Page 53 of Forbidden Protector

"Somebody packed a rag in that flue," I say. "Somebody's still out there deciding what to do about you. You want to hand him a second chance at a room with your name on the register?"

"I want to not need a Blackwater to keep me alive."

"That's pride talking, not the case."

"Maybe it's both." She finally looks at me, chin up, daring me to argue with the part of it that's true. "I've been running interviews from your kitchen table and sleeping under your roof and riding your horses and I like it. That's the problem, Holt. I like it, and I don't trust anything I like right now, including you."

I could push it. I've got four different arguments loaded. The flue, the tracker, the truck that put us in a ditch, the burner with her picture on it. Every single one of them is true and every single one of them would win.

I don't use any of them.

"Okay," I say instead.

She blinks, thrown by it. "Okay?"

"You want your own door. Take it." I stand, because staying seated for this feels like arguing without saying anything, and I'm done arguing with a woman who's already decided.

"That's it? No case for keeping me here?"

"I've got six. I'm not using them."

"Why not?"

"Because every time I make your decisions for you, I turn into somebody I don't want to be around you." I look at her, steady, and let her take that however she wants to take it. "You want the Riverview, you get the Riverview. I'll still be twenty minutes out if the phone rings."

"Twenty minutes," she says, quieter.

"Nineteen, if I don't hit the cattle guard slow."

That gets the corner of her mouth, the almost-smile she rations out. For a second the porch goes easy again, and I let myself have it.

The afternoon burns off slow into evening.

I put the horses up, feed, and check water in the troughs while there's still light enough to see ice forming on them. By the time I'm done, the sun's dropped behind the Front and the cold's come back down off it like it does every night this time of year, no matter how warm the day got.

She's still here.

Tomorrow she moves to the Riverview, but tonight she's at my kitchen table with a plate she barely touches, working her laptop through supper. After we clean up, she moves to the living room with it while I finish squaring away the kitchen.

She's on the couch with her boots off, feet tucked under her. Gus is stretched along the length of her like he's decided that's his post for the night.

"I've got a call to make," I tell her.

"At this hour?"

"Man in Great Falls who's been dodging me. Midnight's about the only time I catch him honest." I get as far as the study doorway before I look back. She's already gone half into the screen, that line between her brows she gets when she's chasing a number that won't sit still.

The county's digitized what it can of the old land records, going back to statehood if you know where to push. I know where to push. A Ranger doesn't stop being thorough just because the war's a different one now.

I pull up the archive on the old laptop in the study, the one Gideon doesn't know still has his father's login cached in it. I go looking for anything with Blackwater's name on a survey filing from the fifties back.

Gideon told her, standing in that study, that the family doesn't survey the north section. Not that ground. My father didn't. His father didn't. He heard himself say it and didn't like the sound of it, and neither did I. A man doesn't say a thing like that without there being a paper ghost of the reason somewhere in a county basement.

I'm three folders deep when Gus starts up. One low sound from the living room, not quite a bark. The same register he used the night the burner phone turned up at the fence. I'm out of the chair and down the hall before I've finished standing.

Mackenzie's already on her feet, laptop shut, one hand flat on the dog's back where he's gone rigid at the front window.

"What's he got?"