Page 111 of Smoke and Roses

“Close enough.”

I laugh, and it turns into a gasp when he moves, and then I’m not laughing anymore. I wrap myself around him with my heels pressed into the backs of his thighs and my hands in his hair. He moves slowly and watches my face the entire time. When I finally come apart, he says it again against my mouth, and then he lets go with me.

After, he lies on his back with me sprawled across his chest. He runs his fingers up and down my spine, and the fire pops down the hall.

“Lindsey,” he says after a while.

“Mm.”

“I’m giving notice,” he says. “Upstairs. Thirty days.”

I lift my head. “What?”

“My lease is month to month.” He’s looking at the ceiling, and his hand has stopped moving on my back. “I signed it on my phone in a truck stop parking lot in Grand Junction. Never even read it.”

I prop my chin on his chest and look at him.

“Travis Raines,” I say. “Are you breaking up with my building?”

“I’m asking if you have room here for a man with eleven boxes and a chainsaw.”

His gray eyes look darker in the firelight, and I can feel his heart pounding under my hand.

He’s nervous. Travis Raines, who walked into a burning barn a week ago, is nervous about asking me this.

“The rent is really high,” I say finally.

His jaw tightens just a little.

“You have to sing the harmony.”

His mouth twitches. “I don’t sing.”

“Then you can hum.” I crawl up his chest until we’re nose to nose. “You hum four worried notes in the shower. I’ve heard you.”

He closes his eyes. “Damn it. That’s classified.”

“Is that a yes?”

He opens his eyes. He takes my face in his hands the way he did at the stone house, the way he does every time he wants to be sure I hear him.

“That’s a yes,” he says.

I kiss him, and he pulls Grandma’s quilt up off the floor and over both of us. For the first time in seventeen years, I’m not waiting for anything.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“If you drop that turkey,” Nolene Strong says, “I will bury you under the pond.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I don’t drop the damn turkey. It’s twenty-six pounds and still sizzling, on a platter the size of a car door, and I carry it from the Strongs’ kitchen to the dining room table like it’s live ordnance. Martin hums the Mission: Impossible theme the entire way.

I set it down. Everybody cheers.

It’s Thanksgiving at the Strong ranch. Lindsey told me a month ago that it was mandatory. Every stray in Eden ends up at Nolene’s table on the fourth Thursday of November, whether they like it or not, and you bring a dish or you don’t come back.

I brought two pies. Lindsey made them. I carried them.