Centuria Books · Somewhere Under a Texas Sky
Somewhere Under a Texas Sky — Read the First Chapter
The woman who tries to control every variable falls for the one man she can’t inventory—a lethal cowboy astronaut who counts exits, then learns to count her freckles instead.
Foreword
Hello, darling. Pour yourself something good — bourbon, if you’ve got it, or the nicest red you’ve been saving for a Tuesday that never comes — and settle in. The book you’re about to read is hot, holstered, and full of Texas dust, and I’ve been waiting to hand it to you.
I wrote Joe because I wanted to know what it would feel like to be loved by a man who has held the worst of the world in his calloused hands and still chooses, against every instinct, to be gentle with one woman. Joe Straightback is a DEVGRU operator with an astronaut’s wings and a Stetson he tips at women in grocery stores because his mama raised him right. He’s silent, he’s lethal, and when he finally looks at you like you matter, the floor drops out from under the room.
I wrote Delphine because I know you. I know the woman who keeps her wine glasses lined up just so, who plans every trip down to the minute, who flinches at the phone ringing after ten p.m. Delphine Rousseau lost the people who made the world ordinary, and now ordinary terrifies her more than any battlefield ever could. She is petite and elegant and tired in a way only the grieving recognize. If you’ve ever tried to outrun randomness by gripping the wheel harder, she is yours.
Now, a word about what you’re holding. This is a military romance with teeth. There is on-page violence, there is a man named Tariq Vance who uses his money the way other men use their fists, and there is a sequence in a Houston steel mill that I will not apologize for writing. There is also explicit, unhurried, deeply earned intimacy — the kind where a man who counts exits for a living finally puts his weapon down and counts freckles instead. If stalking, gun violence, grief, and the occasional bloody knuckle aren’t for you tonight, tuck this one back on the shelf and come find me when you’re ready. I’ll wait.
Underneath the rifles and the cowboy boots and the Parisian back-alleys, this book is about being chosen by someone who had every reason to stay alone. It’s about a man who calls himself a weapon discovering he is also a home, and a woman who calls herself a survivor discovering she is also, still, soft. Joe thinks his darkness will leave another widow. Delphine thinks love is a fatal exposure. They are both, beautifully, wrong — and watching them learn it is the whole point.
I write romance where the man is dangerous and the woman is the only thing on this earth he won’t be dangerous toward. I write heroes who scan rooms and heroines who notice them doing it. I write slow hands, fast pulses, and the particular silence that falls over a Texas porch at dusk when two broken people decide, without saying it, that they’re going to try. I don’t write apology, and I don’t write small. If you came here for a man who’d take a bullet before he’d take you for granted, you came to the right ranch.
So saddle up, sweetheart. He’s already watching the road for you.
Yours, always and a little wickedly,
Lady Heartswell
P.S. Slider’s been pacing in the back of my mind for months now, sharpening his tongue and lining up a cowboy of his own. His book is coming. You’ll want to be there when that gate swings open.
The Man in the Stetson
The crystal base sat three millimeters off center.
Too far left.
Delphine slid the stem. Thumb and forefinger. A measured nudge until the glass kissed the bullseye of the linen coaster. Order restored. Variables locked.
Across the candlelight, Tariq Vance tapped his signet ring against the mahogany armrest.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Heavy gold on wood. A firing pin’s rhythm. To the rest of the Michelin-starred room it was nothing. To her, a countdown.
“You are not tasting the wine, Delphine.”
He leaned forward. The oxygen left the alcove with him. He didn’t want the table — he wanted the inch of real estate behind her sternum. The silence stretched thick as the reduction congealing on their plates. He didn’t care about the vintage. The wine was a leash. Lift the glass, accept the collar. Concede that her boundaries had a price tag.
A 2011 Château Margaux. Flashy. Structurally bankrupt. Much like the man who’d ordered it.
Miscalculation.
Her pulse thumped cold against the hollow of her throat.
Her roster was simple. Binary. Survival math. Option one: men so spineless they couldn’t dent the vacuum she lived in. Corporate ghosts who apologized to waiters and drove beige sedans. Option two: men so cleanly lethal they smelled faintly of cordite. Predators who owned the violence in the room.
Ordinary, decent men did not make the list.
Ordinary men shattered without warning.
Tariq was supposed to be option one. A malleable arms broker shopping for a luxury logistics manager to decorate his arm at Paris galas. Hands clean. Muscle outsourced.
The tap of the ring accelerated. The mask slid an inch. He watched her mouth, waiting for the apology his money usually bought him from everyone else in his life.
She gave him nothing. No softening smile. No deflection to spare his pride.
“I prefer to analyze the bouquet before indulging.” Level. Flat. A sheet of ice on still water. She did not lift the glass. She let the refusal sit on the linen, white on white.
“I spent four weeks securing this reservation.” His voice dropped. The transatlantic purr peeled off in strips. The vowels came up flat and ugly. “I bought the vintage you requested. I bought the table. You will stop staring at the exit, and you will look at me.”
Not attention. Capitulation. He was reading her the ledger — what he’d paid, what she therefore owed.
Three exits. Kitchen corridor, fifty paces. Maître d’, twenty. Service door behind the velvet drape, six feet.
Distance. Trajectory.
Stand up now and she wasn’t walking out on dinner. She was declaring war on a man who dismantled supply chains for sport. Burn the Paris contracts. Double the locks. Start reading shop windows for reflections again. Hollow out the pristine, controlled little sanctuary she’d spent thirty years caulking shut.
Stay seated and he’d hollow her out instead. Slower. From the inside.
She picked her poison.
Palms flat to the tablecloth. Starch cool against hot skin. Chair back.
“The evening is over, Tariq.”
His jaw locked. Tendons rose against the bespoke collar. The silence shifted from negotiation to threat assessment.
“Sit down.”
“Do not contact my firm again.”
One. Two. Shoulders back. Spine a column. Bone-deep exhaustion shoved down beneath the posture, because predators clock a limp.
Velvet brushed her shoulder. Brass yielded under her palm.
Paris air. Crisp. Ozone and river. The amber lamps of Avenue Montaigne strung out along the cobbles.
Move. Right at the corner. Stay in the crowds.
Heels ticking. The restaurant’s glow shrank behind her, swallowed by stone.
Another rhythm answered hers. Heavier. Patient.
A black Town Car eased along the opposite curb, engine a low predator’s hum, pacing her stride for stride. The rear window slid down a finger’s width.
Four hundred meters to the metro. Open pavement. No cover. He has wheels. He has reach.
She would not scream. Screaming was surrender. She cut left into a slit between two stone shoulders, into the older quarter. Wrought iron crowded out the dying sun. Masonry pressed close.
A maintenance crew had pried up a storm grate ahead. Rusted grilles stacked against the brick. A dark mouth opening onto the rush of the sewers below.
A hand clamped her shoulder. Meaty. Unrefined. Fingers dug above her collarbone.
“Fucking bitch.”
He wrenched her back. Stone scraped her shoulder blades. Air gone.
“You think you walk away from me?” Spit on her cheek. The billionaire was gone. Just the ego, leaking. “I own you. I buy people like you to clean my floors in Dubai.”
Her hands moved before the command reached them.
She drove the brass-edged clutch up under his nose.
Bone gave. Wet crunch. A hot dark arc sprayed across his white collar.
He staggered, a guttural noise tearing out of him.
Move.
She pushed off the brick.
His palm caught the back of her skull. Her hair snagged in his fist, roots tearing in bright pinpoint fire. He snapped her head back with whiplash speed and slammed her spine-first into the wall.
The thud went through her teeth.
Then his weight. All of it. His bespoke wool stinking of oud and his own blood. His forearm crushed across her trachea, bone to cartilage, deliberate, measured. Her lungs hauled against the blockade and got nothing. Nothing at all.
She twisted. The signet ring dragged across her cheekbone — a hot wire opening her skin. A bead of blood swelled, tracked her jaw. The brick gnawed her shoulder blade. None of it mattered. Drowning on dry land had a way of simplifying the inventory.
“I will ruin you,” he hissed, his blood and spit on her mouth. “I will have my people tear your life apart piece by piece.”
Dark spots crowded in from the corners. Roar in her ears.
His money wasn’t a number. It was a standing army. Wire transfers and proxies and patient men. Even if she lived through this alley, she would not live through him.
Scrape. Click.
Leather. Spurs.
Not European. Not a dress shoe. Not rubber.
Footfalls on the cobbles with a slow, awful authority. Deliberate. Total quiet between each strike.
Tariq’s head jerked toward the sound. The forearm lifted a quarter inch — enough for one tearing gasp. Ash. Copper. Her chest spasmed around it.
A shape detached from the dark mouth of the alley.
Cowboy boots. Worn. Denim. A Stetson tipped low, the top half of his face cut into black. Hands loose at his thighs, fingers slightly curled.
Predatory.
He didn’t look at Tariq. His chin swept the alley — left, right. Sightlines. Exits.
Tariq sneered through the blood. The shield of his money was still a real thing to him. “Walk away, cowboy. This is private.”
The stranger didn’t speak. Didn’t square up. Didn’t break stride.
Tariq released her, stepped back, sliding a hand into his ruined jacket. “I said, walk the fuck —”
It happened faster than thought.
Left hand a snake-strike over Tariq’s reaching wrist. Wrench. Twist. A sick pop. Tariq’s mouth opened in a soundless O around a freshly dislocated shoulder.
The stranger didn’t pause. His right fist drove into the hinge of Tariq’s jaw.
CRACK.
Like a boot through porcelain. Tariq’s eyes rolled white. His face went structurally unreliable. His knees quit.
Before the body hit the stones, the stranger had a fistful of bespoke lapel. He shifted Tariq three feet sideways with the indifference of a man moving a duffel, and let go.
Tariq tipped over the rim of the open grate.
A wet, hollow splash, two seconds late.
Quiet slammed back into the alley.
She dragged air through her teeth. Her hands shook against the brick. The adrenaline drain came on fast — muscles screaming, joints loose, skin gone clammy.
The stranger stood at the lip of the hole. Three seconds. Verifying. No celebration. No look at her for praise.
Then the Stetson tilted her way. A clean question. Alive. Intact.
She managed a nod. Her throat wouldn’t make words.
He didn’t need any. No name. No platitudes. No little speech to be thanked for. He tugged his jacket straight, turned his back, and walked.
Boot heels, fading.
She sagged. An inch down the wall before her knees caught her. Heat flooded her, the chemical opposite of Tariq’s grip — a slow molten rush behind her sternum. She pressed a palm to her throat and watched him go.
Lethal grace. Every muscle in time with every other muscle. The last bleed of orange sunlight outlined a frankly criminal silhouette under worn denim, shifting with each step.
Something stupid and alive jumped under her ribs.
Cataloguing him. Of course you are. Cataloguing the weapon that just kept you breathing.
Tariq Vance had been a monster. Billions of dollars of monster. Ghost-status, untouchable, the kind of man you only survived by never being noticed by him.
This one had erased him in under two seconds. Discarded him like brass at a range.
Who.
Not ordinary. A weapon. He carried death the way other men carried briefcases.
Invincible.
The word knocked against a fault line she’d kept grouted shut for thirty years.
Her core seized. The list — her careful, sterile little list — fractured down the spine. The harmless men. The corporate ghosts. The apologizers. They would not have walked into this alley. Or they would have, and bled out on these stones with her, crying for help that never came.
Only weapons survived. Only violence stopped violence.
The architecture of her entire adult life rearranged itself in the time it took her lungs to refill.
The dying light off his boots warped.
Stretched.
Bled into halogen.
No.
She squeezed her eyes shut and clawed her fingernails backward into the brick. Stay here. Stay in the alley. Stay in the damp and the copper.
The brick went.
The shriek of steel through steel ripped through her skull, loud enough to vibrate in her molars.
An ordinary Tuesday. Endless French countryside. Sun cutting through the green. Soft radio.
Her father. An accountant. Soft hands that checked math errors and packed school lunches. The rumble of his laugh, the most secure sound in the world. Harmless. Ordinary.
The caked grille of the gravel truck crossing the yellow line.
CRUNCH.
The windshield blew inward. Tempered glass and dashboard plastic in a hurricane through the cabin. Seven years old, strapped in the back, watching the roof of the station wagon crumple like foil. Gravity quit.
Something hot dripped onto the toe of her white sneaker.
The car settled crooked against the guardrail. The silence after was worse than the noise.
“Maman?”
The radio was still playing. Synthetic, cheerful pop. A grotesque little soundtrack.
Her father turned his head, slow. Wire frames gone. Half his face buried in the slack airbag, painted a brilliant red that didn’t look real against his skin. He reached a trembling hand back over the center console.
“Del… phine…”
He wasn’t a weapon. He didn’t scan exits when he walked into a room. He couldn’t grid a threat or break a jaw or wrestle a screaming tonnage of runaway steel out of its trajectory. He was a good man.
Good men broke easily.
A spark hissed from the steering column.
Black smoke uncurled from under the hood. Burning rubber, then something sweeter. Hungrier.
His bloody fingers slipped off the console. He didn’t brace. He didn’t fight, because the fight wasn’t in him. His arm dropped heavy between the seats. His last breath went out in a slow wet rattle that took up residence behind her sternum and never left.
The wire sparked again. A clean bright drop of electricity into the dark puddle pooling at his feet.
Heat bloomed. A wall of it. All the air gone at once.
She lunged at the shoulder strap. The buckle held. Warped casing, the red button locked in its housing.
The flames climbed the front tires, frantic orange in the cracked rearview.
“Daddy?” Her throat tore.
The fire found the fuel line.
The Crash and the Ghost
The asphalt baked to a shimmering mirage. Dust cooked into the rental Jeep’s black hood under a sun that refused to blink.
“Liquidate the Saint-Germain apartment.” Delphine’s grip on the wheel went bloodless. Ahead, scrub brush and bleached limestone stretched to nothing. “Wire the funds to the Caymans. I sent the routing numbers.”
The lawyer’s voice crackled through the Bluetooth. “Delphine. This is madness. The market is terrible. Tariq Vance left six messages with the firm this morning. He is demanding—”
“Hang up on him.”
“He owns half the shipping lanes in the Mediterranean. We cannot simply disregard—”
“Sell the furniture. Leave the clothes. If a single file with my name on it remains in Paris by midnight, I will sue you for breach of fiduciary duty.”
She tapped a nail against the leather. Short. Sharp. Metronomic.
“What about the cellars?” The lawyer’s voice dropped.
Three thousand bottles of premier cru, sleeping under Paris stone. A decade of palate and ledgers and proving to a roomful of men that she was not a centerpiece.
“Leave them to rot.”
She jabbed the console. The line died.
She popped the SIM tray, rolled down the window, flicked the chip into the slipstream. Gone. Tariq. The money. The Parisian wardrobe of a life. Wind ate it. Her chest hollowed out into something close to weightless.
A semi blasted past in the opposite lane. The wall of air slugged the Jeep sideways.
Her hands seized the wheel. Knuckles grinding. Hot engine oil bled through the vents, and for three seconds she was back on that rain-slicked highway — rubber stink, the crunch of metal folding into the embankment, somebody screaming and screaming. Her own boots stomped the floor mat, bracing for an impact twenty years late.
Find the apex. Drive the line.
Ordinary men died fast. Her father had been ordinary. An accountant. Followed the speed limit. Paid his taxes. A drunk driver pulped him on a Tuesday. The world did not protect the ordinary; it ground them into wet pavement. Tariq Vance had presented himself as calculable — a soft-handed billionaire whose menace lived strictly on spreadsheets. Wrong. When Tariq grasped he could not own her, the soft hands hired men with knives.
She needed the inverse of soft. She needed the shadow who had walked out of a Paris drizzle and dismantled four men in under ten seconds. The one who moved like opened steel.
The GPS chirped. A dirt road peeled off to the left, unmarked.
She cranked the wheel. Tires bit gravel, kicked up gray. A wrought-iron arch loomed: raw steel welded into a hard upward sneer. The Copperhead Retreat.
The gate was chained open. She rolled through, under a corridor of live oaks. The lodge crowned a low hill — cedar logs, smoked glass, wraparound porch. Modified trucks crouched against the outbuildings. No sedans. No minivans. No families.
She killed the engine and grabbed her duffel. Heat slammed her the second she opened the door, sucking the moisture out of her mouth.
She pushed through the heavy double doors.
Ice-cold air. Vaulted ceilings strapped with timber. Lemon polish, leather, the burnt ghost of espresso.
A man stood behind a sprawling mahogany desk, towelling a whiskey tumbler. Built like a meat locker. Unbuttoned floral shirt over a chest that didn’t apologize. Silver chain across a collarbone the width of a crowbar. Scars laddered up his forearms through military ink.
He didn’t look up. “Read the sign on the gate, sweetheart. You took a wild wrong turn at Austin.”
Delphine dropped the duffel. Her heels rang across the flagstone.
“I need a room.”
He set the glass down. Planted both calloused hands on the counter. Blue eyes did a full sweep — dark bob, severe blazer, total absence of denim.
“The Copperhead is private. Strictly for the fellas.” A bright, surgical smile. “Unless you’re packing serious hardware under those designer slacks, the policy is absolute. Holiday Inn’s about forty miles back.”
“I know exactly what kind of resort this is. I read the tax filings — holding company out of Bexar County.” She placed her hands flat on the wood. “You cater to high-net-worth men who want absolute discretion. Ex-military. Defense contractors. Oil. Men who do not want to be looked at.”
The smile slipped a quarter inch. “Then you know why a woman in my lobby is a liability.”
“I have two hundred thousand in cash in that bag, and I need a place predators can’t follow into.” She held him. “Your name is Beau Jenkins. Force Recon, Camp Pendleton. Private security in Dubai before this.”
He crossed his arms. The forearms knotted up tight. “Who are you running from?”
“A man who thinks he can buy anything.”
“Then he can buy his way onto my property.”
“No. He can’t.” She tipped her chin toward the open door behind reception, where cardboard boxes piled at angles. “Because your security budget is bleeding out into operational waste. You have a case of Château Cheval Blanc ’15 sitting directly under an unshielded heating vent. You’re boiling a ten-thousand-dollar asset. The supply manifest taped to your wall shows a forty percent markup over distributor. They are openly robbing you because they assume a dude ranch can’t tell premier cru from cleaning solvent.”
Beau’s head turned a fraction. He glared at his own boxes.
“Your loading dock is bottlenecked.” She stepped back, smoothed the blazer. “Your delivery routes double back across county lines and bleed secondary transport tax. I ran luxury logistics for the largest holding company in Europe. Give me a cabin on the edge of the property. By Friday you’ll have enough surplus to double your perimeter.”
Quiet. The commercial A/C hummed.
Beau’s arms uncrossed. A slow grin cut across his jaw. “You’re a shark, ain’t you.”
“I am an exhausted woman who needs a bed.”
“What makes you think the men here won’t be a problem?”
“Their preferences exclude me.” She tapped the desk. “I want absolute distance from the male gaze. I want to stop being prey.”
He studied her — the shadows under her eyes, the locked shoulders, the bottom lip she caught between her teeth before it could betray her. He recognized the crash. She watched him recognize it.
“Half the men here are damaged goods,” Beau said, and the abrasive edge slid out of his voice. “We don’t do drama. We don’t do outside-world problems.”
“I am a ghost.”
He reached under the counter. A heavy brass key skated across the polish and stopped at her fingertips.
“Cabin Nine. Back of the property, hard against the treeline. Don’t wander the main trails after dark. The boys come here to escape the world, not gawk at a stray Parisian.” He picked up his tumbler again. “Tomorrow morning, you audit my cellar. If you’re lying about distributor rates, your bags go over the gate.”
“Deal.”
The brass had weight to it. She liked that.
She hauled the duffel out the side door and followed the gravel along the perimeter. High fencing along the treeline, surveillance lenses tucked discreet in the eaves. Beau took his fortress seriously. Good. The thicker the walls, the harder to peel her out.
Cabin Nine sat alone, dark timber under a weeping oak.
She turned the deadbolt. Inside: one room. Queen bed under a quilt. Stone hearth. Spartan kitchenette.
She dropped the bag. Locked the door. Deadbolt. Chain.
Silence pressed in thick. No horns. No traffic. Just cicadas scraping in the brush.
She tugged the canvas curtains closed.
In the dimness, what she had done finally landed. She owned nothing. She owed no one. No society pages. No poached salmon across from billionaires brokering ordnance. A bold, blinding nothing.
And then the underside of nothing — the hollow weight crashing down through her joints.
She sank onto the bed. Springs complained.
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until white bursts bloomed. Her ribs cinched tight around an empty cavity.
Marseille rushed her, uninvited. Baking bread. Her mother’s lavender soap. Her father whistling something tuneless and content over the dishes. Ordinary. Beautiful.
Vaporized on an icy road in a single inhale.
Her hands dropped. Her breath came back wet and broken.
No. Grief made her slow. Grief made her stupid. Focus on the man in the alley. The cowboy.
He hadn’t blinked when he broke Tariq’s men. Hadn’t shouted. He had moved with a kind of silent, dreadful economy — heavy boots, a Stetson, hands that snapped joints like dry kindling. The way his eyes had cut the alley exits was the way a thing at the top of the food chain reads a savanna.
He was out there. Somewhere under the wide Texas dark. Find him. Stand behind a real monster, and the smaller spiders couldn’t reach her anymore.
She stood. Movement starved the ghosts.
Three pairs of denim. Plain cotton shirts. Boots. Practical underwear. She shoved the stack into the top drawer of the pine dresser.
Dusk bled through the gaps in the curtains. The heat eased into a creeping cool.
She ran the tap in the small bathroom and threw cold water on her face. The shock did its job.
A crunch of gravel outside.
She went still. Water dripped from her chin onto the porcelain.
Tires. Slow. Methodical.
The main access road was at the front of the property. Cabin Nine backed onto wild acreage. There was no road out here. Only a maintenance trail.
Headlights swept the wall. White stripes lanced through the gaps in the canvas and held steady on the front door.
An engine idled. Low V8 throb running up through the floorboards.
A vehicle door chunked open. Slammed shut with weight.
Footsteps on gravel. Heavy. Paced.
Not Beau’s swagger. Not a drunk guest losing the path. This was tactical.
The boots crunched closer. Wood groaned as weight took the bottom step.
She backed toward the hearth. Her fingers closed around the iron poker. Cold. Heavy. Honest.
A broad shadow swallowed the strip of yellow under the door.
Her lungs locked. Iron in her fist, knuckles burning.
A single knuckle tapped the oak. Once. Twice.
Quiet.
The shadow held.
Her eyes flicked to the latch. Deadbolt thrown. Chain set.
Paper whispered against wood.
A thick cream envelope slid through the gap and came to rest on the floorboards inside the cabin.
The boots pivoted slow. The porch step groaned again. Footsteps retreated into gravel.
The vehicle dropped into gear. Tires tore the dirt backward up the maintenance trail until the engine note thinned into nothing.
She waited a full minute. Her pulse slammed her ribs from the inside.
Poker still in her right hand, she crossed the room and knelt on one knee. No stamp. No address.
She flipped it over.
Wax seal. Burgundy. A crest pressed deep — two crossed scimitars over a shipping vessel.
Tariq’s house mark.
Her lungs quit. The room canted sideways.
She drove a nail under the wax and tore the flap.
A photograph slid out and landed face up.
Grainy. Telephoto. Her, at the rental counter in Houston Hobby. Digital timestamp burning red in the corner: 11:04 AM. Today.
Black marker slashed across the white margin in a hand that pressed too hard:
The world is very small, little bird. I’ll be seeing you shortly.
The brass handle on the front door clicked and torqued downward with a sharp, violent snap.
Gen Crosses the Atlantic
The brass handle snapped down with a sharp mechanical clack that cut through the humid evening.
Delphine planted her bare feet on the hardwood. The iron fireplace poker lay heavy across her right palm, cold and stupidly unbalanced — too much weight in the tip, but it would crack a skull. Her pulse hammered her ribs. She braced for the swing: lapel height, then jaw, then knee if the first two missed.
The oak door flew open and rebounded off the entryway wall with a crack loud enough to make her teeth click.
Two sweat-slicked men tumbled across the threshold. The one on the bottom wore denim head to toe — jeans, frayed vest, a ten-gallon Stetson jammed onto his skull. The one on top wore leather chaps, a rhinestone harness, and spurs that gouged bright streaks into the floorboards as they wrestled across the rug with their mouths sealed together.
Delphine kept the batter’s stance. The poker shook in her grip.
Boots stamped up the porch. Beau Jenkins marched through the open doorframe brandishing a laminated clipboard, and slapped the flat edge of it across the rhinestoned man’s bare flank.
“Wrong cabin, you glittering menaces. Out. Move.”
The man on top grunted, peeled his mouth free, blinked up at Beau, then registered her — the woman with the iron bar cocked over her shoulder. He hooked his partner’s belt loop, hoisted them both upright in one fluid heave, and dragged him backward onto the porch.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the one in the Stetson slurred. “Lost the map.”
Beau slammed the door and threw the deadbolt with a calloused thumb. The cabin filled with the wake the intruders had left behind — bourbon, sweat, and a heavy floral cologne that bit the back of her throat. He lowered the clipboard. His eyes raked over the iron still raised by her ear.
“Put the metal down, honey. Ain’t nobody here trying to buy whatever you’re selling.”
Air seeped back into her lungs in a thin trickle. She lowered the poker. Iron thunked onto the stone hearth. Her fingers peeled off the handle, cramped white.