Page 19 of Devoured

She came back at the end of the day, which he hadn't expected.

He was in the corral with a green colt as the light went long, working it in slow circles, sleeves shoved up, and he felt her before he saw her — that prickle at the back of the neck — and looked up, and she was at the fence with the Hendricks folder, and she'd caught him mid-work with his guard all the way down and his shirt stuck to his back, and for a second, before either of them remembered they were at war, she just looked at him.

And he looked back. And neither of them did a single thing about it.

The colt blew out a breath. A long way off a dog barked. The three seconds stretched into something that wasn't three seconds anymore, her at the rail and him in the ring and the whole gold evening holding still around the pair of them, and Dean felt the want come up in him so plain and so total that it frightened him, because it wasn't the body's want, or it wasn't only that — it was the other thing, the thing he'd buried with his wife, the wanting to cross the ring and stand close to somebody and not be the only one holding the whole world up.

She broke it. Set the folder on the post. "Delivery number's on the top sheet," she said. "You don't have to look at it tonight."

"Lara…"

But she was already walking to her truck, and he let her go, because what was he going to say. I'm sorry I humiliated you in front of my brothers because they were right. I haven't wanted anybody in four years and now I want you and it's the most disloyal thing I've ever done. There weren't words for any of it that he was anywhere near ready to say.

He walked her to her truck anyway. He didn't usually. He didn't examine why he did it now.

She had the door open, one boot up in the cab, when he found something, not the right thing, nowhere near the right thing, but something.

"Lara."

She stopped. Looked back at him over the top of the door, wary, the color from this afternoon long gone but the memory of it still between them. "Yes?"

And there it was, the thing he'd been carrying around all day with no idea what to do with it, right there in his throat, I'm sorry and don't go yet and a dozen other sentences he hadn't said out loud in four years, all of them backed up behind his teeth.

"...Drive safe," he said.

Something moved across her face, and for once she didn’t fold it away. She held his eyes across the top of the truck door. "That’s not what you were going to say."

It landed in him like a dropped tool. She’d seen the swap, the whole sentence he’d had standing right there and traded at the last second for the safe one, and she wasn’t going to do him the kindness of pretending she hadn’t. He opened his mouth. Nothing came. The real sentence was still there and his throat had closed over it the way it always did, and now she was watching him fail to say it, which was a new and specific kind of hell.

"That’s what I thought," she said, not unkind, which was somehow worse than if she had been. She got in and pulled the door shut, and the engine turned over, and she pulled out without gunning it and without looking back. And Dean was alone in the gold light with the real sentence still jammed behind his teeth and the new, raw fact of it sitting on him: this time she’d watched him not say it. He hated himself, cleanly and completely, for not saying the thing. Out loud, to her face, the not-saying cost more than it ever had alone in the dark.

He just didn't know yet what the thing was.

That was the worst part. He genuinely didn't know yet.

CHAPTER EIGHT

She knew it was bad before she'd worked out why.

It was the ranch radio, the squat black handset on the corner of the desk, on low the way Helen had taught her to keep it. She'd gotten quick at it, faster than she'd expected. Quick enough, now, to tune in to a transmission a second before she heard the words.

This one was wrong.

There was a quality to the dead air after Mack's voice, a pause that went a beat too long. Lara was halfway up from her chair before she'd consciously decided to move.

"East pasture." Mack's voice came back tight. "Wade, get over here. Bring the truck. And somebody find Dean."

"On it," said somebody. Walt, maybe.

"Now, Wade."

"On it."

Lara was already at the window. The yard had gone from its usual unhurried rhythm into something else, Wade jogging across to a truck, Mack on his radio with one hand and his other up shielding his eyes against the sun, Walt already in motion toward the barn. Dean came out of the corrals at a run with his hat in his hand. He didn't ask Mack a question. He just listened for two seconds, nodded once, and was up into the passenger side of Wade's truck before the engine had settled.

Chase was already in the driver's seat. She hadn't seen him cross the yard. He'd just been there, in that way he had.

The truck went out the gate doing forty.