He stood carefully, not wanting to wake her, and slipped outside. The yard was quiet. No riders on the horizon, no tracks in the frost. He breathed out slowly, relief mixing with the cold air. Maybe they'd given up.
Maybe the stand he'd made had been enough to send them looking elsewhere. Or maybe they were just biding their time. He went about the morning chores, feeding the horses and checking the stock. When he came back inside, Ayla was awake, stoking the fire. "Quiet out there?" she asked.
"So far?" She nodded, but the tension didn't leave her shoulders. The days that followed fell into a new pattern. They worked hard during daylight, pushing through the tasks that winter demanded, but they stayed close to the ranch. No trips to town, no unnecessary risks.
At night, they took turns keeping watch, though more often than not, they both ended up awake, sitting by the fire and talking in low voices. Wyatt learned more about her in those quiet hours than he had in all the weeks before. She'd grown up in a small community to the east, the daughter of a woman who'd raised her alone after her father disappeared. She'd learned to work young, taking any job she could find to help make ends meet. When her mother died 2 years ago, she'd been left with nothing.
No family, no home, just the clothes on her back and a hunger to survive. "I thought if I kept moving, I'd find somewhere that felt right," she said one night. Somewhere I could belong. But every place I went, I was just passing through. A stranger invisible.
"You're not invisible here," Wyatt said. She looked at him, her eyes reflecting the firelight. "No," she said softly. "I'm not." In turn, Wyatt told her about the ranch, about how he'd bought it 10 years ago with money saved from years of trail driving and rough work.
He'd thought it would be a fresh start, a place to build something permanent, but the isolation had been harder than he'd expected. The winters were brutal. The summers weren't much better. And being alone wore on a man in ways he hadn't anticipated. "So why stay?"
Ayla asked. "Stubbornness, mostly," Wyatt said with a dry smile. "And pride. Didn't want to admit I'd made a mistake." "Is it a mistake?"
He thought about that. A month ago he might have said yes, but now sitting across from her, the cabin warm and the silence comfortable, he wasn't so sure. "Ask me again in the spring," he said. One afternoon, while they were mucking out the stalls, Ayla paused and leaned on her pitchfork. "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure." "Why haven't you asked me about the details of what happened before I got here?" Wyatt straightened, wiping sweat from his brow. "Figured it's your business. You want to tell me, you will.
You don't, that's fine, too." "Most people would have asked." "I'm not most people." She smiled just a little. "No, you're not."