Page 119 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“Just go, Jonah.”
He leaned down and kissed the top of Miriam’s head. The baby grabbed at his collar—that same fistful grip she used on everyone she loved—and Jonah unhooked her tiny fingers one at a time and pressed his lips together hard enough to turn them white at the edges.
“I’m sorry, Gracie. I know that don’t fix it. But I’m sorry.”
He walked away.
Miriam whimpered.
“I know, baby girl.” Grace bounced her. “I know.”
***
The house had gone quiet by the time she crept back inside. Rafe had left a plate of bread and cold beef on the counter with a towel over it. Logan had shut his door, but a thin line of lamplight leaked under the gap, and the scratch of a pencil on paper came through the wood.
Ledger work. Which meant Logan had retreated into numbers, which meant he’d rather count cattle losses than look at her.
Grace fed Miriam the last of the evening bottle and rocked her in the nursery, in the crib with the carved roses, in the room Logan had built for them, and every inch of it pressed against her ribs like a bruise that kept getting thumbed.
He’d come after her the first time. Ridden out before dawn, knelt in the dirt, built a fire, brought biscuits.
He wouldn’t come this time.
Miriam’s breathing deepened against Grace’s chest. Grace lowered her into the crib and tucked the blanket around her and stood there with her hands on the rail, tracing one of the carved roses.
Five petals.
The fifty dollars sat crumpled in her dress pocket. She pulled the bills out and smoothed them flat on the changing table. Back in New York, fifty dollars bought six months of rent, or a conversation with a man who ran pickpockets for a living.
Ace wanted the loot. The loot lived somewhere under the ranch property. Ace had torn the place apart looking for it and come up empty. He’d beaten Jonah half to death. He’d threatened Grace’s life.
And he’d come back.
Men like Acealwayscame back. She’d grown up among them—the dock bosses, the ward runners, the landlords who collected rent at knifepoint—and every single one of them operated on the same oily clockwork. Want, take, wait, come back for more.
You didn’t beat a man like that by building a bigger fence. Logan could put iron grates on every window and ride every fenceline from sunup to sundown, and Ace would just wait. Patient as a rat in a wall. Grace had plenty of experience with rats. They chewed and chewed until something gave.
Unless you took away the cheese.
Fifty dollars. To Ace Pike, who’d spent his life squeezing nickels out of children’s pockets, fifty dollars meant something. Maybe not enough to buy him off forever, but enough to get ameeting. Enough to walk in and say, “Leave this family alone, and I’ll help you find what you’re looking for, or take the money and go, but either way you’re done threatening the people I love.”
Stupid plan. Half a plan. Quarter of a plan, honestly, held together with spit and hope and the same stubborn bullheaded refusal to sit still that had gotten her chased off a horse two weeks ago.
But sitting still had never saved her from anything. Not in the tenement, not at the docks, and not in the freezing little room where she’d waited for Jonah to come home with money. She hadn’t asked where it came from because asking meant knowing and knowing meant…
Anyway.
Grace pulled the pencil from the kitchen drawer. She tore a page from the back of Logan’s receipt pad—he’d notice that—and sat down at the dining table.
Logan,
I’ve gone to find Ace. Don’t come after me. Jonah is my brother, which makes this my mess to clean up. The only reason that man has any hold on this family is because of me, whether I knew it or not. I’m taking my fifty dollars because it’s mine, and you said so yourself, and I aim to use it to make him leave.
Tell Miriam I’ll be back.
She stopped writing. The pencil hovered over the paper, and the clock on the mantel ticked, and upstairs, the pencil had stopped scratching, which meant Logan had either fallen asleep over his numbers or given up on them.
I meant every word of that letter. The one I wrote from New York. Nobody told me what to say. Not Jonah, not Ace, not a single soul. I wrote it at the kitchen table with a pencil just like this one, and I meant it.
