“This is the grocery store everyone uses,” he said as we walked. “Pharmacy’s two doors down. Hardware place is on the corner. If you need anything, it’s here or it’s a forty-minute drive.”
I smiled. “Good to know.”
He showed me the park where kids played on Saturday afternoons, the diner with the best breakfast tacos, the coffee shop that made real coffee instead of brown water, and the tequila bar some quadruplet ranchers had opened. Somewhere between the bakery and the feed store, I realized I was laughing.
He told me about his first job. I told him about my worst shift ever. He listened like he cared, and that did something dangerous to my chest.
People looked at us as we walked. Some waved or told him to pass along a greeting to Mama Mae.
I felt the contrast between us in a way I hadn’t before. My restless energy hummed next to his steady presence. My hunger for forward motion rocked against his rooted calm. It made everything feel more real.
As we crossed the street, his hand hovered at my back, guiding me around a truck pulling out of a parking space. He caught himself and dropped it. I pretended not to notice.
A few blocks later, we stopped at an intersection. A truck idled at the curb. A man leaned against a building and watched me like he was waiting for something.
Caleb noticed instantly. His whole body changed. Shoulders set. His jaw went tight. His hand settled at my back, and he pulled me closer to his side.
“You can’t control everything,” I said.
“I can try.”
The words hit hard because they weren’t about the truck. They were about me.
We drove back to the ranch in silence. By the time we pulled up to the cabin, my nerves were frayed and my resolve was shaky.
“This is exactly what I meant,” I said as we stepped onto the porch. “You decide where I go, who I see, when I move.”
“And that’s why you’re still breathing.”
“I can’t build my life around your fear.”
He pulled his hat off and held it against his chest. His brown eyes burned with tightly harnessed frustration. “I refuse to bury you because of your pride.”
The air burned between us. Underneath the anger, attraction simmered, hot and dangerous.
“I’m ready to stay,” I said. “But on my terms. I want to set up an interview at the hospital. I want Lucas registered for school. I want to find a place for us to live. I’m not taking advantage of Mama Mae.”
He shook his head and looked at me like I’d told him I planned to walk into traffic.
The ranch hummed around us. Neither of us moved. And we both knew the next step would change everything.
CHAPTER 10
CALEB
The problemwith calm was that it could make a man forget. Not all at once. It happened in small moments between the stress. Like a laugh that wasn’t forced or a deep breath that doesn’t feel borrowed. Or a morning spent sipping coffee without constantly counting exits and angles and blind spots.
The ranch had been doing that to me for three days. It wasn’t that I’d stopped watching. I never stopped watching. I walked the perimeter at dawn and again at dusk. I checked gates, radios, and sightlines. I watched trucks I didn’t recognize pass on the county road and logged the plates. But routine had settled in around us, steady as a heartbeat.
Lucas had found a rhythm with the horses and the men who knew how to make him feel useful without making him feel small. He’d started smiling in a way that didn’t look like a defense mechanism.
Marisol had started studying on the porch with her laptop and a yellow legal pad. She’d sit with her hair up and her face set in that stubborn, determined way that made me admire her and want to carry her back inside. She was building a future in her mind… one that probably didn’t have a place for me.
I stood in the yard watching her do it, a quiet kind of pride settling in my chest that I didn’t have words for. That was the dangerous part. Hope made a man soft. Hope made me miss things.
So on the morning she told me she wanted to go into town to check out the hospital and the school, I didn’t argue. I didn’t try to talk her out of it. I didn’t pretend I could keep her locked behind a fence and call it protection. I just tightened the net.
She met me on the porch a little after eight, dressed in jeans and a plain button-down shirt that made her look younger than she was and tougher than anyone who didn’t know her would ever guess. Her hair was down, shiny and loose, and she had her folder tucked under her arm like she was going to a normal appointment in a normal town.
