But it’s Lola I’m watching, and trying not to get a hard-on.
She moves through the apartment like a storm. The couch cushions get slashed with a kitchen knife. The bathroom mirror shatters under the bat, and she doesn’t even flinch when the glass hits the tile. She smashes the light fixtures. Puts holes in the drywall. Rips the shower curtain down with her bare hands.
She’s crying and laughing, both at the same time. Swinging that bat with her good arm while her bandaged hand stays pressed against her ribs, and every hit is a word she didn’t get to say. Every hit is a door she couldn’t lock. Every hit is a man who told her she didn’t have a choice.
She has a choice now.
She stands in the middle of the wreckage, chest heaving, bat resting on her shoulder, my hat tipped sideways on her head.The apartment is destroyed. Every surface broken. Every wall marked. Reese won’t recognize it when he comes back.
Good. Let him stand in the ruins and know exactly who left them.
She turns to me. Eyes bright. Cheeks flushed. A streak of sweat cuts through the dust on her forehead.
“I needed that,” she breathes.
“I know you did.”
Ace kicks the espresso machine across the floor. “Can we do this every weekend?”
Lola laughs. A proper, full, from-the-gut laugh that bounces off the destroyed walls. I take the bat from her. Pull her into me and kiss the top of her head. “Now let’s get you home, firefly.”
She adjusts the hat on her head, takes my hand, and walks out without looking back.
Turns out Sterling Ranch didn’t become a real home until I had Lola Jackson in it with me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
LOLA
“Hey, Hunter?”I call out as I place my toothbrush next to his on the bathroom shelf.
There’s something about that, the two brushes side by side, mine and his, touching at the handles. It feels more intimate than anything we did in that bathtub last night.
“Yeah, baby?”
His voice is so close it makes me jump. I spin around and find him leaning against the doorframe, watching me with that quiet intensity that makes me squirm.
“How far from this house is Violet’s?” I ask.
He smiles. “Not far. Probably walk it in five minutes.”
I lean back against the basin. “How big exactly is this ranch?”
“Hundred and fifty.”
My mouth drops open. “One hundred and fifty acres?”
He shakes his head. “Nah. One hundred and fifty thousand acres.”
“Holy shit, Hunter.”
That’s like double the size of Manhattan.
He chuckles. “Yeah.”
“How the hell do you look after all that land? How do you have time to even stand here?”
He takes a step forward, filling the doorframe the way he fills every room. “The day-to-day work is all done by people who work for me. Colten is their boss. I own the ranch. I’m here to make sure it survives every day. Everything goes through me, but I trust them all to do their jobs. Just as they trust me to keep them alive. We’ve got cattle, horses. An animal sanctuary. We love animals like our humans here.”