“He’s scared,” she says.
“I know he’s scared. I’m scared too. The difference is I’m not pretending the kiss didn’t happen.”
“Give him time.”
“I’ve given him years.”
Grace puts her hand on my knee. Squeezes. “The years weren’t about you. The three days might be. That’s different.”
I look at her—this woman I’ve known for barely a month who somehow became the closest thing I’ve had to a friend since Rose.
Pregnant and tired and covered in hay and giving me advice about the most complicated man I’ve ever met, in the middle of a compound full of bikers, on the tailgate of a farrier’s truck.
Rose would love her.
The thought comes unbidden and lands like a warm hand on the back of my neck.
Rose would absolutely love Grace—the quiet strength, the dry humor, the stubborn refusal to be intimidated by anything—including a six-foot-three MC enforcer who’s terrified of the baby monitor.
“Thank you,” I say. Meaning it.
Grace bumps my shoulder with hers. “You’re part of this ranch now, Bex. Your problems are our problems.”
The words.
I don’t expect them to land the way they do.
Part of this ranch. Our problems.
After Wade Lockhart looked me in the eye and said you’re not family, sweetheart—after a lifetime of being the kid from the bad home, the tagalong, the one whose place at the table was always borrowed—Grace says it like it’s obvious.
Like belonging here is a fact, not a question.
I blink hard and look at the sky.
Don’t cry on a tailgate in front of a pregnant woman, Dalton.
You have a reputation.
“So,” Grace says, stealing the other half of my sandwich. “Was it a good kiss at least?”
I think about his hand in my hair. His mouth on mine. The sound he made.
“It was the best kiss of my entire life, and I want to kill him for it.”
Grace laughs. Full and bright and real.
The kind of laugh that carries across the compound and makes two brothers at the clubhouse door look over.
The kind of laugh Rose used to have—the kind that makes you feel like the world is survivable.
“Yeah,” she says. “That sounds about right for one of these men.”
Shadow finds me after I’m done with the rescue horses.
I’m loading tools into my rig, end of the day, spent.
He walks up the way he does everything—quiet, deliberate, large.
