Page 199 of City Girl for the Cowboy Daddy

The words were quiet enough that I nearly lost them under the fiddle.

I understood anyway.

“No,” I said.

“I thought that would feel worse.”

“How’d it feel?”

“Strange.” Her fingers moved once at the back of my neck. “Then good. Then guilty. Then good again.”

I held her and let the song take us nowhere.

This had been what she wanted. Not the crowd. Not the banner. Not her name restored through a public show of support. She’d wanted evenings. A floor. A plate. A phone on a shelf. An hour when nobody’s safety depended on whether she checked the hinge twice.

I knew that now.

Maybe I’d known it before she did.

What I hadn’t known was how much I wanted to be the man who gave it to her. Not because she couldn’t function without me. She’d functioned without everybody for years. That was the problem.

I wanted her to stop functioning sometimes.

I wanted her shoes under my table and her phone on my shelf. I wanted her drawings mixed in with the ranch bills. I wanted to hear her laugh from the other room and know I hadn’t caused it and didn’t need to. I wanted to wake up with her stealing my blanket and go to bed with her correcting the plot of whatever western I read aloud.

I wanted the boring parts.

The grocery list. The damp towel. The argument about whether a stationary bucket could be aggressive.

The chain pressed into my thigh as we turned.

I’d thought about giving it to her when the dance started.

Then Earl had grabbed my arm. Then Wyatt needed the cash tin. Then Ty was leaving, and a man who’d hauled stock under his own policy and saved the entire operation deserved a proper handshake.

I was waiting for the right moment.

The moment with no dust, no interruption, no Petey, no risk that I’d fumble the clasp and drop the horseshoe into a cup of lemonade.