Page 58 of Wild Sanctuary

And the most terrifying part isn’t what he did. It’s that I would have paid double just for the way he looked at me as he did it.

14

WYATT

Sold.

The word rings through the tent like a rifle shot, and my brain catches up with my mouth about three seconds too late.

Two thousand dollars.

I just bid two thousand dollars. In front of three hundred people. In front of every rancher, shop owner, church elder, and gossip merchant in Blackstone Creek. In front of Colt, who will never let me hear the end of this. In front of Shelby, who was mid-sentence when I opened my mouth and stepped off a cliff I can’t climb back up.

In front of Daisy, who is standing on that stage looking at me like I just pulled the pin on a grenade and handed it to her.

What in the hell did I just do?

The murmur starts low and builds fast. I can feel it moving through the crowd—heads turning, elbows nudging, mouths already shaping the words that’ll be all over town by morning.

Wyatt Hartley bid two thousand dollars on Tom Monroe’s girl.

People are looking at me with expressions ranging from surprise to delight, and every single one of them is trying to work out what they just witnessed.

But I don’t have an answer for them. I don’t even have an answer for myself.

All I know is she was up there with that Blackwood kid bidding on her like she was a parcel of land at a county auction, and her face⁠—

Her face reached right inside my chest.

It wasn’t the polished composure she’s been wearing all week. Not the journalist armor or the sharp smile she uses like a shield. Something underneath all of that fractured when she heard the Blackwood name, and for a second she looked exactly the way she looked at her father’s funeral. Small and fierce and holding herself together through sheer force of will while the ground dissolved beneath her feet.

I stood three feet from her at that funeral. Three fucking feet. Close enough to see the tremor in her hands. Close enough to hear the breath she kept catching and swallowing back down. And I didn’t reach for her. Didn’t put my arms around her. I stood there like a goddamn statue while she shook apart alone, because I didn’t trust what would happen if I touched Tom’s daughter with three hundred mourners watching and his casket barely in the ground.

I let her stand there alone. And I’ve never forgiven myself for it.

So when Holden Blackwood smiled at her like she was something he could buy, and that same look crossed her face—that same tremor, that same fierce, brittle refusal to break—my mouth opened without a conscious thought. Because I wasn’t going to stand by and watch her hold herself together alone. Not again. Not ever again.

My eyes haven’t left her since I stepped forward.

She’s still on the stage, her fingers curled around the brim of her old hat, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths that she’s trying to control. She’s looking at me like I’ve just upended everything she thought she knew, and she hasn’t decided yet whether to thank me or kill me.

Move, Hartley.

My boots carry me forward before I’ve made a conscious decision. Through the crowd, past the turned heads and the whispers, toward the stage. People move aside without being asked, the way they do when something in a man’s stride says this isn’t a conversation.

She’s looking down at me from the low platform. For once, she’s the one looking down, and the reversal makes my heart race—this tiny woman who barely reaches my shoulder standing above me in the string lights, trembling ever so slightly.

I hold out my hand.

I don’t say anything. Don’t explain, don’t justify, don’t crack a joke to defuse the tension. I simply extend my hand, palm up, and wait.

She stares at it for a heartbeat. Then another. And in the space between those heartbeats, her expression hardens in a way I deserve after the shit I spewed this morning.

Relief eases the tension in my shoulders when her fingers slide into mine anyway and the contact hits me like a live wire. Her skin is warm and soft against my calloused palm, her hand small enough that my fingers close around it completely. I help her down from the stage, and when her boots hit the ground she’s close enough that I can smell her. That scent I caught in my office this morning, something light and warm that’s been following me around the property all week like a ghost I can’t outrun.

I should let go of her hand. I know I should let go.

I don’t.