Chapter 16
Ethan
The Spur and Spoon smells like coffee and bacon grease. The whole town is holding its breath this morning, but you wouldn’t know it from the way people are eating their eggs.
Beckett sits at the counter nursing his second coffee, positioned to see the door without turning his head. Daniel’s truck is across the street with sight lines on both exits and the alley behind. Tom and Angus are three booths down, two cowboys reading the paper. Saint, one of Beckett’s watchmen, is covering the end of Main Street, while the other two, Tank and Tex, stand at the breakfast bar, coffees in hand. Mabel is behind her counter, pouring coffee for me this morning as if this were any other morning.
We chose the ground.
It took three days and federal coordination to get here. Vance shook the tail past the interstate and reemerged under a name he thought nobody would recognize. Beckett found him in under forty-eight hours. Once we tracked him to his hotel, we had what we needed. Vance was planning to come for her—a parking lot, afuel stop, or a road shoulder at dusk. He was going to make her prey.
So we took the moment away from him.
I sent word through a secure channel—two degrees of separation, the kind of drop Vance couldn’t ignore without appearing weak in front of his own people.We'll be at the Spur and Spoon, Thursday morning, nine-thirty. Breakfast. Public.
An invitation to a funeral he hasn’t realized is his.
Jenna sits across from me in the window booth, fork in her hand, explaining a cross-referencing method she wants to develop for the ranch’s breeding records. She’s relaxed. Well, she’sperformingrelaxed. Both at the same time. That’s my wife, the woman who built the federal case against the man she’s here to see, choosing to eat huckleberry pie while she waits for him to walk through that door.
She’s wearing one of my flannels over a tank top, sleeves rolled to her elbows. The patches on her forearms are a quiet pink, the calmest I’ve seen them. Her foot is hooked around my ankle under the table. Not obliviousness. Deliberation.
“Are you listening?”
“Yeah.”
“What did I just say?”
“Filing system. Breeding records. Cross-referenced by dam lineage and calving dates.” My hand is on her knee under the table. Has been since we sat down. “You also said something about color-coding that I lost because you pushed your glasses up.”
Her mouth does the almost-smile. “My glasses distract you?”
“Everything about you distracts me. The glasses are just today’s excuse.”
She bites her lip and looks down at her huckleberry pie, the tips of her ears turning pink.
Mabel brings coffee without being asked. Three tables away, Phil Denton and his wife raise their mugs in our direction. At the counter, old Roy Watkins catches my eye and nods with the approval of a man who saw me grow up and has decided this girl is all right.
When Ethan Sutton tells Mabel Kerry he’s having breakfast on a Thursday morning with a quiet request that regulars show up at nine, the diner fills by eight-forty-five. They’re eating pie because they want to. They’re also witnesses, and they know it.
Jenna leans back in the booth. She catches me watching. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re about to say something that’s going to make me cry into my pie.”
“I was going to say you have huckleberry on your chin.”
She swipes at her chin. Nothing there. Her eyes narrow. “You’re the worst.”
“You married the worst.”
“I did.” She steals a berry off my plate. “Best decision I ever made.”
The bell above the door chimes.
The cologne hits first—something expensive, designed for conference tables and corner offices. Wrong for a diner that smells like bacon and pie crust.
My hand tightens on Jenna’s knee. Her ankle presses into mine, then relaxes.We’re here. We’re ready.