Page 57 of Heart of the Sun

“I am being chauffeured. I’m just sitting in the front seat. Unless you want to hand me the wheel?” I nodded to the reins in his hand.

“Nah, I got it. Couldn’t nap?”

“I didn’t even try. I’m wired.”

“I’m not surprised.” He gave me another side-glance. “You really should be proud, Emily. You were brave. Amazing, actually.”

“If I knew all I had to do was chase down a speeding buggy and then hang off a horse for a few death-defying moments to win your approval,I’d have done that at the start and saved us a lot of bickering.” I elbowed him gently.

“Ha. I prefer the bickering over the death-defying stunts, but…we worked together when we needed to.”

Warmth traveled along my skin. Why did Tuck’s approval make me feel so damn glow-y inside? All the applause, all the accolades, and at the moment, I wasn’t sure if any of that had felt much better. Which was concerning, honestly, but…another of those vague thoughts I simply wasn’t going to deal with now.

“Do you think Lavina is going to be okay?” I asked after a moment.

He was quiet for a few beats. “I don’t know her, but I hope she’s strong enough to put whatever happened behind her. And I hope she has a mother or a mother figure who can help her through it.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “That’s going to be important.”

“How are you doing regarding the man you…”

“Stabbed in the neck?” I sighed. “I feel oddly…okay. I mean, maybe other emotions will come. But after seeing how they victimized those two people. After seeing the helpless anger on Abram’s face and looking into Lavina’s haunted eyes… And knowing that what I did, whatwedid, stopped it from continuing… I’m not going to feel guilty about that, because if given the chance, I’d do it again.”

He looked over at me, pride clear on his face, along with a bit of surprise, and that same inner glow infused me. His thigh rubbed against mine and inspired a different kind of heat, and I cleared my throat and looked away.Your boyfriend is sleeping behind you, Em. Stop getting turned on by Tuck.

And maybe this was a byproduct of the adrenaline surge too, but I suspected it was not because I’d responded to him this way before, though until this moment, I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it.

“Speaking of good deeds, I didn’t get a chance to tell you that what you did for Brent in Silver Creek,that was good work too. The Goodfellows were obviously so grateful and…you were generous without knowing it could benefit you as much as it did.” He’d taken the lead with us, ensured we had food and water and were safe, and he’d taken the opportunity to help others along the way too, whenever he had the skills.

“Thanks, Em.” We were on a quiet stretch of road where we hadn’t seen travelers on foot in a while and we swayed along, the surroundings made dreamy by the pink-hued sky. We were both quiet for a moment, our thighs touching as the horse moved steadily in front of us. “You want to hear something kinda funny?”

I glanced at his profile and nodded.

“The reason I knew how to set that bone in particular was because I performed the same maneuver in prison.”

I gave him a confused smile. “What? Why?”

“A buddy of mine, this dude who’d had my back a few times, had gotten injured in a fight out in the yard and dislocated his elbow. Going to the infirmary would have raised questions and he only had a few months of his sentence left. So, I got this medical book out of the library and learned how to pop the bone back into place.”

“Oh my gosh, of course you did.”

He chuckled. “I didn’t tell Sheriff Goodfellow that. I thought the felon thing might concern him more than letting someone with a small amount of veterinary experience touch his son.”

The felon thing.That phrase echoed. But I could see why the coincidence of the dislocation pleased Tuck. I liked it too, the idea that even if the knowledge one acquired was due to a negative or painful circumstance, it was still knowledge and it might come in handy when you least expected it. Even the hardest parts of our lives provided positives from which to draw.

I wondered what this whole experience would leave me with.

And beyond that, I wondered what Tuck had done to end up in prison,wondered if he’d tell me. But knew that if he did, it would be because he’d decided to trust me for more than just a fleeting moment. I was surprised he’d brought up his time behind bars at all and sensed it might be some small surrender that perhaps he didn’t even realize.

But in any case, for the first time, it felt like I was talking toTuck.Not the man I was hiring to be my bodyguard, or the stranger I’d once known but didn’t any longer. Tuck.My friend.

There you are. You’re still in there.Something about that made me want to smile. And cry. Because it made me realize just how much I’d missed him.

“Anyway,” I said quickly, attempting to move my complicated, disconcerting thoughts aside, “we’re lucky we have you on our side.” I hadn’t seen it because I’d been tied inside the compartment, but I’d heard his running footsteps coming and could still picture him as he must have looked storming toward the buggy at a dead sprint and practically flying onto it in order to rescue us. “You’d be an asset in any situation right about now,” I said. He was strong and smart, and he had an obvious comfort level in this new precarious situation that not many others likely did. “People everywhere could use your help,” I said. “So…thank you for being…here for us. Charlie and I are really grateful.”

I smiled over at him, but his face seemed to harden minutely before he said softly, “It’s nothing.” And then he looked away.

That evening, we came upon an old, dilapidated barn that had clearly been abandoned long ago. If there had once been a house nearby, it’d long since been torn down. We unhooked the horse and Tuck tied her near the side of the structure that provided her some patchy grass to munch and a few puddles of water from what must have been a recent rain. Then we slipped through the gap in the double doors and entered the space, pearly light filtering through the multitude of gaps in the wood. I watched Tuck move through, his head tilted back as though he was assessing whether or not the ceiling was likely to fall in.And though it had obviously gone unused for what must be decades, it seemed sound enough to sleep in for one night.

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