Page 99 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“Because he wasright there! Right there, Logan, and if I’d gone to the house and fetched somebody he’d have gone, and we’d be right back where we started, checkin’ locks and ridin’ fences and findin’ nothin’!”
“So, instead you’re standin’ here with a busted ankle and a bullet over your head, and we still got nothin’!”
“Oh, get off my—”
“Except now I know whoever’s out there carries a gun and my wife rides straight at him like she’s got a death wish!”
The wordwifecame out rougher than he meant. Or maybe exactly how he meant. Hard to tell when his whole body ran hot and sick all at once, like he had a fever.
Grace’s eyes brightened. She wouldn’t cry, of course. Grace never cried when she fought. She would cry after, alone, when she thought Logan couldn’t hear her through the thin walls. But the tears stood close enough.
“I ain’t got a death wish, Logan. I was tryin’ to help.”
“I don’t need that kind of help.” He dragged both hands through his hair. “I need you alive. That’s the help I need. You, breathin’, in one piece, not lyin’ in a field with a—”
His throat closed up. Just locked, the way a gate latch caught when it rusted shut, and he had to stand there with his mouth open like a fool while the rest of that sentence rotted behind his teeth.
Grace watched him with that look she got sometimes, the one that cut straight past every fence and wall he’d ever built and found the scared kid underneath who’d ridden home to empty boots on a porch.
“Logan.”
“Don’t.”
He crouched down and took her right boot in both hands. She hissed when he eased it off. The ankle had already started swelling, and the skin had gone tight and shiny. But she hadn’t broken any bones. He’d seen that, and this moved wrong for it; the bones tracked where they should, but she flinched hard when he pressed the outside edge.
“A sprain.” He pulled her sock off. “Bad one.”
“I’ve had worse.”
“That don’t make me feel better.”
“It ain’t supposed to make you feel better, it’s supposed to make you stop fussin’.”
Something in his chest just... unclenched. Like somebody had pulled a cork. Only this hollow, shaky thing remained where all the heat used to be, and underneath it, plain as daylight…
Grace. Chewing a pencil over a letter to Jonah. Kneeling in his mother’s flower beds. Singing the frog song off-key with Miriam’s fist in her collar. Every single morning in his kitchen for the rest of his life, and if she wasn’t there, if that chair sat empty—
His stomach dropped straight through the ground.
He’d been yelling at her for the same reason a man kicked a wall after he tripped over it.
“C’mere.” He turned around and crouched lower. “Get on.”
“I can walk.”
“Grace. Get on my back.”
She sighed the sigh of a woman who knew she’d lost a war and climbed on. Her arms hooked around his neck. Her chin settled against his shoulder, and her breath hit warm on the side of his throat.
He carried her across the field. Neither of them talked for a while. Just his boots in the grass and her weight against his back and the afternoon sun pressing down on them like a hand.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” he said.
“You should be.”
“I am.”
“Good.”
