I sink into a plastic chair, head in my hands. Beau drops beside me like his strings got cut. Gabriel paces, already on the phone with his deputies, setting up crime scene protocols and manhunts.
"I'm gonna tell her," I say to the ugly carpet. "When she wakes up. I'm gonna tell her everything."
"Tell her what?" Beau's voice is carefully neutral, but I hear the undercurrent.
"That I'm crazy about her." The words come out raw, honest as an open wound.
Silence stretches between us like a tightrope. Then Beau speaks, quiet and certain as mountain stone.
"Yeah," he says. "Me too."
We both look at Gabriel, who's stopped pacing mid-stride. He meets our eyes, and something passes between the three of us. Understanding.
The question hanging in the air like gun smoke: what the hell do we do about it?
For now, we wait.
Three men brought together by a girl who might not make it through the night.
Three men who might get a second chance at getting it right this time.
If she'll have us.
If she survives.
I close my eyes and make promises to a God I stopped believing in years ago.Bring her back to us. Let her be okay. Let me tell her the truth before it's too late.
Because losing her now would break something in me that all the whiskey in Montana couldn't fix.
16
Lucy
Consciousness crawls back in layers, like surfacing from deep water.
First comes the smell. That sharp antiseptic stench that screams hospital louder than any alarm.
Then pain hits, everywhere at once, like someone put me through a meat grinder and forgot to turn it off.
Finally, voices filter through the fog. Low, masculine, achingly familiar.
I keep my eyes closed. Head feels like it's been used for batting practice. Ribs scream with every breath. Left wrist weighs a ton, probably casted. But I'm breathing, which is more than I expected when I was tumbling down that ravine like a broken doll.
"She's stirring." Colt's voice, rough as gravel, so close I can feel his breath against my cheek.
"Lucy? Come on, Shortie, open those eyes for me."
I force my eyelids up, blinking against fluorescent lights that stab straight through my skull into my brain. The room swims into focus slowly. Colt sits beside my bed looking like he's been through his own personal hell. Dark circles under those green eyes, stubble way past his usual devil-may-care scruff, flannel shirt wrinkled and stained with what might be my blood.
Movement by the window catches my attention. Beau stands with his back to the room, shoulders rigid as fence posts, staring out at something only he can see. Even from here, I can feel the tension radiating off him like heat waves.
And by the door, Gabriel leans against the wall in full uniform, arms crossed, watching everything with those sharp blue eyes that miss absolutely nothing.
All three of them. Here. Together.
"Darcy?" The word scrapes out like I've been gargling sand, but it's the only thing that matters right now. If I failed to get those antibiotics through, if that sweet little calf died...
Colt's face does something complicated. Disbelief mixed with the kind of affection that makes my chest tight. His hand finds mine, careful of the IV line snaking into my arm. "Of course that's your first damn question. Not 'how long was I out' or 'what's broken.' You're worried about a calf."
