We packed up and drove down the mountain with her hand in mine and the radio playing something with steel guitar and the windows cracked and the valley opening up below us as the road curved toward home.
The ranch. The Lodge. The kitchen where Maisie was probably destroying Dad at chess through sheer force of personality. The paddock where Starlight was waiting. The porch where the light was always on.
"Clay," she said.
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For waiting."
I squeezed her hand. The road straightened and the ranch gate appeared and beyond it the land — our land, Blackwood land, the ground I'd been born on and built on and would build on for the rest of my life — spread out green and gold under the February sun.
We pulled up to the Lodge. Maisie was on the porch. She was wearing Dad's hat — it covered her entire head and most of her shoulders — and she was shouting something about checkmate.
Callie laughed. I parked. We got out.
The porch light was on.
It would stay on.
Chapter 25
Clay
I stood at the south paddock fence and watched the yearlings move through the morning light and thought about the man I used to be.
Eighteen months ago, I'd been standing in an arena with a championship buckle and a body that was done and a question I couldn't answer. Now the buckle was in a drawer, and the body still ached — it always would — but the aches were fence-post aches, not bull-riding aches. Different muscles for a different life. A better life. A life I'd built with my own hands on Blackwood land, post by post, morning by morning.
The breeding program was real. Blackwood-bred quarter horses were gaining a reputation that stretched past the county line. Our first auction brought buyers from three states. Dale Whitfield had come back twice and brought friends. The filly Maisie had named — Starlight, of course — was showing cutting horse potential that had Jack grinning every time he worked her. Maggie's laminated breeding plan had turned into a laminated five-year strategy, which had turned into a laminated ten-yearvision, because Maggie didn't do anything by halves, and neither did this family.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
A text from Momma's phone. But not from Momma. Grammy Lou had done the school drop-off this morning — volunteered, she'd said, because she wanted to take Maisie for pancakes first. In reality, it was part of the plan. Keep the spy close. Keep her away from Callie so she wouldn't accidentally blow the operation before lunchtime. Maisie had clearly gotten hold of the phone before being dropped off at the school gate.
Opperashun propozal is a go.
I grinned. Leaned against the fence. Read it again. The spelling was devastating. The intent was clear.
We'd been planning this for a month.
It started with Maisie. Because Maisie came first. Before the kiss, before the dates, before any of it — there was a little girl in pink cowboy boots who'd climbed into my lap at a party and told me I was her cowboy, and everything that came after grew from that.
I'd found her in the barn on a Tuesday afternoon. She was sitting on an upturned bucket, brushing Starlight's mane and telling her about a boy named Oliver who'd been sent to the thinking bench again for putting a beetle in the art supplies.
I crouched down to her level. The way I had the first night. The way I always did.
"Maisie, I need to talk to you about something important."
She put the brush down. Gave me her full attention. Six years old and she already had the Callie look — the one that saidI'm listening and I'm assessing and you'd better be serious because I don't have time for nonsense.
"I want to ask your mommy to marry me," I said. "But I need your help. You in?"
Her face went still. Not the bouncing, chattering, seven-expressions-in-two-seconds Maisie. Still. She looked at me with an expression I'd never seen on her — careful, serious, the face of a child who'd learned to check before she hoped.
"Does that mean," she said, very quietly, "that you can be my daddy?"
