Because once I let myself want him like that, I wasn’t just risking a kiss. I was risking how quickly he’d started to feel like something permanent.
I just don’t know if me and Jesse candopermanent. I don’t even know if he wants to.
I glance away quickly.
Get it together, Abilene.
He clears his throat and goes back to work, climbing the ladder again, and the view should not be doing things to me. This should not be happening while children are present and tools are involved and daylight exists.
And yet.
I hug my mug to my chest as if it might restrain me and mutter under my breath, “You are a grown woman. You can survive a man fixing a gutter.”
“Say something?” Jesse calls.
“Nope,” I say brightly. “Just… aggressively affirming my sanity.”
He laughs, and the sound slides straight down my spine.
I’m so, so doomed.
And the most infuriating part?
Despite the heat, the memory, the way my body still hasn’t forgiven me for stopping that kiss…
It isn’t awkward. Not even a little.
Which somehow makes wanting him worse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Marshall
Friday
The bell over the door at the Colter Creek Feed Store rings sharp and metallic when I step inside, announcing me whether I want it to or not.
The place smells the same as it always does. Grain dust. Leather. Oil. Old wood soaked through with decades of boots tracking in mud and hay and sweat.
It should settle me. It usually does. But today it just reminds me how close we came to watching all of it burn.
Tommy Jones is leaning against the counter, one boot hooked on the rail, coffee cup balanced in his hand as if he’s been here long enough to need a second refill. Terry Johnson’s beside him, arms folded, shoulders slumped in that way that says he slept badly and woke up worse.
“Morning,” Tommy says.
I nod. No small talk. Grab a sack of feed from the stack by the door, hoist it onto my shoulder. The weight hits just right. Solid, useful, something that exists outside my head.
“Containment’s holding,” Terry says, reciting a line he’s already said a dozen times today. “Rain did its job.”
“For now,” Tommy adds. “Wind shifted overnight.”
Could’ve gone the other way.
Nobody says it, but it sits there between us anyway. That’s how things work here. We don’t waste words on what everyone already knows.
“Still damage,” I say.
“Plenty,” Terry replies. “Fences on the north end are toast. Lost a good stretch of grazing land.”
