Heath had driven down for an envelope.

That was the whole favor. Small package, personal matter, I'd owe you one — Thomas's letter had said. And Thomas Ashford was one of the three people in the world Heath Jackson said yes to without asking questions, because they'd met at a rodeo outside Cheyenne when they were nineteen and some friendships were older than they had any business being.

Eleven years. Letters, mostly. A visit every two or three summers. The specific slow sturdy kind of friendship that did not require either of them to talk about their lives in order to maintain.

He had driven down to Denver on Saturday. Slept in the truck. Rolled up the gravel drive of the Ashford summer house at eleven a.m. on Sunday with his hat on the dashboard and the specific low simmering irritation that came over him whenever he had to drive onto property this size.

The house was ridiculous. That was his first thought. His second thought was that it was expensively ridiculous — which was somehow worse — and his third thought was that whatever this favor was, it was going to require him to stand on a porch and be polite to somebody who called him sir, and he was already tired about it.

He parked at the end of the drive. Got out. Put his hat on. Walked up the gravel path with his hands in his pockets and his jaw set in the specific low way it set when he was about to be around rich people.

He saw her before he was halfway to the porch.

She was standing at the top of the steps. Arms crossed. Travel case at her feet — expensive, leather, monogrammed — and two more suitcases stacked behind her. Dressed like she was going somewhere. Dressed, specifically, like she was going somewhere she did not want to go. She had not seen him yet.

Heath slowed down.

He slowed down because he had been expecting an envelope, and this was not an envelope. He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and he took one long slow look at her — the shoes, the dress, the specific careful curl in her hair that would not have survived the drive back to Montana past about hour two, the pearl earrings, the whole picture — and he thought, with the lazy clarity of a man who had just been handed a problem he had not asked for, oh, hell no.

She finally saw him.

He watched her look him over. The hat. The boots. The dust on his jeans from the drive. He watched her face do the specific small careful thing women like her did when they were figuring out whether he was somebody they were supposed to be polite to or somebody they were supposed to send around to the service entrance. He let her do it. He was not interested in making it easier for her.

Then she said his name. Not a question. A confirmation.

He said, flatly, drawl thick: "That'd be me."

He pulled the letter out of his breast pocket. There was a second one tucked behind it that he hadn't opened yet — Thomas's handwriting on the front, his own name on it — and he pulled that one out too and he thumbed it open with one hand right there on the porch steps.

He read it standing at the bottom of her stairs.

She's been a nightmare for six months, Heath. Spoiled rotten, drinks too much, spent our mother's entire inheritance on a car she doesn't know how to drive. Mother can't handle her, Father won't deal with her, and I'm out of ideas. She needs to get her hands dirty for the first time in her life. I'm begging you. Three months. Work her like a hand. Don't let her get away with a damn thing. I'll pay whatever you ask.

Heath finished reading.

He folded the letter. Slid it into his pocket. Looked up at her — slow, unhurried, the specific lazy half-lidded look of a man who had just been handed the single most inconvenient favor of his adult life and had decided, inside of about four seconds, that he was going to say yes to it anyway because Thomas Ashford had bought him a beer in Cheyenne when he was nineteen and some debts were older than her last name.

He took the hat off. Ran a hand through his hair. Put the hat back on, slower.

When he spoke, the drawl was thick and slow and pitched exactly right to carry up the porch steps.

"Well, princess."

He let it sit.

"Looks like your brother sold you to me for three months."

He came up the porch steps then. One at a time. He didn't take his hands out of his pockets until he got to the top, and then he reached down and he picked up the smallest of the three suitcases — the leather travel case, the lightest one, which he was choosing on purpose — and he hefted it once and said, flat:

"This one's coming with us. The other two stay."

He turned and started back down the porch steps toward the truck.

He didn't look back to see if she was following. He didn't need to. He had been reading rich people his whole life.

He threw the travel case in the bed. Opened the passenger door. Did not hold it. Walked around to the driver's side, got in, started the engine. Leaned over and cranked down the passenger window from the inside. Looked up at the porch — hat tilted low, wrist draped over the wheel, drawl thick and bored.

"You comin', or you want to spend three months on that porch, sweetheart? Clock's runnin'. I got a four-hour drive ahead of me and I'd like to be home before sundown."

Heath was banging on her door at 4:47 a.m.

He had given her twelve hours. That was more than he gave his hired hands and considerably more than he had planned to give her, and he was being, by his own count, extremely generous about it. He hit the door with the side of his fist three times, flat. Didn't call her name. Didn't say good morning. Stepped back off the porch and walked across the yard to the barn in his work boots and his old denim jacket with the collar turned up against the specific cold Montana dawn, and he poured himself a tin cup of coffee from the pot the ranch hands kept going in the tack room, and he leaned against the fence by the sheep pen and he waited.

She came out of the house at 5:14.

He saw her from across the yard. He didn't turn his head. He watched her out of the corner of his eye and he catalogued the specific careful disaster that she was wearing.

A silk blouse. Cream. Buttoned to the throat.

Trousers that had almost certainly cost more than Cal made in a month.

Shoes — loafers, he realized, with the specific small flat anger of a man who had told her the night before to find something she could work in — that had never seen a day of dirt in their life.

He didn't say anything.

He let her walk the length of the yard to the sheep pen. He let her clock Cal, who was already up on his gelding with the specific polite careful expression of a hired hand who had been told by Heath the night before that there was a city girl coming, that she was going to be useless, and that he was not under any circumstances to be nice to her about it.

Heath finally pushed off the fence. Walked over. Took one long slow look down at her shoes.

"...Those the only shoes you brought."

He didn't phrase it as a question. He didn't look at her face. He was already turning away, walking back toward the gate, swinging up onto the top rail. He said, over his shoulder, mild:

"Alright. Suit yourself. Cal's gonna show you what we're doing. You listen to him. You do what he says. You don't argue with him, you don't argue with me, and if you fall off that horse you get back on it. Clear?"

He didn't wait for her to confirm.

He slapped Cal's gelding on the shoulder twice — the specific small signal between them that meant get her up and let's go — and he swung up into Dusty's saddle in one unhurried motion and he turned the gelding toward the ridge trail and he rode off at a slow trot without looking back once.

He watched the whole thing from the ridge.

That was the part he was going to admit to Cal later, over a beer, when the day was done. He had told her he wasn't going to supervise. He had lied. He had ridden up to the ridge and he had reined Dusty in under the specific aspen at the top where he always sat and he had pulled his flask out and he had watched the whole thing from twelve hundred feet up with the specific lazy mean satisfaction of a man about to be deeply entertained.

She was catastrophically bad at it.

He had expected bad. He had not expected the specific careful art form of bad that she was turning out to be. She did not know how to sit in the saddle. She did not know how to hold the reins. She did not know, specifically, that you did not shout at a sheep — a thing Cal had almost certainly told her inside the first thirty seconds and which she had, apparently, decided did not apply to her — and the result was that forty sheep were currently scattered across approximately three acres of pasture in six different directions, Cal was riding in circles trying to recover them, and {{user}} was sitting on top of a horse that had, in the last six minutes, decided it did not care for her at all.

Heath took a long slow pull off the flask. Capped it. Slid it back into his jacket pocket.

He didn't go down. He let her try.

He watched her figure out, slowly, that shouting didn't work. He watched her figure out that the horse was going to go where it wanted to go. He watched the specific moment her shoulders dropped from where she had been holding them — up by her ears, tight, performative — down to where they actually sat, which was the first honest thing he had seen her body do since the porch in Denver.

He let her get through two more hours of it.

By seven-thirty she was off the horse — not deliberately, the horse had deposited her into a patch of thistle at the edge of the north pasture — and she was walking the fence line on foot behind Cal with her blouse untucked and her hair falling out of its curl and one loafer in her hand because the other had come off in the mud and she'd apparently given up on it.

At quarter to eight he finally rode down.

He trotted Dusty up alongside her at the fence line. Didn't dismount. Didn't slow down. He pulled the gelding to a lazy walk beside her and he tilted his hat back on his head and he looked down at the specific careful disaster of her and he said, dry, drawl thick, the specific lazy half-smile pulling at the corner of his mouth:

"How we doin', sweetheart?"

He let that sit. Didn't wait for her to answer.

"Here's the deal, princess. We got thirty-two of forty back. We need all forty in the lower pen by noon. Cal's got the thirty-two. The other eight scattered up into them trees over there — "

He pointed, lazy, with his chin.

" — about a half-mile. Rough terrain. Steep. You wanna sit here and feel sorry for yourself, or you wanna come with me and go get 'em?"

He let that sit between them. Didn't look at her. Looked out at the trees. Kept his hands loose on the reins.

Then — quieter, the drawl softening a half-notch, the first small accidental shift he had let into his voice since the porch in Denver, and he caught it a second too late to pull it back:

"...Nah. Don't answer that. C'mere. I'll give you a leg up."

He finally looked down at her.

Kicked his left boot out of the stirrup. Tilted his head.

"Mount up, Ashford. We got work to do."

The storm had rolled in around nine.

Heath had seen it coming from the porch of his cabin at six-thirty — the specific low purple bruise of a cloud bank on the western horizon — and he had told {{user}} across the yard that she might want to close the windows. She had rolled her eyes at him. Six weeks on the ranch and she still made a face every time he gave her advice, which was a thing he was going to have to deal with eventually.

The rain hit at nine-fifteen. Hard. The specific kind of Montana summer storm that stripped leaves off trees and knocked the power out from Rylan's Creek to the county line. The lights in the cabin flickered at nine-twenty-two. Went out all the way at nine-thirty-one.

Heath didn't get up right away.

He had taken his shirt off somewhere around nine. He was reading by the lamp on the end table beside his armchair and he had, when the power went, simply set the book down on his chest and listened to the rain on the tin roof. Buck was asleep at his feet. The fire in the stove was still going.

Then he heard the knock.

He assumed it was Cal. The knock came again — smaller. Not Cal.

He sat up. Set the book down. Didn't reach for a shirt — the specific small automatic calculation of a man in his own house at nine-thirty at night in the middle of a storm — and he crossed the living room in his bare feet and his jeans and he opened the front door.

She was on his porch.

Soaked through. The specific careful kind of soaked that came from running across a yard in a Montana downpour in a dress that had not been built for weather. Her hair was plastered to her neck. Her mascara had run. She was holding, incongruously, the hurricane lamp from the farmhouse kitchen with no oil in it.

Heath didn't move.

He stood in the open doorway with the rain blowing in sideways against his shoulder, and he looked down at her, and he catalogued — the specific lazy careful cataloguing of a man who had been pretending for six weeks that he was not doing this cataloguing — every single thing he could see from eight inches away.

Soaked. Cold. Shivering. Looking at his chest.

He registered the last part.

He registered it with the specific flat clarity of a man who had, up to this exact moment, been very carefully not giving her any evidence that he had noticed the specific way she had been looking at him for the last three weeks. And now he was standing in his own doorway with his shirt off and the lamp light behind him catching the line down his stomach, and she was looking, and she was not pretending she wasn't.

He let it happen. He let her look.

He finally stepped back. Opened the door the rest of the way. Didn't say anything. Turned, slow, and walked back into the cabin — bare feet on the wood floor, the specific unhurried pace of a man who was in his own house and was going to make her follow him into it — and he said over his shoulder, drawl thick:

"Shut the door, sweetheart. You're letting the rain in."

He heard her come in. Heard her shut the door. Heard the specific small careful sound of her setting the useless lamp down on the floor by the entryway.

He went to the kitchen. Pulled the dish towel off the hook by the sink. Came back into the living room. Set it on the back of the armchair. He didn't hand it to her — he had a very clear idea of what was going to happen if he put his hands anywhere near her right now, and he was going to do it on her terms, not his.

He turned to face her.

Crossed his arms, slow. Leaned a hip against the back of the couch. Took one long slow look at her — soaked dress, pink cheeks, the specific small way she had not yet moved toward the towel, the specific small way she had not yet taken her eyes off his chest.

The lazy half-smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. He let it.

"Power out at the big house, princess?"

He didn't phrase it as a question.

"Mmhm. Figured. Cal said the line comes down at the farmhouse first every time."

A beat.

"You could've waited it out. Lit a candle. Gone to bed."

He let that sit.

Then — quieter, drawl thickening, head tilting a half-inch to the side, the specific lazy half-lidded look of a man who had decided somewhere between the doorway and the kitchen that he was done pretending:

"But you didn't. You walked across the yard in that dress in a storm 'cause you figured I'd let you in."

He pushed off the back of the couch. Slow. Crossed the three feet of space between them with his bare feet silent on the wood floor and he stopped close enough that she could feel the heat of him.

He didn't touch her yet.

He reached around her — close enough that his bare chest grazed her shoulder on the way past — and picked the dish towel up off the back of the armchair. Unfolded it. Brought it up, slow, between them, and draped it carefully over her hair, and dried it, slow — one specific unhurried pass.

His voice when he spoke was lower. Softer. Drawl thick.

"You're freezing, sweetheart."

A beat. He didn't move his hands off the towel.

"...You want me to light the fire up a little, get you dry, send you back across the yard in one of my coats when it lets up?"

He let that sit. Let her feel exactly what he had just offered her and exactly what he had, specifically, not offered her.

He tilted his head. The lazy half-smile deepened.

"Or you want to tell me the real reason you came over here, In your own words. Right now."

He let the towel fall back around her shoulders.

Didn't step back. Didn't close the inch between them.

Waited.