Page 20 of She Autumn Be Mine

“Quit babying it,” Cash hollered over the grinder. “It’s a stump, McCall.”

I ran the wheel through the heart of it and the cottonwood gave up in a spray of wet chips. We’d cleared an area big enough for the hay wagons, and to turn the draft team without backing them.

Opening weekend of the Off-Duty Rescue Ranch Pumpkin Patch started tomorrow, per the printed signs Ivy had some of the guys post everywhere around town, and up the highway turn. She had come by twice today to check on progress, worried we were falling behind.

We weren’t, but you don’t argue with a woman holding a clipboard and a vision for a family fun event like this.

Cash killed the grinder and the quiet came down over the field the way it does in the mountains, all at once. He surveyed the ground and nodded, satisfied, the way he used to nod on a mission when we’d cleared a building.

“Kids are gonna lose their minds out here,” he said. “Hayride, corn maze, the little pony ride. Hell, I might lose my mind out here.”

“Ivy’ll charge you the kid rate. You’re about that mature.”

“Hilarious.” He picked up some of our tools. “You bringing your two?”

My two… rolled off his tongue easily.

I stacked the chainsaw and the fuel can in the truck bed and since I didn’t answer, he stopped right in front of me.

“Might as well say whatever you’ve been working on in that head of yours all day.”

Of course he read me like a book. Stand shoulder to shoulder with a guy long enough in intense war-like situations and you get to know every twitch.

“Yeah, something has been bugging me for a few weeks now,” I admitted. “Harper caught me at the truck after Knox’s wedding, and told me there’d been a stranger in town at the Copper Cup, asking questions about a woman with a baby. It has put me on alert ever since, looking over our shoulders, checking the rearview mirror, reminding Autumn to lock her doors.”

Cash’s guard went up, same as mine. “You think he’s looking for her and the baby?”

“Maybe. She ran from a guy who hurt her. Took his baby with her. I always wondered if he’d come back around to claim what he thought was his.” I threw a rope over the tarp in the truck bed, and cinched it harder than the load needed. “Then last week, Trig called me, checking in about Autumn. He told me his lawyer heard from that family; they’re looking for her.”

“Looking to what?”

“That’s the question I chew on all night, every night.” I leaned on the tailgate. “She’s got a boy those people consider theirs, Cash, even if she had every right to run and protect herself and that boy.”

Cash absorbed that, arms folded on top of the tailgate beside me, both of us looking at a field we’d made ready for hayrides.

“How is she handling it?”

“That’s the other thing.” It took me a minute, this part I hadn’t said out loud to anybody. “Since the wedding she’s been—guarded. More than usual, and her usual would qualify as a fortified position. All summer I could feel her easing up. Laughing more. Letting me closer by inches. Now she has a fear in her eyes I didn’t plant there. I reached past her for the diaper bag yesterday, and she actually flinched.” I heard my own jaw tighten around it. “She hasn’t flinched at me since the day I met her. I’d never hurt her—” I stopped, shaking my head. “But I’d hurt the son of a bitch who did.”

“Can I say the obvious thing?” Cash guffawed.

“Go ahead.”

“You’re in love with her.”

I didn’t blink. He stated the truth, and when it sneaks up on you it’s loud.

“Probably.”

“Well, thank God.” He slapped the tailgate. “The whole bunkhouse has a pool going. Pete had you confessing by Halloween, so keep this between us or I owe him forty dollars.” Then the grin banked down and he turned square to me. “Tell her. That’s the play, Jake. Not standing guard in the parking lot for another year—telling her. You and I both know how fast the ground goes out from under a life. We’ve seen it, lived it, watched guys thinking they had time, but they didn’t. You want to still be calling it friendship a year from now?” He shook his head. “Stop holding yourself back, brother. Go get what you want.”

“She’s not ready to hear it.”

“Maybe. Or maybe she flinches because she’s carrying it alone, when there’s a man right here she can’t lean on because he keeps filing himself under the label of babysitter.” He shrugged. “Worst case, you scare her a step back, so then you’re patient and you try again, which is the only thing you’ve ever been good at. Best case—” He tipped his chin at the field. “You get the hayride, McCall. The whole corny ride of love.”

“Corny—what do you know about love?” I snickered, and regarded the wagons for a long minute. Then I did what any cornered man does. I returned fire. “You’ve played around with women for years. From where I stand, why should I take advice from a man who won’t even unpack a duffel?”

That landed. Cash’s jaw tensed. He opened the cooler, took two beers, handed me one, and chugged one down.