Page 81 of Warrior Security
He’d been in town this morning, and my truck had been parked right here for the better part of an hour. He would have walked past it, and he would have seen it.
This was exactly him: a rose on my seat without a note or a text or any production at all, because that was who he was.
He didn’t announce things. He just did them.
I picked it up. The stem was cool and smooth between my fingers, and the petals were full and open, the deep saturated color of a flower that had been chosen with intention, not grabbed from a bucket on the way out the door.
I got into the truck and pulled the door shut.
The noise of town was on the other side of the glass, and in here, it was quiet and I was holding a rose that a man had left for me. Logan had held my hand in a field last night while I listened to the hardest story he’d ever told. He’d caught me in a flood. He’d handed me an axe when I didn’t know what to do with my own rage. He’d promised no more junk drawers and meant every word.
This was one rose with no card and no audience, from a man who had seen my truck and thought about me and taken thirty seconds out of his morning to make sure I knew.
Then I set it on the dash, leaning the stem against the windshield where the bloom caught the sun through the glass. I started the truck.
The phone was still in my pocket. The conversation I’d been rehearsing all morning was still there, still hard, still waiting. But it didn’t have to happen today.
Logan had offered to be beside me when I made the call. He’d said he would sit with me while I dialed, and he would stay for whatever came after.
So I would wait for that. I could pick a day when he was next to me, when I wasn’t running on avoidance and caffeine and a parking lot that felt wrong for no good reason.
Logan wasn’t leaving. He’d given me Reid last night because he trusted me with the heaviest thing he carried. I’d given him my family, my finances, my whole ugly truth, and he was still here. Still fixing fences and feeding animals and leaving roses on the seat of my truck.
I pulled off Main Street and turned toward the county road. The rose slid along the dash as I took the corner, and I reached over and steadied it with two fingers.
Logan would be there when I got home.
Chapter 24
Logan
I’d been in the barn since five, and the morning had a shape to it I didn’t love.
The stalls were mucked and the feed rounds were done. Duchess had taken her joint supplement buried under a fistful of alfalfa because she would rather starve than cooperate without a bribe. The hose was coiled, the aisle was swept, and I was replacing a latch on the tack room door while Tova dozed in the center of the aisle with her chin on her paws and her ears twitching at sounds only she could hear.
It was a normal Pawsitive morning, normal work, except today, Lark was going to call her parents and ask them for money.
She couldn’t put it off any longer.
We’d sat at her kitchen table until midnight going over what she would say. Rehearsing. Although she refused to call it that. “I’m not rehearsing. I’m strategizing. There’s a difference.” There wasn’t, but I let her have it.
She laid out the approach: the amount she needed, the repayment timeline, the five years of documented outcomes at Pawsitive that any reasonable person would find compelling. All of it was organized and clean. She was treating this like a business transaction, not a call to family.
Because evidently,businesswas her parents’ love language, if they had one at all.
I’d played her mother. Not because I’d met the woman, but because Lark had told me enough that I could fill the gaps. I asked the questions her mother might ask, the ones designed to remind Lark that she’d made the wrong choices and this was proof. She answered every single one without flinching. Her voice stayed level and her jaw stayed set.
Her hands shook the entire time. And I fucking hated the words coming out of my mouth.
Lark had accepted my offer to be beside her today when she made the call. That alone told me what kind of day this was going to be.
If there was one thing I knew about Lark, it was that she did not accept help easily. She redirected it, outpaced it, or buried it under so much caretaking that nobody noticed she was the one drowning. The fact that she’d said yes meant she knew today was going to hurt, and she was letting me be close enough to see it.
But we had to get through Gimbal’s pickup first. The new owner was coming by sometime late morning. Lark had been in the training ring since sunrise running the standard poodle through final commands, doing the handoff prep she always did before a placement.
Gimbal had been ready for a week. The prep wasn’t for the dog.
I tightened the last screw on the latch and tested the swing. It held.
