Page 29 of The Outsider

He grunted a laugh as he thought those words. Definitely not in the context women normally slept in his bed. Not that they usually slept in it. It had been a while since there had been a woman anyway.

He was fond of arrangements. He wasn’t big on going out, getting drunk and picking women up; that was his brothers’ territory. It wasn’t that he’d never done it; he just wasn’t habitual about it. It was one of those things that fell into a gray area for him. And he didn’t like a gray area.

He liked things to be clear. Definitive.

And that was where he preferred a long-standing arrangement over a hookup. There was a woman who delivered vitamins for the cattle to the ranch a while ago. And she had included him as a stop on her route even when they didn’t need vitamins.

There had been clear boundaries and clear rules. She had chosen to stop and see him, she had always been totally sober and in her right mind, able to skip the stop if she hadn’t wanted sex. His father was just such a manipulative bastard, and he had never, ever wanted to be like that. He didn’t want to cajole or seduce. He didn’t like anything that fell into that category.

He realized he was a little bit over-the-top about that. That he took it to an extreme. But his actions when he’d been a teenager had been such that he felt extremes were warranted where he was concerned.

He didn’t trust himself.

She had moved on to another area, and that was fine. But it had also left him in a bit of a dry spell. He was busy, though, and it wasn’t something he thought about overly much.

It was a testament to the fact that it had been a few months that handling and moving a bed put his mind firmly on sex.

He got everything loaded into the back of the pickup and drove it back to his place. He was beginning to feel a little like a Ping-Pong ball, pinging around back and forth. Then he wasn’t done yet.

He brought the bed into the empty room in his house and worked toward assembling it. And by the time he was through, it was lunchtime. He could grabsomething at the house, or he could head over to the barn, where Fia and Denver had no doubt collaborated on some vittles for the workers.

He opted for Denver’s food, because he knew it would be better than whatever he could rustle up here.

But when he pulled up to the barn, what he saw made his stomach drop down into his feet.

He looked up through the windshield and saw Bix. She was on the roof, no tether or safety line or anything like that. Scrambling around like a wildcat from one end of the ridgeline to the other.

He put the truck in Park and didn’t even bother to turn it off.

He got out and looked at his brothers, who were just standing there with their hands on their hips looking up.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked.

Denver gestured toward the barn. “She’s checking to see if the roof leaks.”

“Are youinsane? She could get herself killed.” He started to walk toward the barn, but realized there was no ladder. “How the hell did she get up there?”

“She climbed,” said Denver, looking impressed.

“Like a rat,” said Justice.

“And you justlether?”

“You’ve known her longer than I have,” said Denver. “You know, like a half a day longer, but what gave you the impression that she was somebody that asked for permission to do anything?”

He knew his brother had a point. But they could’ve picked her up and tied her to something to keep her from doing something that dumb.

“She’s skin and bones,” said Daughtry. “She probably doesn’t have the strength to be doing things like that.”

“And yet she is,” said Denver.

Daughtry hadn’t worried that she wouldn’t work hard. That was funny. Maybe because he didn’t care whether or not he was taken advantage of. That wasn’t the point of him offering her work. But it hadn’t occurred to him that she would go overboard trying to prove that she was fit to be here. And it should have.

Because she was exactly that person. If he really thought about it. Everything she’d said added up to this. People might make assumptions about her because she had been working on the wrong side of the law, but what she did was work. She obviously believed that a person had to earn their way; she just didn’t believe that the way was necessarily what the law said.

And now here she was, going overboard trying to prove herself.

“Bix!” he called out.

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