I didn’t know how to answer that, so I just kissed him again, slow and deep, letting him know without words. The world outside could have ended, and I wouldn’t have noticed.
Eventually, we rearranged ourselves enough to get under a blanket, Ransom curled around my back, his hand splayed over my stomach. We were too big for the couch, too raw for anything that came next, but I never wanted to move.
“You ever think about the future?” I asked, somewhere between asleep and awake.
He grunted. “Every day.”
“You see me in it?”
His arm tightened. “Only you, Sheriff.”
I closed my eyes, and for the first time in a decade, I didn’t dread tomorrow. We fell asleep like that—entwined, sweat-damp, completely spent. Two broken men trying to make a life out of the pieces left over.
In the dark, his hand never left my body.
And that was more than enough.
Chapter Twenty-Three
~ Ransom ~
Sunsets on the McKenzie porch hit different. It’s not just the slant of gold through the orchard or the way the last light scalds the battered wood rails to the color of old pennies—though that’s part of it.
It’s the sense of deliberate, generational stubbornness that clings to the place, like even the sunset has to square off with a McKenzie before it’s allowed to drop behind the hills.
I stood at the porch rail, elbows planted on the rough wood, half-watching the sky bruise up for evening. Below, the valley looked like someone had poured honey over the fields and then let a dog run wild through it, nothing but gold and unruly shadows.
In the near distance, Ma wrangled a folding table into submission with all the grace of a champion wrestler, calling out orders that pinged across the yard like rifle shots. Her voice could make a Marine blanch.
I grinned. The old man had set out two extra sawhorse benches, expecting a crowd. He always did, even when it was just us and the ghosts of every McKenzie too ornery to leave this patch of dirt.
I heard him before I felt him. Floyd’s boots on the planks, his gait clipped and self-assured—a cop’s walk, even out of uniform. Then: arms around my waist, tight, like I might try to take a header into the flower beds for old time’s sake. His chin bracketed my shoulder, lips finding the place just below my ear that always ran a shiver down my spine, no matter how many times he found it.
He didn’t say anything at first. Just breathed in and out, slow, his chest a steady pressure at my back. After a minute, he leaned his head, brushing his nose along the scruff of my jaw.
“You’re still,” he murmured. “You okay?”
“You make me sound like a horse on tranquilizers,” I shot back, but didn’t bother to hide the edge of contentment warming up my ribs.
He squeezed tighter. “Could be worse. Ma wanted to rent a clown for the party. I told her you scare easy.”
“She’s saving that for the rehearsal dinner.”
It was easy, with Floyd. Ridiculously easy. He always knew when to prod and when to back off, which for a man who’d once tried to arrest me for vandalism was saying something. He was the only person I’d ever met who could both calm me and drive me batshit, sometimes in the same breath.
“Do you ever think it’s all a setup?” I asked, not expecting him to answer. “The normal, the family, the dinners. Like it’s a test we all keep failing but nobody calls time.”
He went quiet, which meant he was about to get philosophical. “I used to. Not so much anymore.” He picked at the sleeve of my shirt, plucking lint with unconscious precision. “I don’t know, Ran. Maybe failing the test is the point.”
“That’s deep, for a man who can’t cook boxed mac and cheese without calling the fire department.”
He huffed. “One time.”
Out in the grass, Harlow herded a mismatched trio of kids and mutts toward the main house. The smallest of them, a dark-haired waif with an alarming amount of confidence, was Levi. Still skinny, but no longer hunched up like a bundle of exposed wires. Six months ago, the kid barely spoke in full sentences. Now he could out-talk Floyd on a bad day.
I caught Ma’s eye as she set a platter of fried chicken—her version, which involved an amount of hot sauce only permissible under federal law—onto the table. She jerked her chin toward us, like it physically pained her to see an able-bodied man notcarrying something, then pretended not to be watching when I waved.
“I think you made her nervous,” I told Floyd.
