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can’t.” She squeezed his arm and smiled. “Got to get back on the horse again.”
    “A cabin break-in isn’t exactly the same thing as getting tossed from a pony. Plus, you’ll have to wake up the little man.”
    “Too late to worry about that,” she murmured as she heard her son calling her name from down the hall. She followed the sound to the spare room, where Nix had set up the sofa bed for Logan, piling pillows around him to keep him from rolling too close to the edge. Logan looked sleepy and cranky, but the watery smile he flashed when he caught sight of her face made her heart melt into a sticky little pool of motherly love in the center of her chest. “Mama.”
    “You ready to sleep in your own bed tonight?” She plucked him from the tangle of sheets and buried her nose in his neck, reveling in the soft baby smell of him.
    “Yep,” he answered with an exaggerated nod that banged his little forehead against her chin. “Ow!” He giggled as he rubbed his forehead.
    “Watch where you put that noggin, mister,” she answered with a laugh of her own, pressing a kiss against his fingers. “Let’s go home, okay?”
    “I’ll get his things.” Nix picked up the scattered toys she’d packed for Logan while she carried him out to the front room. Nix carried the two small backpacks for her and put them in the front seat of the Jeep while she strapped Logan into his car seat in the back.
    “If you decide you’d rather come back here, no matter what time it is, you pack up the little fellow and come on back. I’ll keep the sofa bed ready.” Nix reached through the open back door and gave Logan a head ruffle. Logan grinned up at him and patted his curls back down.
    “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, although nothing short of a full-on assault was going to drive her out of her own house. She wasn’t going to play the damsel in distress, not even for someone like Nix, who had only her best interests at heart.
    She’d made too many decisions in her life already based on what other people wanted her to do. She wasn’t going to ignore her own instincts any longer.
    Still, her steely resolve took a hit when Logan’s sleepy voice piped up from the backseat as she turned onto the winding road to her cabin. “Mama, are the mean men gonna be there tonight? I don’t like them.”
    She put the brakes on, slowing the Jeep to a standstill in the middle of the deserted road. “I don’t like them either,” she admitted, beginning to question her motives for taking her son back to the cabin so soon after the break-in. Was she willfully putting him in danger just to bolster her own desire to stand on her own two feet?
    But she couldn’t tuck her tail and run away from their home. It was one of the few things she could call her own in the whole world. Her great-grandfather had built the cabin over a hundred years ago with wood he’d chopped himself and the sweat of his own brow. Her grandfather had added to it over the years—indoor plumbing, extra rooms as the family had expanded. When he had died, he’d left the place to Briar’s mother, who’d deeded it to Briar as a wedding gift.
    It was one of the few things she had left now of her mother. That cabin and twenty-four years of good memories.
    She couldn’t let fear drive her away from that legacy. For her own sake and especially for Logan’s.
    “I won’t let the bad men scare you anymore,” she said firmly, hoping she was telling the truth. Because as much as she’d tried to hide it the night before at the hospital, Dalton Hale’s words had weighed heavily on her. Not the thought of Johnny’s infidelity—she may have been dismayed by the information, but she hadn’t been surprised. But the idea that he might have gotten himself tangled up in Wayne Cortland’s criminal activities—that was the notion that had nagged her every waking hour since Hale first brought up the subject.
    Johnny hadn’t turned out to be the strong, solid man of