No White Knight

“Nah. It wouldn’t help tonight.” I tilt my head back against his shoulder, looking up at the sky. “Just hold me, Holt. Let me watch the stars.”

* * *

For the first time in a few nights, Holt and I head home and sleep like the dead.

It’s nicer than I want to admit.

The safety and security that comes with being able to slip into a man’s arms and know he’s not there for anything but my company, my warmth.

There’s this thing I’ve started realizing about manipulative people.

They can also be really empathetic.

It takes empathy to realize what people want, but what matters is how you act on it. Some people use it to jerk others around. They’re sensitive to what you want, sure, but they only care as far as it takes to get what they want out of you.

Then there are people who use it the right way.

Guess which one I thought Holt was.

Now guess which one he really is.

It’s still strange, looking at him with new eyes, but I like what I see.

I think he’d listen to just about anything I told him, too, and I’m not used to having that anymore.

So I’m quiet as I slip into bed with him and we turn out the lights. He gathers me up like he’s gonna use that tall, strong body to wall off all the things messing with me.

In that silence, where the only thing I can hear are his slow, soothing breaths, I let it out.

“Y’know…I miss having a family,” I whisper.

Holt stirs slightly, then tightens his grip, his hands firm and sure.

“Nothing wrong with missing that,” he says.

I smile.

Then that wicked insight that makes me want to kiss and slug him simultaneously comes out. “Nothing wrong with missing Sierra, either. Even if you’re missing the sis you wanted and not the sis you got.”

“How, Holt?” I squeeze my eyes shut, looping my arms hard around his neck.

“Come again?”

“You just take all these jumbled up things inside me and sort them out with a few little words,” I tell him. “How do you see so much?”

“Because we’re not so different, honey.” He sighs heavily, but it’s not a sad thing. More thoughtful. “I never got the family I wanted. Blake, yeah. He’s all the good things you could ever want in a brother, and I’m glad we’re making up and figuring out our shit. But I never knew who my father was, and my ma was…not who she should’ve been. Not right in the head, pitting her boys against each other for favorites. So I miss the family I never had.”

I murmur softly.

He dips his head, rubbing his jaw gently to my hair, his beard scratching lightly. “Doesn’t mean I can’t make that family one day, once I’m settled down.”

That thought cuts deep.

Not just the idea that one day, I could make the family I’ve craved too…

…but that maybe me and Holt want that same thing, deep down in our feeliest of feels.

I don’t wanna be that girl.

Miss Reads Too Much Into It.

Thinking that because he’s willing to tell me what he wants, he might just want that with me.

If I were in my right mind, being my mouthy, brazen self, I’d just ask him what he means.

But I don’t want to ruin this tonight.

I need him close right now.

So I don’t say anything at all.

I just cling hard enough that he’s almost got no choice but to hold me until morning.

While I slip away into sweet dreams, hoping everything looks better with the dawn.

* * *

I can’t say things look better, but they’re not looking worse.

It’s an easy, warm morning with Holt again. Another day where he doesn’t have to go back on-site with it being Sunday, but I’ve still got work around the ranch.

Animals don’t take days off.

Of course the lunk insists on helping again.

We work quietly in a tandem I really enjoy, hauling hay bales and feed troughs and letting the sheep out to graze. Before long we’re mounting up to ride the property, checking the fences yet again and watching for gopher holes and fox burrows.

Nature doesn’t respect fences. We can at least negotiate a truce where we can.

We head out to Ursa, too.

Those old tire tracks are still there, damning evidence that someone’s been snooping around, but there aren’t any new ones.

Maybe Declan and Sierra really did realize they were in over their heads and just got the hell out of Dodge.

Even if I got a lucky break, that leaves the bank and Dad’s legacy to worry over.

I make myself dismount and head for the saloon.

Gerald Bostrom hasn’t moved, no surprise.

Even the skeletal hand resting on the bar, outlined in years of accumulated dust, remains totally undisturbed.

I focus on the skull, that empty, hollow face.

If I just stare long enough, could I see what kind of man he was?