"You weren't trying to get yourself killed. I've watched you ride twice now, and at Amarillo you looked like a man who wanted the bull to finish the job. Today you looked like you actually cared about walking out of the arena." She tilts her head, studying me with the same analytical intensity she brings to financial records. "What changed?"
The honest answer is sitting right next to me, smelling like hotel shampoo and ink, and I'm not about to hand her that kind of leverage.
"Got tired of hospital food," I say.
"Liar." But her mouth curves, just slightly, and her shoulder presses harder against mine. The contact is deliberate this time, and the warmth of it spreads through my arm and settles somewhere deep.
We sit like that for a few seconds, shoulder to shoulder, watching the empty arena fill up with shadows while the last of the crew packs out the livestock equipment. The silence between us isn't awkward. It's the silence of two people who are both acutely aware that there's about six inches of air between his thigh and her thigh, and neither of them is doing anything about it, and neither of them is moving away.
"Don't stay out late tonight," she says. She doesn't look at me when she says it, and her voice is level and matter-of-fact, like she's issuing a schedule update. "We need to plan the Flint approach."
"Is that what we're calling it."
The corner of her mouth twitches, just barely. "Among other things. Unless you'd rather sit in the truck and brood. I know that's your preferred evening activity."
"I don't brood."
"Colt, if brooding was an Olympic sport, you'd be a shoe-in for the gold." She stands, gathers her notebook and bag, and looks down at me with an expression that's equal parts challenge and invitation. "Don't keep me waiting." She pauses on the step below me. "I've arranged for a rental car to be delivered to me. I need my own wheels if I'm going to work sources independently. I'll meet you at the room."
"You don't need your own car. You've got my truck."
"I've got access to your truck when you're not using it, which is never, because you live in it." She tilts her head. "I need to be able to move without waiting on your schedule, Holloway. Don't make it a thing."
She walks down the stadium steps without looking back. I watch her go, and the ache in my gut has nothing to do with the bull ride and everything to do with a woman who walks into a room and takes control of it the same way I take control of an eighteen-hundred-pound animal, with nerve and timing and the absolute refusal to be thrown.
I should keep this professional. Grant is dead. Merrick is untouchable. The investigation is a house of cards held together by financial data and a steer wrestler's off-the-record confirmation. The last thing either of us needs is a complication.
I don't keep her waiting. I'm not built for staying away from something I want, and Kenna is rapidly becoming the thing I want most.
7
KENNA
The rental car is waiting at the arena lot when I get back to ground level, a forgettable silver sedan dropped off by the delivery driver right where I told him to leave it. I find the keys in the lockbox on the rear tire, text Colt that I'll meet him at the room, and drive back to the motel.
His truck is already there when I pull in. The light in our room is on.
He doesn't ask about the car when I come through the door. He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his boots still on and the Flint file spread across the comforter, and the look he gives me when I walk in is the same look he gave me the first night in Amarillo: assessing, deliberate, hungry.
We spend the next hour planning the approach and the hour after that doing things that have nothing to do with planning.
In the morning, we take his truck. Flint's ranch is four hours into the kind of backcountry where a sedan would bottom out on the first cattle guard, and Colt knows the route. I leave the rental in the motel lot. It'll be there when we get back.
The drive takes every one of those four hours on roads that get progressively worse, and Colt drives all of it in a silence that's somehow louder than any argument we've had.
The truck cab smells like leather and dust and the cedar soap he uses, and my body still carries the evidence of last night. I feel the soreness in my hips, the tender spot on my collarbone where his teeth found skin, the way my pulse kicks every time his forearm flexes on the steering wheel.
We've been sleeping together since the first night, and we haven't discussed it or named it or done anything except fall into each other like it's inevitable and then pretend in the daylight that it didn't happen. That's exactly how I want it, because naming it means feeling it, and feeling it means confronting the lie I'm wrapped in like a second skin.
"You tried Flint twice," I say, breaking the quiet because the alternative is staring at his hands on the wheel for another sixty miles and thinking about what those hands did last night. "What happened?"
"First time, he didn't answer the door. Second time, he told me through the screen to walk away."
"That's it? That's your approach? You bang on the door and hope for the best?"
"I'm a bull rider, not a diplomat."
"That much is clear." I pull my notebook from my bag and flip through the pages where I've been building the approach. "Here's the plan. I go to the door alone, with my press credentials and a professional demeanor. I tell him I'm writing a feature on the circuit's stock contractors for a regional outlet. I ask about the industry, about changes in the business, about retirement. I get inside. I build rapport. Then I steer the conversation."
