by Lexie Ray
“We’re tempted, Zoe, but we’ve got to go,” Avery said as Paisley left. “Next time, though, definitely.”
He looked at me, his hand on the still-open front door. “You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to.”
I frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean you can come stay with Paisley and me if things get too weird,” he said. “I understand why you don’t want her here. Doing the right thing isn’t very fair to you, is it?”
“I might take you up on it some night,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
“Paisley’s pissed,” Emmett said helpfully after the door closed.
“I think we all pretty much picked up on that, thanks,” Chance said, rubbing his face in his hands. “Tucker, do you have any realistic guess as to the probability of the threat we might have to deal with?”
“It’s like I told you before,” I said, rising from the seat I’d taken earlier. “It could be him again, and it might not be. He might want to finish what he started, and maybe he was just having a little fun. It might be nothing.”
“But it could be something,” Chance said. “Where are you going?”
“Upstairs,” I said.
“But it’s dinner,” Zoe protested. “And that Amelia’s a hell of a cook. She’s staying with us, right? You all are helpless fucks in the kitchen department.”
“Never really cared to learn,” Peyton piped up with a crooked but charming smile.
“I don’t really have an appetite,” I said. “I think I’ll call it an early night.”
“Tuck, thanks for the intel,” Hunter said, making me pause on the stairs. “I know that sucked.”
“Hope it helps,” I said, though I didn’t know what it would help, except for satisfying everyone’s burning curiosity. I could imagine Emmett and Peyton returning to their trailer tonight and watching the entirety of that documentary they’d found. I hoped it didn’t name me.
I flopped heavily down on my bed, aware that I’d feel better with a shower, but I felt too drained to make the effort. I hated the weakness I felt after sharing all of that with everyone. I’d spared them the goriest of details from the case, but there was enough media interest in those details that I was sure everyone would probably learn them soon. The muffled sounds of laughter and conversation drifted up the stairs and into my room, and it was hard not to feel left out. My family — well, minus Paisley — were welcoming Amelia into their lives with open arms. I just couldn’t understand it, but, then again, they probably couldn’t understand why I felt the way I did about Amelia, including my desire to avoid her like the plague.
I popped a pillow over my head and held it there, intent on drowning out the sounds of merrymaking coming from downstairs.
My grip on the pillow eased, and I slept.
And dreamed.
The grave. It was always the grave that really haunted me. The smell of it, the way it crept into my mouth and down my throat, poisoning me. The feeling of finality, that I had done all I could even though there was still more to be done, my blood mingling with the crumbling earth. She was sobbing out her breath next to me, crying for me to help her, but I was beyond all that. I had come face to face with the thing I wanted most in the world, and I had failed. He had bested me. I wanted nothing more than to clamber out of the earth and after him, but I couldn’t. I was dead. I was dying. It was the end, and the peace was the most surprising part. Peace outweighed the disappointment, and soon even pain evaporated. It was a mighty resignation to simply accept what was about to happen. This really would be my grave, and hers, too, if she was as weak as she’d sounded, as weak as her cries were, fading away. Everything was fading away.
I gasped and flung myself upward, toward the edge of the grave that was nothing more than the darkness of my room, the edge of the bedside table, grappling with it.
Goddammit. I was bone tired of these dreams, weary from waking up in the middle of the night, wondering what sounds had escaped from that realm and poisoned this reality.
“You have them too, don’t you?”
I recoiled from the side of my bed, my hand groping toward the gun I kept close by at all times.
“It’s just me.”
“For fuck’s sake, Amelia.”
I was both relieved and disgusted to see her there, crouched on the floor beside me. How long had she been there? Why was she even in here with me?
“Sorry,” she said with half of a shrug that told me she wasn’t sorry at all. “I heard some sounds.”
“I hope you don’t go and investigate every sound you hear during the night,” I said, still angry with her and myself. “This is the country. You’re going to hear some weird shit that you didn’t hear in the city.”
“It wasn’t country sounds,” she said. “It was you.”
“You need to go back to sleep,” I sighed, shame burning my face and making me thankful that we were sitting here in the dark. “If you’re going to live here, you’re going to be working. It’ll be a long day once morning rolls around.”
“I just needed to make sure you were all right.” Amelia looked very small on the floor — smaller than I had remembered her being.
“I’m as all right as I’ll ever be,” I said, cross with her without even really knowing why.
Everyone in my damn family knew what these nightmares were about now. I just didn’t need Amelia in on the secret, too. “I’d be better if I wasn’t in danger of shooting people who snuck up on me in the dark in my own house.”
“I keep a gun close by, too.”
I wasn’t sure what she was trying to do here. Was it establish rapport? Get on my good side? Find something in common besides our shared past? I didn’t like it. I didn’t want her to be here in the first place. There was no way I was going to sashay down memory lane with her.
“A gun will do you no good if you’re not trained,” I spat. “More than likely, it’ll get you or someone innocent in this house killed.”
“Who said I wasn’t trained?” Amelia asked, amusement coloring her words. “I can’t count the things I’ve done since we last crossed paths to make myself feel safe again. Self-defense classes. Concealed carry license and training. Weekly sessions at a gun range. Judo. Everything.”
“And yet you’re here.”
“I was an idiot for thinking I’d ever feel safe again.”
I didn’t want to talk about this. I damn sure wasn’t ready to hash things out with Amelia Banks.
“Go back to bed,” I said. “Lock your door if it makes you feel better, but you’re safe here.”
Amelia rose silently and stood there for a moment, looking at me. It was too dark to read her face — so dark that it was even tough making out the shape of her body.
“I hope you’re right,” she said after a too-long stretch of silence. “I don’t sleep much now, either. I hate being in that grave again.”
She left me with that thought, and the knowledge I’d return to the very same location in our past once I sank into slumber again. Maybe it was a blessing or a curse, but I didn’t sleep again that night, staring at the ceiling, thinking about graves and Amelia and Oscar Green.
Chapter 4
I didn’t like having Amelia on the ranch, didn’t like that my brothers knew what had happened to me — albeit in a neutered version of the truth. It wasn’t their problem or past to worry about. It was mine. And with Amelia here, living just down the hallway from me, it was a past I could no longer ignore.
I tried my best to keep my distance during the day. I thought it would be easy — I was expected to complete my work around the ranch as if everything were perfectly normal, as if it wasn’t affecting my psyche to have Amelia Banks living and breathing and sleeping in the same space I was.
But I saw her much more often than I thought I would, for the ranch being as big as it was.
The dude ranch was delayed indefinitely, even though the barracks were ready for guests, due to the spate of catt
le thefts and the ensuing gun battles that sometimes accompanied them. But Avery was taking Amelia around, practicing his spiel for future guests.
“And here we have some real, live ranchers working the herd,” he announced to her loudly, the two of them riding up on horses.
“There’s work for you, too,” I remarked mildly. “You know, you used to be a real, live rancher before you got the idea in your head to be a tour guide.”
“Dude ranch boss,” Avery corrected, but he had good humor about it. “Someday, at least.”
“When we can stop having shootouts every other night,” I joked at him. Somebody had to joke about it, or we’d all sit around moody as hell, like Chance.
“Wait, shootouts?” Amelia was ill at ease astride her horse, a city girl through and through. “I thought you said this place was safe.”
“Safe for people, most of the time,” I said. “Less safe if you’re part of the herd.”
“Not safe for people,” Avery snorted. “I got shot out here.”
Amelia looked at me, her eyes wide, but I’d done all the reassuring I was prepared for today.
“And so did a cattle thief,” I said. “Peyton got him.”
“What is this, the Wild West?” Amelia asked, frowning at the two of us. “You’re acting like it’s some kind of joke. We’re living in modern times, you know. These kinds of things aren’t supposed to be happening, are they?”
“We joke about it, because what else can we do?” I countered more vehemently than I intended to. “What should we do? Duck and cover? Cower and hide? Let whoever’s behind this know they can have all the cattle they want if they just please, pretty please, leave us out of it?”
Amelia looked at me with her big eyes, hurt and unsure of me. I was an asshole. I got it. I just didn’t want to be sitting here having this conversation.
“You know, real, live ranchers can be grumpy,” Avery said smoothly, attempting to ease the tension. “Let’s go to the horse rehab center. I think people are a little better behaved over there.”
Amelia gave me one last piercing look before bouncing away on her horse. I hoped Emmett or Peyton or the both of them helped her sit easier on that horse before she got thrown or fell off without any fault assigned to the horse.
And then I realized I didn’t really have any business hoping anything for Amelia. She was her own woman. She came here because she didn’t think she had a choice in the matter. I was just some asshole making her life harder than it should be.
At the same time, I wished that it had been anybody else on the Dallas police force — any of the dozens of other men and women who had found her, instead of me. Then, Amelia could’ve shacked up with one of them instead of all the way out here with me and my family.
Things would be different if I hadn’t followed my gut that night.
Everything would be different.
I sighed that thought right out of my head and continued consulting the logs that Avery used to be in charge of. We were looking to sell off a goodly portion of the herd — well, what herd we had that hadn’t been stolen yet — to help get the rest through the coming winter. The drought had really sapped the strength of the place, but ranchers all around the region felt its effects. We hadn’t been able to grow much of anything in the grain department to sock away to feed the herd during the winter. In fact, we’d had to purchase hay and grain throughout the summer as the grass in the pastures withered away to spiky brown stalks, dead in the ground. The river had even gotten so dangerously low that our latest enterprise was trucking in water, and that had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Chance said we needed to cull the herd, Paisley sucked it up and agreed, and that’s what I was out here doing with a couple of hands from the Summers side of the ranch.
It was a tough enough decision as it was, figuring out which cattle would stay and which would go — along with which would give us fresh steaks to celebrate the sale — but I couldn’t get Amelia off my mind. It came with the territory of living with her, I was sure, but that didn’t make it any easier.
“That one’s for sale,” I said, pointing at a creature snuffling along the ground.
“You just said that one stays, Tuck,” one of the hands countered, confused.
“Fuck.” I pushed my hat back from my face and rubbed my forehead, feeling like a useless idiot. “It stays, then.”
It was even worse at dinner. Zoe had been pushing for this idea of family meals, and for the most part, people obliged her. It helped that she was the best cook out of all the women who currently made up the Corbin family. We crammed chairs and tables and TV trays and whatever we could find into the front room and feasted on whatever Zoe saw fit to serve each night, Avery and Paisley coming over from their house even though it was bigger and nicer over there, Hunter and Hadley meandering up from their cottage on the river, Emmett and Peyton even sidling in, Peyton gradually getting over her shyness around all the rest of the loud folks.
She’d won a civil suit from her shit stain of a father after he beat her within an inch of her life, and she’d poured the funds into the horse rehab project that had been the shared dream of both her and Emmett. She seemed happier now — much happier than she had been glowering at people down at the bar in town where she used to make her living. The business was doing well, too, and the profits it did generate were going to the upkeep of the ranch. Chance was grateful, and Emmett was at least graceful. He’d been railing on us for years to let him do something like this to help the money situation on the ranch, but we’d always shut him down.
Some people deserved to be listened to, but I couldn’t find it in myself to let Amelia be one of those people.
Just seeing her there at our family dinners, everyone laughing and joking with each other, asking her about the things she used to do before her life had been upended, made me retreat inside myself, wish I were someone or somewhere else. She was the physical embodiment of the period of my life I wanted to forget the most, and I found it hard to flee her presence in my own house. More than a dozen times, I feigned illness or apathy or business or some combination of the three to steal away from those nighttime commitments of family dinners. I just couldn’t enjoy myself when she was around. I could barely even eat without tasting dirt.
And it was even worse with Zoe discovering that Amelia had a knack for cooking.
“I can’t believe you missed dinner last night,” our housekeeper said, cornering me in the kitchen as I got a piece of fruit for the road, rising before anyone else to avoid everyone else — or so I thought.
“I had some things I needed to take care of,” I lied, feeling awkward about it. I wasn’t the kind of person who just lied about things on a whim. See? Amelia living on the ranch and hanging around all the time was making me into someone I wasn’t used to being.
“Well, you didn’t get to eat a meal that was probably the best I’ve had since Toby and I came on,” Zoe said. “That Amelia’s a hell of a good cook. Better than me, even.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” I said. “None of us ate well until you moved in.”
“You didn’t taste what I did tonight,” she retorted. “It was exquisite. Don’t miss out next time.”
But I couldn’t stomach the thought of eating around Amelia, much less eating what she had cooked. It wouldn’t taste like anything except the grave to me.
I avoided Amelia in every situation I could manage, but I always felt her gray eyes on me, watching. It was a hell of a thing. The ranch was so goddamn big that I sometimes missed seeing one of my brothers for an entire week, even if we were working in the same place. You could easily miss someone if they were devoting their time at the barn, the clinic, the horse rehab, or if they were riding the fence lines or tending the herd. How was it that Amelia always seemed to be nearby me if she knew how I loathed being around her?
I couldn’t decide whether it was just by chance that I saw her over and over again, riding with one of my brothers or the ranch hands, help
ing with the horses at Emmett’s project, scouring the barracks, admitting people to the clinic as Hadley’s receptionist, or if she was purposefully shadowing me. One day, after three encounters that I’d had to make excuses to get away from, interrupting my work and ruffling my feathers, I had a disconcerting thought: What if I was the one shadowing Amelia?
Why would I do that, if that was the answer to all of the various run-ins I had with her? I hadn’t had a decent meal in the weeks since she’d been here, more interested in slinking up to my room to avoid seeing her. I’d experienced an unprecedented weight drop because of it. I was now so anxious about having a nightmare within earshot of her that I slept in fits and starts, lightly, like a cat, and some days out on the ranch, riding with the herd, I found myself nodding off in the saddle.
If something happened — a theft attempt, or Oscar Green sauntering on to the property to take what he thought was his — I wouldn’t be worth a goddamn to anyone. Everything started to feel like one long waking nightmare that I could never escape from.
It was one of these days, a hellishly hot day — it broke some kind of longstanding record, the weather man chattered on the radio in the barn as I approached — that I knew I needed some kind of relief. I should’ve had the sense to grab a nap, nightmares or not, but I froze. Amelia was in the barn, spreading hay through stalls that had been freshly mucked. It was yet another accidental encounter, but it felt like something more. It was as if we were magnets of opposite polarity, jerked toward each other at all times, no matter where we were located on the ranch. I’d come to the barn to take a break because I had a feeling she’d be riding the fence line with Hunter this afternoon. Instead, she was at the very place I’d tried to avoid her.
I did an abrupt about-face and went instead to the old water pump at the back of the structure, by the shipping containers we were using for grain storage. I stripped my shirt off, overheated in the unseasonable weather, and pumped the water, splashing it on my face and chest. It did little to cool me off, at first — the high temperatures had made the water roughly the same temperature as a hot shower. But I was patient, and the wind was favorable, cooling the hot water I’d already wet myself with. The water turned cold — well, about as cold as it would get in the summer — and I felt marginally better. I was still exhausted and jumpy and hungry and weak, but at least I wasn’t hot anymore.
