“No. It isn’t. But that’s one reason he does it. He doesn’t actually commit crime in the town, but that’s his home base. And that’s how he manages to keep himself pretty clean. How my dad managed to do it before him. Keep your head low, run the nasty shit up to Portland. And there’s a big port up there. Easy to export all the bad stuff. That’s how he does it.”
“Wow. For all that work, you’d think you could just get a job.”
“You would think. That was what I did.”
“What makes people do that, do you think?” she asked. He noticed that there were bags of groceries sitting on the table. Little fabric bags. Of course she had her reusable bags. She seemed like that type. Like she thought about everything.
“What is what?”
“Why do some people do everything that they were raised to do. Then other people don’t. It seems to me, even though we are on extreme ends of the spectrum, that we both decided to be different than our families. I just wonder why. I wonder what pushes a person to make that decision.”
“For me it was when I saw my brother shoot someone. Thank God he lived, but... Some guy that worked for them. Shot him. Like he wasn’t anything. I knew that was wrong. My dad never did anything like that. Not in front of anybody, anyway. There was enough plausible deniability that I can try to find ways to believe what he said when I was young. But you can’t explain away that. I couldn’t excuse that. Didn’t matter that the guy was a scumbag just like my brother. It doesn’t excuse the violence. I couldn’t stomach it.
“I’m just thankful that one year I went to school. We were homeschooled. But I met a teacher that changed my life. She knew things. And she was lovely. And smart and sweet, and I knew that the whole world wasn’t bad. Not the way that my mom thought it was.”
“Well now, that is kind of funny. You had to learn the world wasn’t bad, and I had to learn my family was a whole lot worse than I was led to believe.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me help you with those groceries.”
He went to the table, and started to take out the parcels there. A lot of produce. Meat.
“I could cook for you,” he offered.
“No,” she said. “You weren’t even able to get up on your feet yesterday. I don’t need you cooking for me.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I do. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you sit at the table and peel potatoes. I’ll cut the veggies. We’ll have some beef stew.”
“Sounds good.”
And that’s what they did. And it was the strangest damn thing, because Clayton hadn’t shared his life with anybody in more years than he could count. And even when he had, it hadn’t been like this. He had friends in the rodeo, sure.
But there hadn’t been anything domestic about that. He had women. Buckle bunnies that liked spending the night with a cowboy. But they didn’t cook for him. He made them breakfast sometimes. But that was it. They hadn’t shared moments like this.
It was a novelty. Talking to a woman like this. Talking to anybody like this. Kind of a damned gift.
And when he bedded down on the couch that night, things seemed awfully sweet. Better than they had for a long time. When he woke up the next morning, it was to see Tala, standing at the dining table, packing things into a bag.
“I have school today,” she said quietly. “I’ll see you when I get back in the afternoon. There’s leftover stew in the fridge. I don’t have a microwave, but feel free to heat it up on the stove.”
“Yeah.”
And he purposed then and there that he was going to make sure that today, he found a way to take care of her.
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE HAD THOUGHT about him all day. While she was helping kids with their math, she had been thinking about Clayton. What he was doing, if he was okay. If he had taken his shirt off. Or used her shower.
Oh dear.
She was feeling overwarm in spite of the chill in the air by the time she left school and got into her car, driving on the dirt roads that connected the various dwellings on the ranch. She drove past the Sullivan sisters’ big farmhouse, the expansive green lawn and the idyllic willow trees.
And she didn’t care because she was still thinking about Clayton.
Her heart was fluttering like a trapped bird by the time she pulled up to her cottage. And then she saw him, and her heart hit her sternum with a bump. She put the car in Park and got out quickly, her immediate fear and anger a total overreaction and she knew it.
And even while she knew it, she couldn’t stop herself.
Because there he was, shirt off, swinging an ax down onto a vertically set hunk of wood.
He looked...
She’d seen his body. Right before he’d stitched himself back together, and she’d been aware of the muscle then. But this was something else entirely. Though she was concerned about the homegrown stitches popping open.
But also distracted by his body. But also horrified he might hurt himself. Or be seen.
“I don’t want you bleeding everywhere again!”
He straightened, breathing hard, and she was mesmerized. By his sweat-slicked skin. By the way his muscles shifted with the motion. His abs, his... Everything.
And she felt in that moment every inch what she was.
An odd bird raised in a strange nest. Who had kept all of her weirdness wrapped around her as insulation when she’d gone into the world, because defying the way she’d been raised only felt good to a point, and beyond that she’d been worried.
Worried her mother might be right. Worried at least that she could become distracted from her focus. Worried she might validate what her mom thought about her by messing up, and she had done everything in her power not to mess up.
But here she was now, with her degree, a house, a job, and by some stroke of luck, a very handsome man chopping wood for her, and she had to ask herself what she was really afraid of.
Getting hurt.
Getting hurt really badly.
All that masculinity, because when have you ever been around that?
Also getting hurt.
Well, that was the truth of it. She’d used her childhood as an excuse to hold people at a distance, and here Clayton was. He’d literally crashed into her house, her life. And she felt close to him even though it had been days, and if she felt this much for him now...
“I’m fine,” he said, indicating the line of stitches still holding his side together.
“You could have hurt yourself.”