Page 26 of Breaking His Exile

Evander swept the trees with the rifle scope. Lowered it.

“No kill site. No den.” He turned in a slow circle, scanning the terrain. “She was passing through. Probably on her way to the creek drainage south of here. Good hunting along the water this time of year.”

Relief loosened something in Rainey’s chest. “So Sable’s safe.”

“The cat’s moved on.” He slung the rifle. “We head back.”

The return was downhill, which should have been easier. It wasn’t. The slope was steep in places, cut with runoff channels and loose scree that shifted under her boots. Evander picked a route that wound between the worst of it, but twice she had to grab a sapling for balance, and each time her ribs lit up with a bright, specific pain that made her breath catch.

She was watching her feet, counting steps, when the ground gave way.

One second solid under her boot, the next nothing—a patch of loose gravel and dry soil sliding out from under her with a sound like pouring rice. Her weight went backward. Her arms flung out, grabbing for anything, and there was nothing to grab, just air and the sudden sick tilt of falling⁠—

Evander’s arm locked around her waist. Hard. He yanked her against his chest with a force that drove the air from her lungs and sent a white-hot spike through her ribs. Her face smashed into his shoulder. She could smell him—pine smoke, gun oil, the sharp salt of sweat—and feel the solid wall of his chest against hers and the hammer of his heart where her palm had landed.

He didn’t let go. His grip was iron, one arm banded across her back, the other hand braced against a tree trunk, holding them both upright against the slope. His breath came fast against her hair.

“Jesus Christ.” His voice was rough, stripped of its flatness. “Are you hurt? Your ribs—check your ribs.”

He was already checking. His hand moved to her side, pressing gently along the line of the fracture, his fingers probing with a urgency that felt wildly out of proportion to a stumble on a hillside. His other hand came up and cupped her jaw, tilting her face toward the light, his thumb brushing her cheekbone as if checking for blood.

“I’m fine.” Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. “It’s just a slip. I’m fine.”

He didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes moved over her face—her mouth, her eyes, the pulse jumping in her throat—and something raw moved behind them, something she had no name for. Fear, maybe. Or guilt. Something old and deep and entirely his.

Then he caught himself. She felt it happen—the moment his body remembered who he was, and where they were, and what he was allowed to feel. His grip loosened. His hand fell from her face. He took a half step back, putting air between them, and his expression closed like a door slamming.

“Watch your footing.” The flatness was back, but it sounded forced now, stretched thin over whatever had just broken through. “The soil’s unstable on this grade.”

Rainey stood where he’d left her. Her ribs throbbed. The place where his hand had been on her jaw felt warm, marked. She could still feel the shape of him against her chest, the specific heat and weight of a man who had just reacted to her near-fall like she’d stepped in front of a train.

She didn’t understand it.

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Evander stayed closer than he had before, though he’d never admit that either. Tilly ranged between them, her dark eyes moving from Evander to Rainey and back, reading a tension neither of them would name.

Back at the cabin, Evander checked Sable again. The mare was calm now, dozing in the sun with the blanket still across her back. He refilled her water trough from the hand pump and spent five minutes running his palm along her neck, talking to her in that low murmur Rainey couldn’t make out from the porch.

She went inside. Her guitar lay across the cot where she’d left it, the scrape along its flank a pale mirror of Sable’s. She picked it up and cradled it against her chest, feeling the familiar weight, the curve of the body against her ribs. The low E string had gone flat again. She tightened the peg, tuned it by ear, played a G chord. The string slipped. Flat again.

She tightened it. Tuned again. Played the chord. Better.

The song came without her deciding on it. Something slow she’d written in a motel outside Boise, rain ticking against the windows and nowhere she had to be by morning. Four chords. A wandering melody. Lyrics about a highway and a decision that couldn’t be unmade. She’d played it a hundred times. Could play it half-asleep.

Apparently not tonight.

The low E slipped flat halfway through the first verse.

She stopped. Retuned. Started again and made it through the verse this time, almost to the chorus before the string gave out again and dragged the chord sour beneath her fingers.

“Ugh. Come on.”

She twisted the peg, plucked the string, listened.

Still wrong.

Instead of starting over, she let her fingers move.

Not the Boise progression. Something else. Slower. Quieter. A handful of chords she’d been picking at in her head all day without realizing it.