When at Red Creek Book 1: When the Dust Settles
Author
Oonagh C. K.
Reads
17.8K
Chapters
31
Emmeline never left Montana, but Cole did—ten years ago, chasing rodeo dreams and leaving her behind. Now he’s back for his father’s funeral, colliding with the life she built without him. Her family ranch is on the brink of collapse, and Cole is hiding a career-ending injury that could end everything. One storm, one night in a line shack, and the walls between them begin to crumble. But Cole has a job offer in Wyoming, Emmeline has a ranch drowning in debt, and a safe, steady future within reach. When the world keeps pulling them apart, can two broken people risk everything for love?
Chapter 1: Time Did Him a Favor
EMMELINE
The second I looked up from my whiskey sour, it was already too late.
He was in the doorway of Dusty’s, six-foot-two, filling out a navy button-down like it had been cut for him specifically, a cowboy hat tilted just enough to look cool and distant. His hair was longer than I remembered, dark, curling a little at the collar.
He’d grown stubble that traced the jaw I’d once spent an embarrassing amount of time studying in the back row of AP English. He looked like himself and not like himself at the same time, and something about that specific combination was the most disorienting thing I’d ever seen.
But it was his eyes that stopped my heart. Even from across the bar, even after ten years, those hazel eyes could still undo me.
Cole Hayes. Back in Red Creek. Back in my bar, on my Friday night, looking like time had done him a personal favor.
“Why is he here?” I heard Cassie muttering next to me. Alcohol had already begun to slur her voice.
“Funeral.” The word came out flat. Because of course he had come to his own father’s funeral. Who wouldn’t?
“Em, breathe.” Her hand closed around mine on the table. “You’re white as a sheet.”
She must have been right. I could feel how the blood was evacuating my face like it had better places to be. Smart blood.
I should have left the second I recognized him. I was not in the state of handling him or whatever feelings were now running wild in my heart and stomach. So I told my legs to stand.
But the second I was upright, he looked over.
The moment our eyes met, something moved across his face. He looked like a man who had braced for impact and found the blow landed differently than expected.
I watched his hand still on the brim of his hat. His shoulders went rigid beneath that perfectly fitted shirt. Then his eyes moved over me. Slowly. Carefully. Nobody had ever looked at me like that. Nobody except him.
For one suspended, horrible second, I was eighteen again, standing in the school parking lot, watching him load a bag into the back of his truck while I pretended I wasn’t watching at all.
Then his brother Mason, who I found standing next to him, said something that broke the spell he was in. Cole replied and clapped him on the shoulder.
And began walking directly toward me.
Every step he took tightened something low in my stomach. I had rehearsed this. In the shower, in the car, in the half-awake hours of too many sleepless nights, I had rehearsed exactly what I would say if I ever saw Cole Hayes again.
Something cool. Something unbothered. Something that made it abundantly clear I had moved on so thoroughly that his name was just a word to me now.
“Emmeline.”
“Cole.” I folded my arms. Useless armor.
“I didn’t think I would see you here.” His voice was deep.
And then I heard myself start talking. Too fast, too bright. Nothing like I had planned. “Well, we’re just having a girls’ night. Me and Cassie.” I grabbed her hand and looked at her like I was pleading for help. “It was really great seeing you. Have a great time back home. Say hi to your mom from me.”
The silence that followed was the most humiliating two seconds of my adult life.
“Okay,” he said quietly with a polite nod. Then he turned on his heel and walked away, exactly the way he’d walked away before, without fighting for us, and I sank back into the booth before my knees could announce their resignation.
“Have a great time back home?” Cassie stared at me, shocked. “His father just died, Em.”
“I know.”
“You told him to say hi to his mother—”
“I know.”
She pressed her lips together. Then, more gently: “Honey, he looked like he’d seen a ghost.”
I stared at the watery remains of my drink. Maybe he had. Maybe we both had. I need another drink, I decided, and downed the rest of the whiskey sour in one long, burning pull.
***
The cool night air hit my flushed skin like mercy after way too many drinks and too many hours of avoiding Cole in the crowded bar. I leaned against the side of my truck in Dusty’s parking lot, eyes closed, trying to remember how a person breathed normally. This night had been too much for me.
“Emmeline.”
Out here his voice was different. In the bar it had been swallowed by noise and crowd and the chaos of my own heartbeat. Out here in the dark it was just his voice, low and unhurried, and it landed differently than it should have.
But why did he use my full name? Only my mother used my full name.
I didn’t open my eyes. “What do you want, Cole?”
“You planning on driving like that?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re drunk.”
He was closer than I’d expected when I opened my eyes. He’d taken his hat off, and his hair was tousled like he’d been running his hands through it. My brain was in overdrive while we stood there staring at each other. It all felt familiar, and yet I felt like I was standing there with a stranger.
How do you behave when the last time you saw each other was over a decade ago, when you kissed goodbye? Back then I could have traced every single part of him with my eyes closed. I’d known the exact weight of his hand.
The precise way he laughed when something genuinely surprised him, different from his easy social laugh. The way he held a coffee cup, the way he looked at the sky before rain, the way he said my name when everything was fine and the different way he said it when it wasn’t.
And now he was standing three feet away, and the reality was that I knew none of it. A whole life had happened to him, and I hadn’t been there for any of it.
He was a stranger wearing the face of the person I’d once loved most.
“I can take you home.”
“That stopped being your job,” I said. The words came out cleaner than I felt. “The day you left. That’s when it stopped being your job.”
Something moved across his face. It looked like it hurt.
Good, said the small, mean part of me.
“I know,” he said quietly. “But I can’t watch you drive home like this.”
“Then don’t watch.”
I stepped toward the driver side.
The pavement made a small, treacherous shift beneath my feet, and I grabbed the door handle harder than intended, and then his hand caught my elbow, and the world stopped doing the thing where it moved.
We stood there. Neither of us said anything, and I was overwhelmingly aware of every inch of distance that wasn’t between us.
His hand on my elbow was warm. Steady in that way he’d always been steady when it mattered. He had always had that particular quality of stillness. The world could be falling apart at the edges, and Cole Hayes would still be the thing you reached for. I’d forgotten that. Or I’d tried to forget it, which wasn’t the same thing at all.
He wasn’t letting go of my elbow.
I wasn’t pulling away.
This is a terrible idea, said the small sober part of me that was still operational somewhere in the back of my brain, very far away.
“You are as stubborn as you always were,” he said. Low. Almost to himself. And the ghost of a smile crossed his face, and it landed like a fist.
I know that smile, some ruined part of me thought. I still know that one.
Before I could answer, Cassie appeared around the corner, and we took a step back as I steadied myself.
“There you are; I’ve been looking everywhere—” She stopped. Looked between us. Did a very fast calculation. “Oh. Great.”
“I’m driving her home,” Cole said.
“Like hell you are.” Cassie stepped between us.
“Cass,” I heard myself say. “It’s okay. He can drive us both.”
She gave me the look. I deserved the look.
He drove the way he always had: loose grip on the wheel, easy in the silence, muscle memory guiding him through turns he’d made countless times in his old beat-up Ford.
Cassie sat between us in the cab, filling the quiet with updates on people we’d gone to school with, and I kept my shoulder pressed against the door and stared out the window and tried very hard not to be aware of exactly how close he was.
After we dropped her off, neither of us spoke.
He pulled up in front of the house and cut the engine. Neither of us moved. We just sat there in the dim glow of the dashboard lights, the weight of all that time filling the space between us.
“The house looks the same,” he said finally.
“Dad doesn’t like change.” I fumbled with my seat belt, trying to ignore the way my heart was racing. “Nothing much changes around here.”
“Some things do.”
“Do they?” I asked. Softer than I meant to.
Before he could answer, I was getting out of the truck.
