Page 1 of Devoured

CHAPTER ONE

Lara Baxter had been lying about being okay for three months by the time the rental car turned off the highway onto the gravel road that ran out to Royston Ranch.

I'm good, she'd told the cab driver at the airport, when he'd taken one look at her one suitcase and her city shoes and asked if she had the right address. I'm good, she'd told herself for the ninety minutes since, watching the last gas station fall away behind them and the land open up flat and gold and going nowhere in every direction.

She'd been telling that lie long enough to admire her own delivery. She'd started it three months ago, the afternoon she brought takeout to her fiancé's office to surprise him and found him already busy with someone who wasn't her. Ex-fiancé. Her cheating ex-fiancé, if they were being precise, and she was an accountant, so she liked to be precise. She'd told the lie on the flight out of Boston, in the terminal in Midland, Texas, every mile of the drive since into a kind of country she had only ever seen from an airplane window. By now it had worn smooth. She believed it for whole minutes at a time, and somewhere in the last three months she had decided that counted as healing.

The town of Soluno had gone by in under a minute — a wide quiet main street, a diner, a feed store, a bar with a hand-painted sign, a church, and then nothing again, the town letting go of the road almost as soon as it took hold of it. The driver hadn't slowed. People out here measured distance in the way Bostonians measured rent, like it was the one thing that organized everything else, and the ranch was apparently still twenty minutes past the last building in town.

Now the car slowed at a gravel turn and stopped.

"This is it," the driver said. "You want me to wait?"

"Please," she said. "I shouldn't be long."

She got out.

The heat met her like a hand flat against her chest. Boston heat was wet and close and stuck to your skin. This was dry and huge and didn't care whether she could stand it. The sky went on forever. She had not known a sky could do that. Off past the house a windmill turned without hurry, and the air smelled of cut hay and horses and hot dust, and under all of it something she didn't have a word for yet — the smell of the basin itself, oil and stone and distance.

The ranch sat in the shallow bowl of the land like it had grown there, and it was bigger than any one building, it was a whole settlement of them. The main house came first and largest: two stories of white clapboard gone soft and gray at the edges from the sun, with a deep porch that wrapped the whole front and turned the corner out of sight down both sides. Rockers on it. A swing at one end. It was the kind of house built by people who'd planned on a lot of family and a lot of years. Spread out behind and around it, connected by packed-dirt tracks, sat the rest of the operation, a couple of smaller cabins set off among the trees, a long low bunkhouse, two barns, equipment sheds, working pens, a round corral where a man was moving a horse. The whole compound had the look of a place that ran itself, that had run itself for a long time. Beyond it the ground rose to a single live oak on a distant rise, dark and alone against all that sky, and farther out the bones of an old drive-in screen stood blank in a field, holding nothing. Fences ran to the edge of what she could see and kept going past it. Six generations of life, and she'd answered a classified ad to be a part of it.

A woman came out onto the porch, drying her hands on a dishtowel, moving fast the way people move when there's already too much in the day.

"You'll be Lara." She had a kind, harried face and gray coming in at her temples. "Helen Crane. I keep the house." She glanced back over her shoulder at the screen door, then at the yard, then settled on Lara with an apology already loading. "John's not up here. I'm sorry… he's out on the property somewhere, he forgets the time when he's with the cattle. I'll find Dean for you."

"That's all right," Lara said. "I'm early."

She wasn't, particularly. But Helen's face eased a fraction, so it was the right thing to say. Lara had always been good at the right thing to say. She had built a whole life out of reading what a room needed and handing it over before anyone had to ask. It had made her useful. It had made her, for a long time, very easy to overlook.

She'd been good at reading what people weren't saying. She had also, it turned out, not been very good at it at all.

Helen went to the corner of the porch and called down toward the pens — Dean! — a long flat note that carried. Then she came back and stood with Lara in the kind of silence two strangers keep when one of them is waiting to be handed off to a third.

He came up from the corrals on foot.

Lara saw him before he saw her, which she would think about later. A big man, unhurried, crossing the open ground between the pens and the house like the distance was his and he'd get there when he got there. Sleeves shoved up to the elbow over forearms a city man didn't come by. Sweat darkening his shirt down the middle of his back and at the collar, the cotton gone translucent and clinging in a way she had no business noticing this fast. Dust to the knee. Dark hair pushed off his forehead by a hand or a hat, she couldn't tell which. He was wiping his palms on a rag as he came, and he wasn't looking at the house yet, he was looking at the near fence line the way you look at something you'll have to deal with tomorrow.

Then he looked up, and saw her, and stopped wiping his hands.

His eyes were the thing. Amber, almost gold in the hard light, startling in a face that otherwise looked like it had been left out in the weather on purpose, and they landed on her with the full uncomplicated force of a man who missed nothing on his own land. She felt it in the back of her knees, which was unfair, and unwelcome, and entirely typical of her.

She knew, the way you know weather changing, exactly what was happening on his face, because she had spent her whole life learning to read exactly this. He had expected someone else. Someone he'd already decided about. And the woman on the porch wasn't her, wasn't whatever fake city thing he'd built in his head on the drive up from the pens, and she watched him have to put the built thing down and look at what was actually in front of him.

What was in front of him was a woman in jeans and a plain shirt with her hair coming loose from where she'd twisted it up off her neck in the heat, holding a purse she suddenly felt stupid for holding.

His face went still. Not blank. Still — the deliberate kind, a stillness with effort under it, the look of a man stepping carefully around something on the floor.

And here was the trouble, sitting in her chest before she could stop it: she noticed the stillness, and her whole body leaned toward it.

Because she knew this. God help her, she knew this exactly. Not him, she'd never seen him before in her life, but the pull, the specific tilt of wanting that started low and certain when a man like this turned and looked at her and went quiet. She had felt it three times before. The fiancé. The one before him who'd kept her on a string for two years and married someone else inside of six months. And the first one, the one who'd taught her the feeling in the first place. Three men. Every single time it had started just like this, with a quiet face and her own stupid body deciding before she did.

She knew what that pull meant. It had never once meant anything good. It was the most reliable warning system she owned, and it pointed, every time, dead at the thing that was going to cost her.

So she did the only sane thing, which was to stand very straight and show none of it on her face.

"Ms. Baxter." He'd reached the bottom of the porch steps. He didn't come up them. "I'm Dean Royston. My father didn't tell me he'd hired you until this morning."

Polite. Measured. Cold around the edges in a way that had nothing to do with the heat.