“Where are we going?” Rae asks quietly from where she’s tucked against me.
I glance down at her.
“I’m taking you home.”
Her eyebrows lift slightly.
“My home?”
“Your farmhouse.”
She studies my face for a second like she’s trying to figure out what’s going on in my head.
“And then what?”
I push the bar door open with my shoulder and step out into the night air.
“And then,” I say calmly, “I’m staying there until this whole thing is handled.”
She shifts slightly in my arms.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know,” I interrupt.
Behind us I hear the guys starting to move again, boots on wood, low voices.
“But I’m going to.”
TWELVE
RAE
The ride outof town is quiet. Not awkward-quiet, exactly, just heavy. The kind of silence that hangs in the cab of the truck when two people are both thinking too much and neither one of them feels like being the first to say something.
Cole drives with both hands on the wheel, his jaw set in that hard line I’ve already learned means he’s still angry. Not yelling angry. Worse than that. Controlled angry. The kind that sits under the surface like a storm waiting for somewhere to land.
I sit beside him with my cheek pressed lightly against the cool window, giving directions every few miles when the road splits.
“Take the next right.”
He nods once.
A few minutes later I point ahead. “Then stay left when the road curves.”
He doesn’t ask questions. He just follows the directions I give him, which leaves me with entirely too much time to think. My mind keeps circling the same things over and over. The bruisespreading across my face. Voss and how stupid I was to go in there guns blazing. The look on Cole’s face when he first saw me sitting on the floor at the bar. And the fact that we’re driving straight toward my place.
My stomach tightens a little as the truck turns onto the narrow dirt road leading out toward the fields. The headlights cut through the darkness ahead of us, illuminating the ruts in the road and the long stretch of fence running along the pasture.
“There,” I say quietly, pointing ahead. “The farmhouse.”
Cole slows the truck as the old white house comes into view.
It isn’t fancy. It’s old. The paint is chipped in a few places and the porch sags just a little on the left side where the wood needs replacing. The barn sits off to one side with the pasture stretching out behind it, and the faint shapes of the fences are just visible in the moonlight.
The porch light I left on glows softly against the front steps.
I watch Cole’s face carefully as he pulls the truck into the gravel driveway, my stomach tightening a little as the tires crunch over the stones. This is my place. The one thing in my life that belongs completely to me. No landlord hovering over my shoulder, no boss setting the rules, no one telling me what I can or can’t do once I step onto this land. The animals, the house, the stretch of dirt and grass surrounding it, every stubborn little piece of it. It’s mine in a way nothing else has ever been, the only place I’ve ever had where the ground under my feet feels steady, the one thing in my life no one can take away from me.
