Page 103 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“And Jonah?” Ace’s voice followed him to the doorway. “Don’t go gettin’ sentimental on me.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I know you like playin’ house up there, choppin’ wood, feedin’ chickens, an’ havin’ supper with thefamily.”
“So?”
“That ain’t your family, boy. That’s a job. And the sooner you remember that, the better it goes for everybody.”
Jonah ducked through the doorway and out into the cold. The night air hit his lungs like creek water, a whole different animal from the swampy weight of the harbor air he’d grown up breathing. Colorado kept surprising him with how many stars it had. Back in New York, on a clear night, you could count maybe a dozen through the factory smoke. Here, they packed the sky so thick it had to be fake, like somebody had poked a thousand holes in a dark sheet and hung a lantern behind it.
The walk back along the creek took twenty minutes in the dark. Jonah kept his boots in the water where possible because it killed the sound. He’d learned this running errands for Ace through the Fourth Ward alleys at night, where getting heard meant getting caught and getting caught meant getting beaten by whoever owned that particular stretch of cobblestone.
He reached the culvert. The iron grate, the one he’d helped Mason build—four hours of hammering and fitting, Masoncracking jokes the whole time, and Jonah laughing until his ribs hurt—swung open on the hinges he’d installed himself.
The bunkhouse window slid up. Gerald opened one of his evil eyes as he sat on his perch, but the distance held, and the bird settled. Jonah swung himself inside, landed on the floor, and lay down on his bunk still wearing his boots.
Pulling them off would take everything he had left and then some.
Mason snored in the next bunk. Thomas mumbled something into his pillow—probably poetry, the man wrote rhymes in his sleep, which was ridiculous and a little bit admirable, not that Jonah would ever admit that to him.
The ceiling above him—
Damn it. Logan had put that ceiling in. Tongue-and-groove pine with every board fitted so tight you couldn’t slide a playing card between them. The man built things the way he did everything else. Precisely. Logan didn’t redo. He measured and thought and measured again until he got it right the first time, and then it stayed right. Years later, you’d lie on your back underneath it, and it held.
And, in a few weeks, Jonah would hand Ace the keys to tear it all apart.
Grace’s garden. Rafe’s roses. The fences Logan rode every morning at dawn. The cradle with the carved flowers. The nursery with the blue cushion. The chicken coop where Gerald terrorized anything that moved. Ace would rip all of it up, trench through the grounds, and turn the whole place inside out while the family stood in some fairground watching strangers judge Grace’s tomatoes.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until colors bloomed. The taste of pennies sat on his tongue again. Twelve years old and a blind man’s watch in his pocket and Ace’s hand on his shoulder.
You’re more like me than you think, boy.
He rolled onto his side and stared at the wall. Mason’s snoring hitched.
Tomorrow he’d eat breakfast with them. Sit at that table, pass the biscuits, laugh at something Thomas said, hold Miriam while Grace cooked, and look Logan in the eye like a man who wasn’t about to ruin his ranch.
His boots pressed against the footboard. He should take them off. The mud would stain the blanket, and Grace would—
Grace would notice. She noticed everything. That letter from Ace, the way he’d come back with creek mud on his trousers, the way he’d—
He closed his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The knock hit the door before the sun hit the mountains.
Three hard raps that punched through whatever dream Logan had been having about fence posts and nails and jerked him upright in bed with his pulse already hammering between his ears. His hand found the Winchester against the wall just as his feet found the floor, and that bitter four-in-the-morning cold found its way up his spine.
Three more raps.
“Logan!”
Grace’s voice. Pitched high and sharp in that way that meant something had gone sideways, and his gut dropped because the last time a knock came before dawn on this ranch—
He yanked the door open with the rifle in one hand and his other hand still working the top button of his trousers, and Grace stood in the hallway in her nightdress with her hair loose around her shoulders. She’d pulled Mormor’s shawl tight across her chest, and her eyes had gone wide enough to catch what little moonlight came through the hall window.
“What happened?” He grabbed her elbow and pulled her closer, already scanning the dark hallway past her. “Who’s hurt? Is it Miriam? Is it—”
