Chapter 18: The Loft

The girls were asleep in the foreman's spare room, with his wife's quilt over them and the horses between them.

I had kissed them both and checked the lock twice.

The rusted can from the burned beam sat on the foreman's porch rail, wrapped in a feed sack.

He had left it there for the sheriff.

I walked past it across the dark yard to the new barn, because I knew where he would be.

Conal was in the loft, on his knees, spreading a horse blanket over the hay.

He heard the ladder creak, and he looked up, and for a long moment he did not breathe.

"You shouldn't have climbed that," he said. "Whoever lit that fire can wait until morning."

"I climbed it."

"Your knee."

"My knee is fine tonight."

I stood at the top rung with the lantern light on his face.

I could see how he had been waiting, and I could see he had not dared to hope.

"Come here," I said.

He came.

He did not grab me, and that was what undid me.

He stood in front of me, close enough to touch, and he laid his palm against my cheek.

"The terms," he said, very low.

"Expired on day thirty-one."

"Leandra."

"Overruled, Mr. Draper."

His laugh was short and shaken.

Then he kissed me, softly, again and again, along my jaw and the corner of my mouth.

I was the one who turned my head and took his mouth hard.

I tugged his shirt out of his jeans.

He lifted it over his head and dropped it in the hay.

The lantern showed me the scar down his forearm and all the long muscle of his chest.

I ran my hands over him.

"Slow," he said.

"No."

"You'll let me."

"Not slow."

"Then I'll go slow, and you'll tell me to hurry," he said, and he took the buttons of my blouse one at a time.

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