Page 7 of Switch

“Terri. You’re early.”

“I had a cancellation.” Terri’s eyes hadn’t left me. “Is everything all right out here, Savannah?”

“Everything’s fine. These two are helping me with the back fence.”

“In those?” Terri nodded at my cut.

“They work cheap,” Savannah said. “Come on. Your mare’s been waiting on you.”

She had her arm through Terri’s and was walking her toward the barn before the woman could ask anything else. At the door Terri glanced back over her shoulder at me one more time. I knew that look. I’d been getting it from women like her since I was six years old and living in the trailer down the wash.

Gage buckled his saddlebag. “Fence contractors,” he said, shaking his head.

“Stop complaining.”

“I’m just saying. Though, I suppose I’ve been called worse.”

He rode out with a two-fingered wave. I went and stood in the shade behind the hay barn and waited.

Forty minutes is a long time to wait with nothing to do but think.

Through the barn wall I could hear her with Terri. Easy voice, easy laugh, talking hoof testers and some joint supplement Terri had read about. She was good at it. She had a woman who’d just seen two patched bikers in the yard laughing inside ten minutes.

She’d built all this. Nine horses, owners who paid on time, a name people trusted from Las Cruces to Silver City. Out of a ranch that had barely broken even when her father ran it.

And that look Terri gave me at the door. I’d watched Jack McGuire give it to my father across this same yard for ten years. Polite. Cool. The look you give the help.

Back then I’d figured Savannah deserved better than a man who got looked at like that. Standing behind her hay barn with my bike tucked where her clients couldn’t see it, I thought so now too.

Didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

Eventually Terri’s SUV went down the drive, a lot slower than it had come up, and then Savannah came around the corner of the hay barn like a storm coming over a ridge.

“What did I say?”

“I didn’t know the car.”

“It was a Tuesday. I told you about Tuesdays!”

“You told me Tuesdays and Thursdays. You didn’t tell me they turn up early and fast in a car I’ve never seen. There are men carrying guns across the back of your land, and I just thought…” I didn’t get to finish before she cut me short.

“Do you know what Terri Vance does when she leaves here?” Her voice was low and shaking. “She goes to lunch with three women who own horses. Two of them have horses in my barn. By dinner every one of them is going to know I’ve got a pair of bikers out here with guns under their vests.”

“Better that than them coming up this drive and finding out.” As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t.

“No. You don’t get to tell me what’s better.” She stepped in close. Close enough that I could see the hay dust in her eyelashes and smell the sweat on her skin. “Every horse on this place belongs to somebody who can hook up a trailer and take it away. I lose one, I lose a month’s feed bill. I lose three, I lose the ranch. My father kept this place through two droughts and a bank that wanted it, and I’m not losing it because you can’t stand in the shade for one fucking hour.”

She was right. That pissed me off almost as much as what it was doing to me, having her that close with her chest heaving and her eyes on fire.

We were toe to toe.

Heat came off her in waves. A strand of hair had come down and stuck to the side of her neck, and I knew what that neck felt like under my mouth. I knew the sound she made when I found the place just below her ear. Three years hadn’t touched any of it.

Her gaze dropped to my mouth. Just for a second. It was enough.

I’d been fighting it since the second she put her hand on my bike last night. I’d been fighting it since the funeral. I lifted my hand, and my knuckles were an inch from her jaw when she caught my wrist.

Her grip was iron. Her voice was worse.