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"It's a job," Lara said.

Wade smiled under the mustache like she'd said something funny, and didn't argue, and started back down the rise.

By afternoon the tour was done and Wade had handed her back to the office with a tip of his hat and an instruction to holler if she got lost, which she suspected was less about the buildings than about the family.

She sat down at the desk — his father's desk, the one she'd worked at all yesterday, the one she now understood had become, by neglect, nobody's — and looked at the work in front of her, the drifts of it, the long slow archaeology of a man who'd run a six-generation ranch out of a checkbook and his own head until his head betrayed him in a south pasture.

A smarter woman would mind more, probably, about being called a grifter by the man who signed her checks. She found she mostly didn't. He'd been wrong, and they both knew he'd been wrong, and a man who threw a punch that bad and that off-target was a man swinging at something that wasn't her.

Which left the only thing that actually worried her, the thing she'd been not-looking-at since the cattle guard: she'd watched him ride out this morning and felt it pull, low and certain, the old terrible pull, at a man who'd insulted her not an hour before, and some traitor part of her wanted to be sitting right here at this desk when he rode back in.

She picked up the first stack of mail and started sorting.

She'd be fine.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Burchall man showed up at nine in the morning in a truck too clean to have ever done a day's work, and Dean knew what he was before he'd got both boots on the ground.

"Mr. Royston." A hand out, a smile that came standard with the suit. "Glad I caught you. I won't take much of your time."

"You won't take any of it," Dean said, and didn't shake the hand.

To the man's credit, he kept the smile. They always kept the smile; it was the most expensive thing they owned. He started in anyway — the words partnership and mineral assessment and no obligation, the same words Burchall had been carrying onto Royston land for going on two years now, slid across the same imaginary table by a rotating cast of clean trucks and standard smiles. Different man each time. Same pitch, almost word for word, like they were all reading off a card somebody back at a headquarters had written. That was the part Dean had never liked, not that they wanted the minerals, everybody out here wanted something out of the ground, his own uncle had built a whole second fortune on it. It was that Burchall never quite said the thing straight. There was always a softer word laid over the hard one. Assessment for survey crews on your land. Partnership for we take a cut of everything under your grass forever. A man who meant well said what he meant.

He let the rep get about a third of the way through before he stopped him.

"I appreciate the drive out," Dean said. "The answer's no. It was no last month and it'll be no next month. My father will tell you the same when he wakes up, and he'll tell you with more words than I'm going to."

A flicker, there and gone. "I'd heard he was unwell. I'm sorry to —"

"Mack." Dean didn't raise his voice. Mack was already crossing the yard, because Mack had been watching the clean truck since it turned in off the road. "Walk the gentleman back to his vehicle."

He didn't wait to watch him go. He had a hospital to get to, and the clean truck and the standard smile had used up the last of the civility he'd woken with. Some part of him filed the visit, though, the way you'd note a coyote working a fence line in daylight, not alarmed yet, just aware that something kept testing the same gap, patient about it, and that patience in a predator was never a thing to like.

His father looked smaller every time, and Dean hated it with a violence he had nowhere to put.

John Royston had been the biggest thing in every room Dean had ever stood in with him, and now he was propped up in a bed with a tube taped to the back of his hand and a monitor counting his heart out loud for anyone to hear, and he was furious about it, which was the only part that still looked like him.

"They won't let me have coffee," John said, by way of greeting. "Decaf. They brought me decaf, Dean. I told the girl I'd rather have the stroke."

"I'll smuggle you a real one."

"You're a good boy." His father's eyes were sharp even if the rest of him wasn't. They tracked Dean to the chair and stayed on him while he sat, and Dean knew that look, had known it his whole life, the look that meant his father had already worked out what Dean had come in carrying and was just waiting to see if Dean would say it himself.

"Burchall sent a man out this morning," Dean said first, because it was the easier thing and the old man would want to know. "New face. Same pitch."

John's mouth went flat. "Course they did. Smell a man down and they come sniffing." He worked a breath. "They'll keep at it. They've got the time and the money to keep at it, and I've got a bad heart and four months of paperwork I can't get up to do. You tell that boy nothing. You sign nothing. Not while I'm in here."

"I sent him off. I'm not signing anything."

"I know you're not." A pause, the machine ticking between them. "It's going to land on you, all of it. The land and the kids and holding that company off the fence line." His father's mouth twisted. "Chase'll work himself into the ground beside you, he always has, but it's not his to carry and we both know it. Brody's halfway round the world and not coming back for his old man's bad heart. And Jett —" He stopped. Didn't finish it. The thing about Jett never had a clean end to it. "Well. You know where Jett is every morning." A breath. "It lands on you. It always lands on you. I'm sorry for that. I didn't plan on doing this to you from a bed." His father's hand moved on the blanket, the closest John Royston came to reaching for anybody. "But you'll hold it. You've been holding it. You held it before you should've had to."

Dean didn't answer that. There was no answer to it that wouldn't cost them both something neither of them had to spare today.

And his father, having said the soft thing, retreated from it the way they both always did, eyes sharpening again, and waited, because he'd known from the second Dean walked in that the Burchall man wasn't the only thing his son had come carrying.

Dean said it himself. He'd never been able to outwait the old man.