Page 92 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
He pressed his wet hands over his eyes.
What was the smart play here?
Tell Logan? Confess everything? Take the beating, take the exile, grab Grace and the baby, and run? Run where? With what money? Was there a place that Ace’s crew couldn’t reach?
Grace had burned the letter. She’d originally told him to do it, but then she’d changed her mind and insistedshedo it. He’d watched her burn it, standing by the stove yesterday morning, feeding the paper to the flame with steady hands and a jaw set tight enough to crack walnuts.
He’d promised to tell her everything, but he’d only told her some of it.
The pickpocketing. The Fourth Ward. The years of stolen wallets and purse-cutting and running from coppers through alleys that stank like fish guts. Enough to explain the letter, make her cry, and earn the look she’d given him.
He stood up from the creek bank. Wiped his face on his sleeve. His hands steadied. Not because anything inside him had settled, but because panic only helped if it moved your feet, and standing by a creek at three in the morning accomplished nothing.
He climbed the slope. Crossed the property. Slid back through the bunkhouse window, scraping his shirt buttons on the frame. Lay down on his bunk. Stared at the ceiling.
The wood planks ran straight and even, each one butted tight against the next, because Logan Foster built things right. Logan cared about the people who slept under his roof enough to make sure the boards above them held together without gaps.
Lord… What do I do?
Chapter Twenty-Five
The idea hit her somewhere between wringing out Thomas’s socks and discovering that Mason had, once again, left a penny in his trouser pocket.
Town.
She could go to town. Right now. This morning. By herself, like an actual grown woman who made decisions without consulting a committee of four men and a rooster.
Miriam kicked her feet on the blanket, babbling at a cloud, doing that thing where her whole body got involved in the babbling, fists pumping, legs kicking, mouth stretching wide open like she had strong opinions about the sky and needed everyone to hear them. Grace scooped her up, pressed her nose into her neck and—
Yeah. She was going to town.
The men had scattered. Logan rode the south fence with Thomas. Mason and Jonah hammered at whatever had broken this week in the far barn. Rafe worked a strip of leather on the porch, squinting at it as if it had offended him.
Nobody needed her for anything. Not for the next few hours, anyway.
She had to get seeds.
Logan had tilled the garden plot behind the chicken coop last week, split the black dirt open to the sun, and it looked ready, but half the seed packets she’d ordered from the general store catalogue hadn’t come in yet. However, Mr. Henley had told her last week—through Mason, because, apparently, a woman couldn’t get her own messages in this family—that her pole bean seed and her squashhadarrived.
So. Town. Seeds. Maybe a peppermint stick from the jar on Henley’s counter, the ones that tasted like Christmas and cost a penny each. Miriam could gum one of those. Probably.
She hitched Penny to the small cart in about twice the time it should’ve taken, because Penny kept turning her head around to watch with that slightly judgmental expression horses got when they knew you still buckled the traces wrong. But Grace got it done. Strapped Miriam into the sling, climbed up, and clicked her tongue the way Logan had taught her.
***
Pitkin fit into about four blocks and a church steeple, but after weeks on the ranch, it might as well have been Paris.
People. Actual people she didn’t share a supper table with. A woman in a green dress nodded at her outside the dry goods store. Two boys chased a dog down the main street. Somebody played a fiddle—badly, but still—from an upstairs window above the saloon.
Grace tied Penny at the rail and walked into Henley’s General Store with Miriam on her hip. The bell above the door chimed. Mrs. Henley looked up from behind the counter and smiled the way women smiled at other women holding babies. That ‘oh, look at you, you’ve got one too’look that crossed every line of class and age and didn’t need a single word to work.
“Mrs. Foster! And who’s this little dumpling?”
Nobody in town had ever called herMrs. Fosterbefore. Her face heated up. Just... warm, all at once, for no good reason.
“This here’s Miriam.”
“Oh, ain’t she precious? She’s got your eyes.”
