Page 11 of The Rogue (Four Corners Ranch #11)

The very first thing Rue had to deal with was figuring out what the heck to do about her house. Of course, the notices had

gone up on a Sunday so she couldn’t call anyone about it, which left her with the Mondayest Monday ever.

The beginning of what would have been the first week of her married life. The kind of day Rue usually saw as a fresh start

began by just feeling stale and awful and generally horrendous.

Justice hadn’t gone out last night, which she knew was weird for him, and even still she half expected to run into a half-dressed

woman somewhere in the house. She knew that Justice wasn’t one for restraint, but he was being saintly. He was always good

to her. He was always nice. But this sort of sainted-savior thing with nothing that she could even begin to reciprocate was

starting to get to her, and then added to that, when she woke up there were no half-naked women; she just didn’t even know

how to orient herself.

Everything was already weird.

When Justice came into the house while she was making coffee, having clearly been out, she couldn’t hold it in. “Oh. Did you

have sex somewhere else?”

“Excuse me?” He looked scandalized. He looked like he might have clutched his pearls if he was wearing some.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “It was a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.”

“It was the fuck not. I prefer to dance around things in double entendre, Rue. I prefer to show up looking laconic and disheveled,

and laugh and make asides that could be interpreted in multiple ways. I am a gentleman. I do not kiss and tell.”

“No, you just bang and insinuate.”

“As God intended.”

“Well, I’m asking,” she said.

And she actually didn’t know why she was. Why she was preoccupied with that. She had just been thinking about the fact that

he was being overly saintly and solicitous and she didn’t want him to feel like he had to do that. Because she wanted things

to be normal, and this would be normal, except it also felt...

Maybe she was just feeling insecure. And she was projecting it onto Justice. There was the little issue of feeling possessive

of him.

It did happen sometimes.

In fairness, he sometimes behaved the same with her. They could both be a little bit territorial. It was just that they were

so close. It was just that they were best friends. And right now she needed him. So much.

He was here. Asher wasn’t here, because she didn’t want him to be.

She never wanted to see his ferrety face ever again.

That should have been her first clue that something was amiss.

He was a little ferrety. Justice had said that, in fact.

Very early. But, given the fact that Justice had never been in a relationship, she didn’t think that his opinion had mattered.

Perhaps she should have listened to what she had thought of at the time was a rather shallow evaluation of someone. Nonetheless,

the idea of Justice going out and being with someone else right now when she was alone upset her, and while she knew that

was not fair, especially because she was contradicting her own internal musings, it was still how she felt.

“I was up feeding cows, if you must know.”

“Now I don’t know if you would tell me.”

“I would tell you. I’m not embarrassed.”

“You’ve been taking care of me. And I feel like this is probably cramping your style.”

“I’m not Asher,” he said, doing what Justice did with her, always cutting straight down to the heart of it. Often before she

even could. “I don’t consider you an inconvenience or a barrier to my sex life. I’m taking care of you and staying with you

because I want to. Okay?”

“Well, it doesn’t have to... I mean, I don’t want to run into a woman here...”

“I don’t bring women back here.”

“You... you don’t?”

“No.”

“But it’s so nice. I mean, the room I was staying in needed some work, but your room is very nice. And now that we have my

bed in the guest room...”

“I don’t bring women here,” he said. “I don’t know why that’s hard to believe.”

“Because it just looks like the kind of place that you bring women to.”

“I don’t. Do you know why? If I brought women here then they would want to spend the night. Worse, I would feel obligated to let them. It’s not neutral territory. If I go to their place, they can throw me out, or I can see myself out.”

“You don’t... you don’t spend the night with people?”

“No,” he said, looking at her like she was crazy.

“I don’t know that,” she said, spreading her hands. “Why would I know that?”

“I’m not really sure why you know it now,” he said.

“Because I feel... I feel naive. Which isn’t fair. I was in a relationship for eight years. Half the time he was gone,

and he and I had... Our connection was so based on this vision that we had for the future. Our theoretical future. It was

so... cerebral, I guess? That doesn’t even feel like the right word. It was companionable. We wanted all the same things.

I really, really valued that. There was something calling about him. There was something... comforting. And now I’m starting

to think that was a shelter, and I shouldn’t have been hiding in it. Because he wanted something else.” She stood there, feeling

wounded. Baffled. “He was out fighting a war. You would think that he would want something stable waiting at home. You would

think that sex under gunfire wouldn’t take precedence.”

Justice let out a long breath and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I hate to break it to you. But I think sex under gunfire

makes a lot of sense. Trauma bond and all of that. Intensity.”

He looked at her then. Really looked at her. His blue eyes felt hot, burning into her, and she didn’t care for that. Because it was a little bit too much. She also didn’t want to peel back the layer to get beneath the top of what he had just said. It was all a little too close to the bone.

Trauma bond.

Yeah, that felt...

Well, like something the two of them might share.

“But you don’t even spend the night with people,” she said.

“Because I don’t want intensity,” he said. “I want to have fun. I don’t want to be navigating weird morning-afters, and I don’t want

to know anything beyond the girl’s name, okay?”

She rolled her eyes. “There has to be a middle ground.”

“I am not a man of middle grounds, Rue, so I can’t help you there. I do assume you need a little bit of help with the bank

today.”

She bristled. “I don’t need help with the bank.”

She wanted help with the bank. But she was a grown woman, and she could drive into Mapleton and speak to someone herself.

It was a small-town bank, and she imagined that she would get further with them going right up to the counter and explaining

the situation.

She didn’t need Justice for that.

She kind of wanted him, though. Which was a bit annoying.

“I don’t care if you need me or not. I’m going.”

“Well... surely you have things to do.”

“Surely I do not have things to do that are more important than helping you through this current crisis.”

She felt discomfort gnawing at her. It was adjacent to the feeling she had when Justice had first walked in and she had felt vaguely jealous, but it wasn’t exactly the same. This was more like fear.

Everything was being weighted toward her. Everything was about her.

That just didn’t happen in her life. To her parents, she was an inconvenience. She had never been all that important. And

it really... it really made her feel so... edgy when he did things like this. When he was just so good and present and

pouring all this stuff into her, it made her feel like she had to reciprocate. Like she had to make herself important.

Maybe she could organize his sock drawer.

“Okay. I really would like for you to go with me. But I just feel like this can’t be all about me. I’m not used to this. To

being the one who needs help. To being the one who is a mess. I’m not used to it because...”

Because she couldn’t afford it. She had never been able to. Her parents would never have taken care of her, and she desperately

didn’t want to be a burden to her grandmother. Her grandmother had been wonderful, and she had never made Rue feel like a

burden, but Rue was so aware of her own presence. Of the space she took up. Because... she had to be. She’d become painfully

aware of what it meant to take care of herself from the time she was little, so when anybody else stepped in to do it, she

was really aware of it. Of the labor.

Their teacher had always paid extra attention to her, and Rue had felt like she had to be an exemplary student to make up

for it. To make the investment worth it.

And with Justice... She had helped him with his homework. She had taught him to read. She had soothed his hangovers. She was used to giving him things. And he had been so relentlessly giving to her in the run-up to the wedding, and now this.

“Like what’s going on with you?” The words came out lamely, and just kind of landed between them with a thud.

“Are you serious right now?”

“I’m serious. Sometimes, Justice, I feel like you know everything about me. Everything about my life, and I don’t know anything

about yours.”

He never slept over with women, apparently. She hadn’t known that. Not that they made a habit of talking about sex—but they

were friends and they did share things. Sex wasn’t a totally taboo topic for them.

“That’s not true,” he said. “It’s just that it’s a lot less work to see down to—” she made a scoffing noise “—the bottom of

a kiddie pool than it is to see the bottom of the ocean.”

“Oh please,” she said. “You’re just so committed to this whole shallow thing that you do. It isn’t honest. I know you. I’ve

known you for all these years and you’re the most caring... You’re the most caring, sweet man—”

“Hang on a second. I am not sweet.”

“You are .”