Page 63 of Knotting the Cowboys

Sarah.

He would bring up Sarah, the traveling nurse who'd blown through our lives like a wildfire, leaving nothing but ash in her wake. The one who'd seemed perfect until she wasn't, until we realized her interest was in what we could provide, not who we were.

"Willa's nothing like her," I grit out.

"No," Mavi agrees quietly. "She's not. Which is why I'm asking. Sarah was a mistake we could recover from. Willa... if this goes wrong, we lose everything. The ranch, the pack stability, Luna's safe space. You ready for that risk?"

I stare at him for a long moment, seeing the genuine worry beneath his usual paranoid exterior.

He's not wrong to be concerned. We've built something good here, something worth protecting. But he also didn't taste her desperation, didn't feel how perfectly she fit against me, didn't hear the way she said my name like coming home.

"I'm ready," I say finally, each word deliberate. "She's worth it."

Mavi searches my face, then nods slowly.

"Alright. Just... try not to fuck in the truck where the baby can see, yeah? We're trying to raise her with some class."

"Fuck off," I mutter, but there's no heat in it.

I stride toward the house, leaving him with the truck and whatever surveillance equipment he's probably planning to install. Each step feels like a declaration, a choice made that can't be taken back.

Inside, I can hear voices—River's calm tones, Austin's laughter, Luna's happy babbling.

And somewhere in there, Willa, probably still flushed from our kiss, still tasting like possibility.

Mavi's right about one thing—there's no holding back now.

But as I reach for the door handle, I realize I don't want to hold back.

Not anymore…not with her.

Time to make the right choice, even if it burns everything down in the process.

Learning To Trust

~WILLA~

My hands are numb where they've gripped the sheets all night, but there's a heat in my chest that I recognize as something far more dangerous than guilt—it's hope, unfurling like a flower that doesn't know winter's coming.

The October morning filters through curtains I don't remember closing, painting everything in shades of amber that make the room feel like a memory I'm still living in.

My body aches in places that haven't ached in years—not from pain, but from want so acute it's carved itself into my bones.

Did it really happen?

The question circles my mind like a vulture over carrion. But I can still taste him—pine and leather and that indefinable maleness that made my knees weak.My lips feel swollen, oversensitive, like Cole's kiss branded them with invisible marks only I can feel. I press my fingers to my mouth, chasing the ghost of pressure, and a whimper escapes before I can swallow it back.

The kiss. God, the kiss that rewrote every definition I had of what kissing could be.

Not the perfunctory pecks Blake allowed when his pack was watching, performances of affection that left me cold.

Not the calculated seduction I'd endured in the early days, when each Alpha took their turn showing me what I'd gain by submitting.

Those first months in Iron Ridge, every touch was a transaction disguised as foreplay, every breathless whisper in my ear a rehearsed line from a script older than the bloodline itself.

Blake would watch from a distance first, that slow, predatory tilt of his chin that said remember, you’re being graded here.

Every time I caught his gaze, he'd meet my eyes and arch an eyebrow, not in curiosity or surprise but in the way a cop tests sobriety—measuring how much of myself I'd managed to keep hidden, how much was leaking out where someone might notice. He had a way of looking through me, weighing the sum total of my behaviors against the endless, invisible rules of his world.

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