Chapter 1
Joelle
The road is so bumpy my bones are jangling, and the heat so violent the car smells like it’s melting. Even with the window open, there’s no relief. The air outside is just as heavy, filling my nostrils with the odor of sunbaked dirt.
My body’s sticky with sweat, but I can live with that. My dry mouth is another matter. I ran out of water two hours ago.
Worse, I’m close to leaking from the left side. It’s always the left.
It’s been over twelve hours since I last nursed.
I press my forearm tight across my chest and try to breathe through it, but there’s no ignoring the ache. I feel swollen, overripe, and raw, under the kind of pressure that makes my hands shake and my throat close up. I want to cry. Or scream. Maybe both.
You’re doing this for a reason,I remind myself.You’ve got to let it dry up. It’s time.
Caleb—my son, not one of the men I’m about to see—is with Janey today. Sweet, long-suffering Janey, who took us in when I had nowhere else to go and never once made me feel like the burden I’ve become. She helped me through the end of my pregnancy, the mess of those first few months, all the nights I thought I’d break from exhaustion. She gave us everything without asking for anything in return.
But people have limits, and I’m close to reaching hers. I need to find somewhere else to go before she asks me to leave.
She hugged me goodbye early this morning, her arms tight around my shoulders, whispering that I was stronger than I thought. Caleb clung to me, fat little fingers fisted in my shirt, and I had to swallow the lump in my throat not to fall apart right there. I kissed his blond curls and told him I’d be back soon.
God, I hope I will.
Grayswood ranch rises out of the dry land like it was always part of it. The weathered siding, wide porch, and warped screen door I remember slamming shut when I was a teenager at the end of my patience are all the same. It’s still isolated, still quiet, and too far from anything that feels like real life. It’s the kind of place you forget how to leave once you’ve been there long enough and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or terrifying.
I lived here for a while, back when Mom married Clay. I was fourteen. The twins, Wade and Caleb, were already grown, and barely acknowledged us beyond cold nods and long silences. They hated Mom. I knew that. I don’t think Wade ever looked at me long enough to decide what he thought of me. Caleb was sweeter, but always busy with theranch. I was a kid who tagged along with a marriage they wished didn’t exist.
When I left, I’m sure they never expected to see me again, and I never planned on returning.
But plans don’t mean much when you’re clean out of options.
The ad was short:Live-in housekeeper. Remote cattle ranch. Room and board included. Cooking and housekeeping. Some ranch chores. No timewasters.
No names. No website. Just a phone number and an address I recognized. I called out of desperation and the voice that answered was low and unmistakably familiar, saying to come around three. Said they’dsee how I fit.
Now here I am, about to step back into a world that I thought would always be an uncomfortable memory.
I pull the car into the gravel drive and shut off the engine, heart beating loud in the silence. My hands tremble on the steering wheel. My shirt’s soaked through at my back, and I don’t have long before I’ll be leaking through at the front. I reach for a tissue but find the box empty and I don’t dare look down because I don’t have a choice but to get out of this car and go inside.
I make my way to the porch, my heart hammering. The wood groans beneath my beat-up sandals, and for a moment, I stand there, fist raised, staring at the door like it might open itself.
There are so many reasons I should turn around and leave. When the Crosby brothers find out it’s me who’s looking for work, chances are they’re going to tell me to go. I hate that they’ll see how pathetic and desperate I am. But my son needs a place to live, and I’ll do anything for him. Anything. Including humiliating myself before two menwho used to be my stepbrothers and are now strangers.
I knock.
The door opens almost instantly.
Wade stands in the doorway. I know it’s him from the arrogant tilt of his head and the way his gray eyes size me up in two seconds flat. For a moment, my breath just… stutters.
He’s bigger than I remember. Not only tall, but broad in a way that fills the entire frame, like he’s expanded to fit this rugged ranch house, one meal and tossed hay bale at a time. His shoulders are bare and sun-browned, muscles shifting under skin that looks carved by heat and work. His jeans sit low on his hips, the line of his trim waist disappearing into denim that’s been worn soft by years of riding and sweat. Veins standout on his rounded biceps, exuding strength and vitality.
He wasn’t like this when I was a kid. Back then, he’d been lanky and severe, all sharp glances and colder silences. Now he’s a man in full. Solid. Weathered. Beautiful in a way that hits like a blow I wasn’t braced for.
My heart lurches hard enough that I feel it in my throat.
I shouldn’t be reacting like this. Not tohim. Not to someone who once couldn’t stand to be in the same room as me, even when I was mopping the perspiration from his dying father’s forehead. But my body doesn’t know that or doesn’t care. Arousal, low and tight, curls in my belly—tainted by a mix of nerves, heat, and the humiliation of feeling anything at all in this moment, of all moments.
Then his eyes sweep over me. Slowly. Thoroughly.
