Page 19 of Knotting the Cowboys

If there’s a trace of vanity in the way he ducks his head or smooths it back, I can’t find it. His jaw is shadowed by an impeccable five o’clock scruff, more salt than pepper at his chin, and the effect is less “grizzled movie sheriff” and more “the manyou call when your house is on fire and you want your pets saved first.”

But it’s his eyes that pin me, and I mean really pin me, like a bug on a collector’s card. They’re slate-gray, shot through with hints of blue, and behind them lives a steel-trap intelligence that I instantly, irrationally, want to impress. He takes me in, head to toe, in a single sweep that is neither lecherous nor dismissive—just coldly, precisely efficient.

It’s obvious he’s the leader here, not because anyone told me, but because the air around him rearranges itself to make room for the fact.

The shock of his scent hits me second and hard: sharp pine resin, old leather, and something softer beneath—maybe the ghost of aftershave or the memory of a campfire. It’s a scent that wraps around my ribs and makes my heart clench in a way I can’t afford. The Omega part of me, the part I’ve spent years duct-taping behind my ribs, catalogues the chemistry faster than I can blink:dominant Alpha, unmated, unhurried, but vigilant.The instinct in me responds before my brain can draw the brakes. A spiral of recognition, desire, and what I dare acknowledge is dangerously close to hope skids through my nervous system.

I make myself breathe.

He stands a deliberate three feet from my bumper, feet planted in mud-caked boots, arms crossed with a mechanic’s indifference.

His posture says “don’t fuck around,” but his face—fine-boned, wide-browed, almost handsome if you stripped away the day’s exhaustion—softens just enough to suggest he’s not here to run me off the land. Still, I keep my hands visible, gripping my keys like a talisman.

My whole body remembers the lesson:never underestimate a man who can hurt you.

He waits, and in the silence I notice how my boots are sinking into the gravel, how the air carries the promise of snow, how my hands are trembling just enough to betray me if he looks closely. He doesn’t. Instead, his gaze flickers past my shoulder to the battered Honda and back again, an assessment so practiced it might as well be a handshake.

Behind him, I catch movement—a second man, slightly shorter and more slender, with hair as black as the midnight sky.

He approaches with the unhurried, unflinching gait of a veterinarian—someone who’s spent years bringing his hands up to shattered bones and twitching muscle, who’s learned to move nearer not with force but gravity. Each step broadcasts intent, but not threat. I recognize it instantly: the way he keeps his palms open, slightly flexed, so even a wounded thing knows he means to help. There’s a gentleness in his carriage so pronounced it almost hurts to look at; the living proof of what rescue looks like when rescue is done right.

He’s younger than the first, but not by much. Maybe thirty? His skin is the pale, luminous kind that freckles but never tans, and there’s a smoothness to his jawline that gives him the appearance of perpetual aftershave, even though he clearly hasn’t bothered with a razor today. The contrast between his fair skin and his hair—black as the inside of a well, parted just off-center and falling in a perfect, ink-dark crescent over his brow—gives him an improbable, almost cinematic beauty. If the first man is a slab of unyielding granite, this one is all angles and patience, a stone honed to a blade.

His eyes startle me. Lush, saturated green—the precise hue of grass after a thunderstorm or those ancient glass bottles you find half-buried behind the barn. They’re bright, patient, and unflinching, and I can tell even from this distance that they’re scanning, noting, matching my face to some internal database. His gaze is so searching, so appraising, that for a second Iwonder if I’m bleeding or limping or otherwise in distress. I check my hands, my knees: no visible wounds. Still, the effect is the same as stepping onto an exam table and having the doctor’s fingers on your pulse before you’ve explained why you’re there.

When he gets close enough that I catch a breath of his scent, it nearly floors me. Not the brute-force pine of the first man, but something subtler and more intoxicating—sage, rain on stone, and the faintest thread of sugar maple. It’s the smell of a storm rolling in over a hayfield, of possibility and shelter and something else, too, something stitched through with longing. For a lightning-flash second I see myself through his eyes, a stranger with one good shoe and a pair of suitcases held together by bungee cords. I look like I belong anywhere but here, and yet his face doesn’t register even a flicker of judgment. Just curiosity, and that unwavering calm.

He stops a full pace behind the first man—close, but careful not to crowd—and after a beat, his lips curve into what I’m surprised to realize is a real smile. Not the cold, professional sort that clerks and functionaries use to keep you moving, but something softer, with a trace of mischief. It’s as if he’s set himself the challenge of figuring me out without asking a single question. He doesn’t say anything, just stands with his hands in his pockets, shoulders relaxed, eyes never leaving my face.

In the span of six seconds, he has already built a file on me, and I can sense him updating it, live. His expression is so open it borders on clinical, but the warmth is unmistakable:something about it makes me want to spill my entire life story right there in the driveway.

I feel the urge to speak first, to offer some explanation for my existence, before I even register the absurdity of that.

The compulsion to fill the silence is nearly overwhelming, but the words won’t come.

His quiet patience amplifies every insecurity I carry: the battered exterior, the way my clothes still smell faintly of engine oil and sweet scent of cinnamon and coffee, the quaver in my jaw as I try not to cry or hyperventilate.

He sees it all, and in his eyes, I swear, there’s not pity but a kind of fierce, impossible understanding.

A movement by the barn interrupts the silent standoff—a third figure, taller even than the first, but lean where the others are solid. His hair is a mess of dirty blond, and from across the yard, I can make out a posture that doesn’t so much walk as stalk. He’s pacing the barn’s perimeter with restless, prowling energy, every so often glancing over at the gathering by the house but never quite meeting anyone’s gaze. There’s something about him—maybe the way he rolls his weight from heel to toe or the set of his jaw—that tells me he’s the kind of man who doesn’t do well with waiting.

Or new people in his space?

Trailing the barn-walker, or maybe keeping tabs on him, is a fourth presence.

This one is slighter, not just in build but in affect: his blond hair almost white in the sun, freckled arms folded in a loose, off-guard way. He’s stationed himself on the bottom step of the porch, half-seated, half-leaning against the post, and his smile is so wide and guileless it takes me a minute to process it. It’s the smile of a fourth-grade class clown—unhardened, a little too eager, but somehow endearing. The kid brother in every family sitcom, except here he’s at least twenty-two and dressed in worn denim and boots that look like hand-me-downs.

The effect is so wholesome it almost sets my teeth on edge.

All four of them are watching me, all in their different ways. The first—the Alpha, that old, mythic capital-A kind—stands his ground, arms crossed, face unreadable. The second, the man with the rain-green eyes and gentle hands, does nothing butkeep watching, as if willing me to find my own words. The third circles at a distance, feigning distraction but always aware of the group’s center of gravity. And the fourth, the porch-sitter with the impossible grin, seems to vibrate with a restless, sunny energy, like he’s seconds away from leaping up and tackling me with a hug.

I realize, with a cold flush, that this is all some kind of test. Not a threat—not exactly—but an evaluation. The way a hospital team might take in a new patient, quickly but thoroughly, each expert bringing their own lens to the assessment. My heart is pounding so hard I’m sure they can hear it, even across the gravel. My Omega senses, dulled by years of city living and good old-fashioned repression, start to buzz at the edges, warning me of something I can’t name.

It occurs to me, belatedly, that I have never in my life stood in front of four men who looked like this—all different, yet bound together by some invisible thread of familiarity. For half a breath I wonder if I’m in a movie, or dreaming, or hallucinating from stress and too many gas station energy shots. But no, this is real: the Montana sun, the scrape of gravel under my boots, the impossibly alive ranch that’s supposed to be mine.

My hands tremble as I fumble for my bag, the motion drawing their eyes to me again.

The first man—Alpha, I remind myself—finally speaks, and his voice matches everything else about him: low, steady, edged with granite.

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