Page 20 of Thunder

"Raine," he calls, easy. "Let's let Miss Presley and Miss Grace work, baby. Bring the cat."

"But—"

"Raine."

She goes, because she minds him, hugging me hard around the neck one more time first. "Bye, Miss Presley, feel better cow!" Then she trots off toward the bike with Biscuit yowling his displeasure to the whole county.

And for one second, as she goes, I let myself look at him. He's already looking at me.

Of course he is.

He's got his hat pushed back and the rattlesnake dark on his throat in the noon light and that steady weather-coming stare fixed on me across forty feet of dirt.

He doesn't wave and he doesn't smile and he doesn't say a word.

He just tips his chin at me.

Once.

The smallest thing.

Then he gets his daughter loaded and his own busted body back on the bike, and they ride off.

He looks sad, Raine said.

I get in my truck after Grace is gone and Number 68 is dosed and settled in the quarantine pens for the next couple of days.

I sit there in the heat with my hands on the wheel, and I think about a man who told his daughter I was probably busy, and got sad right around when I stopped coming.

The same man who rode all the way out here just to collect a kid he could've trusted to drive a side-by-side two hundred yards home.

He didn't have to come himself.

He wanted to see if I was out here.

And the worst part, the part I can't say out loud to anyone, not even the dashboard—the worst part is that when he tipped his chin at me, something in my chest lifted like a field lark going up.

For one whole second I forgot every good reason I have to stay away from him.

One second.

Then I remembered all of them, every last one, and I started the truck and drove home to my empty cabin.

But it took me that whole second.

And it's getting harder, not easier, to find them.

CHAPTER FOUR

Thunder

Pride's a hell of a painkiller right up until it isn't.

That's the lesson I'm about to learn again, and I'm going to learn it the hard way, because I'm forty minutes into rehanging a gate I've got no business touching, and I'm too stubborn to quit while I've still got the legs to walk away from it.

The gate's on the corral by the far barn, the heavy pipe one that sagged its hinges last winter and never got fixed because there was always something worse we had to handle here on Sharp Shooter Ranch.

It's a two-man job on a good day.