Page 96 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“I said Igot’em.”
She walked past him toward the house, holding Miriam against her chest with one arm and the pole beans, summer squash, and free marigolds with the other. Behind her, Logan’s boots scuffed the dirt. He followed. Of course, he followed. The man would follow her into every room of this house for the rest of the summer if that’s what it took to keep her inside his fences.
She climbed the porch steps. Rafe held the door. She thanked him without looking at his face because if there had been pity on it, she’d have broken down right there, and she’d done enough breaking down in front of Foster men for one lifetime.
She set the seed packets on the table.
For a garden she’d plant inside the fence, on a plot Logan had tilled for her, in soil she’d tend on her knees, twenty yards from the back door where Logan could see her from the barn if he turned his head.
Miriam squirmed, and Grace bounced her, and hummed something tuneless into her hair, and tried not to think about the bench in town where she’d sat in the sun for two whole hours eating a peppermint stick like a woman with nowhere to be and no one to answer to.
Someone else would be sitting there right about now anyway.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Two days of staying inside the gate like a good wife, and Grace wanted to claw her own skin off.
She’d weeded the garden. Twice. Scrubbed the kitchen floor until the wood turned pale. Mended every torn shirt in the house and reorganized the pantry, which nobody had asked her to do, and which Logan would probably re-reorganize the second she turned her back, because the man could not abide a spice jar facing the wrong direction.
And still. Two days. The gate sat right there, thirty yards from the porch, and she couldn’t walk through it.
Breakfast dragged. Logan ate his eggs with that careful fork work he did, separating the whites from the yolk like they’d committed separate crimes. Mason talked about a calf born overnight. Thomas kicked Jonah’s boot under the table for no reason.
A normal morning. The scrape of knives on tin and the tick of that mantel clock she’d started counting in her sleep: fourteen ticks a minute, eight hundred and forty an hour, all of them inside these walls.
The men cleared out one by one. Logan squeezed her shoulder on the way past. Three days ago, that touch would’vesent heat all the way down her spine. Today it landed and she couldn’t even—
She just sat there.
Rafe lingered. He always did after breakfast, working on his coffee like he had a personal grudge against the last half-inch. He watched her over the rim of the cup. Not staring. Just... there. Waiting. The way he did right before he said the thing you didn’t want to hear.
Grace picked at a thread on the tablecloth, listened to the clock ticking, and tried to remember what the bench in town smelled like. Pine, maybe. Warm pine and dust and that sweet horse-sweat smell that hung over Main Street in the mornings.
“You look like a barn cat in a rainstorm.”
She glanced up. “What?”
“All hunched over, tail tucked, mad at the weather but can’t do nothin’ about it.” He set his cup down. “How long you gonna sit at that table feelin’ sorry for yourself before you tell me what’s eatin’ you?”
“Nothin’s eatin’ at me. I just…”
She tattled it all out.
The gate. The fences. The way Logan looked at her every time she stepped off the porch, as if she might bolt. How she couldn’t ride to town or walk the creek path or even take Miriam past the chicken coop without one of the brothers happening to wander in the same direction, casual as you please, like they justfelt likestrolling that way.
“I ain’t a prisoner, Rafe. I know that. I got a roof and a family and more food than I ever had in New York, and I ain’t ungrateful. I swear I ain’t. But I came two thousand miles to stop feelin’ trapped, and now I’m—”
Her voice cracked. She pressed her lips together and stared at the tablecloth.
Rafe topped off his coffee. Took a slow sip. Set it down with that preciseclickhe did, cup handle pointing east, same as every morning.
“Logan’s mama used to say he’d organize the wind if he could get it to hold still.”
Grace’s throat tightened.
“He ain’t tryin’ to lock you up, girl. He’s tryin’ to keep you alive. There’s a difference.”
“It don’t feel like a difference.”
