Page 84 of Wild Sanctuary

“June tells me there’s a mechanical bull,” she says, and there’s a dry edge underneath that almost gets me.

“Apparently.”

“And a lasso station.”

“So I’m told.”

“And the Gazette wants action shots.”

“That is the information I have, yes.”

She turns toward the window and I catch the ghost of a smile in the glass. There and gone. The cab shrinks another six inches.

“It’s just dinner.”

She doesn’t answer that. I don’t look over to see her face, because I already know what I’d find, and because the road ahead requires my full attention, and because if I look at her right now the last wall I’ve got is going to come down before we reach the parking lot.

The Blackstone Inn appears around the final bend, lit up warm against the valley. Through the wide front windows, I can see the dining room dressed in white linen and candlelight with the kind of careful detail that has June Hartley’s fingerprints on every surface.

Around the side, the terrace is strung with lights and littered with hay bales. The unmistakable silhouette of a mechanical bull is ringed with padded mats. And a photographer from the Gazette is already setting up, testing his flash against the angles.

I pull in, kill the engine, and for a second, neither of us moves. The truck ticks as it cools. Inside the Inn, a burst of laughter carries out through the open windows on the warm evening air.

Daisy reaches for her door handle, and I’m out and around to her side before she can open it. Because if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right, even if right means holding the door for a woman I can barely look at without every thought in my head falling apart.

She steps down, and for a moment we’re standing closer than the occasion calls for. Close enough that I can see the amber flecks in her brown eyes and the scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose that I’ve spent six years pretending I haven’t memorized. Near enough that the warmth from her bare shoulders reaches me across the inches between us.

I step back and gesture toward the entrance.

“After you.”

She holds my gaze for one beat longer than is safe for either of us. Then she turns, and we walk toward the Blackstone Inn side by side, and I have the length of a parking lot to get my head right.

Working dinner.

Tom’s daughter.

Home by nine.

The poker face holds. It has always held. Thirty-five years of practice and not once has it cracked when it mattered.

I pull the door open for her and follow her inside.

It’ll hold. It has to.

20

DAISY

The Blackstone Inn looks like June Hartley reached inside its chest and rearranged its organs.

White linen on every table. Candles in mason jars wrapped with twine and sprigs of something that smells like lavender and sage. Place cards in careful calligraphy. The whole room feels staged—like it’s waiting to be photographed, which it is. The Bozeman Gazette photographer is already circling, and the Helena Independent has sent a woman with a notepad and sharp eyes who looks like she’s already halfway to a headline.

Wyatt holds the door and I step inside, and whatever almost-ease we managed in the truck evaporates on contact with the room.

The dry back-and-forth. The smile I almost couldn’t suppress.

Gone.