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The mare closest to me flicked an ear like she agreed.
The scent threaded into me, reawakening that hunger, enough to make me wish that the man downstairs wasn’t already ash. Not because he deserved another breath…but because something in me still needed the release.
Unfortunately he was gone now…and fucking useless.
I exhaled once slowly, trying to get ahold of myself. I tried to space out my kills. Even when they didn’t involve people from within Blackwood. Like the man I’d just disposed of, Donald Hinkler, according to his driver’s license.
“Should’ve kept you around a little longer,” I said, annoyed, and headed toward the porch.
Jett’s truck was already parked out front.
He’d pulled in crooked, one tire nudged right up against the house. The hood was dusty as hell. One of my good horse blankets was crumpled across the back like it lived there.
The man was basically a stray cat with expensive sunglasses.
Speaking of—
There he was, sprawled on my porch swing, as if the thing had sprouted him overnight. One long leg kicked out, the other bent, heel hooked over the chain. Jett wore sunglasses even though the sun wasn’t up yet, with a Tupperware container balanced on his knee and cornbread halfway to his mouth.
“Morning, princess,” he said. “You look like you’ve been up all night thinking about a girl.”
“Get off my swing,” I said.
“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “It’s warmed to my ass. We’re bonded now.”
I shook my head and climbed the front steps—just as Ryder’s cruiser bounced up the drive, gravel spitting behind it. The light bar was dark, but the engine was complaining like it had been begging for mercy for years.
Ryder parked even more crooked than Jett, which was a feat, then got out in one long line of irritation. His sheriff uniform was unbuttoned at the throat, his badge was slightly off-center, and his gun was riding low on his hip. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
He stalked past Jett with a scowl. “If you’re eating Hayes’s food again, at least don’t touch the peach preserves. I was saving those.”
“You left them unattended in a house I have keys to,” Jett said, walking freely through the front door as if to prove his point. Leaving it open for us like he actually owned the place and was granting us privilege to enter. “That’s on you, lawman.”
“You have keys to my house?” I asked.
Jett grinned. “You really don’t keep track of who you give those to, do you? Kind of dangerous with our extracurriculars, don’t you think?”
Ryder brushed my shoulder as he went inside. “If that last jar’s empty, I’m arresting someone.”
“For theft of canned goods?” Jett asked. “Is that a felony?”
“Depends how mad I am,” Ryder said. “And they aren’t just canned goods. It’s Marvis’s preserves, and you know that.”
I hated agreeing with Ryder on anything. But my shoulders dropped anyway, like the truth was too heavy to fight.
“Yeah,” I muttered, following them in. “They’re worth killing over.”
And I wasn’t fully joking. Marvis had been my nanny when I was a small, feral menace tearing holes in the drywall and giving my parents migraines. When I moved back to the ranch after New York, I brought her with me and hired her as my cook, mostly because she threatened to haunt me if I didn’t, but also because I’d never tasted food better than hers.
Now she ran my house, cussing me out in a voice honed by a bountiful amount of bourbon and reminding anyone who wandered into her domain who actually ran the Hayes Ranch.
If Marvis knew anything about the extracurriculars I handled in the basement, she didn’t comment—just slid an extra helping onto my plate and muttered that I looked “peaked.”
Half the town feared me. The other half feared Babs. I feared Marvis.
It was how my world worked.
Inside, the kitchen was half dim, half washed in dawn light bleeding through the window over the sink. Dust motes spun in a slow dance through the beam cutting across the table. Marvis had today off, but she’d left me leftovers to survive on.
