Page 12 of Promised to the Cowboy

“You didn’t know.”

“Still.”

I gentle my voice. “It’s fine. Drink your coffee.”

She settles into her seat and drinks her coffee.

The room slowly comes back to life around the hole that opened in it. The machinery of the family clanks back into motion.

Ethan starts a story about a fence—a heifer that put herself through a brand-new run of wire on the day he finished it.

Jenna laughs, and Delaney joins in.

Evie asks about the wire, and Ethan answers like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

I stand at the counter and remember the way she said my name that night, breathy and needy. I don’t know why she’s here—yet—but Idoknow I’m in trouble because I already want her to stay.

Chapter 5

Evie

I lie still and let the gray light come up in the window—east-facing because Gabriel put me in the room that gets the morning sun—and I do the thing I’ve started doing first thing every day, the thing I haven’t told a soul. I place my hand on my stomach under the covers, in the dark, where it’s just me. Twenty weeks and five days now. I press my palm to the new curve and breathe and say good morning.

“Okay,” I tell the ceiling. “Okay. We’re really doing this.”

The “we” is new. The “we” has been the strangest part. I have been a one-woman operation my entire life—Marlowe and me, then just me—and now there’s a “we.” The “we” can’t talk back, but somehow, it’s already the loudest voice in every room I’m in.

I get up and dress carefully. Usually, I dress like a woman late for a horse, but this morning, I stand in front of my bag and pick the loose shirt, the one that drapes. I tell myself it’s because it’s going to be warm today, which is a lie, and button it anyway. Twenty weeks will show in jeans and a fitted tee. Twenty weeks is making decisions about my wardrobe before I do.

I look in the little mirror over the dresser. Sun-bronzed, braid already escaping, my mother’s ring on my hand, hazel eyes that can’t decide if they’re green or brown in this light. I look like a woman who drove for hours and slept badly and has a secret the size of a person.

“Subtle,” I tell my reflection. “Real subtle, Gale.”

I smell coffee before I find the kitchen, which tells me I’m not the only one up early.

Maggie’s at the stove in a chenille robe with her hair in a braid, flipping something that smells like heaven, and she doesn’t even turn around. “Sit. Eat. You’re not going to argue with me about it because I already know you’re going to try, and I already know I’m going to win.”

I sit. A plate appears in front of me—eggs, biscuits, and a slab of ham.

“You don’t have to do this,” I say around a mouthful of biscuit I will think about for the rest of my life.

“No,” Maggie agrees, sliding a second biscuit onto my plate before I’ve finished the first. “But I enjoy feeding people.”

She finally looks at me. There’s no judgment on her face. Only kindness. “I buried a husband on this ranch and then raised three boys. I know a woman who’s not sleeping when I see one. Don’t need to know why. Just figured you could use a plate without anyone asking questions before seven in the morning.”

“Thank you,” is all I trust myself to say.

“Don’t thank me, thank the chickens.” She points her spatula at me like a sentencing judge. “Now, go walk it off before Gabrielfinds you and gets weird and silent at you, which, fair warning, is his love language.”

I’m laughing—the first real laugh in ages—as I head for the door.

The ranch at dawn is beautiful. With breakfast settling and Maggie’s orders to walk it off still ringing in my ears, I let myself wander. This would be rude in most houses, but on a ranch, it’s practically expected—you find the coffee, walk the place, and learn where things are in roughly that order. The air is cool, and the light is lifting over the ridge that no doubt gives the place its name—that hard line between green and gold that you only get in a county that has to fight for its water.

I go to the barn because horses make sense in a way people refuse to. It’s a good barn. Clean, old, and well-kept. The aisle is swept. The leather is oiled and hung where it belongs, not slung over a rail to crack in the weather. There’s a coffee can of horehound drops on a shelf by the tack room and a radio that’s been tuned to a honky-tonk station.

I run my hand along the stall doors. The horses’ ears swivel as they decide about me. A big bay. A leggy gray. A stocky little buckskin who pins her ears just to keep her options open, and I like her immediately.

And then, in the corner stall, is a horse looking at me with one eye. The other eye looks as if it healed over long ago. He’s positioned himself on his good side at the bars to get a look at me, head cocked, ears forward, the friendliest expression I’ve seen on anything in days.