Page 103 of His Eighth Ride

“Nah.” Opal leaned her head against his shoulder and sighed. “He knows how much you mean to me. He knows how wonderful you are. How much Gerty trusts and relies on you. How good of a person you are. How?—”

“Okay,” Tag said, not needing the compliments or accolades. “I got it.” He fumed silently for several beats of his heart, and then he finally started to calm down.

Opal waited through all of that, and then she waited some more. “I love you, Taggart Crow,” she whispered. “Please tell me we can go back to the farm and cuddle on my new chair and watch the stars.”

He got to his feet and pulled her up too. “Let’s get back to the farm to watch the stars, honey-love.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I’m sorry, okay? I’m working on it.”

“You’re doing great,” she said.

He took her back to his truck and opened her door for her. She got in, but he didn’t back up and close the door. He crowded in close, his hand drifting across her thighs to her waist. “Opal, there’s three things I can’t really change about myself, even if I wanted to. Do you want to know what they are?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

Tag grinned at her, and he leaned in close as he said, “One, I love you. Two, I love you, and three….”

He pressed his lips to hers and stole a kiss before he whispered, “I love you,” for the third time.

thirty-three

Opal took Mike’s hand and stepped up into the house. Her house. Gerty, Tag, and Steele had already entered, and Opal had been last. She stopped as the others spread out throughout the space, and while it didn’t have all the walls perfectly plastered and painted, nor any windows, doors, countertops, furniture, or fixtures, Opal felt the pure oxygen of it filling her lungs.

This was her house.

No, her home.

A home. Maybe the first one she’d ever lived in.

“Honey?”

She looked at Tag as he came back to her. “It’s so bright in here,” she said. “I love it.”

He smiled and tucked her against his side. “It’s bigger than it looks from the outside.”

“There’s not even a front door,” she said. “You can see straight through the house, from front to back.”

“Yeah, but it’s deeper than it looks. That’s all I meant.”

The house wasn’t a box, as Opal had lived in many of those and had rejected any plan that just had four corners. Therefore, her house faced the street with a flat front and a porch that ran the width of that—and around the south side, where she could sit in the winter and take in the golden sunshine.

The house ran diagonally south, creating a backyard that had solid walls along two sides, the garden at the back, and a lane that she could drive on to park anything she wanted—a boat, a trailer, extra farm trucks.

“A nice big area for living,” she said, taking the first steps into the house. “Where I’ll spend most of the time with the kids—if we’re not outside.” She went all the way to the kitchen at the back. “Separate entrance for muddy cowboys.” She beamed at Tag and nodded to the right. “Back door leading to our fabulous deck.”

The kitchen literally had nothing it in but walls with outlets and wires sticking out of them. No appliances. No counters. No cupboards. But Opal could see it all, including herself scrambling eggs for Tag before he went to work on the farm, and cutting up apples into chunks for the cutest dark-haired boy, who had Tag’s lopsided smile and affinity for writing down his confusing thoughts, his fears, his worries, reminders for himself—and how very much he loved Opal.

She felt warm from head to toe, and not only because June had arrived, and the house had no air conditioning yet.

“Still got a few months to go,” she said.

“Only two or three,” Tag said. “All the finishes go in fast if they’re scheduled.”

She looked over to him. “Scheduled? I have to schedule them?”

“Your contractor should know when your stuff is coming,” Tag said. “You want me to call him and get the schedule?”

Relief painted through Opal. “Yes,” she said. “I’d love that.”

They continued to walk through the house while Gerty said she wanted a back deck like the one Opal had, and Mike told her she could have whatever she wanted. She tensed for a moment, but Tag didn’t say anything. It seemed so “Hammond” to just get whatever she wanted, and Opal hadn’t been so sensitive to such things before.

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