Page 57 of Wild Sanctuary

His eyes find mine across the crowd, and my breath hitches.

Because Wyatt Hartley doesn’t do this. He doesn’t speak up in crowds. He doesn’t draw attention to himself. He doesn’t put a single thing he feels on display for anyone to see. I’ve watched him all week, deflecting, shutting down, retreating behind walls so thick I couldn’t find a handhold. This morning he couldn’t get me out of his office fast enough. An hour ago, he was standing across this clearing, letting another woman fix his collar.

But now, he’s looking at me like I’m the only person in the tent.

The murmur that moves through the crowd is low and electric. People glance at each other. At Wyatt. At me. I can feel the questions forming in real time—the gossip gears of Blackstone Creek grinding to life.

Did you see that?

A fifteen-hundred-dollar bid?

From Wyatt Hartley?

Holden turns and finds Wyatt in the crowd. The easy smile doesn’t falter, but the calculation behind it shifts as the whole town holds its breath to see what happens next.

But Wyatt isn’t looking at Holden.

He’s looking at me. He hasn’t stopped looking at me.

“Sixteen hundred,” Holden counters. His tone is still light, but the leisure has disappeared from his voice.

Wyatt doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t shift his weight. Doesn’t break eye contact with me for a single second.

“Two thousand.”

The crowd audibly gasps, and it’s the kind of collective intake of breath you feel in your chest. Two thousand dollars at a Blackstone Creek fundraiser is the kind of number that turns heads and starts rumors and gets talked about at Sunday dinners for years.

My heart is hammering so hard I can feel my pulse in my fingertips, in the soles of my feet, in the base of my throat where the air won’t come fast enough. His green eyes are locked on mine, and the expression on his face⁠—

It’s not the stone wall. It’s not the careful blankness he wears like a second skin. It’s cracked wide open, and it’s the most honest I’ve ever seen Wyatt Hartley look in my entire life.

The man standing in the back of this tent with three hundred people staring and two thousand dollars on the line—that man isn’t looking at me like I’m a problem. And I don’t know whether to be relieved or furious.

The whole tent is still. The band has stopped playing. Even the kids have gone quiet, sensing the shift in the air the way animals sense a coming storm.

Holden lifts one hand. An easy, deliberate concession, like a man folding a poker hand he was never going to win. He steps back with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes and melts into the crowd like he was never there at all.

“Going once.” Shelby’s voice has gone strange, as though she’s witnessing something she wasn’t prepared for.

My eyes haven’t left Wyatt’s. I couldn’t look away if the tent caught fire.

“Going twice.”

His chest rises. Falls. His hands are still at his sides, but his fingers flex once—a tiny, barely visible movement, like he’s stopping himself from reaching for something.

The gavel comes down.

“Sold.”

The word echoes through the tent, swallowed up by a rush of applause, whistles, and the band scrambling back to life like nothing just shifted on its axis.

And I don’t hear any of it.

I’m still standing there, rooted to the spot, my fingers tight around the brim of my hat, my pulse a live wire under my skin.

Two thousand dollars. For one dinner.

For me.