“That sounds more than fair,” Rhett said. Then he stepped forward.
I put my hand up, a reflexive stop. He didn’t stop.
He stepped past my hand and transferred the rope for one of the cows into my gloved hands. He took the other. “Show me the way,” he said, smiling.
I nodded and pulled the cow behind me, walking across the yard and entering the barn to put her away for the night.
The barn was warm, shaded from the wind, and the smell of manure, and straw settled around me. I breathed it in and said, “Bunkhouse is around the back,” I said. My voice had not changed. “Follow the track past the equipment shed. There should be wood for the stove. Dinner is at six.” I turned toward the barn. “Don’t be late.”
They left, and as they did, their scents combined and wrapped around me. Not strongly as it was already fading the way scents did once their source was at a distance, but clearly enough that I stopped moving for a moment.
Cole’s had been the first one I’d consciously placed: something clean and earthy underneath the cold, hay and iron, the smell of a person who worked outdoors in all weather and didn’t mask it. Rhett’s had been different. It had cut through the cold air before I knew what it was, both dark and sweet, and had no business caressing me with its touch. I backed away, biting my lower lip, when Wade’s scent registered. A low, quiet warmth, gunpowder under everything, the type of scent you felt in the chest rather than registered in the nose. It had been there when he was still in the saddle, when I hadn’t even put a nameto him yet, and it had sat in my sternum like something pressing from the inside.
I stood in the stall doorway, with the particular clarity that comes to a person when they have been standing in mud all day and have no more capacity for self-deception. Three Alphas. They were Alphas, and I’d just agreed to them living on my ranch, beside me, with me, a heavily pregnant, vulnerable omega, all alone.
***
The onions hit the butter and the smell of them opened up through the kitchen, sweet and sharp at once, and I stood at the stove and let it do what smells do in cold houses at the end of hard days, which is to say it made the room feel briefly inhabited. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and kept the wooden spoon moving.
The potatoes were already boiling on the back burner, a sound I had always found unreasonably reassuring, the low, rolling knock of them, the steam that blurred the window above the sink. I had put together a stew without much deliberation, the kind of thing that fed people without asking anything of them, protein and root vegetables and a broth I had started from the heel of a ham left in the freezer.
I had set four places. One of which, used to be Ethan's. I took a deep breath, knowing I had no choice but to move his chair now.
I gripped the wooden back of the chair, caressed my hand across the edge, then straightened it quickly. For the first time since he’d died, I’d straightened it, part of me felt like this was progress, the other part of me felt like I was replacing him. I sighed, and went back to the stove.
He wouldn’t have minded. That was the thought I let myself have. He would have moved over without being asked, pulled up a chair at the corner, told whoever it was to take the seat. It was the kind of thing he did, unreasonably hospitable, the kind of man who offered the better cut to the guest and ate the rest himself. He wouldn’t have minded. I stood at the stove and stirred and let myself know that, and then I let it go.
Outside, I could hear them. The particular sound of men moving in the cold: the scrape of boots, a brief exchange of words, the low creak of the bunkhouse door shutting. Then quiet. I kept stirring.
They came in through the back door a little later. Standing on the mat while they worked off their boots. Cole was first. He left his boots in a clean pair at the edge of the mat, toes forward. He washed his hands in the sink and took a seat at the table, thanking me. Rhett came in next, with mud on one knee and a grin already running. Wade came last, pulled the door shut against the wind, and stood for a moment in the entryway, hands loose at his sides.
“That,” said Rhett, from the direction of the mat, “is a genuinely remarkable smell.” He said as he washed his hands, moving out of the way for Wade to. “I’ve been eating my own cooking for the better part of six weeks.”
I smiled. “Take a seat,” I said, without turning from the stove.
I ladled the stew and brought it to the table in turns and sat down at my own place, noticing that Wade had sat in Ethan's seat, opposite me. I swallowed then passed the bread around. Wade accepted it with a nod and a quiet thank you that came out lower than Cole’s, more settled in his chest. Rhett tore a piece directly and then caught himself and passed what remainedtoward me with the slight correction of a man who had been raised with better manners than he always remembered to use.
“How long have you run it on your own?” Cole asked. He was looking at his bowl when he asked it, which was either consideration or habit.
“Long enough,” I said.
He looked up. Accepted that, apparently, because he did not push it.
“The south fence,” he said, after a moment. “The posts along that run. How many need replacing?”
This I could answer. “Three at minimum. Two more that are marginal, might make it through the winter, might not.” I pulled the bread toward me. “The one by the east paddock gate is the worst of them. The wire’s been compensating for the post for about a month.”
He nodded once, and went back to his stew.
Rhett, who had been eating with the focused sincerity of a man who had meant what he said about his own cooking, looked up. “What about the tractor?”
I kept my voice flat. “What about it.”
“Just that it’s been making friends with the rust.”
“I know what state the tractor’s in.”
He held both hands up, one of them still holding bread, the fingers spread. “No argument here,” he said. “Just asking.”
