“You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to?” he asks, voice sharp but quiet. “I know you’ve been spending time with that drifter.”
I go rigid. My pulse pounds in my ears.
“That’s not what this is about,” I grit out.
“No?” He exhales sharply, rubbing his jaw. “Then what is it, George? What do you want?”
I swallow hard. “I want you to trust me. I want you to let me figure out my own damn life without forcing me into something that makesyoucomfortable.”
Dad’s expression flickers like I took a swing at him and landed the punch.
I don’t stay to watch the full impact.
I turn on my heel and walk out of the barn, past the guests, past Marcus, past everything that feels like a trap.
I don’t stop walking until I’m in the open night air, my shoes crunching against the dirt.
I don’t know where I’m going.
I just know I need to breathe.
* * *
Sleep is useless.
I toss and turn all night, the argument with Dad replaying in fragments—his disappointment, my defiance. But beneath all that?
It’s Beckett’s voice I keep hearing.
SEAL. Former.
It shouldn’t have hit so hard. But it did.
Because I know what that means. Not in theory and not from movies. I grew up in the shadow of a man who came home from the military but never really left it behind. I know what it's like to be second to a mission, to lose someone to silence and routine and the weight of always being ready for a threat.
And now I know what Beckett is. What he was.
But he told me. He didn’t hide it.
And that’s what keeps me awake. That, and the way his voice wrapped around me in the barn yesterday. How his hands didn’t simply touch my skin; theyanchoredme.
How can I want something this much when everything in me says I shouldn’t?
I eventually fall into a restless sleep,only to dream of hands that know too much and eyes that see everything. I wake up tangled in the sheets with his name on my lips.
The morning is too bright. Too loud. Toomuch.
I splash cold water on my face like it’ll wash the ache out of my chest, but it only wakes the part of me that aches for him.
I pull on my work clothes, shove my hair into a ponytail, and head to Havenridge before I can talk myself out of it.
I’ve got my “focus on work” speech ready—an internal pep talk about how Beckett’s hard body pressing me against the barn wall as I shattered on his hand yesterday meant nothing.
But the moment I step inside the workshop at the ranch, my resolve falters.
Beckett leans against a truck like he owns the place, arms crossed over his chest, making his biceps strain against his shirt. Unfairly perfect in every way. Of course, he looks edible. Because the universe hates me.
My stomach does that annoying flip it’s been doing since I first saw him at The Honey Pot. My brain, however, screams at me to ignore him. To pretend I don’t remember his hands on my skin.
