Page 60 of Devoured

And neither of them said anything after that, because there was nothing that wouldn't be too small for what they'd both, in their own short words, just agreed to, a thing that lived a long way past the wall he'd drawn on her kitchen table, a thing he'd asked for and she'd given, neither of them naming it, both of them knowing.

She fell asleep in his bed, in his house, with his arm heavy across her and his breath slow against the back of her neck and his children sleeping down the hall. It was the first time she'd stayed. And on the edge of sleep, warm and wrecked and held, with the whole long good day folding shut behind her, Lara thought, with no shadow on it at all for once: so this is what wanting feels like, when you finally let yourself.

Then she slept.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Lara left for Midland before the dew was off the grass, and Dean spent the morning pretending the house didn't feel wrong without her in it.

It was a fool thing to feel. She'd been gone three hours, to fetch her sister off a plane, and she'd be back by lunch. He'd run this ranch and this household alone for four years and never once stood in his own kitchen feeling like a room was missing a wall. Now she drove to the airport and the place went quiet in a way he didn't care for, and he caught himself glancing at the clock over the stove like a man waiting on weather.

He heard them before he saw them.

He was out by the corrals when the truck came up the drive a little after noon, and the passenger window was down, and what came out of it was music turned up too loud and a woman's voice singing along to it badly and with total commitment, and then the truck stopped and the door opened and Lara's sister stepped out onto Royston ground like she was making an entrance she'd rehearsed.

She was — Dean took it in the way you take in weather coming across the basin — a lot. Bright. Loud before she'd said a word, somehow, just in how she stood. Where Lara was contained, hair up and out of the way, dressed for work she meant to do, this one was all turned outward: big sunglasses shoved up into bigger hair, a dress that had no business on a ranch, arms already open before there was anybody to hug.

"Oh my God," she announced, to the ranch at large, to the live oaks and the corrals and the dogs already losing their minds over her, "this is… Lara. Lara. There are actual cowboys. There's a barn. You ran off to the middle of nowhere and joined a postcard."

"It's a cattle ranch," Lara said, coming around the truck, and Dean watched something in his chest ease just at the sight of her, the small private fact of her being back. "Try not to propose to any of the hands before dinner."

"No promises." The sister spotted Dean across the yard and her whole face changed, lit, sharpened with interest, and she said, not quietly at all, "Lara. Is that him?"

"That's him."

"You did not tell me he looked like that."

"I'm standing right here," Dean said.

"I know," said the sister, delighted, entirely unbothered, sticking out her hand as he came up. "Addi. Addison, but nobody's called me that since I was in trouble. You're the cowboy. I've heard a frankly suspicious amount about you and also almost nothing, because my sister's a vault, so I'm going to need the whole story and I'm going to need it before she can stop me."

"Addi," Dean said, and shook the offered hand, and found himself — against every expectation he'd had about this visit — liking her immediately. "Dean."

"Dean." She held onto his hand a beat, looked him frankly up and down, and then turned to Lara and mouthed something Dean was glad he couldn't read. "Okay. Okay, I see it. I'm fine. I'm normal about this."

"You've never been normal about anything in your life."

"That's true." Addi let go of his hand and clapped her own together. "So. Where are the children? I've come a very long way to corrupt them."

She didn’t corrupt them. She demolished them.

It took her, by Dean's count, under four hours to dismantle the entire defensive architecture of his household, and she did it without appearing to try, which was the part that got him.

Levi went first. He'd planted himself in front of her with the gravity of a boy about to test a stranger and demanded, "Do you know who the strongest one is? In the whole show. Do you know?"

"I do not," Addi said, sitting down cross-legged on the floor to be at his level, dead serious. "But I need to. Walk me through it. Start at the beginning, I don't want to miss anything."

That was the end of Levi. He talked for forty minutes. She asked follow-up questions. By the time he wound down he'd appointed her, unprompted, his second-in-command, and would have followed her into a fire.

Giana was harder, the way Giana was always harder. She hung back in the doorway with her arms crossed and her grandmother's measuring look on, deciding, while the loud bright stranger filled up her house. And Addi — Dean watched it happen and was impressed in spite of himself — did the one thing most adults got wrong with Giana. She didn't chase her. She didn't crouch down and turn the high beams on. She just stayed interesting at a distance and waited.

It took most of the afternoon. Then Dean came through and found Giana sitting on the arm of the couch near Addi, not next to her, near her, and heard his daughter say, in the flat skeptical voice she used to test whether an adult was worth her time:

"Is your hair real?"

"Some of it," Addi said, not looking up from the magazine she was flipping. "About sixty percent. You want to see where it stops?"

A pause. Then, despite herself, fascinated: "...Yeah."