Chapter 158 Smoothing Things Over

Chapter 158 Smoothing Things Over
The dust rose in lazy spirals behind the Audi as Sierra turned onto the long gravel drive that led to Marsh Ranch. She'd been staring at that road from her bedroom window for three days now, willing Ryder's truck to appear, listening for the crunch of tires on gravel that never came.

He'd returned the ranch truck on Tuesday. Cody said he'd pulled up, left the keys on the dash, and driven off in his own pickup without a word. No knock on the door. No message. Nothing.

Sierra had replayed every moment since Pittsburgh a hundred times. The gunfire. Collins and Vargas bursting through that door. And Ryder, God, Ryder, materializing out of the darkness like something ancient and terrible, his hands finding Viktor Sobol, his fists rising and falling with a rhythm that had nothing to do with self-defense and everything to do with annihilation. The sound of it. The wet, heavy sound of knuckles meeting flesh long past the point of necessity. His eyes, not the warm hazel she loved but something black and feral, something she'd never seen in him before. Collins and Vargas had to drag him off, and even then his body had trembled with unspent violence.

She understood silence. She'd built a career on spacing the right amount of silence between words. But Ryder's silence was different. It wasn't strategic. It was shame.

And she couldn't let shame be the thing that undid them.

The Marsh Ranch spread out before her, its fences painted white and straight, its pastures impossibly green against the brown hills. The main house sat back from the road, a handsome stone-and-timber structure that made Sage Ranch look like a line shack. But Sierra drove past it, following the dirt track toward the equipment shed where she could see the back end of a John Deere poking out into the sunlight, its rear wheels jacked up.

She parked and stepped out, the Arizona heat pressing against her skin like a warm hand. A pair of worn boots extended from beneath the tractor, crossed at the ankles. A wrench clanged against something metallic, followed by a muffled curse.

"You planning to stay under there all week?" Sierra called, leaning against the doorframe.

The clanging stopped. The boots shifted, and Ryder slid out on a creeper, squinting up at her. Grease streaked his forearms and smudged his jaw. His knuckles were still swollen, the cuts scabbed over in dark ridges.

"Hey," he said, like she'd caught him stealing something.

"Hey yourself." She crossed her arms. "Hydraulic line?"

"Lift cylinder seal." He sat up, wiping his hands on a rag that was already too dirty to be of any use. "Blew out last week. Been meaning to get to it."

"Mmm." Sierra looked around the shed, at the neatly hung tools and the swept concrete floor. Everything in its place. Everything under control. That was Ryder's world, order, precision, discipline. Which was exactly why Pittsburgh had rattled them both so badly.

"You need something?" he asked, starting to rise.

"I need you to sit down and listen to me."

He got up from the creeper, the rag going still in his hands. His eyes found hers and held, wary. He moved over to an overturned five-gallon bucket a few feet from him and flipped another one over, offering it to her. She sat, planted her Ariats on the concrete and laced her fingers together in her lap.

"I've been trying to figure out the right way to say this for three days," she began. "Turns out there isn't one. So I'm just going to say it."

Ryder waited.

"What I saw in Pittsburgh scared me." The words came out steady, but her chest ached with the effort of keeping them that way. "Watching you with Sobol, the rage in your eyes, the blood on your hands, the way your knuckles were split open and you didn't even feel it. The way Collins and Vargas had to physically pull you off of him." She swallowed. "I didn't know that was in you, Ryder. I have never seen anything like that in my life, and it terrified me."

His jaw tightened. He looked down at his damaged hands, turning them over as if seeing them for the first time.

"But being scared doesn't mean I stopped loving you," Sierra continued, her voice softening. "It doesn't mean I don't want to spend the rest of my life with you. It means I needed a minute to breathe, and I needed to come here and talk about this face to face instead of pretending it didn't happen."

She paused, steadying herself.

"I still love you and I still want to marry you. That hasn't changed."

The shed was quiet except for the ticking of cooling metal and a meadowlark somewhere outside. Ryder stared at the rag in his hands for a long time before he spoke.

"I don't know where it came from." His voice was low, rough at the edges. "That thing with Sobol. I keep going over it in my head, and I can't explain it. Maybe being locked up in that room for days, not knowing if you were alive or dead. Then hearing him threatening you and Sylvia. Knowing that he'd used me as bait to get at you. I guess it broke something loose in me. Something I didn't know was there." He dragged a hand down his face, leaving a fresh streak of grease. "I would have killed him, Sierra. If Collins hadn't pulled me off, I would have beaten that man to death with my bare hands."

"I know."

"And the worst part…" He stopped. His throat worked. "I've done something worse, and I'm living with the guilt of it." He met her eyes, and she saw something raw and exposed there, something that had been eating at him longer than Pittsburgh. "After Warren shot you, I tracked him down. I roped him and I…"

"I know," Sierra said quietly, interrupting him.

Ryder blinked.

"I was coming to after surgery when you and Cody were talking about it. I heard everything." She held his gaze. "I spoke with the Scotsman about it. He told me there's no body. He said his people took care of it."

Ryder stared at her, the color draining slightly beneath his tan. "Took care of it how?"

"I don't know. And you don't want to know."

He sat with that for a long moment, his eyes distant, processing. She could see the questions forming, the cowboy's need to understand exactly what had happened to the thing he'd left behind. But she could also see the moment he let it go, his shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch.

"The Scotsman," Ryder said slowly. "I still don't know what to make of that man."

"Neither do I. But he's stepped in and kept me alive more than once. I've decided that's enough for now."

Ryder nodded, turning the rag over in his hands one last time before setting it aside.

Sierra leaned forward on the bucket. "No more secrets," she said firmly. "Not between you and me. Not about anything. Whatever's in you, whatever's in me…we lay it out. All of it. Deal?"

The shed fell silent again. A horse nickered somewhere beyond the open doors, and the afternoon light shifted, catching the dust motes between them like tiny suspended stars.

Then Ryder cracked his grin. Not a half-smile, not a polite upturn of the lips, but the full, slow, lopsided grin that creased the corners of his eyes and sent a thrill racing through Sierra's body, even back when she hated him.

"Reckon husband and wife ought to keep everything out in the open," he said, his voice warm and easy for the first time in days. "That is… if you're still up for gettin' hitched."

"Ryder Marsh." Sierra slid off the bucket and closed the distance between them, settling onto his lap on the creeper, her hands framing his grease-smudged face. "I flew across an ocean, survived a plane crash, got shot twice, and let myself get kidnapped by Russian gangsters. You really think a few secrets are going to scare me off marrying you?"

His hands found her waist, pulling her closer, and his mouth found hers. The buckets toppled over and they fell to the floor without stopping. The kiss was slow and deep and tasted like dust and motor oil. She felt his heartbeat against her chest, steady and strong, and the tension that had knotted her stomach for three days finally, mercifully, unwound.

When she drew back, breathless, her forehead resting against his, Sierra smiled down at him.

"Besides, I've already got Sylvia working on the reception."