Page 41 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
She shifted onto her side, dodging the stems and rocks that claimed every inch of ground, and ended up wedged between a knob of root under her shoulder blade and a divot that cradled her hip at the wrong angle.
Back in New York, she’d slept on a cot thin enough to count the slats through the mattress, and even that ranked as luxury next to raw Colorado dirt. The blanket scratched her cheek. Through the wool, a cold draft snaked along the ground and found the gap between her boots and the hem of her skirt, prickling up both shins.
In the sling, Miriam sighed and tucked both fists under her chin. Grace counted each breath against her collarbone the way she’d counted them every night for three weeks.
Jonah stepped outside.
Grace lay awake.
Above her, the tent canvas rippled in the breeze. Through the open flap, coals pulsed from orange to gray and back.
She closed her eyes and strained for the tick of the mantel clock.
Miles up the road, in a kitchen she’d scrubbed twice over, that clock ticked right now. Without her. Every second landingon the next in a chain that ran all night, and she’d gotten used to falling asleep inside that rhythm the way a person did to rain.
And Logan.
She didn’t want to think about Logan, but there he was anyway, taking up space in her head the way he took up space in every room he walked into. He’d looked her in the eye and told her she was welcome to leave. Like she was seasonal help. Like the weeks of washing his clothes and singing his baby to sleep and pulling weeds from his dead mother’s garden hadn’t woven her into anything that mattered.
Grace pressed her nose against the baby’s hair and breathed in, cinching tighter around the ache lodged behind her breastbone. She lay in the tent her parents had carried across an ocean, reaching toward the house on the hill with every inch of herself.
To the roses coming back along the porch railing. Rafe’s chair creaking at the head of the table. The kitchen, gold with lamplight at supper. Mason tipping his face back in laughter while Thomas scribbled poems he’d deny writing if you caught him at it.
To Logan, most of all.
Chapter Twelve
Logan split a log clean down the center and drove the axe into the stump before the halves hit the ground.
Good.
Another one. He grabbed a round from the pile, set it on the stump, and swung. The blade bit through the grain, and the wood popped apart with acrackthat echoed off the barn wall. He kicked the halves aside and reached for the next because, if he stopped chopping, his hands would go idle.
Idle hands led to idle thinking, and that ran to that road curving behind the cottonwoods, where three people had gotten smaller and smaller until the bend had swallowed them whole.
So, he chopped.
The morning sun climbed past the ridge and poured across the yard, and the flower beds along the porch held their stubborn roses in a row of green that nobody would water today. Or tomorrow. Or however long it took for the blooms to figure out the woman who’d saved them had walked off down a dirt road wearing Logan’s shirt.
Hisshirt.
She’d taken his good flannel too, the one with the pearl snaps he’d replaced by hand last winter because the originals had cracked. She hadn’t even had the courtesy to grab one of the old ones from the rag pile. Just swiped the best one off the hook like it belonged to her, which it didnot, on account of nothing in this house belonging to her.
She’d made that clear enough by leaving.
He swung the axe, and the log split crooked, one half flying wide and skipping across the dirt toward the chicken coop.
Fine. Crooked split. Happens.
Behind him, the screen door whined on its hinges.
“You been at that woodpile since she left.” Thomas leaned against the porch rail. “We got enough firewood to last through next winter and the one after.”
“Ranch always needs firewood.”
“Ranch needs a lot of things right now, and none of ’em involve you beatin’ logs to death.”
Logan set another round on the stump. “Go check the south fence.”
