Page 105 of Coyote

"Damn."

"Come back when you do something worse," John said. "Knowing you, I'd start stretching now."

He was easy in there. That was the word for it. Easy. A big man moving around a small room he'd built to fit himself, everything within reach because he'd hung every shelf.

I thumbed the cord in my pocket and thought about giving it to him right then. But the timing was wrong. I didn't want an audience.

There was one place I could be sure we'd be alone, and I'd known it from the start. I put the cord back in my pocket.

"You're loitering," John said without turning around.

"I'm supervising."

"Mm." He tied off the tape. "Whatever it is you've been sitting on all day, you'll tell me when you tell me. I know how you work."

"After supper," I said. "Bring your horse. You're coming with me."

"Where?"

"You'll see."

We rode out after dinner, with maybe two hours of light left. Nimue curled around my collar and tasted the air more than usual, which meant she knew where we were headed before he did.

We dismounted when the terrain got too rocky, tied the horses off in the shade, and started up toward the cave.

"Been a while since we've been out here," he said.

"We've been busy getting shot at, and then healing."

The little bones turned on their wire at the mouth of the cave, ticking in the evening wind. Nimue slid off my shoulders at the entrance and went in ahead of us. By the time I'd built the fire small, she'd claimed her warm flat rock at the back, coiled where she pleased, officially done with both of us.

John had to fold himself nearly in half to clear the entrance. All that man, bent down to fit through a hole in a rock, grumbling about his back. I almost laughed.

He sat where I pointed, on the bedroll, his head brushing the rock, firelight moving on him. "Nice to get away for a while," he said. "I forget I have a home until I'm out of it."

I took the cord out of my pocket.

He froze when he saw it. He looked from the brass to my face and worked out where it had to have come from, because there was only one shot anybody on this ranch would string on rawhide.

I stepped between his knees and looped the cord over his bowed head. The casing settled flat against his chest.

"I walked the pass," I said. "Found it where you stood. All your life you never pointed a gun at a man, and you spent that on me." I tapped the brass once. "You don't get to leave that lying in the rocks. You carry it."

His hand closed around it. His jaw worked. "Coyote."

"Wait. There's more."

I took his free hand. Then I turned my own hand over under his and opened it, palm up.

"Everything up that hill is mine," I said. "You know it. Everybody knows it. The horses, the ground, the people. Mine."

"I know the speech."

"Down here, there's one thing that runs in the other direction." I pressed his open hand flat against my chest. "I'm yours, John. All of me. You're the only man alive who could leave me, and I'm handing you that on purpose, and I won't ever take it back."

The fire popped. His fist stayed closed around the brass.

"Nobody's ever had that," I said. "Not Rafe. Not Sierra. Nobody. What's mine can't leave me. That's how I've kept everything I've ever kept." My throat closed down, and I talked through it. "If I'm yours, you can walk off with me any day you please, and I get no say in it. That scared me so badly I almost didn't bring you down here."