My jaw tightens.
“You’re twisting my words.”
“No,” Rae says, shaking her head slowly. “I’m hearing them exactly how you meant them.”
We’re both breathing harder now, standing too close, the quiet morning around us completely forgotten.
The porch suddenly feels too small.
“I’m not something you claim, Cole,” she continues, her voice quieter but sharper somehow. “I’m not one of your motorcycles or a piece of territory you plant a flag in.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
I stare at her.
Because the truth is sitting in my chest like a loaded weapon and I’m not used to saying things like that out loud.
What I meant is simple.
No one gets to hurt her.
No one gets to touch her the way Voss did.
No one gets to take her away from me now that I know what it feels like to have her here.
But the words get tangled somewhere between my brain and my mouth.
And Rae takes my silence as the answer. She nods slowly, like something inside her just settled. “Yeah,” she says quietly. Thenshe picks up her coffee and steps past me, heading back toward the door. “Just like I thought.”
SIXTEEN
RAE
I tellmyself I did the right thing. The thought repeats in my head like a stubborn little mantra while I move through the house, setting my coffee mug in the sink and pretending the quiet doesn’t feel different now. I ripped the bandage off before things got worse. I didn’t wait around for the moment where he finished whatever business he has with Voss and rode away without looking back. I didn’t give myself time to imagine something that was never going to last. I chose how this ended.
That’s what I keep telling myself. It still hurts like hell. The kitchen feels bigger than it did an hour ago. The house does too. Even the animals seem quieter, like they’re picking up on the tension hanging in the air. Daisy follows me around while I move from the counter to the sink and back again, her tail wagging slowly like she’s trying to figure out why I’m acting weird.
“I’m fine,” I mutter to her. She doesn’t look convinced.
I grab the coffee pot and pour myself another cup even though I barely finished the first one. The smell fills the kitchen, warm and familiar, and I wrap my hands around the mug like thatalone might steady the strange hollow feeling sitting in my chest.
Because the truth is… having Cole here this past week has been everything.
It started out simple enough. A biker sent out to deal with trouble at The Rusty Nail, a quiet man who barely talked but watched everything like he was cataloging the entire room in his head. I thought he’d handle the idiots trying to shake Wayne down and disappear again the same way he appeared.
Instead he stayed. One morning turned into another, and before I knew it he was standing in my barn feeding goats like he’d been doing it his whole life. He listened when I talked, which I do a lot, and he never once looked bored or distracted. When I laughed, he watched me like the sound meant something to him. When the animals climbed all over him, he just accepted it with this quiet patience that made my chest do weird little flips every time I noticed.
And at night… I swallow slowly and stare down into my coffee. At night he held me like I mattered. Not in some over-the-top romantic movie way, but in this steady, grounded way that made me feel safe without him ever saying the word out loud. The first night he stayed I woke up tangled in his arms and it startled me so badly I almost rolled off the bed. After that it just started feeling normal, like my body expected to find him there.
That’s the dangerous part. Because somewhere in the middle of all those quiet mornings and barn chores and kisses that stopped just shy of crossing the line, I fell for him. The quiet, brooding biker with eyes that miss nothing and a voice that gets low and rough when he says my name.
I didn’t plan for any of this, and I definitely didn’t want it, but it happened anyway, quietly and stubbornly working its way under my skin until I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there anymore. The worst part isn’t even the thought of losing him, though that hurts more than I want to admit. What scares me the most is realizing just how badly I want more of him, how easily I could imagine letting him stay, letting this week turn into something bigger, something permanent, something I’m not sure I’m brave enough to hope for.
I want mornings like the ones we’ve had this week where I wake up warm with his arm wrapped around me and Moose snoring at the foot of the bed while the cats judge us from the dresser. I want quiet walks to the barn with coffee in my hand and him beside me while the sun comes up over the pasture. I want the calm way he moves through the world balancing out the constant chaos that seems to follow me everywhere I go.
Cole is steady in a way I’ve never been, the kind of man who feels solid and grounded no matter what’s happening around him. I stare out the kitchen window at the barn for a moment, trying to figure out how to describe what I am in comparison. Loud, maybe. Messy. A little reckless. I’ve always been the kind of person who jumps into situations before thinking them through because standing still never felt like a real option. Whatever the word for it is, it isn’t the same kind of strength Cole carries so effortlessly.
