Page 38 of Warrior Security
I sat there with my mouth open and nothing coming out of it. I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell him the hot water heater wasn’t his problem, that I was handling it the way I handled everything, by myself, because asking for help meant admitting I needed it.
And I had beennot enoughfor my entire family my entire life. I was not going to benot enoughhere.
But I was sitting in a truck that shouldn’t have started, arguing about plumbing with a man whose shirt I’d torn in a fit of passion, and the absurdity of it landed on me so hard I almost laughed. What came instead was something closer to surrender.
“I think it’s dead,” I said quietly. “Not fixable.”
“Then I’ll figure out the next step. Even if it means you move in to my cabin and I live in your house until we get it worked out.”
“That’s not your?—”
“We’ll figure it out tomorrow. First thing. We get the animals situated tonight so you know they’re okay, then tomorrow I’ll look at what needs fixing in your house.”
I stared at him. He stared back. Calm, unhurried, immovable.
“Fine,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
We handled the evening rounds. Fed the animals, checked the medication log, topped off water bowls. Logan walked to Tova’s kennel and opened it. Tova trotted out and pressed against his leg, and he dropped his hand to her head the way he probably didn’t realize he was doing.
When we were done, he looked at me. “I’m going to go so you can shower. I’ll be at your house by six tomorrow morning. We’ll start with the hot water heater before the morning rounds.”
Already planning. Already making tomorrow concrete so I didn’t have to wonder whether any of this would hold in the daylight.
“You don’t have to?—”
“Six o’clock, Lark.”
I watched them go, the tall man and the calm yellow dog, and something behind my ribs ached in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
I went to the barn shower. Peeled off the mud-caked clothes and stood under the hot water and let it run over me until my skin stopped feeling like it belonged to someone else. The barn was quiet around me. Just the sound of the water and the soft rustling of animals settling in for the night and the distant hum of the heater that worked perfectly fine out here while the one in my house sat dead.
Six weeks of this. Walking out here before dawn, showering in a building that smelled like hay and horse and dog kibble, getting dressed in the cold and walking back to a house that wasn’t much warmer.
I’d told myself it was temporary. I’d told myself it was fine. I’d told myself a lot of things.
Tomorrow at six, a man was going to look at my hot water heater and try to give me back something as simple as a warm shower in my own home. And I didn’t know why that thought made my throat tighten.
I toweled off, got dressed, and walked over to my house.
I stood in my kitchen without turning on the lights. Cold air pressed against my skin and settled into the tile under my boots. Outside the window, the porch light on Logan’s cabin glowed through the cottonwoods.
I could still feel him. His thigh between my legs. His hand at the small of my back. The way he’d shifted to give me more without once trying to take. My body held the memory like a handprint, specific and warm and impossible to ignore.
I stood in my dark kitchen, and I was terrified.
Not of him. Of wanting. Because the last time I’d wanted someone, I’d ended up with stitches and no family and a name I had to shed to survive.Wantingwas the door I’d locked the night I walked out of my marriage, and this afternoon, it had swung wide open and I didn’t know how to close it again.
But I felt something I hadn’t let myself feel in a very long time. Something small and stubborn, lodged behind the fear, refusing to be stamped out.
The possibility that someone could see all of me. Every ugly, broke, desperate, stubborn piece. And not walk away.
I didn’t trust it.
But I felt it.
Chapter 12
Logan
