"What'd you say?"
"I told him I have one of those faces."
He looks at me and holds the look longer than is safe on a dirt road. Whatever he sees makes his nostrils flare.
"That cover of yours has a shelf life," he says. "You know that, right?"
“I know."
"When it breaks, and it's going to break, you better have a plan for what comes after."
"Do you always assume the worst?"
"I assume what experience tells me. And experience tells me that lies have expiration dates."
The words land harder than he probably intends, or maybe exactly as hard as he intends. I can't always tell with Colt whether he's being blunt or surgical.
Either way, the silence that follows is thick with everything we're not saying, and the space between us in the truck cab feels both too small and too large at the same time.
He turns back to the road. The afternoon sun pours through the windshield, and I watch the highway unspool ahead of us and feel the timer counting down on something I can't stop.
The truth is, I don't have a plan for what comes after. I've been so focused on the investigation, on finding Grant's killers, that I haven't let myself think about the detonation that's coming when Colt finds out that the woman he's been sleeping with is the sister of the man whose death he can't forgive himself for.
The woman sitting in his passenger seat with his best friend's face hiding behind a fake last name.
I stare through the windshield and feel his hand ghost over my thigh again, lighter this time, almost questioning, and I cover it with my own before I can think better of it.
His fingers lace through mine and hold on. The grip is warm and steady and entirely too real for something built on a lie.
8
COLT
Kenna works the way a rodeo vet works a sick animal: methodical, relentless, and completely indifferent to how much time has passed since she last ate or slept.
After Flint's ranch, we spent the next several days in Albuquerque between events, working leads from the motel room and the press office. But the circuit is a fishbowl, and Kenna didn't want to spread sensitive documents where someone with Thornton's logo on their jacket might glance over her shoulder. So we drove an hour to Santa Fe in separate vehicles, found a diner where nobody knows us, and she turned a booth into a war room.
She's been at it for three hours. She's commandeered the entire table surface with printed spreadsheets, her backup laptop, a notebook covered in handwriting so precise it looks typed, and a coffee cup she keeps refilling without looking up.
The waitress stopped checking on us an hour ago. Even she can tell this table doesn't want small talk.
I should be studying the spreadsheets. Instead I'm watching Kenna's fingers trace the columns, remembering where thosefingers were at two in the morning when she woke me up by dragging her nails down my stomach.
She's wearing a tank top, and every time she leans forward to tap a number, the neckline shifts and I can see the edge of the mark I left on her collarbone. She hasn't covered it. I don't know if that's carelessness or a choice, but either way, it's making concentration difficult.
"You're not looking at the spreadsheet," she says without looking up.
"I'm looking at the spreadsheet."
"You're looking at my boobs—not the same thing."
"True, but your boobs are closer and far more appealing."
"Move the spreadsheet closer and stop being useless." She slides a page across the table and taps it with her pen. "Every single one. Every event where Thornton Livestock supplied stock for the past two seasons. At least one top-ten rider sustained an injury. Every time."
I drag my attention to the numbers because she's right, I'm being useless.
She's cross-referenced event schedules with stock contractor assignments and injury reports, then layered in the financial data from the circuit's payout records. The pattern is undeniable once you see it laid out.
