He grinned at her. “I know better than to argue with you,” he replied.
She laughed. “Damn right you do,” she agreed, tossing up the apple and catching it in her hand again as they stepped out of the door. She’d actually finished her own physical therapy sessions not long ago and got a clean bill of health. Between the knife wound in her leg and then her shoulder, she’d had some work to do of her own to heal up properly.
The sun blazed down, a late fall day alive with the gold and red of the trees. More than half a year after the attack on Warrior Peak by Ziegler and his men, things were finally starting to get back to normal, and he couldn’t have been happier.
In fact, the day before he had spent most of the afternoon planting rows of flowers and grass in and around the paddock. Bailey had offered to help him, but he knew she had an appointment with Willis to talk over some more of the evidence that had come to light, and he didn’t want to keep her from that. Besides, it was a chance for him to get back to reality, a chance for him to forget about all the limitations that had been on him as he had been recovering from getting shot.
Of course, they hadn’t felt like limitations with Bailey around. She had been there to help him out every step of the way, literally. He had struggled with walking for the first couple of weeks, the pain sometimes getting to be too much for him, and she would patiently take him over to the cafeteria for breakfast without a word of complaint. After that, she helped with his physical therapy on the side, learning the best exercises for him to do and making sure he always got them done. She liked to crack the whip, but he was thankful for that. It kept him on track. He had finally been allowed to get back to doing some work the month before, though Xavier and Lawson had both tried to talk him out of it, and they wouldn’t let him do everything he was doing before he got shot.
“You don’t need to push yourself,” Xavier had tried to warn him. “You don’t want to do too much and have a setback with your recovery. The work will still be there when you’re ready.”
“At this point, I think I’m putting it back more by not getting out there and doing something,” he had protested. “I need to feel like I’m doing something useful. You guys get that, right?”
“You’re resting,” Lawson had told him. “Sometimes, that’s the most useful thing you can do.”
“Besides, it’s not like you haven’t been busy helping out with the case,” Xavier had pointed out—a fair thing to bring up.
Aaron and Bailey had been working with Willis and a few other cops across the state with the case against Ziegler and hiscrew. Not that it was actually going to court. At the moment, it looked like they would each be taking a plea deal. It wasn’t ideal, and Aaron would have preferred to see them made an example of, but he got it. The information they handed over might have been enough to get to the bottom of a few cold cases, and those victims deserved justice.
And at the end of the day, he didn’t care how they went away, as long as they were out of his life, and Bailey’s life, for good. It had taken a long time for Bailey to recover emotionally from what she had been through, and even now, he sometimes found her awake after a nightmare. But, these days, he could usually coax her back to bed and hold her until she fell asleep.
She’d even recently agreed to meet with Sarah, the counselor at the sanctuary. He had finally shared with her about how he came to be at Warrior Peak all those years ago. How messed up his head was, paranoid of being tracked down or worse, and how Sarah had helped him overcome some of the worst of the nightmares. After listening to Aaron voice the details so similar to her own, she’d decided it might be good for her, too. Just to round out her healing, and Aaron couldn’t have been more proud of her for that.
Bailey had settled in at Warrior Peak amazingly well, and was working with Willis down in Blue Ridge to help put the pieces of the case together. She had even dropped in a few mentions about working with him long-term, and Aaron truly hoped she would. Blue Ridge wasn’t all that different from Kings Mountain, and it would give her a fresh place to start over.
They arrived at the paddock, where Wheatie was already working her way through some of the flowers Aaron had planted there the day before. He had done everything he could to help erase the damage caused by the fire.
“Hey, you!” he called to the horse.
Wheatie lifted her head long enough to snort in their direction, and then went right back to eating the flowers.
He sighed and shook his head.
“I told you this would happen,” Bailey teased him. She had—she’d reminded him of how Wheatie had gone through the flowers before, and suggested putting up some new fences before he started work on replanting, but he hadn’t listened.
“This is supposed to be where the plants are regrowing,” he reminded Wheatie as he reached the fence. “You’re not going to let that happen as long as you keep eating them.”
“Hey, leave her alone,” Bailey protested, reaching over the fence to pat Wheatie on the nose. She and Wheatie had such an amazing bond. Wheatie lifted her head to stop eating for a moment to greet her friend.
“Here, I brought you an apple,” she continued, offering the fruit in her hand. Wheatie carefully wrapped her lips around it and then snapped it up, making Bailey laugh.
“And now you’ve just rewarded her for eating my plants,” Aaron pointed out.
Bailey shrugged. “You can’t blame a horse for horsing,” she replied. “She deserves it. She worked very hard supervising you, you know.”
“I should have known you would take her side in an argument over mine,” he replied, but he couldn’t help but grin. This side of her, this softer side, was one he was falling more in love with every day.
“Yeah, I always will, sorry,” she replied, tossing her hair over one shoulder and flashing him a playful grin. “Come on—let’s take a look at the flowers, and see if there might be anything to salvage, huh?”
She slipped her hand into his and guided him toward the other side of the paddock. Thankfully, Wheatie had done lessdamage over there, and it looked like there would be enough for them to work with.
“Well, I guess it’s something,” he muttered, and she leaned into him.
“It’s going to be overflowing with green again soon enough,” she promised him. “You’ve done a great job here. And I know it’s not going to be long until you start to reap the rewards.”
“Oh, I think I’ve already got plenty of those,” he murmured, and she smiled as he leaned his head down to hers to give her a kiss. He meant it—she was a greater reward than anything he could ever have asked for. Sometimes, their closeness didn’t even feel like it could be real to him, but it was. It was as real as the sun beaming down on them from the sky above, and just as warm.
They headed back to the main building to help with preparing dinner. It was a ritual they had gotten into doing a few times a week, spending some time together and helping Cade and the others make some delicious food. One of the new arrivals had even started a vegetable garden, giving them fresh produce to use. It was these quiet, domestic times they spent together that Aaron loved the most. It made him imagine what living with her in a real house would look like. He was in no rush to leave the sanctuary, not for a long time, but getting to picture her in a home of their own made him smile.
