Not on my work. Not on the horses. Onme.
“You’re still here,” I say. Smooth, Dalton. Pulitzer-worthy observation.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t move from the stall door. Doesn’t uncross his arms. But something in his posture is different—the rigid control is still there but it’s straining, like a rope pulled to its limit, the fibers starting to separate. “The bay picked up his front left today.”
“I saw.” I walk toward my apron, which is hanging on a hook six feet from where he’s standing, because I am an adult and I can walk past a man in a barn without my body catching fire. “That’s ahead of schedule. We can start corrective work next week.”
“Bex.”
I stop three feet from him.
Close enough to see the tension in his jaw.
Close enough to see the pulse in his throat, fast, faster than a man leaning casually against a stall door should have.
Close enough to smell him—leather, hay, sweat, and underneath it the warm base note that I have been trying and failing to stop cataloguing since the first week.
“What?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
He’s looking at me the way he looked at me through the barn doors this afternoon.
Except closer.
Without fifty yards of distance to dilute it.
The full, unfiltered intensity of Lee Simms’s attention directed at me from three feet away, and the impact of it is like stepping into a current—every nerve in my body orienting toward him, every cell rearranging around the gravitational pull of his gaze.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to stop this,” he says. His voice is low. Rough at the edges. The voice from the barn floor, the one that comes from the underneath place. “I’ve been trying for weeks. I can’t.”
The air between us goes solid.
“I can’t stop thinking about you.” Each word sounds like it’s being pulled out of him by force. Like the admission is a physical thing, heavy and sharp, and speaking it aloud is costing him something vital. “I can’t stop watching you. I can’t stop hearing your voice in my head when you’re not here. I haven’t slept in a week because every time I close my eyes I’m back in that stall with your mouth on mine and I don’t want to wake up.”
I can’t breathe.
I literally cannot draw air into my lungs because the space in my chest where air is supposed to go has been filled entirely by the sound of Lee telling me he can’t stop thinking about me.
He pushes off the stall door.
One step. The three feet becomes one.
I can feel the heat of him—actual, physical heat radiating off his body, or maybe that’s mine, or maybe there’s no difference anymore.
“Tell me to stop.” His eyes on mine. Desperate. Burning.
The eyes of a man standing at the edge of a cliff he’s been walking toward for weeks, needing someone to either pull him back or push him over. “Tell me this is wrong. Tell me she’d hate us for it. Tell me whatever you need to tell me to make me walk away, because I can’t do it on my own anymore. I’ve tried. I can’t.”
I should say the right thing.
The responsible thing.
The thing that protects us both from the wreckage this will cause—the guilt, the grief, the complication of two people bound together by a dead woman falling into each other’s bodies like it’s the only place left to fall.
I don’t say the right thing.
“I’m not going to tell you to stop.”
He makes a sound. The same sound from the stall—low, broken, involuntary.
