Page 8 of Switch

“Don’t,” she said. “You found your own way out of my bed once. You can find your own way out of my barn too.”

She let go of me and walked away.

I was left behind the hay barn with my hand hanging in the air where her face had been, and her ranch went on around me. A horse called from the paddock. The windmill turned out back.

Three years I’d been sure leaving was the right call.

One day on her land and I was starting to wonder who the hell I’d been protecting.

CHAPTER 3

SAVANNAH

Two days of Switch under my roof, and my horses had already picked a side.

I found him in the barn aisle at first light with his forearms folded on Deuce’s stall door. Deuce had bitten a vet tech and two farriers since spring. Right now he had his big sorrel head pushed into Switch’s chest like a dog after a scratch, and Switch was working his knuckles along the crest of that neck, slow and deep, right where the muscle knotted up from standing in a stall all day.

“He bites,” I said.

“Not me.”

“Give it time.”

He didn’t look up. His other hand held his phone. “They came through last night.”

That got me across the aisle.

He tipped the screen so I could see. The juniper camera, the one up on the switchbacks. Grainy black-and-white footage, the infrared turning the whole hillside silver, but it was unmistakable. A utility truck came around the last bend, pale in the picture, gray or tan. Two men in the cab. Black cases strapped down in the bed. The camera had fired three times as it passed, and in the third frame the plate sat there clear as day.

“Anybody see them?”

“They came off the hill and went back out the same way. Never touched the county road, and that’s where Havoc was sitting.” He thumbed the screen dark. “Deacon’s got it.”

“And then what?”

“Then we find out whose truck that is.”

“And in the meantime they keep driving across my land.”

“For now.”

For now sat in my gut like a stone.

I made the mistake of looking at his hands. Big, scarred across the knuckles, a healed split through one thumbnail. They’d been gentle on Deuce and gentle on Whiskey, and the night of the funeral they’d been anything but gentle on me, and my body picked that moment to remember all of it. Heat crawled up my neck. I was standing in my own barn at first light with manure on my boots, getting worked up over a man scratching a horse.

Pathetic.

I reached past him and slid Deuce’s door. “Back.”

Deuce rocked off the sore foot and shuffled back. Switch watched him do it.

“You teach him that?”

“Three weeks and a sack of carrots.”

He nodded, still watching the horse, and for one second he was just like somebody else I remembered. A tall man with sunburned forearms leaning on this same stall door, a long time ago, letting a little girl carry the curry comb up and down the aisle behind him while he worked. Ray, Switch’s father. I’d been eight, maybe nine. He used to call me boss and I felt like the most important person in the barn.

I shut that down and went to get the muck fork.