“It’s simple,” Brynne answered lightly. “Neither one of us would have had time to become who we are. Did you know a person’s frontal cortex doesn’t stop developing until they’re twenty-five years old?”

“Excellent reasoning,” Eli replied, “but I think all that legitimate sex would have made up for an underdeveloped frontal cortex, at least a little.”

“I don’t agree,” Brynne said, with a slight smile, “but I get that men under twenty-five—and often over twenty-five—don’t think with that particular part of their anatomy anyway, so maybe it doesn’t matter.”

Eli’s grin broadened. “You may have a point there, Bailey. I’ll take it under advisement.”

Brynne reflected in the privacy of her own mind that, right about now, she’d rather be taken under something quite different from advisement. What she said aloud was, “Take off your shirt.”

Eli looked pleasantly startled. “Well,” he replied, “all righty, then.”

Now it was Brynne who laughed. “Your shoulders are too close to your ears, Sheriff. You need a back rub.”

Eli removed his flannel shirt, tossed it over the back of a chair. “I won’t turn that down,” he said, reaching for one of the chairs at Brynne’s kitchen table.

He turned it around and sat astride it.

Brynne stood behind him, began to work the muscle in Eli’s neck and shoulders with the strong fingers of an artist and a cook.

He groaned, rested his forehead on his arms, folded across the back of the chair. He was still wearing his T-shirt.

“Hard day?” Brynne asked quietly. Of course, the question was rhetorical, since that much was perfectly obvious, given the way he and Melba had rushed out of Sara’s house earlier.

His response was muffled because he didn’t raise his head. “Worse than hard,” he replied. “Freddie Lansing hanged himself in that old barn on J.P.’s ranch.”

Brynne had only encountered Freddie once or twice, in passing, and she’d recoiled inwardly each time. She knew he’d threatened Eric Worth and, by extension, his younger sister, in the text Eric had shown Eli the night before.

Sara had filled her in on the details, explaining that she’d taken the threat seriously, and hired Dan Summers as a bodyguard.

“That’s awful,” she said, and she meant it, even though a part of her was deeply relieved that Sara and her children were no longer in harm’s way.

Eli sighed. “I despised that kid,” he said, relaxing slowly as Brynne’s fingers worked to loosen rigid muscles. “But I sure as hell wouldn’t have wished him dead. His folks are destroyed. Freddie wasn’t much, but he was all Fred, Sr., and Gretchen had.”

Brynne pressed her thumbs into a hard knot between Eli’s shoulder blades. “I feel sorry for them,” she replied honestly.