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 saysminein 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 enclosedspace 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.
