Banshee, from the bench, Bex's feet still in his lap: "I saw that shit."
I don't look at my father. I can't.
If I look at him right now, I'll lose my nerve, and I've been building this nerve for eight years, three weeks, and four Lone Stars.
I'mnotlosing it now.
"Shake on it, cowboy." I hold out my hand. Steady. Rock steady, even though my heart is doing something illegal in my chest. "Or I walk back to the fire and pretend I never said it."
He looks at my hand, at my face, and then looks at my hand again.
The moment stretches. Two seconds. Five.
Long enough that I start to feel the heat of the fire on my back.
Combined with the heat of his gaze on my front, there’s a very real possibility that he's going to say no, and I'm going to have to walk back to that table and sit down, and die quietly while Thunder makes a joke about it.
Then he takes my hand.
His grip is warm and hard.
His palm is calloused from reins and rope and years of work that have made his hands into something rough and sure.
His fingers close around mine and I feel it in my whole body—the contact, the heat, the current that runs from his skin into mine like touching a live wire.
He doesn't let go.
His thumb shifts. Just barely.
A quarter inch across the back of my hand.
Not a stroke. Not a caress. Just—pressure.
The smallest possible movement that still counts as deliberate.
And his eyes are on mine, they're saying something his mouth won't, his hand won't, and his body has been refusing to say for eight long years.
I feel it everywhere.
In my fingers. In my wrists. In the backs of my knees, the base of my spine, and the place between my hips where the heat pools and settles and makes my breath do something I can't control.
He lets go and steps back.
The kind of stepping back a man does when he knows that if he stays one more second he's going to do something that can't be undone.
I don't step back.
I stand there for a second with my hand still warm, my pulse in my throat, and the whole compound watching and I think:I did it. I actually did it.
Then I turn and walk back to the fire.
I don't look back. I don't need to.
I can feel him watching me. I've always been able to feel him watching.
* * *
I make it back to my cabin.
