Shelter

by Jay Crownover

  I swallowed the lump in my throat that felt like it was going to choke me. “No, honey. You don’t have to go back to your mom’s. Something bad happened to her and she died.” Daye’s eyes widened and her little mouth fell open. She blinked at me like she wasn’t quite seeing me so I asked, “Do you know what that means, Daye? When someone dies they go away and you don’t see them anymore, but you always have a piece of them inside of your heart. You get to keep all the memories you have of that person. It’s up to those of us left behind to make sure the person who’s gone is never forgotten.”

  She lowered her lashes and leaned heavily into my chest. “I’m not going to see Mommy again?”

  I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. “No, baby girl. You’re not.”

  We stared at each other for a long, silent moment. She watched me and I watched her until big, fat, silent tears started rolling down her cheeks. She didn’t make a sound, but she buried her face against the side of my neck and I felt her small body shaking violently. I cupped the back of her head and rocked her back and forth as the sound of the river covered my ineffective platitudes. My horse stamped his front hooves in agitation and let out a huff like he was just as worried about Daye as I was.

  We stayed like that for a long time. I let Daye cry it out, and I wasn’t surprised that when she pulled away, my face was once again damp. Losing Alexa was painful, but watching my daughter grieve for a mother who had never loved her the way she deserved killed me. I’d rather take another bullet to the chest than put my kid through this.

  I used the hem of my t-shirt to dry her face off and kissed her on the forehead. She was limp in my arms when I picked her up and took her back to the horse. She was quiet on the ride back to the ranch. It wasn’t until the barn was in sight and she noticed both Lane and Cy waiting for us that she whispered, “I’m sad, too, Daddy.”

  My heart turned itself inside out and I told her the only thing I could. “I know, baby girl. I know.”

  Somewhere No One Would Look

  Emrys

  I heard the floorboards outside my room creak and peeled my eyes open. I blinked into the darkness, rolling over and reaching for my phone so I could see what time it was. When the numbers glowed that it was almost three in the morning, I groaned and told myself to go back to sleep. Things had been tense at the ranch after Rodie’s visit. Leo was beating herself up for the way she’d treated Alexa the last time she saw her. Sutton had his hands full dealing with Daye’s unpredictable emotional state, and both Cy and Lane were trying to keep the rumor mill from chewing their brother up and spitting him out. By now, everyone knew Alexa had been murdered and that Rodie had stopped to question Sutton about the circumstances. Since there were no other obvious suspects and no signs of a struggle, the locals were having a ball speculating about the middle Warner brother.

  Sutton was putting on a good front, acting like he could care less about the gossip, but this afternoon one of the little girls in Daye’s ballet class had asked her where she was going to live when her daddy was taken away to jail. Daye pushed the other little girl and had a monster-sized breakdown that had only quieted down a little while ago. He might be unfazed by the lies and conjecture swirling around about him, but he hated it affecting his daughter. Cy had to restrain him when he’d started throwing things around the kitchen out of sheer frustration. Brynn lost a good set of plates, and I’d helped her clean up the mess after he’d flipped the table after Daye had cried herself into exhaustion. Luckily, Cy and Leo had worked to arrange a break in the tours for the week so Sutton’s outbursts had only been witnessed by family. No one knew how to help the obviously grieving father and daughter, and Leo mentioned on the sly that both his brothers were terrified the news of Alexa’s death would send him into a backslide. Everyone was watching both Sutton and Daye like they were moments away from shattering.

  Because I was just as concerned about the blond brother as everyone else, I convinced myself I should crawl out of bed and peek into the hallway. Cy and Leo were on the opposite end of the house, so I knew the noise wasn’t coming from either of them. Brynn moved like a ghost so I never heard her coming or going. Whenever Lane had company for the night, he always escorted them down the hall and back to wherever it was they had come from. He was a bit of a manwhore, but at least he was a gentleman toward all his conquests. There had only been one set of footsteps making the old floors squeak leading me to believe it was Sutton up and wandering around. Daye moved fast and light. Her small steps wouldn’t have been heavy enough to wake me, so I poked my head out the bedroom door and frowned when I caught sight of a broad back in a plaid shirt and disheveled blond hair disappearing down the stairs.

  I told myself to mind my own business, that he was a grown man and didn’t need a keeper. He’d already told me flat out he wasn’t interested in being fixed, so I should just let him be. But he didn’t go into the kitchen like I assumed he would. There was no buzz from the TV, either, because he bypassed the living room and went straight to the front door. I heard the wood moan as he pulled the door open, and before I could overthink it, I was searching for a pair of flip-flops and a sweater so I didn’t freeze to death, then I darted down the stairs to follow him out of the house.

  Everything in Wyoming seemed bigger than life. The dark sky. The stars that shone like diamonds. There were so many and they were all so bright. It was prettier than any piece of jewelry I’d ever seen. The silence was also huge. I could hear each breath I exhaled and each thump of my heart. I could also hear the shuffle of Sutton’s feet as he made his way across the property and headed the few hundred yards past the guest cabins and the massive garage toward the big barn that stretched out along the side of the property. It was that quiet out and every little sound seemed to carry for miles. There was no hiding anything out here.

  He spent a lot of time out in that barn with the horses. Since I’d been back at the ranch and had seen him in his element, it became clear that he would much rather spend his time with the animals than the paying guests. He was cordial, but that was it. He never went out of his way to be charming or engaging, even though the people showing up day in and day out had paid a small fortune to be here. He reluctantly met new arrivals and showed them around. He helped Lane set up rides and double-check supplies, and he worked with the novice riders, getting them familiar with the tack and the big animals. He always seemed to breathe a little bit easier when Lane took the tourists off the property for the day, and he never bothered with small talk when they showed up at the main house for their welcome dinners. I was right about him being reluctant to fill the role he had been born into, but not wrong about him being a cowboy anyway. He didn’t want to play tour guide, but it was his family’s business so he didn’t have a choice. The barn was his haven, his safe place, but that still didn’t explain why he was disappearing inside of it in the middle of the night.

  Thankfully, he left the door cracked enough that I cloud shimmy through without alerting him to my presence. A horse nickered and another one whinnied and kicked at the wooden door in its stall. There weren’t any lights on, but there was a soft glow coming from one of the rooms at the back of the barn. I heard him mutter something nonsensical to the agitated animals and heard a thud as something heavy hit the floor. He swore and I followed the sound of his voice, shivering as the nippy night air blasted through my yoga pants and thin tank top. The sweater wasn’t doing much to stave off the chill, but the goosebumps lining my arms had more to do with the fact that I knew I wasn’t going to like what I saw when I entered that room.

  The floor was concrete and covered with a cowhide rug. There were saddles on stands and bridles hanging on the wall. There was a long, wooden table shoved against one of the walls that had a bunch of other items on it that I didn’t recognize. Sutton had his back to me while he pawed through a set of leather saddle bags that had his initials stamped on the sides. He was pulling out item after item, discarding them on the table as his shoulders tensed
the deeper into the bag he dug. I stepped fully into the tack room waiting for him to notice me, or for him to sense he was no longer alone. He was so focused on his task, he didn’t so much as turn his head even as I moved closer to where he was standing.

  “Thank fuck.” His shoulders dropped and he tossed the leather in his hands away; the flash of silver caught my eye as he clutched a silver flask in his fist. His shoulders dropped and his head hung heavy as he swore again, his fingers turning white where he gripped the contraband like it was his lifeline.

  I rubbed my hands up and down my arms to chase the chill away and to keep my hands occupied so I didn’t reach for the flask. He needed to put it down and step away from it for the right reasons, not because someone forced him to.

  “That’s the one place your brothers didn’t think to look, huh?” I kept my tone light and my voice quiet, but he still jumped and whirled around like he’d been caught doing something wrong.

  There was a guilty flush on his face and he couldn’t meet my eyes. “What are you doing out here, Em? Are you following me?” His shirt was unbuttoned and he didn’t have anything on underneath it. His jeans were zipped but unbuttoned and he had those battered Chucks on his feet. He was a whole lot of eye candy with those washboard abs and that tousled blond hair. Even caught red-handed, chasing after his downfall, the man still managed to make my insides warm and my heart beat faster in appreciation.

  “What are you doing is the better question?” I pointed at the flask he was still holding in a death grip. “Do you really want to drink that? How is it going to help a goddamn thing?”

  He looked at the flask and then around the room that smelled like leather and oil. It was surprisingly clean for a room full of riding equipment. He blinked like he had forgotten where he was for a second and then finally met my probing gaze. The green in his eyes was bright with an anguish I could see all the way across the distance that separated us. “I don’t need a watchdog.” He was being belligerent because he wanted me to walk away.

  Too bad for him. I didn’t do that anymore . . . at least where he was concerned.

  “No? How about a friend? Can you use one of those?” I took a step forward and reached out a hand hoping he would hand over the flask without a fight. “A friend will last longer than whatever you have in there and will make you feel much better than slugging that back. A friend won’t leave you with a hangover and nothing but regret in the morning.”

  His eyebrows lifted and the corner of his mouth raised in a sardonic grin. “You want to be my friend, Em? Coulda swore when I had my mouth between your legs and my dick in your mouth you wanted to be something more than that.”

  He was trying to push me away, just like he had before. He wanted to hurt me so I wouldn’t care about him hurting himself, but that wasn’t going to happen. I cared. I cared so much it was all I could feel. His pointed words didn’t even make me flinch; they didn’t make me run. I didn’t look away or cower under the heat of his growing aggravation. His words didn’t bother me at all, because as long as he was lashing out, he wasn’t opening that flask.

  “I can be whatever you need me to be, Sutton.” I cocked my head to the side and waited to see what he was going to do. He was too big for me to tackle and wrestle the flask away from, and he mattered too much for me to let him make this mistake on his own.

  Both his eyebrows shot up and he turned so that he was leaning on the sturdy table. His eyes kept shifting between me and the flask, uncertainty making him look older and more defenseless than he was. “You gonna be my distraction, Emrys? You gonna offer up that pretty mouth of yours? You gonna let me use that perfect fucking body of yours until I’m numb and can’t think about anything other than how wet you get and how good you taste?” He put the cool metal of the flask in my hand and caught me around the wrist, pulling me closer to where he was leaning. “Do you think you’re good enough to shut out the sound of my daughter crying herself to sleep at night because the entire town thinks her father is a coldblooded murderer? Can you get me hot enough to forget the fact that I have to sit in a church full of people who think I have it in me to murder my ex, even though they’ve known me my entire life? You gonna suck me so hard that I stop replaying every single time I gave up on Alexa over the years?” He was talking about Alexa’s funeral, which was this weekend. “Do you think your pussy is tight enough to block out the fact I’m hurting my family’s fucking livelihood?” Cy had mentioned again that they needed to talk about hiring outside help, and it was no secret that canceling the tours this week had been a bit of a financial hit. The ranch still made money off cattle and horse breeding and boarding, but the real money was in the tourism. As much as Sutton disliked it, it wasn’t going away; it couldn’t.

  I stared at him for a long moment before twisting the cap off the flask and sniffing at the contents. It smelled like whiskey and burned like gasoline when I took a swig. The tiny sip was for a little bit of courage and because I was feeling a whole lot of temptation. I was standing in front of him, waiting to see what he would do. His old and new distractions all wrapped in one. Maybe it would make me taste good enough that he could forget for just a minute. The taste made me wrinkle my nose in disgust. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and turned the flask over to dump the remaining liquid onto the concrete floor. Sutton watched the motion unblinkingly, but his jaw clenched and a muscle jumped in his cheek.

  I closed the remaining distance between the two of us, pulling my sweater down my arms as I went. I tossed it on top of his saddlebags and put my hands on the hem of my tank top. I pulled the thin cotton over my head and dropped it on the growing pile. My nipples immediately pulled into tight points and I shivered from both the chill and the look in his eyes. I liked the green, but I liked the dark shadows of desire that turned those emerald eyes almost black even better. I had my fingers in the waistband of my stretchy black pants when he reached out and caught my wrist.

  “Em.” He shook his head and let out a deep sigh. He closed his eyes and dropped his forehead down until it pressed against mine. I shouldn’t be surprised at how easy it was for him to turn all that anger and disgust inward, but I was. The man gave me emotional whiplash. “I can’t.” He sounded like he was in pain. “I won’t. I would have hated myself in the morning for a little while if I finished off that flask. If I use you to make myself feel better,” he groaned and his hands slid up my arms until he was cupping either side of my neck, his fingers under the fall of my hair. “I will hate myself forever. You deserve better than that.” You deserve better than me was left unsaid, but I could see he was thinking it.

  I pushed the black material off my hips and let it fall to my feet. I heard his breath catch and felt his hands tighten on my neck when he noticed I wasn’t wearing anything underneath. I put my hands on his pecs, appreciating the flex of muscle and the solid feel of him under my palms. I brushed my lips along the curved edge of his jaw, his facial hair surprisingly soft against the kiss. I pushed the fabric of his shirt off his shoulders and made a sound of appreciation at the sight of his taut upper half.

  “Then don’t use me to feel better. How about you let me distract you because it’s something I want to do? I want to give you what you need.” I pressed closer to him, the tips of my breasts dragging across the hard plane of his chest. One of his hands slid down the back of my neck and traveled the entire length of my spine. He stopped at the curve of my ass, palming the roundness of one side and hoisting me up on my tiptoes so that there was no missing the hardness that was pressing against the fly of his unbuttoned jeans. The head of his cock had escaped from where his pants were unbuttoned and I could feel the velvet soft underside of it brush against my stomach. The contact made me shiver and he swore under his breath. I rocked my hips into his and smoothed my palms across the wide expanse of his shoulders. “Let me help, Sutton.”

  I kissed the corner of his mouth and brushed my lips over his parted ones. He groaned from somewhere deep in his chest and I wasn�
�t sure if it was from the taste of whiskey that lingered on my lips or the fact that I slid a hand across the ripped plane of his abs and caressed his growing erection through the stiff fabric of his jeans.

  “What do you get out of any of this, Em? What’s in it for you?” He used his hold on my ass to pull me tighter against him, grinding his cock into my hand and rubbing the length between us in search of some kind of relief.

  I put my hands on either side of his face, fingers tickling at the bristle of his facial hair. I looked him dead in the eye and told him the truth, the real truth, not the one I tried to convince myself of or forced myself to believe.

  “I get you.”

  The Best Place I’ve Ever Been

  Sutton

  She said she got me. I couldn’t figure out why she wanted me, but I wasn’t about to question my good fortune.

  The last couple of days had been almost as hard as waking up in the hospital. I could still feel the way the way the memories of what happened to her cutting me in half. The way everyone in town didn’t bother to hide their suspicion or the fact they really thought I was capable of murder hurt in ways I wasn’t prepared for. As always, Cy was the golden boy, the prodigal son. Lane was the jokester, the one everyone loved and wanted to hang out with. Then, there was me . . . the guy they actually believed had it in him to harm his child’s mother. It was more proof that I was out of step in my own life, that I didn’t fit in in the place where I had always been. My brothers were enraged on my behalf; Cy had threatened to pull contracts with several local vendors over the gossip and gleeful chatter. I told him not to worry about it, as long as we could keep Daye away from the worst of it, I didn’t care what they were saying about me. But then my daughter had reached her breaking point and lashed out. I felt like I was losing control of everything again and all I wanted was a quiet minute to think. Since I couldn’t silence the constant refrain of ruin in my head, I figured the only option was a stiff drink.