Chapter 15: What He Wanted

Wyatt's POV

I told Melinda to stay on the porch, and she came down the steps behind me anyway.

"Stay with the dog," I said.

"He's not my dog."

"Then stay with yourself."

She stopped on the bottom step, and I walked down the drive alone.

Jared had one hand on the gate to hold himself up.

He smelled like a bar, and the rental car was parked crooked on my road with its door still open.

"Ranger," he said. "Look at you. Protecting the property."

"You drove here drunk."

"I drove here to talk to my fiancée."

"Give me your keys."

"Or what? You'll write me up?"

I held out my hand.

He looked at it, and then past me at the porch.

Melinda stood there with her arms crossed and her braid undone.

His expression went soft and ugly at once.

"Look at her. She looks happy. You know she's never looked like that with me?"

"Keys."

He gave them to me, and I put them in my pocket.

"It was a joke, you know," he said. "The trail. Shea said she'd be fine. She's always fine. She's sensitive, that's all."

"She was alone on a trail in a hundred and eight degrees."

"She'll come back to me," he said, and his voice dropped, confiding. "They all do. Give it a week. She needs somebody who knows how she is."

I took the velvet box out of his hand while he was still talking.

He didn't notice until it was gone.

"Sit on the bench," I said.

I called the cab company in town, and I stood beside him until it came.

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