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CHAPTER ONE

Twenty minutes past the last building in Soluno the road turned to gravel, and Sunny Tyler drove it with the windows down and her arm out and the radio on a station that had given up on being anything but country somewhere around Abilene, and she was singing. Badly. On purpose. There was nobody for forty miles to hear her do it, and she’d checked.

Twelve hundred miles in two days, one motel in the middle with a pool she’d looked at from behind a chained door and not gone near, which she’d been annoyed about by breakfast, because it was hot with no air conditioning and there was a pool. Somewhere in Oklahoma she’d quit looking in the mirror for a gray sedan, and somewhere past Abilene she’d quit looking in it at all, and by the time the sky did the thing Texas skies apparently did, which was take up the whole windshield and most of the side windows and dare you to have a problem with it, she’d decided she was going to like it here. She decided things like that early. It was a habit that had never once let her down, and she wasn’t about to start doubting it in a county with more cows than people.

The directions had come from the daughter-in-law, Lara, on the phone, and they’d been good ones, and funny. Two cattle guards, a windmill, the bones of an old drive-in screen standing in a field for no reason anybody would explain to her, and then the gate. My father-in-law will tell you he doesn’t need anybody, Lara had said. He had a stroke last year and he’s decided it never happened, and honestly, he’s mostly right, so don’t argue with him, just outlast him. It’s me that needs you. I’m five months along and I can’t get the roasting pan out of the low cabinet without the whole house hearing about it, and there are Royston men through this kitchen all day long and not one of them can make toast. Sunny had liked her before the call was over, and she’d liked her more when Lara had said, right at the end, and you can leave whenever you need to, no questions, in a voice that said she’d heard something in Sunny’s and wasn’t going to ask what.

Indiana could stay in the mirror. The team, the shop, the sponsor’s man with the good teeth and the two dinners she’d give a great deal to have back. She’d ended it in May, in person, politely, the way you were supposed to, and he’d nodded and said he understood, and then he’d been outside her building the next Tuesday. And the Thursday. And at the shop on race week with flowers, and the police had been kind about it, and had said, kindly, that there wasn’t much they could do without something on paper, and had she thought about getting out of town for a while.

So she’d gotten out of town. Three months, housekeeper, live-in, a family with a baby coming, and it had been the furthest job the search bar would give her, and she’d laughed out loud at her kitchen table when she’d seen where it was. She’d taken it under her own name, because she wasn’t a liar and she was damned if he’d make her one, and she’d packed in forty minutes and told the team she was working remote and driven south with her laptop and her sunglasses and a strong feeling that whatever else Texas did to her, it was not going to be boring.

The house came up on a rise. Two stories of white board with a porch wrapped around the whole front of it, barns behind, pens, a round corral. Cattle somewhere past the pens, bawling at nothing. Hot metal and dust and something green under it, cut grass or hay, and a windmill ticking around on no wind she could feel. And a tractor in the yard with its guts open and a man bent into it up to the shoulder.

Good. Fine. She’d come all this way to be somewhere nobody knew her, and the first thing it had in it was a man, and not just any man. A tanned, muscled, hot as fuck cowboy of a man, with his shirt stuck to his back and his forearms doing things forearms had no business doing at nine in the morning. Of course it was. Of course he was.

She parked in the shade end of the yard and got out.

“Morning. You work here?”

He straightened up out of the tractor, a week past needing a haircut, with a grin already loaded before he’d gotten all the way around.

“I do today.”

“Then I need ten minutes of you before you go back in that engine.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He set a wrench down on the tire like he had nowhere to be until further notice and came across the yard wiping his hands on a rag. “You’d be the housekeeper.”

“Sunny Tyler.” She didn’t put her hand out. His were black to the wrist, and she’d decided somewhere in Oklahoma that she was done shaking hands with men for a while.

“Out of Indiana?”

“Word travels.”

“It doesn’t have to travel. Pearl hands it out at the counter with the pie.” He tried the name over, once. “Sunny.” She watched him mull it, and rolled her eyes, because everybody felt the need to comment on it, every single time, and he was plainly no exception. “Now that’s —”

“Don’t.”

“Wasn’t going to.” He was going to. He put it away for later instead, and grinned about putting it away, which was worse, and she was very nearly grinning back, so she opened the trunk.

Two boxes, a duffel and the laptop bag, and behind them, pushed to the back where it always went, the other one.

“Those two go to the kitchen. Countertop, not the floor.”

“Countertop, not the floor.” He stacked both boxes on one arm like they were empty, which they were not, and nodded at the last one. “This one coming?”

“Not that one.”

It had no label. It was taped the way the others weren’t, clear tape over brown tape over tape gone amber at the corners. He looked at it a second longer than a box was worth. Something crossed his face that wasn’t charm, and it was gone before she could read it, and she was fast.

“Where do you want the one you never open?”

“In the car.”

“Fine by me,” he agreed, easy as anything, and put the trunk lid down over it, and was already walking his armload toward the house and talking again, something about the heat, the county, a swimming hole she’d want to know about come August, words at a rate that had to be his resting rate. She stood a moment at the shut trunk with her hand flat on it, and then she got her bag off the seat and went after him, because the alternative was standing in a stranger’s yard being read by the hired help, and she’d rather be read indoors.

John Royston was in the kitchen, and he was not what she’d been told to expect.

She’d been told stroke. She’d built a picture on the drive down, a cane, a chair with arms, a hand under the elbow on the stairs. The man at the head of the table was sixty-some, upright, a coffee in front of him he wasn’t drinking, and a face that had finished with the whole subject a long time ago and would thank her not to reopen it. He looked her over the way he’d look over anyone new he was letting onto his ranch, and she liked him for it immediately, because at least it was a look.