Page 83 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“Grace, some of it ain’t—”
“I don’t care if it ain’t pretty! I’ve been eatin’ stolen food since I was ten years old without knowin’ it. You owe me the truth.”
He nodded.
***
The wash took an hour and a half.
Grace scrubbed each piece on the board, wrung them, and scrubbed again. Her knuckles went red, then raw, and the lye soap stung the tiny cracks in her skin. Miriam babbled on her blanket. Kicked her feet. Chewed the rattle and dropped it and squawked until Grace picked it up and handed it back, which happened roughly every four minutes.
She hung Jonah’s shirt on the line. Pinned it at the shoulders. The fabric flapped once in the breeze, sleeves spreading wide like arms reaching for something.
A gang boss. Pickpockets. The take from the harbor job.
And now the silver. The break-in. The strongbox was picked open in the night while she and Miriam slept down the—
No.
She jammed the clothespin down so hard it cracked.
No. Jonah wouldn’t. He’d never steal from them. He’d never sneak into the house—the house where she and the baby slept, the house that had taken him in—and rifle through Logan’s desk like some common—
But he knows the house.Where the office sat. How the locks worked. He’d lived here for weeks now, eating at their table, laughing at their jokes, playing with Miriam on the porch while Rafe rocked in his chair and—
Stop it.
She grabbed another shirt from the basket. Plunged it into the tub. The water sloshed over the rim and darkened the dirt at her feet.
Jonah talked about the culvert at the fence line. Yesterday, after the break-in, standing right there with the rest of the men, pointing out how a person could crawl through. He’d been the one to check the back door. He’d found the picked lock. Reported it back to Logan with the right amount of alarm in his voice.
Stop it, Grace.
Her hands twisted the shirt so hard the seams groaned.
This line of thinking made her sick. Physically sick. A sourness in her stomach, a taste like pennies on her tongue. Her own brother. The boy who’d starved himself so she could eat. Who’d slept on the floor so she could have the bed. Who’d kept her laughing through winters that should’ve broken them both.
No. Not Jonah.
Somebody else broke in. Somebody who knew the property, as Rafe had said. Somebody who’d been watching. The culvert, the back door, and the strongbox all pointed to planning. A person who’d taken the time to study the ranch from the outside.
Her brother slept in the bunkhouse and tripped over chickens. He couldn’t sneak past a rooster named Gerald without ending up on his back in the dirt. The idea of him creeping through a dark house, picking a lock, searching a desk without making a sound…
Ridiculous.
She wrung the shirt out and hung it next to the first one. Two sleeves dripping in the sun. Water running off the cuffs and leaving dark spots on the grass below.
Tonight. He’d tell her everything tonight, and she’d listen, and she’d decide then how much of her brother she could still trust.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Four days of nothing.
No tracks. No broken wire. No boot prints near the culvert. No sign that any living soul had come within a mile of the property since the break-in, and that—more than anything—put Logan’s teeth on edge. Because trouble that announced itself you could fight. Trouble that vanished meant it picked a better hiding spot.
The new deadbolt held solid on the back door. The iron grate Jonah and Mason had sunk into the creek bed blocked the culvert tight enough to stop anything bigger than a muskrat. Every window on the ground floor carried fresh latches, the kind that needed a key from the outside and a thumb-turn from the inside.
So the house sat locked up like a strongbox. Good. Fine. Still didn’t explain who’d gotten in or why the only thing they’d taken weighed about two ounces and came out of the dirt.
