Page 17 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
Chapter Five
The house had gone dark.
Pa had turned in first, climbing the stairs with the hitch in his step that got worse in the evenings because the old man just wouldn’t admit that the old injury in his hip ground bone against bone whenever the weather shifted. Thomas had followed not long after. Mason—who’d spent most of the evening shooting guilty looks at Logan from across the room, and Loganwouldgive him a piece of his mind tomorrow—had finally slunk off to bed around nine with a mumbledg’night.
So, now, the house relaxed.
Well, it did so as much as it could with a baby sleeping in a dresser drawer in the spare room. They didn’t even have a crib. Mason had had to scramble one together from a dresser drawer and some folded quilts.
Logan changed into his last clean shirt, since the other four hung on the wash line out back, and stepped out onto the porch.
The night had cooled the air off the way nights under the mountains could do, dropping twenty degrees between sundown and full dark. The yard smelled of pine pitch and cold stone, and the chimney let off the faintest traces of burning wood.
I’ll have to top up the embers soon.
Out past the fenceline, a coyote called out with a note so thin Logan half expected it to snap, and another answered from somewhere up the ridge.
This right here used to be Ma’s favorite spot.
This porch. This view. This particular slice of quiet after a long day. She’d sit in the rocker Pa had built her, the one that still filled the far corner, on which years of use had flattened the cushion, and she’d watch the stars come out while the boys finished their chores. Sometimes she’d hum. Sometimes she’d just sit.
Since the day she died, everyone avoided the rocker like the plague.
Except now.
Grace sat in it and rocked without a care in the world, looking out into the distance as if she’d never seen proper nature. Then, as she noticed him, she pulled a shawl around her shoulders that looked like it’d been mended so many times that nothing remained of the original fabric.
For a stretch, neither one of them spoke. Just the coyotes and the wind and the house settling on its foundation, the way old houses did.
“Stars out here are somethin’ else.” She tipped her chin up as she whispered. “Back home, you’re lucky to see a handful on a clear night. Too much smoke and lamplight.”
“Gets even better in winter.”
She pulled the shawl tighter. Even in the dark, the set of her shoulders showed a woman bracing against a gust yet to come. Under the starlight, those freckles across her nose stood out against her skin like flecks of copper.
He exhaled. “I owe you an apology.”
That got her to look at him.
“My brothers had no business doin’ what they did. Placin’ that ad, buyin’ you a ticket, draggin’ you halfway ‘cross the country without so much as a word to me about it. That ain’t how I run things around here, and it sure as Sunday ain’t the welcome you deserved after four days on a train.”
“Yeah.” She stood up and walked up to the railing. “I figured you didn’t know.”
“Not a lick. If I had, I’d have put a stop to it ‘fore the ink dried on that letter.”
“Well,” she ran her thumb along the railing. “That does explain the rifle.”
A cough charged up from his chest, but he covered it up by clearing his throat. “Pa don’t trust strangers comin’ up on the property. Got his reasons for it.”
She nodded like she understood there might be more to that story, but wouldn’t push for it tonight.
Smart woman. Or maybe just tired. Probably both.
“What made you answer the ad?” He leaned against the railing next to her. “The real reason. Not whatever polished version you put in your letter.”
For a long moment, she just looked out at the dark, and the shawl shifted across her shoulders as she took a breath.
“Rats ate my hair.”
