line, dropped right in front of me like he had opened a door and dared me to walk through it.
His eyes were steady, earnest in a way that made my knees weak. The bruising on his face only made it worse. He looked like a man who would fight anything that touched me. He looked like a man who already had. He looked like a man who would do it again and again until there was nothing left standing but me.
For one crazy second, I almost let everything fall into place, let myself admit how scared I’d been, how safe his arms had felt, how much I’d hated waking up without them. I could see myself setting the mug down and walking the two steps across the kitchen and standing between his knees and leaning in until there was no more pretending, he was just watching out of obligation.
CHAPTER NINE
KRISTIN
By the time the highway peeled off toward Everton, the bruise at my hip had found a heartbeat. Every pothole made it throb in time with my pulse, and the ring on my finger felt like a dare I’d said yes to at three in the morning.
I told Lincoln I needed to check on the warehouse. He offered to drive, but the last thing I needed was being with him in another confined space.
Everton wasn’t much: grain elevators, a diner that never changed its menu, a hardware store that carried everything from hay string to stroller wheels, and my warehouse sat two streets off Main, a rectangle of corrugated steel with my logo stenciled large enough to be seen from the highway. Tin Star Barrel & Tack. The name had been a joke once, a rib from a man who called me Tin long before anyone else did. Now it was stamped on invoices, stitched into caps, and slapped on the sides of shipping boxes.
I pulled around back and killed the engine. The lot was mostly empty—Marnie’s Subaru, Ty’s beat-up half-ton parked in its usual spot, the loading dock empty. A gust of wind stirred loose snow across the ice-covered asphalt. The keypad chirpedwhen I keyed in my code, and the back door thunked open with the same faint grind I kept promising I’d oil.
Inside, it smelled like leather and dust, with the faint citrus scent of the cleaner Marnie said was the best. Fluorescent lights hummed. Down the main aisle, pallets sat shrink-wrapped and orderly: cinches, breast collars, headstalls, a new run of high-fashion graphic hoodies that always sold out faster than I could reorder. Order. Routine. The complete opposite of my last few days.
I breathed. It didn’t fix anything, but it was something.
“Boss?” Marnie’s voice echoed from the office corridor. She popped out a second later, a pen tucked into her messy bun and a coil-bound notepad clutching her chest. “You were supposed to take time off. I don’t want to see your face here.” Her eyes swept my face before dropping to how I was carrying my weight.
“I can’t just stop living because I fell off my horse,” I said softly. The smile I offered her didn’t land.
She didn’t buy it. “You okay?”
“Fine.” I set my keys in the catch-all by shipping. “What’s our morning look like?”
“Three pallets will go out to the store in Texas by two, pick, and pack on twenty-seven orders, two local pickups, and Clay says the afternoon freight might be early because the weather’s turning.” She flipped a page, then hesitated. “Also… the front door was locked when I got here, but the deadbolt wasn’t seated right.”
My shoulders crept up. “Was Ty here early?”
She shook her head. “He swears not. I checked the cameras, but the front entry feed is black from midnight to six.”
