Page 9 of Promised to the Cowboy

“Actually,” I say, “I was about to ask if I could use your bathroom.”

“Sure. But fair warning.” One corner of his mouth twitches as he looks at the kitchen window. “My family is in there. All of them. And they are… a lot.”

I think about the bull I got on at twelve because my father told me I’d be too small. The finger I set myself at seventeen. The long drive I just made with nothing but the conviction that I would not be my father.

“I’m a barrel racer, remember? Crazy is in my blood.”

He laughs, and the sound lands right behind my ribs.

Somewhere behind us, out in the dark, a horse whinnies, low and soft, the way they do when something new has come into the barn and they haven’t decided yet what it is.

Gabriel opens the door.

I walk through it.

Chapter 4

Gabriel

I haven’t slept right since Bigfork.

Daniel used to say I could sleep through a mortar drill, which from a former Ranger is either a compliment or a diagnosis. He never specified which. I’d put my head down, and the dark would come up to meet me, and that was that. Early bedtime, dawn chores. A simple machine of a man. That’s me. Thatwasme.

Then a barrel racer broke the machine.

And now she’s in my kitchen, at the table, boots hooked on the chair rung, braid coming undone like it did in Bigfork.

I watch her eat a sandwich the size of a doorstop. She eats like a person who’s worked for her food her whole life. No fuss or apology. Elbows where she wants them. She pulls the sandwich apart with her hands, picks the tomato off, and sets it on the plate edge without comment. I log it—no tomato—the way you log a horse’s quirks, the side it likes you to mount from, the gate it won’t pass without a fuss.

She eats the whole thing in five minutes, then stares at the empty plate. “I could eat another one of those,” she says, sounding almost angry about it. “I’m always starving lately.”

I make her another one. While my back is turned, I ask myself the question I haven’t said out loud since she got out of that truck: why did she drive all this way to find me now?

It’s been four months since Bigfork. One night, that’s all it was supposed to be. But it wasn’t, not for me. She’s been in my head ever since.

I went looking for her after. My brothers noticed my absences, but all I got was a circuit schedule and one entry form with a PO box that went nowhere.

Then the doubts crept in. She left before dawn that night at the motel. A woman leaving before the sun comes up is saying something pretty clear, and I heard it. I heard it the way I hear everything about myself—as confirmation. I decided that the kind of man whose birth killed his own mother doesn’t get to chase a woman down and ask her to stay.

I lean against the counter and let myself look because she’s distracted by the sandwich, so it’s safe. Safe is the word a careful man reaches for when he means he’s already in trouble.

“You’re staring.”

I come back to the present so fast that I nearly give myself whiplash.

“Am I?”

“You are. It’s fine.” Evie takes another bite of the sandwich and talks around it, which should not be charming but is. “You’ve gotthe whole brooding-rancher thing happening. Real gothic. Did you cultivate that, or were you born with it?”

“Born with half. Earned the rest.”

She huffs a laugh through her nose. And there it is again—the thing where she laughs and I have to look at the floor.

One night. No strings. No last names.

Her words from Bigfork echo in my brain.

She laid out the rules and watched my face to see if I’d flinch. I didn’t because—God help me—those rules sounded like the safest thing anyone had ever offered me.