Page 77 of Filthy Twisted Devil

“Yes.” It comes out so fast, it’s almost embarrassing. Of course I have a minute for her. I have all night. I have the whole fucking week if she needs it. My meetings can wait.

“Good.” She tilts her head toward the back barn door. “I want to show you the field behind the barn. I thought we might mow it and put a tent out here for dancing.”

“Maybe I should walk Rose back to the house first?” I glance over at Eden’s mom, my eyes landing on her tricky left wheel.

Rose scoffs. “Go! I can travel twenty yards by myself, thank you very much.”

As if to prove it, she throws her weight into the turn and wheels quickly out the front entrance.

“I’m going to sneak over and make sure she makes it to the house,” Eden says, following her mom’s path. She peers through a window for a few minutes before nodding. “Okay. We can go.”

It’s late in the evening when we stroll out the back. The sky is a long stretch of pale yellow, fading at the edge into a periwinkle blue. It’ll be almost an hour before the sun fully sinks beyond the horizon, but the field in front of me is still coated in a golden sunset haze.

“Wow,” I murmur.

“Yeah,” Eden says. “It gets a little less majestic once you think about hay fever, but⁠—”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Exactly.”

I graze a tall piece of grass with my fingers. “You have to cut it all to make room for the tent? Shame. It’s pretty.”

“We don’t have to cut all of it. There will still be the view.” She points to the rolling hills in the distance. Outside the industrial barn, the horses are small black dots, enjoying the end of their free time in the pasture.

“I can see why Brinley wanted to get married here,” I say.

Eden nods, and for a moment, we stare silently out at the golden hills, taking it all in.

“Dinner’s soon,” she says finally. “Are you hungry?”

“Not really. Are you?”

“No. Do you want to watch the sun go down? We can go in if it gets too cold.”

“Yeah. That sounds nice.”

She opens her tote bag and pulls out a blanket, which she lays across the tall grass. It’s not large—my feet will definitely hang off over the edge if we lie down, but it flattens down the plants enough for us to sit down comfortably.

As I settle onto the blanket, the grass rises around Eden and I like a small, protective fence. The air smells crisp and fresh. Overhead, the dark blue evening sky has started pushing harder against the daylight.

“Do you see that?” Eden points to a small, bright star overhead. “That’s Leo.”

“Wow. I’ve never been able to see stars this early at night.”

“There’s light pollution where you come from. Out here, it’s just us for miles.”

I know she’s talking about the ranch, but it feels true for me and Eden here. It’s like we’re all alone, with just us and the prairie. I lean back on my hands and look up at the sky. A few more stars have blinked into sight.

“It must have been nice, growing up seeing all these stars.”

“It’s all I knew. When I visited Brinley as a kid, that’s probably the first time I saw anything different.”

In the distance, a cricket chirps. A few more join in. Eventually, I lie down on the blanket, and a moment later, Eden lies down next to me. We watch as the sun sinks and the crescent moon glows brighter. Without worrying what she’ll think, I thread my fingers through hers, and she lets me, even though there’s no one to perform for out here. No brothers, no friends, no executives.

“I can see why you wanted to come back here,” I murmur.

“No,” Eden corrects me quietly. “I don’t want to come back.”