“I Don’t Need Anyone,” He Said—Then She Slept in His Arms Till Dawn

Colton Reed had said the words so many times over the years that they no longer felt like a declaration so much as a simple statement of fact. The way a man might say he didn’t care for whiskey or didn’t hold with gambling. I don’t need love. He’d said it to his mother, worn thin with worry over her only son’s stubborn solitude.

He’d said it to the handful of women in various towns along his years of drifting who had tried, gently or not so gently, to soften the hard edges he’d built around himself. He’d said it most recently and most bitterly to himself, alone on the trail with nothing but his horse and his thoughts for company, in the years since Abigail Foster had stood him up at the altar of a small church in Cheyenne and married a banker’s son three weeks later instead, choosing security and comfort over a hired ranch hand with nothing to

his name but grit and a fast gun. That had been six years ago now, and Colton had spent every one of them since building a life deliberately unencumbered by anything so unreliable as affection. He’d made his way as a guide and occasional bounty hunter, escorting travelers and shipments across the more dangerous stretches of territory between railheads, work that suited a man who preferred the honest predictability of trail dangers to the far less predictable danger of caring for another person only to watch them

choose someone else or worse, choose to leave entirely. He was good at his work, reliable in the way that mattered most in a business built on trust. Clients who hired Colton Reed to see them safely from one town to another arrived exactly as promised, and word of that reliability had spread enough over the years that he rarely lacked for employment.

It was this reputation that brought him on a bright autumn morning to the modest home of a recently widowed rancher named Thomas Hartley, who had sent word requesting an escort for his niece, a young school teacher named Josephine who needed safe passage from the railhead at Cedar Falls to her uncle’s ranch outside the considerably more remote settlement of Millbrook, a journey of nearly four days through territory that had, in recent months, grown troublesome with a small but persistent band of outlaws preying on travelers along the isolated stretches

of trail. Colton had expected, based on the brief details in Thomas Hartley’s letter, a fairly straightforward job. Collect the young lady from the train, deliver her safely to her uncle’s ranch, collect his fee, and move on to the next assignment without much complication beyond the ordinary vigilance the trail demanded.

He had not expected, standing on the platform at Cedar Falls station watching passengers disembark from the arriving train, to find himself struck by the particular exhaustion etched into the face of the young woman who finally approached him, having correctly guessed his identity from the description her uncle had provided. “Mr. Reed.

” Her voice was polite, but strained. The voice of someone running on considerably less sleep and reserve than the journey ahead of them would require. >> I’m Josephine Hartley. >> Josie, if you’d rather. Mr. Reed sounds terribly formal for what I understand will be several days of fairly close company. >> Miss Hartley. >> He tipped his hat, taking in the details a man in his line of work learned to notice quickly.

The fine but travel-worn quality of her dress, a pale blue that had clearly seen better days than the two-week journey from back east had left it in, the dark circles beneath eyes that nonetheless held a quick, observant intelligence, the careful way she held herself, as though bracing for one more difficulty in what had evidently already been a difficult journey.

I understand you’ve come a fair distance already. >> Three weeks, she said with a small, weary laugh that held more exhaustion than humor. My mother passed this spring, and with my father gone some years before that, my uncle’s ranch is rather the only family I have left to go to. I confess I hadn’t quite anticipated how thoroughly a journey of this length would wear a person down.

>> Colton found himself, against his usual professional reserve, offering a rare note of genuine sympathy. Losing your mother and crossing half a country inside the same season is enough to wear anybody thin, Miss Hartley. We’ll get you to Millbrook safe. That much I can promise you.

” The problem, as it turned out, was that the train Josie had arrived on had run considerably behind schedule due to track repairs further west, which meant the connecting stagecoach that was meant to carry them partway toward Millbrook had already departed hours earlier, leaving them stranded at Cedar Falls Station until the next available transport the following morning.

Colton, who had planned for contingencies of exactly this kind, arranged what modest lodging the small station town could offer. Though when he returned from securing rooms to find Josie still sitting on the station platform, staring at the tracks with an expression of quiet, overwhelmed exhaustion, he made the practical decision to simply keep watch beside her rather than insist on immediately retiring, recognizing something in her rigid posture that suggested she needed a few more minutes before facing even the small task of

walking to a boarding house. “You don’t have to sit out here with me,” she said when he settled onto the bench beside her without announcement. “I imagine escorting weary strangers isn’t generally part of the job description beyond simply getting them where they’re going.” “Trail work teaches a man patience,” Colton said.

“No sense rushing a person who’s earned the right to sit still a while.” They talked in fits and starts as the afternoon light softened toward evening about her position as a school teacher back east, a career she genuinely loved and hadn’t expected to give up so suddenly, about her mother’s long illness, the particular grief of watching someone fade slowly rather than losing them all at once, about her uncle, whom she barely remembered from a single childhood visit years earlier, and the uncertain nervousness of building a new life around a relative

who was, in practical terms, nearly a stranger. Colton found himself offering more of his own history than he typically volunteered to clients, not the full weight of Abigail Foster’s betrayal, which he kept carefully guarded even now, but enough about his years of trail work, his preference for solitude, the particular freedom he’d found in a life built around no obligations beyond the immediate job in front of him.

By the time full evening settled over Cedar Falls Station, Josie’s exhaustion had finally overtaken the last of her carefully maintained composure, and Colton watched her fight with visibly diminishing success to keep her eyes open during a conversation that had grown increasingly quiet and slow. When her head finally dropped unconsciously against his shoulder, she startled awake for a moment, murmuring an embarrassed apology, but Colton, surprising himself with the easy certainty of the offer, simply told her to rest, that he’d keep watch, that

there was no shame in a body finally giving out after 3 weeks of travel and grief in equal measure. She slept, in the end, through the entire night, curled against his shoulder on the hard station bench while Colton sat motionless beside her, watching the stars wheel slowly overhead and the occasional lantern-lit figure move through the quiet town.

More still and wakeful than he’d been in years, acutely aware of the warm, trusting weight of her against him and the strange, unfamiliar tenderness it stirred in a chest he’d spent 6 years deliberately hardening against exactly this kind of feeling. He told himself, repeatedly through those long hours, that this was simply professional vigilance, a guide’s ordinary duty to a client too exhausted to properly care for herself.

But some quieter, more honest part of him recognized, even then, that he had not felt this particular careful protectiveness toward anyone since Abigail, and the recognition unsettled him considerably more than any trail danger ever had. The days that followed, as they made their way steadily toward Millbrook, only deepened what that first night had begun.

Josie proved to be considerably tougher than her initial exhausted arrival had suggested, adapting to the rigors of trail travel with a determined good humor that Colton found himself, despite every intention otherwise, genuinely enjoying. She asked thoughtful questions about the landscape, the wildlife, the particular skills his work required, listening with a genuine curiosity that felt different from the polite disinterest he was accustomed to from clients simply eager to reach their destination.

She laughed easily, even at her own occasional missteps, an ungainly dismount, a poorly judged step near a creek crossing that left her boots soaked through, in a way that gradually wore down the careful professional distance Colton typically maintained. It was on the third night, camped along a quiet stretch of river with a fire burned low, that Colton found himself telling her about Abigail, a story he had not shared with another living soul beyond his own mother in the six years since it happened.

He told her about the small church in Cheyenne, about standing at the altar for nearly an hour before word finally reached him that Abigail had changed her mind, about the particular hollowing humiliation of learning 3 weeks later that she’d married a banker’s son instead, a man who could offer the kind of security a ranch hand’s modest prospects never could.

He told her, haltingly, about the years since, about deliberately building a life that couldn’t be similarly appended, about deciding, with a finality he’d believed absolute, that he simply didn’t need love badly enough to risk that particular kind of devastation again. Josie listened without interrupting, her expression carrying none of the pity he’d half braced for, only a quiet, careful attention that made the old wound feel, for the first time in years, less like a permanent fixture and more like something that might eventually

genuinely heal. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, when he’d finished. “That’s a cruel thing to be left standing at an altar. But Colton,” it was the first time she’d used his given name, and something in him noted the shift with more feeling than he was entirely prepared for, “I don’t think what happened with Abigail Foster tells you anything true about whether you need love.

I think it only tells you that you loved someone who wasn’t capable of matching what you offered her. Those aren’t the same thing, however much six years of convincing yourself otherwise might have made them feel that way.” “Maybe not,” he admitted, staring into the dying fire rather than at her. “But it’s easier not needing anybody. Nobody can leave you if you never let them close enough to matter in the first place.

” “Easier,” she agreed softly, “but not the same as happier. I’ve spent these past weeks watching you take genuine care of a stranger you had no particular obligation to care for beyond a paid job, watching you notice things. That I take my coffee black, that I favor my left ankle after a long ride, that I go quiet when I’m thinking about my mother, that most men wouldn’t bother noticing about someone they decided not to let matter.

I don’t think you’re half as good at not needing people as you’ve convinced yourself you are, Colton Reed.” He didn’t answer that directly, not that night, though the observation settled into him with an uncomfortable, persistent truth he found himself unable to fully dismiss over the following days travel. He had noticed those things. He had, if he was entirely honest with the part of himself he’d spent six years trying not to consult too closely, noticed considerably more than that.

The particular way sunlight caught the auburn of her braided hair, the quick intelligence in her observations about the landscape they passed through, the steady, resilient courage with which she was rebuilding an entire life from the wreckage of losing both parents within a handful of years.

He had noticed all of it carefully, the way a man notices things he’s trying very hard to convince himself don’t matter. The true test of his careful resolve arrived on their final full day of travel when the small band of outlaws that had been troubling the region finally made their presence known. Three riders emerging from a stand of trees near a narrow canyon pass with a clear, practiced intent of men who made their living relieving travelers of whatever valuables they carried.

Colton had faced down worse odds before in his years of trail work, but the The of Josie beside him sharpened his focus into something considerably more urgent than his usual professional calm. Every instinct suddenly, fiercely oriented around a single priority that had nothing to do with the modest fee Thomas Hartley had promised him, and everything to do with the woman whose safety had become, somewhere over these past days, considerably more important to him than he’d been prepared to admit even to himself. The confrontation was brief,

but genuinely dangerous. Colton’s reputation with a gun proved well earned, dropping one rider’s horse from beneath him with a warning shot before the man had fully processed what was happening. While a second bullet found its mark in another outlaw’s shoulder when he made the mistake of reaching for his own weapon rather than heeding Colton’s sharp warning to stand down.

The third rider, seeing the swift, decisive end of his companions’ resistance, wisely chose retreat over further confrontation, and within minutes the immediate danger had passed, leaving Colton breathing hard, adrenaline still coursing through him, turning immediately to check on Josie, who had followed his shouted instruction to take cover behind a nearby boulder and now emerged, pale but entirely unharmed.

Her eyes wide with a particular shock of having just witnessed real violence for the first time in her sheltered Eastern life. “Are you hurt?” His voice came out rougher than he intended, still riding the last of the danger’s adrenaline. “No. No, I’m Colton, you’re bleeding.” She’d noticed before he had, the graze along his forearm where a stray shot had caught him.

Not deep, but bleeding freely enough to stain his sleeve, and her sudden, fierce concern as she crossed the distance between them to examine the wound struck him with a force that had nothing to do with the injury itself, and everything to do with the raw, unguarded fear he saw in her expression. Not the polite concern of a client for a hired guide, but something considerably more personal, more frightened than professional gratitude alone would explain.

“It’s nothing,” he said, though he let her tend it anyway, tearing a strip from her petticoat to bind a wound with hands that trembled slightly, whether from the fading adrenaline or something else entirely, Colton found he could no longer clearly distinguish. “You could have been killed,” she said, her voice unsteady now that the immediate danger had passed and the full weight of what might have happened was catching up to her. “Protecting me.

You could have died protecting me and I” She stopped, seeming to catch herself before the sentence could finish. But Colton, watching her carefully in the aftermath of danger neither of them had fully processed yet, found he didn’t want her to stop. “And you what, Josie?” “And I realized in that moment when those men appeared that losing you would have been considerably more devastating than anything I’ve endured these past weeks, my mother’s passing included.

And I have no earthly idea what to do with a feeling that large after knowing you for only four days.” The admission came out in a rush, as though she’d been holding it back through sheer will and the danger had finally cracked that restraint open. Colton stood very still, absorbing words he had spent six careful years building his entire life around never wanting to hear again, and found, to his own considerable surprise, that instead of the old fear he’d expected, what rose in him instead was something closer to relief. As though a weight

he’d carried so long he’d forgotten its actual mass had finally, unexpectedly, been set down. “I don’t need love,” he said slowly, testing the old, familiar words against a truth that no longer quite fit them. That’s what I’ve told myself for six years. But watching you sleep against my shoulder that first night at Cedar Falls, and watching you patch up my arm just now with your own petticoat while your hands were shaking worse than mine, I think I’ve been telling myself a story that stopped being true somewhere in these past four

days, if it was ever entirely true to begin with. “Colton.” “Let me finish, since I don’t say things like this easily.” He took a steadying breath. “I told myself I didn’t need it because needing it once cost me more than I thought I could survive, but there’s a difference between not needing something and being too afraid to want it again, and I think I’ve spent six years confusing the two. I want it, Josie.

I want this. Whatever this is that’s grown up between us these past four days out of nothing but a paid escort job and a woman too exhausted to keep her own eyes open. I didn’t expect it. I certainly didn’t plan for it, but I’d be lying now if I told you I don’t want it. They arrived at Thomas Hartley’s ranch outside Millbrook the following afternoon, considerably later than originally planned, but entirely unharmed beyond Colton’s bandaged arm, and Josie’s uncle, a weathered, kind-eyed rancher who bore a passing

resemblance to his late brother, welcomed his niece with a particular warmth of a man determined to make good on family obligations he’d had little previous chance to fulfill. He noted, with a shrewd observation of a man who’d raised four daughters of his own before they’d married and moved on, the way his niece and her hired guide looked at each other across his kitchen table that first evening, and said nothing directly, though the knowing amusement in his expression made clear he’d drawn his own accurate conclusions

about what exactly had transpired during four days of travel through dangerous territory. Colton, true to his profession, completed his contracted job, delivering Josephine Hartley safely to her uncle’s ranch exactly as promised, collecting his fee, and by every reasonable measure, his obligation to the Hartley family was fully discharged.

But instead of moving on to his next assignment as he ordinarily would have, he found himself, three days later, still lingering in Millbrook, finding increasingly transparent excuses to visit the Hartley ranch until Thomas Hartley finally took pity on both of them and simply offered Colton work managing a section of the ranch’s growing cattle operation, a practical arrangement that gave Colton legitimate reason to remain in the area while he and Josie navigated, more slowly and deliberately than their dramatic first four days together, the actual building

of a life neither of them had quite expected to find. That courtship unfolded over the following months with none of the danger and urgency that had first brought them together, but with a steady patient deepening that Colton found, somewhat to his own surprise, he genuinely preferred quiet evenings on the ranch porch, Josie’s growing involvement in teaching at the small Millbrook schoolhouse that badly needed a qualified instructor, long rides across land that Colton was gradually, cautiously, allowing himself to imagine

building a permanent home upon rather than simply passing through. He told her, eventually, the fuller truth about how thoroughly Ab

“I Don’t Need Anyone,” He Said—Then She Slept in His Arms Till Dawn

Colton Reed had said the words so many times over the years that they no longer felt like a declaration so much as a simple statement of fact. The way a man might say he didn’t care for whiskey or didn’t hold with gambling. I don’t need love. He’d said it to his mother, worn thin with worry over her only son’s stubborn solitude.

He’d said it to the handful of women in various towns along his years of drifting who had tried, gently or not so gently, to soften the hard edges he’d built around himself. He’d said it most recently and most bitterly to himself, alone on the trail with nothing but his horse and his thoughts for company, in the years since Abigail Foster had stood him up at the altar of a small church in Cheyenne and married a banker’s son three weeks later instead, choosing security and comfort over a hired ranch hand with nothing to

his name but grit and a fast gun. That had been six years ago now, and Colton had spent every one of them since building a life deliberately unencumbered by anything so unreliable as affection. He’d made his way as a guide and occasional bounty hunter, escorting travelers and shipments across the more dangerous stretches of territory between railheads, work that suited a man who preferred the honest predictability of trail dangers to the far less predictable danger of caring for another person only to watch them

choose someone else or worse, choose to leave entirely. He was good at his work, reliable in the way that mattered most in a business built on trust. Clients who hired Colton Reed to see them safely from one town to another arrived exactly as promised, and word of that reliability had spread enough over the years that he rarely lacked for employment.

It was this reputation that brought him on a bright autumn morning to the modest home of a recently widowed rancher named Thomas Hartley, who had sent word requesting an escort for his niece, a young school teacher named Josephine who needed safe passage from the railhead at Cedar Falls to her uncle’s ranch outside the considerably more remote settlement of Millbrook, a journey of nearly four days through territory that had, in recent months, grown troublesome with a small but persistent band of outlaws preying on travelers along the isolated stretches

of trail. Colton had expected, based on the brief details in Thomas Hartley’s letter, a fairly straightforward job. Collect the young lady from the train, deliver her safely to her uncle’s ranch, collect his fee, and move on to the next assignment without much complication beyond the ordinary vigilance the trail demanded.

He had not expected, standing on the platform at Cedar Falls station watching passengers disembark from the arriving train, to find himself struck by the particular exhaustion etched into the face of the young woman who finally approached him, having correctly guessed his identity from the description her uncle had provided. “Mr. Reed.

” Her voice was polite, but strained. The voice of someone running on considerably less sleep and reserve than the journey ahead of them would require. >> I’m Josephine Hartley. >> Josie, if you’d rather. Mr. Reed sounds terribly formal for what I understand will be several days of fairly close company. >> Miss Hartley. >> He tipped his hat, taking in the details a man in his line of work learned to notice quickly.

The fine but travel-worn quality of her dress, a pale blue that had clearly seen better days than the two-week journey from back east had left it in, the dark circles beneath eyes that nonetheless held a quick, observant intelligence, the careful way she held herself, as though bracing for one more difficulty in what had evidently already been a difficult journey.

I understand you’ve come a fair distance already. >> Three weeks, she said with a small, weary laugh that held more exhaustion than humor. My mother passed this spring, and with my father gone some years before that, my uncle’s ranch is rather the only family I have left to go to. I confess I hadn’t quite anticipated how thoroughly a journey of this length would wear a person down.

>> Colton found himself, against his usual professional reserve, offering a rare note of genuine sympathy. Losing your mother and crossing half a country inside the same season is enough to wear anybody thin, Miss Hartley. We’ll get you to Millbrook safe. That much I can promise you.

” The problem, as it turned out, was that the train Josie had arrived on had run considerably behind schedule due to track repairs further west, which meant the connecting stagecoach that was meant to carry them partway toward Millbrook had already departed hours earlier, leaving them stranded at Cedar Falls Station until the next available transport the following morning.

Colton, who had planned for contingencies of exactly this kind, arranged what modest lodging the small station town could offer. Though when he returned from securing rooms to find Josie still sitting on the station platform, staring at the tracks with an expression of quiet, overwhelmed exhaustion, he made the practical decision to simply keep watch beside her rather than insist on immediately retiring, recognizing something in her rigid posture that suggested she needed a few more minutes before facing even the small task of

walking to a boarding house. “You don’t have to sit out here with me,” she said when he settled onto the bench beside her without announcement. “I imagine escorting weary strangers isn’t generally part of the job description beyond simply getting them where they’re going.” “Trail work teaches a man patience,” Colton said.

“No sense rushing a person who’s earned the right to sit still a while.” They talked in fits and starts as the afternoon light softened toward evening about her position as a school teacher back east, a career she genuinely loved and hadn’t expected to give up so suddenly, about her mother’s long illness, the particular grief of watching someone fade slowly rather than losing them all at once, about her uncle, whom she barely remembered from a single childhood visit years earlier, and the uncertain nervousness of building a new life around a relative

who was, in practical terms, nearly a stranger. Colton found himself offering more of his own history than he typically volunteered to clients, not the full weight of Abigail Foster’s betrayal, which he kept carefully guarded even now, but enough about his years of trail work, his preference for solitude, the particular freedom he’d found in a life built around no obligations beyond the immediate job in front of him.

By the time full evening settled over Cedar Falls Station, Josie’s exhaustion had finally overtaken the last of her carefully maintained composure, and Colton watched her fight with visibly diminishing success to keep her eyes open during a conversation that had grown increasingly quiet and slow. When her head finally dropped unconsciously against his shoulder, she startled awake for a moment, murmuring an embarrassed apology, but Colton, surprising himself with the easy certainty of the offer, simply told her to rest, that he’d keep watch, that

there was no shame in a body finally giving out after 3 weeks of travel and grief in equal measure. She slept, in the end, through the entire night, curled against his shoulder on the hard station bench while Colton sat motionless beside her, watching the stars wheel slowly overhead and the occasional lantern-lit figure move through the quiet town.

More still and wakeful than he’d been in years, acutely aware of the warm, trusting weight of her against him and the strange, unfamiliar tenderness it stirred in a chest he’d spent 6 years deliberately hardening against exactly this kind of feeling. He told himself, repeatedly through those long hours, that this was simply professional vigilance, a guide’s ordinary duty to a client too exhausted to properly care for herself.

But some quieter, more honest part of him recognized, even then, that he had not felt this particular careful protectiveness toward anyone since Abigail, and the recognition unsettled him considerably more than any trail danger ever had. The days that followed, as they made their way steadily toward Millbrook, only deepened what that first night had begun.

Josie proved to be considerably tougher than her initial exhausted arrival had suggested, adapting to the rigors of trail travel with a determined good humor that Colton found himself, despite every intention otherwise, genuinely enjoying. She asked thoughtful questions about the landscape, the wildlife, the particular skills his work required, listening with a genuine curiosity that felt different from the polite disinterest he was accustomed to from clients simply eager to reach their destination.

She laughed easily, even at her own occasional missteps, an ungainly dismount, a poorly judged step near a creek crossing that left her boots soaked through, in a way that gradually wore down the careful professional distance Colton typically maintained. It was on the third night, camped along a quiet stretch of river with a fire burned low, that Colton found himself telling her about Abigail, a story he had not shared with another living soul beyond his own mother in the six years since it happened.

He told her about the small church in Cheyenne, about standing at the altar for nearly an hour before word finally reached him that Abigail had changed her mind, about the particular hollowing humiliation of learning 3 weeks later that she’d married a banker’s son instead, a man who could offer the kind of security a ranch hand’s modest prospects never could.

He told her, haltingly, about the years since, about deliberately building a life that couldn’t be similarly appended, about deciding, with a finality he’d believed absolute, that he simply didn’t need love badly enough to risk that particular kind of devastation again. Josie listened without interrupting, her expression carrying none of the pity he’d half braced for, only a quiet, careful attention that made the old wound feel, for the first time in years, less like a permanent fixture and more like something that might eventually

genuinely heal. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, when he’d finished. “That’s a cruel thing to be left standing at an altar. But Colton,” it was the first time she’d used his given name, and something in him noted the shift with more feeling than he was entirely prepared for, “I don’t think what happened with Abigail Foster tells you anything true about whether you need love.

I think it only tells you that you loved someone who wasn’t capable of matching what you offered her. Those aren’t the same thing, however much six years of convincing yourself otherwise might have made them feel that way.” “Maybe not,” he admitted, staring into the dying fire rather than at her. “But it’s easier not needing anybody. Nobody can leave you if you never let them close enough to matter in the first place.

” “Easier,” she agreed softly, “but not the same as happier. I’ve spent these past weeks watching you take genuine care of a stranger you had no particular obligation to care for beyond a paid job, watching you notice things. That I take my coffee black, that I favor my left ankle after a long ride, that I go quiet when I’m thinking about my mother, that most men wouldn’t bother noticing about someone they decided not to let matter.

I don’t think you’re half as good at not needing people as you’ve convinced yourself you are, Colton Reed.” He didn’t answer that directly, not that night, though the observation settled into him with an uncomfortable, persistent truth he found himself unable to fully dismiss over the following days travel. He had noticed those things. He had, if he was entirely honest with the part of himself he’d spent six years trying not to consult too closely, noticed considerably more than that.

The particular way sunlight caught the auburn of her braided hair, the quick intelligence in her observations about the landscape they passed through, the steady, resilient courage with which she was rebuilding an entire life from the wreckage of losing both parents within a handful of years.

He had noticed all of it carefully, the way a man notices things he’s trying very hard to convince himself don’t matter. The true test of his careful resolve arrived on their final full day of travel when the small band of outlaws that had been troubling the region finally made their presence known. Three riders emerging from a stand of trees near a narrow canyon pass with a clear, practiced intent of men who made their living relieving travelers of whatever valuables they carried.

Colton had faced down worse odds before in his years of trail work, but the The of Josie beside him sharpened his focus into something considerably more urgent than his usual professional calm. Every instinct suddenly, fiercely oriented around a single priority that had nothing to do with the modest fee Thomas Hartley had promised him, and everything to do with the woman whose safety had become, somewhere over these past days, considerably more important to him than he’d been prepared to admit even to himself. The confrontation was brief,

but genuinely dangerous. Colton’s reputation with a gun proved well earned, dropping one rider’s horse from beneath him with a warning shot before the man had fully processed what was happening. While a second bullet found its mark in another outlaw’s shoulder when he made the mistake of reaching for his own weapon rather than heeding Colton’s sharp warning to stand down.

The third rider, seeing the swift, decisive end of his companions’ resistance, wisely chose retreat over further confrontation, and within minutes the immediate danger had passed, leaving Colton breathing hard, adrenaline still coursing through him, turning immediately to check on Josie, who had followed his shouted instruction to take cover behind a nearby boulder and now emerged, pale but entirely unharmed.

Her eyes wide with a particular shock of having just witnessed real violence for the first time in her sheltered Eastern life. “Are you hurt?” His voice came out rougher than he intended, still riding the last of the danger’s adrenaline. “No. No, I’m Colton, you’re bleeding.” She’d noticed before he had, the graze along his forearm where a stray shot had caught him.

Not deep, but bleeding freely enough to stain his sleeve, and her sudden, fierce concern as she crossed the distance between them to examine the wound struck him with a force that had nothing to do with the injury itself, and everything to do with the raw, unguarded fear he saw in her expression. Not the polite concern of a client for a hired guide, but something considerably more personal, more frightened than professional gratitude alone would explain.

“It’s nothing,” he said, though he let her tend it anyway, tearing a strip from her petticoat to bind a wound with hands that trembled slightly, whether from the fading adrenaline or something else entirely, Colton found he could no longer clearly distinguish. “You could have been killed,” she said, her voice unsteady now that the immediate danger had passed and the full weight of what might have happened was catching up to her. “Protecting me.

You could have died protecting me and I” She stopped, seeming to catch herself before the sentence could finish. But Colton, watching her carefully in the aftermath of danger neither of them had fully processed yet, found he didn’t want her to stop. “And you what, Josie?” “And I realized in that moment when those men appeared that losing you would have been considerably more devastating than anything I’ve endured these past weeks, my mother’s passing included.

And I have no earthly idea what to do with a feeling that large after knowing you for only four days.” The admission came out in a rush, as though she’d been holding it back through sheer will and the danger had finally cracked that restraint open. Colton stood very still, absorbing words he had spent six careful years building his entire life around never wanting to hear again, and found, to his own considerable surprise, that instead of the old fear he’d expected, what rose in him instead was something closer to relief. As though a weight

he’d carried so long he’d forgotten its actual mass had finally, unexpectedly, been set down. “I don’t need love,” he said slowly, testing the old, familiar words against a truth that no longer quite fit them. That’s what I’ve told myself for six years. But watching you sleep against my shoulder that first night at Cedar Falls, and watching you patch up my arm just now with your own petticoat while your hands were shaking worse than mine, I think I’ve been telling myself a story that stopped being true somewhere in these past four

days, if it was ever entirely true to begin with. “Colton.” “Let me finish, since I don’t say things like this easily.” He took a steadying breath. “I told myself I didn’t need it because needing it once cost me more than I thought I could survive, but there’s a difference between not needing something and being too afraid to want it again, and I think I’ve spent six years confusing the two. I want it, Josie.

I want this. Whatever this is that’s grown up between us these past four days out of nothing but a paid escort job and a woman too exhausted to keep her own eyes open. I didn’t expect it. I certainly didn’t plan for it, but I’d be lying now if I told you I don’t want it. They arrived at Thomas Hartley’s ranch outside Millbrook the following afternoon, considerably later than originally planned, but entirely unharmed beyond Colton’s bandaged arm, and Josie’s uncle, a weathered, kind-eyed rancher who bore a passing

resemblance to his late brother, welcomed his niece with a particular warmth of a man determined to make good on family obligations he’d had little previous chance to fulfill. He noted, with a shrewd observation of a man who’d raised four daughters of his own before they’d married and moved on, the way his niece and her hired guide looked at each other across his kitchen table that first evening, and said nothing directly, though the knowing amusement in his expression made clear he’d drawn his own accurate conclusions

about what exactly had transpired during four days of travel through dangerous territory. Colton, true to his profession, completed his contracted job, delivering Josephine Hartley safely to her uncle’s ranch exactly as promised, collecting his fee, and by every reasonable measure, his obligation to the Hartley family was fully discharged.

But instead of moving on to his next assignment as he ordinarily would have, he found himself, three days later, still lingering in Millbrook, finding increasingly transparent excuses to visit the Hartley ranch until Thomas Hartley finally took pity on both of them and simply offered Colton work managing a section of the ranch’s growing cattle operation, a practical arrangement that gave Colton legitimate reason to remain in the area while he and Josie navigated, more slowly and deliberately than their dramatic first four days together, the actual building

of a life neither of them had quite expected to find. That courtship unfolded over the following months with none of the danger and urgency that had first brought them together, but with a steady patient deepening that Colton found, somewhat to his own surprise, he genuinely preferred quiet evenings on the ranch porch, Josie’s growing involvement in teaching at the small Millbrook schoolhouse that badly needed a qualified instructor, long rides across land that Colton was gradually, cautiously, allowing himself to imagine

building a permanent home upon rather than simply passing through. He told her, eventually, the fuller truth about how thoroughly Ab