Page 49 of Broken Ride

"I want to stop running." The words hold steadier than they've any right to. "It never worked. It was never going to work, and worse, he liked it. So we stand.

"We finish the case, because the case is mine and I'm the only one who can carry it into a courtroom. And when Torres opens that grand jury door, I'm walking through it under my own name. Delaney Prescott is going to raise her right hand and take his whole world apart with charting, and he's going to sit somewhere and learn what my documentation is worth when the bench isn't his." I lift my chin at him. "That's the plan. Feel free to be impressed."

"Been impressed since Amarillo." He stands and crosses to the bed slow, boots soundless on the carpet, and his hand comes up and takes my jaw, knuckles first, then the full grip, tipping my face up the way I once tipped his.

His thumb drags rough across the corner of my mouth and stays there. The look he gives me has nothing safe in it anywhere, and the pull of it lands low and mean, heat rolling down from his hand through everything I own. He could ruin me one-handed and we both know it. He stands there holding my face instead, like it's the last thing that belongs to him. "We stand. And Laney. The night you change your mind about Oklahoma, I don't need a full sentence. Blink twice."

"You're a terrible influence, cowboy." It lands lower than I planned, half wrecked by his thumb, and his mouth ticks at the sound of it, the bastard, because he heard exactly what he did to me.

"I'm the best one you've got."

My phone rings on the nightstand.

The screen turns the dark ceiling gray, and the area code reaches out of it, a hand from a state I left. Oklahoma.

The number is different every time and the area code never changes. He never leaves a voicemail, because voicemails are evidence and he's careful. All these months the ringing has just died into nothing while I let it. Refusing him the sound of me was the only ground I had left to hold.

I look at the phone. Then at Wade, standing over me with Oklahoma still parked behind his eyes, waiting on a word I haven't said.

No more secrets was the deal I just made, and it cuts in every direction, including this one.

I answer and thumb the speaker on in the same motion, and I set the phone down between us like a card played face up.

"Delaney." Garrett's voice fills the room, warm and unhurried and certain, the voice that charmed a whole county and a girl with new boots at a courthouse. "There you are. All that ringing, and tonight you pick up. I knew you'd come around. You always do, eventually. It's one of the things I love about you."

"What do you want, Garrett?"

"To make sure you're all right. I saw the county car at your motel tonight, honey. Lights going, deputy at your door past midnight." A soft click of his tongue, sympathy with a blade folded into it.

"You called them. That's growth, Delaney, it truly is, you calling the law like the law's ever once been on your side. And there's that truck of yours, parked nose-out by the fence, ready to run. I taught you that. Whatever else they've got you believing out there, everything that's kept you alive this far came from me."

The air in the room thins out electric. Wade makes no sound at all, and his stillness has stopped being discipline and started being geology. I hold his eyes across the small distance and refuse to give Garrett the tremor he's fishing for.

"There's a stalking charge in you knowing where that fence is, Garrett. And for the record, you've spent a year watching a woman park a truck and calling it a marriage. Even for you, that's thin."

"A charge." He says the word the way he used to say my cooking. "I'll be seeing you soon, honey. We've got loose ends, and you've been collecting more of them out there than you know."

A pause opens on the line, and I hear him smile into it. I know before he speaks that the pause was built for shipping something.

"One question before I let you rest, Delaney, since you're finally taking my calls. Wade Ashcroft."

The name leaves him slow and savored, each syllable handled like evidence at a scene.

"Does he know you're still married in your heart?"

The line goes dead.

The dial tone hums for a second before the phone gives up, and the room holds its new shape around us. All those calls, and he never once said a name that wasn't mine. Tonight he watched the law park at my door, watched a deputy stand in my light, watched my truck sit nose-out and ready to run, and out of everything he saw, he chose to mail us that one name.

Garrett doesn't waste ammunition, and he doesn't mention a detail he doesn't intend to use. Somewhere out past the reach of the lot lights, in the dark I can't search, my past has finished measuring the only future I've ever wanted.

14

WADE

Garrett Voss owns a voice built for courtrooms and kitchen tables, and it rides shotgun with me clear through the next morning whether I invite it or not. The threat washed off by sunup. Threats are cheap on this circuit, and I've been collecting them since the break-in like a man collects burrs.

What stays with me is the tone.