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“You sure about mornings? I’m very attractive before coffee.”

“You walked into a wall last Tuesday.”

“The wall shifted.”

She laughed, and the laugh broke on something close to a sob.

I put the chain down before I dropped it.

Then I kissed her.

Her hands caught my shirt. My hands found her waist. The first kiss landed hard—eleven days apart, eleven hours back, a whole rodeo, a whole summer of things neither of us had known how to say.

She opened for me with a low sound.

I backed her toward the stacked blankets. She came willingly, mouth hot under mine, fingers working at my shirt buttons with none of her professional precision.

The third button caught.

She tugged.

“Careful,” I said against her mouth.

“Take it off.”

The voice was changing.

Not all the way. But the edges had gone soft. The sentences shorter. The woman who could flatten a vendor at forty paces had left the arena below.

I caught both her wrists gently.

She stilled.

Her pupils were wide.

“What do you need?” I asked.

The question from the bunkhouse. The one she hadn’t been able to answer before she left.

She looked at me for a long second.

Then reached into the back pocket of her jeans and pulled out her phone.

She placed it in my hand.

“You,” she said.

One word.

Badly delivered.

True.

I turned the phone off. Not silent. Off.

I set it beside the necklace on the loft beam.

Her eyes followed it.