That night, after Nash is asleep in the smaller bedroom with Stitch tucked under his chin, I sit on the porch swing of the cabin with the mason jar of sweet tea I never finished and look out at the dark yard.
The cicadas are loud.
A floodlight is buzzing somewhere over by the barn.
The bunkhouse windows are lit up gold, and I can hear the low rumble of men's voices from the porch over there, the occasional laugh, glass on wood, the kind of sounds a woman alone with a sleeping child learns to listen to without breathing.
I think about Garrett. Ialwaysthink about Garrett at night.
About the way he used to come home dirty and tired and play with Nash before he showered.
The hospital bed in our living room. The night he died with my hand around his and Nash asleep in the next room.
The morning after, I walked into the kitchen and made coffee for one person for the first time in nine years.
I'm twisting the gold band on my left ring finger when I look up.
The clubhouse is about two hundred feet away across the dark yard.
There’s a man standing on the porch, and he’s not on the bunkhouse porch with the others.
He’s on the clubhouse porch, alone, and the floodlight is behind him so I can only see his outline, but I can see the shape of the cowboy hat against the dark, and I can see the cherry of a cigarette glowing once and going dark again.
He’s not looking at the bunkhouse. He’s looking at my cabin.
I’m going to make a new life here for us, cook for these men until my hands give out.
Whatever this place is, whatever he is, whatever those eyes mean—Iamgoing to make this work.
Garrett's been dead for nearly two years.
I'm out of money.
I’m out of options.
But I’m not out of the fight, and the man in the white cowboy hat is about to find out exactly how much of it I have left.
He takes a long drag of the cigarette.
The cherry glows.
He doesn’t look away and neither do I.
CHAPTER ONE
Rogue
I'm the man who signs her paycheck.
I'm also the man who's gonna bury anyone who comes for her. The Shotgun Saints pay me for one of those jobs. The other one is on the house.
It's four forty-five in the morning, and the three monitors on my desk are already running because I never bothered turning them off last night.
The left monitor's got the ranch books open—payroll due Friday, a vendor invoice from the feed store I haven't paid yet, an auction record from last month I need to reconcile against the deposit.
Center monitor's got the club's accounts running in the background, the kind of work I don't do with the curtains open.
The right monitor's mine.