I touch the frame. The glass is warm from the sun.
"When was this?" I ask.
"Scottsdale. He'd just scored big and I'd gotten bucked off before the buzzer, and he wouldn't shut up about it for the rest of the weekend." His voice roughens at the edges. "He was the most annoying winner I ever met. I miss it every time I ride."
I look at the photograph and see my brother the way Colt saw him. The rival, the friend, the man who grinned like the world was a joke only he understood. The version of Grant that existed on this circuit, the one I only knew from phone calls and holidays, is preserved on this wall in a hallway in West Texas.
Colt is behind me in the hallway, close enough that I can feel the heat off his body. The space between us has been shrinking since the cemetery, since the wordlovein the morning light, since the drive through West Texas where his hand found my thigh over the center console and stayed there for miles.
"Kenna."
I turn. He fills the hallway with his shoulders and his height and the intensity that radiates from him like heat from stone.
"This is home," he says. "And if you want, it can be yours too."
The words don't need a ring or a ceremony. They're an open door, offered by a man who keeps his locked.
"I want," I say.
He kisses me.
The kiss starts slow, his mouth moving over mine with a care that's different from every other time. There's no desperation in it, no anger, no adrenaline. Just the steady, purposeful intention of a man who has decided this kiss means something new, and he's going to take his time with it.
His hands come to my face, thumbs tracing my jaw, fingers threading into my hair. He tilts my head back and deepens the kiss, and I taste coffee and dust and the faint sweetness of the hard candy he's been working on during the drive, and underneath all of it, the taste that's just him.
"Bedroom," I say against his lips.
"What happened to food first?"
"Priorities shifted."
"They shifted fast."
"Blame the hallway. And the buckles. And the thing you said about home."
His hands drop to my hips, and he lifts me. My legs wrap around his waist, and he carries me to the bedroom with the mountain view and the bed that's never held anyone but him.
He sets me on the edge of the mattress and steps back. He looks at me sitting on his bed, in his house, in the place he built with his own hands and keeps separate from the world.
"You sure?" he asks.
"Colt."
"I need to hear it."
"I'm sure. I've been sure since Albuquerque. I was sure when I was lying to you, and I was sure when you found out, and I was sure in a storage yard in Tucson when someone was shooting at you and the only thing I could think was that I hadn't told you yet."
He pulls his shirt over his head. The scar tissue across his ribs catches the late afternoon light, and the muscles of his stomach tighten as he breathes. His body looks different here, in his own space, framed by his own walls, carrying a weight and permanence it didn't have in motel rooms.
I reach for his belt. He catches my wrist.
"Not yet." His voice has dropped to the register that does things to my pulse that should probably concern me. "I have a plan."
"You have a plan for sex?"
"I have a plan forthis." He kneels between my legs and puts his hands on my knees, pushing them apart with a pressure that's firm without being rough. "This is different."
"Different how?"
