Page 80 of Wild Sanctuary

“June—”

“The Bozeman Gazette is covering it. And the Helena Independent.” She tilts her head. “For the Hendersons. For all of them.”

The Millers. The Coopers. The Holburns.

For Larkspur River…

“Seven o’clock.” I nod once.

“Wear something nice.” She squeezes my arm once and disappears back into the kitchen.

I pull the front door closed behind me and stand on the porch in the late afternoon sun and take a long, slow breath.

Tomorrow night. Dinner at the Blackstone Inn. With media coverage.

And Wyatt Hartley will be there.

That should go swimmingly.

19

WYATT

I wake up hard with my face buried in the pillow and her scent in my lungs.

For a few disoriented seconds I don’t move. Just lie there with my cock aching against the mattress, pulse hammering, breathing her in like a man who’s lost his goddamn mind. My body is convinced she’s here. Every part of me is convinced she’s here, and the want is so real it takes my brain a full ten seconds to catch up and inform the rest of me that I’m alone in my own bed at five in the morning with no excuse for any of this.

I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling and wait for my blood to settle. It doesn’t. I’m hard enough to hurt and the scent is on the pillow, on the sheets, faint but everywhere, warm and floral, and I have no explanation for how it got there that doesn’t make me feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind.

Cold shower. It’s the only play I’ve got.

The water hits like a punishment and I stand under it with both hands braced against the tile until my body finally gets the message. It takes longer than I’d like to admit. And even after, towel around my waist, steam clearing, I can still smell her on my skin like she’s seeped into the pores.

Christ. It’s going to be a long day.

I dress in the dark and head downstairs before the rest of the house is awake. Coffee first. Then the office. The routine is the same as it’s been for fifteen years, and if I lean into it hard enough, maybe the morning will start feeling like mine again.

The coffee helps. The office doesn’t.

I knew it wouldn’t. I stayed out of this room all evening because of it. But the ranch doesn’t run itself, so I push the door open and take it on the chin.

It’s worse than I expected. That same warmth, settled into the room like it belongs, layered over air that’s smelled the same way for as long as I remember.

And reminders of her are everywhere.

The chair sits lower, adjusted for a woman who has a foot of height to make up. The legal pad I keep in the top drawer is out on the desk, the page blank but holding the faint impressions of whatever she wrote before she tore it off.

I sit in the chair, and it’s too low, and it smells like her, so I stand right back up.

Fuck.

Six days of fence posts, icy cold creek water, and not a single surface that held so much as her fingerprints. I came home thinking I’d driven her out of my system the way I drove those damn posts into the hard earth, one heavy blow at a time, until it was buried deep enough to hold.

And it took less than two seconds in my kitchen last night to learn just how wrong I was.

I looked up and she was in the doorway. Hair pulled back, cheeks still flushed from the sun, those brown eyes finding mine across the room like they’d been waiting. And every post I drove at Elk Creek might as well have been made of paper.

I gave the performance of a good goddamn lifetime. And the only person I fooled was her.