“That was chores?”
“That was the easy part.”
His eyebrows lift slightly.
“There’s an easier part?”
“Oh sure,” I say, taking a sip of my coffee. “Sometimes Sheriff tries to fight the mailman.”
Cole stares at me.
Then slowly looks toward the back door like he’s considering whether the rooster might actually come inside and prove my point.
“…your farm is violent.”
I grin into my coffee.
“You fit right in.”
FIFTEEN
GHOST
I wakeup before the sun most mornings, an old habit that never really left me no matter how many years have passed since the first time I learned to sleep light. When you spend enough time in places where hesitation gets people hurt, your body learns to come online the second something feels different. Even out here, in Rae’s farmhouse where the loudest threat most mornings is a rooster with an attitude problem, my brain still runs through the same quiet checklist the moment my eyes open.
I scan the room without moving much, noting the door, the window, the soft sounds drifting through the walls, the slow rhythm of the house settling around us. Pale gray light pushes through the curtains, just enough to paint the room in shadows and shapes, and the faint snort of a goat somewhere outside carries through the cracked window with the cool morning air.
Rae is asleep beside me, and that’s still the part that catches me off guard every time I wake up here. She’s curled on her side facing me, one arm tucked under her pillow while the rest of her is wrapped in a blanket she apparently claimed for herselfsometime during the night. Her hair is a mess across the sheets and half covering her face, and the peaceful look she gets when she’s asleep makes her seem younger somehow, softer in a way that doesn’t show when she’s awake and giving someone hell with that smart mouth of hers. Moose is sprawled across the foot of the bed like he pays rent here, Daisy is wedged up against Rae’s legs, and one of the cats, Outlaw, is perched on the dresser watching me like he’s trying to decide whether I’m a permanent fixture in this house or just a guest he hasn’t chased out yet.
It’s been a little over a week since I rode out here to check on Wayne andThe Rusty Nail, expecting to deal with a couple of idiots trying to run a small protection racket and then head back to Jackson once the problem was handled. Instead, somewhere along the way I ended up staying, falling into a rhythm that doesn’t make much sense for a man like me but feels a little too easy to walk away from. The days start early with barn chores and coffee strong enough to wake the dead, and most of the time Rae talks while I listen, filling the quiet with stories about the animals or the town or whatever happened at the bar the night before. I’ve learned the names of goats that act like they’re running organized crime out of the barn, and I’ve spent more time than I ever expected standing in a pasture watching the sun come up while Rae laughs at something one of the dogs did.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started noticing things I shouldn’t be paying attention to. The way she wrinkles her nose slightly when she’s dreaming, like something in her sleep annoyed her. The way she hums under her breath when she’s making coffee in the morning, like the quiet doesn’t sit right unless she fills it with something. The way she laughs with her whole body, head tipped back and eyes bright, like she doesn’t care who hears it or what they think about it. I noticed that one early, maybe the second day I stayed here, and now it’s thekind of thing my brain catalogs automatically without asking permission first.
The truth is she’s driving me completely insane, and the worst part is I don’t even want it to stop. It’s not loud or chaotic the way she is when she’s awake and moving through the world, but something about being around her has been getting under my skin in a way I didn’t see coming. We’ve kissed more than once over the past week, the kind of slow, lingering kisses that start soft and end with her fingers gripping the front of my shirt like she forgot we’re supposed to be taking things slow. There have been touches too, hands sliding over hips when we pass each other in the kitchen, fingers brushing across the back of her neck when she leans against me while we’re standing outside watching the animals. Every time things start to cross that line where it would be easy to lose control, something pulls us back before we go too far.
Sometimes it’s Rae laughing and stepping away like she can see the exact second my thoughts get ahead of me, and sometimes it’s me forcing myself to slow down because she deserves more than being rushed into something by a man who still isn’t sure what the hell he’s feeling. I’ve spent most of my life keeping people at arm’s length for a reason, and the idea of letting someone get close enough to matter the way she already does is the kind of thing that used to make me shut doors fast. The problem is that every morning I wake up with her beside me, every time she looks at me like she already decided I belong here, that instinct to run gets a little harder to listen to.
My phone buzzes quietly on the nightstand, and I reach over to grab it before the vibration wakes her. The screen lights up with a message from Riot, which immediately pulls my mind back to the reason I came out here in the first place. Riotdoesn’t text people before sunrise unless something is moving, and the name sitting in the middle of that message is one I’ve been waiting to deal with since the night Rae walked into that warehouse and came back with bruises on her face.
Voss.
The memory of seeing her that night still sits wrong in my chest. The split in her lip. The swelling across her cheek. The way her hands shook even while she tried to act like she was fine. I’ve replayed it enough times over the past week that I can still see exactly how it looked when she lifted her head and tried to brush it off like it was nothing. The men who held her down while Voss put his hands on her made a mistake the second they touched her, and the longer I stay here watching her move around this house like she’s already decided I belong in it, the harder it is to pretend that mistake doesn’t belong to me to handle.
I slide carefully out of bed so I don’t wake her or disturb the animals that have claimed half the mattress. Jeans and a T-shirt go on quietly before I head downstairs and step out onto the porch, letting the cool morning air wake me the rest of the way up. The pasture is still covered in a thin layer of mist, and somewhere near the barn one of the goats knocks something over with a dull thud. It’s quiet out here in a way the city never is, but the calm doesn’t fool me. All it does is give my brain more space to run through the same thought that’s been circling for days.
Voss is still breathing.
I dial Mason. He answers quickly, which means he’s already up and working. “Ashcroft.”
I lean against the porch railing and watch the fog slide slowly across the fence line before speaking. “Riot find him?”
Mason doesn’t bother asking what I’m talking about because he already knows. There’s a brief pause on the other end of the phone before he answers, his voice steady and calm the way it always is when he’s measuring the weight of something before saying it out loud. “Riot’s got a location,” he says. “Warehouse on the edge of Harlan. Voss has been moving between there and a couple other properties he uses for storage.”
My jaw tightens as I stare out across the pasture. “And the men with him.”
“Still the same crew from that night.” The quiet that follows stretches long enough that Mason knows exactly what I’m thinking. “You’re not riding down there alone,” he says finally.
I don’t answer right away. Through the kitchen window I can see Rae moving around inside the house, probably starting coffee and letting the dogs out before she heads to the barn. Watching her like that makes something heavy settle deeper in my chest, the same cold certainty that’s been sitting there since the night she came home bruised.
