Page 77 of Devoured

She tipped her head back and looked up at him. Her face was a wreck. She had never looked better to him in his life.

"Take me home, Dean," she said.

And that was the only word in it that mattered. Not take me back. Not let's try.

Home.

"Yeah," he said, and his voice didn't work right, and he didn't care. "Yeah, darlin'. Let's go home."

And this time, when he said it, she didn't tell him she was nobody's darlin'.

She just smiled, the wide unguarded one, the one that had undone him on a porch two months and a whole lifetime ago, before he'd had the sense to know it, and held on.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The town knew before they were past the county line.

Lara figured it out somewhere around the feed store, when a man she half-recognized loading bags into a truck looked up at Dean's truck going by, did a double take at her in the passenger seat, and broke into a grin so wide she could see it from the road. He lifted his hat. Not to Dean. To her.

"Dean," she said slowly. "How does that man know?"

"Pearl." Dean didn't even have to think about it. He had one hand on the wheel and the other holding hers on the bench seat between them, and he hadn't let go of it since the airport in Midland, two thousand miles and one entire life ago. "I texted Helen from the plane to say we were coming home. Helen will have told Pearl inside four minutes. Pearl is the entire county's nervous system. By the time we hit Main there won't be a soul in Soluno who doesn't know you're back."

"That's hilarious."

"Yeah." He brought her hand up and kissed her knuckles without taking his eyes off the road. "Get used to it. They're yours now too."

And the thing was — and this was the part that undid her, a little, looking out the window at the town scrolling by — they were. Two months ago, this same watching had felt like a hand at her throat, the small-town twin of the exact thing she'd fled Boston to escape. Now the hardware-store woman came out onto the sidewalk to wave. Now the kid at the gas station gave Dean a thumbs-up so enthusiastic he nearly fell off his bike. The watching hadn't changed. She had. It wasn't surveillance anymore. It was a whole town leaning over a fence to say good, finally, we're glad.

Pearl was standing in the door of the diner when they passed, arms crossed over her apron, and she didn't wave. She just looked at Lara through the truck window, and shook her head slowly, and mouthed three words Lara read clear as a billboard:

About damn time.

Lara laughed so hard she had to put her hand over her mouth.

They were all at the ranch.

She saw the trucks first, too many trucks, the yard full of them, and her stomach dropped, because she was wrung out and wrecked and not ready to perform fine for a crowd, and then she saw who the trucks belonged to and understood it wasn't a crowd. It was the family. All of it. Both halves of it.

Chase reached the truck before she'd even got the door open, and the look on his face, relief, plain and total, a man who'd been holding a thing together with both hands finally getting to set it down, told her more about the last week than anything Dean had said. "Hey," he said, gruff, helping her down like she was made of glass. "Hey. Good. You're here. Good."

"Hi, Chase."

"He behave himself in Boston?"

"He groveled beautifully."

"Course he did. He's a Royston. We're real good at being wrong and then being sorry about it." But his voice was thick, and he squeezed her shoulder hard before he let go.

And then Jett — Jett, who Dean had told her once didn't hug anybody, who'd straddled this whole feuding family his entire life by never getting too close to either side — Jett walked straight up to her and wrapped her in both arms and held on for a second, hard, and said low in her ear, "Welcome home. Don't let him talk himself out of it again. You've got my number if he tries." And stepped back like it hadn't happened, ears slightly red.

Mason was there, leaning on his truck. He'd driven all the way out from town the second word reached him, here on John's land in plain sight of everybody, grinning at her. "Wouldn't have missed it," he said. "Somebody in this family had to be rooting for you out loud."

And Ainsley came around the side of the house with Levi riding her hip and Giana holding her other hand, and Lara understood without being told: the kids had needed their favorite cousin, and Levi had picked up a phone and called her, and she'd come, the Clay-side girl folding herself into the John-side kids' bad week like the wall their fathers built was a thing that simply did not apply to the children. Ainsley met Lara's eyes over Levi's head and didn't say anything at all. Just smiled, wet-eyed, and tipped her head toward the boy on her hip like, go on, then.

Because Levi had spotted her.

"LARA."