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Then she was gone down the porch steps, and her truck went out over the cattle guard, and the yard was quiet again, except it was a different quiet than the one Lauren had driven to town that morning to get away from, and she stood on her own porch a while trying to name the difference, and didn't, and went in and painted until the light went.

Helen's casserole went in the oven at six, and it was better than anything Lauren had cooked in the house yet, which she chose not to take personally.

She ate at the table with the burn mark and took stock the way she did at the end of a day, out of old habit, a shopkeeper counting the drawer. One friend, acquired, along with the entire map of a feud she was apparently living in the middle of. One picnic she'd been assigned to, one wedding she was on a list for, ten cousins to memorize. And one right hand that could still feel the weight of his, warm and open and letting her hold it, which she had done, in the window booth at Pearl's, in front of the county, first, with nobody to blame for it in any direction she looked.

That was the part she kept arriving at, standing at the sink with the dish. Because she'd run the numbers on him driving home, run them honestly, the old arithmetic her whole life had taught her: two big outfits, real money humming under one of them, her dirt wedged in between, and a man from the money side who'd spent a week and more of afternoons on her place with tools in his truck. She'd looked for the angle the way she used to look for the line where a bad month went wrong.

She couldn't find it. He'd asked her nothing. Not about the land, not about her plans since that first day at the gate, not what Greene's office sent or when the realtor was coming. He'd bought a pump at cost and made her keep the receipt like it mattered to him that she had it, and today he'd stood in a room full of witnesses and let her hold his torn-up hand like the only thing at stake in the county was whether he'd put salve on it. If Mason Royston was working an angle, he was the worst salesman she'd ever met, and she'd met them all.

She dried her hands and turned off the porch light, and let herself say the balance out loud to the empty kitchen, because saying a thing out loud was how you closed the month.

"He doesn't want anything."

The kitchen didn't argue, and she went up to bed with the drawer counted, easy in her mind for the first time since Denver. She left the account open anyway. Good months had fooled her before.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The middle of November found them a rhythm, and Mason quit pretending he wasn't building his days around it.

There was always a reason. That was the discovery. A man who wanted one could find a reason on a hundred and sixty neglected acres every morning of his life, and he did, the barn doors that needed rehanging, the last soft stretch of the east line, the loose tin on the pump house roof that sang every time the wind came up. He'd work the home place till noon and be down the seam road by one, and she'd have coffee on like it was a standing arrangement, and they'd work till the light went and stand in her yard not saying the thing, and he'd drive home and do it all over the next day like a man with no memory.

The county kept score. Jace had started calling the seam road Mason's commute, and Knox had taken to announcing the day of the week at supper, Tuesday, in case anybody wondered where Mason had spent it, it being Tuesday. He let them have it. It was cheaper than answering.

And ten days went by in which he didn't touch her. Not a glove handed across the tailgate, not her shoulder brushing his in the truck cab, nothing since she'd held his hand in the middle of Pearl's with the county watching, and it got harder every single day, and he kept showing up anyway, because he still hadn't worked out what a man was allowed to want on land his father had an appetite for.

The wind came through hard in the night, the first real norther of the season, and Mason ran the west line at first light as he did after any blow, and found the gap where forty feet of his fence used to be, and the tracks of a couple dozen cow-calf pairs going through it like a parade.

Going east. Onto the Merritt place.

He stood a minute at the break, reading it. Old wire on this stretch, the last of what he hadn't gotten to, a splice some hand had made before Mason was born, and the wind had put a dead mesquite limb across it and the cattle had done the rest, the way cattle will find the one weak thing in a mile of strong ones and lean on it until it gives. His cows. Her land. There was no version of this morning that didn't end in her yard, and he'd be lying if he said the thought slowed him down any, and he was getting real tired of catching himself in that lie before breakfast.

He threw the limb off, left the gap for later, and drove the long way around to her cattle guard.

The scene, when he came up her drive, was already fully underway.

Cattle everywhere. Half the escapees scattered across the yard, calves bawling, one cow standing in the dead garden eating the dead stalks like it was her job, another on the porch steps looking through the kitchen window at her own reflection with real interest. Jace's truck sat crossways in the drive with the door hanging open, and Jace himself was out in the middle of the mess with an empty feed sack in one hand, whooping cows off the propane tank, having, by every visible sign, the time of his entire life.

And there was Lauren. Middle of the yard, hair coming out of its tie, wearing the flannel and holding a kitchen broom out at arm's length like a sword she had not been trained on, squared off against a fourteen-hundred-pound cow that had stopped chewing to consider her.

"Don't smile at it," Jace called to her, delighted. "They can tell."

"I'm not smiling at it, I'm establishing dominance."

"The cow disagrees. Sweep left, she's fixing to go around you."

She swept left. The cow, unmoved, went around her anyway, at a walk, the way a cow goes around a traffic cone, and Lauren turned a full circle with the broom and the betrayal on her face and saw Mason's truck, and whatever his morning had been on the drive over, it reorganized itself entirely around the sight of her furious in a yard full of his cattle.

He got out. Jace saw him and lit up like a jackpot.

"There he is. Your cows, brother. Came through the west line in the night and invited themselves to the garden. I was coming back from town and saw Wainwright brands on the wrong grass." He gestured grandly at the wreckage, the garden, the cow on the porch steps. "I've been defending the lady's turnips from a hostile invasion for half an hour on no coffee."

"He's been yelling at cows and enjoying it," Lauren said. "One of them ate a fence post. Ate it."

"Chewed on it," Jace said. "Sagebrush, it's like gum to them."

"It's my fence post."

"And nobody respects it more than that cow." He was talking to her but reading Mason the whole time, and Mason knew exactly the moment his brother finished the arithmetic, because the grin changed direction, went from pleased to anticipatory, a man discovering the morning had entertainment in it beyond livestock. "Well. Mason. Good of you to come claim your girls."