Page 68 of Forbidden Rancher's Return

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Afterward we lie tangled in the moonlight. His hand traces idle patterns up my arm. My cheek rests against his chest. His heartbeat is even under my ear.

"You're thinking loud," he says.

"You always say that."

"You're always thinking loud."

I press closer. "About what comes next."

"The rebuild."

"After the rebuild."

He's quiet for a moment. His hand stops on my shoulder.

"What do you see," he says.

I close my eyes. "This house in the fall with the windows open. The new barn full. You on the porch in the morning making lists in your head while I make them on paper."

"That's specific."

"I'm a specific person."

His arm tightens around me. "I see the same thing."

I lift my head. Look at him. His face in the moonlight. The man who carved our initials into a tree at sixteen and came back at twenty-seven and is lying in my bed right now looking at me like I built the ridge itself.

"Stay," I say.

"I'm here."

"I mean stay. Every morning. Every winter. Every time the power goes out and the fence falls down and the town has an opinion."

"Calla." He looks at me with those eyes. "I already said yes to that. Last night. With the water heater."

I laugh. The water heater. The most unromantic commitment in the history of this ridge and somehow the most real.

"Fine," I say. "Then just hold still and let me fall asleep."

"Yes ma'am."

I settle against his chest.

The stream runs somewhere through the dark below us.

And for the first time in eight years, I don't lie awake holding this ranch together alone.

I let Rowan hold it with me.

And I sleep.

The lumber delivery had come early that Friday morning.

Two flatbed trucks grinding up the ridge road at seven-thirty, loaded with fresh-cut pine and Douglas fir that filled the whole yard with the smell of sawmill and resin.

The driver was a man named Cliff who has been delivering to this ranch since before I was born. He climbed down from the cab, looked at the burned frame, and shook his head once.

"Your granddaddy would've had words about this," he said.

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