"We're gonna be okay, baby."
The Civic rolled past the sign and into Copper Creek, and for the first time in six years, what came next was mine to decide.
I almost believed it.
Chapter 1
Clay
I was having the best night of my life, and my shoulder was trying to ruin it.
The Blackwood Ranch was lit up like a county fair — string lights crisscrossing the yard between the Lodge and the barn, with music pouring out of the speakers Hunter had wired up that afternoon. Half of Copper Creek was spread across the property with drinks in their hands and grins on their faces, and I was in the middle of it like the sun everything was orbiting. Which sounded arrogant. I knew it sounded arrogant. But when you've just won the PBR World Championship — when you've stood on that platform in Fort Worth with the buckle in your hand and the roar of twenty thousand people in your bones — you're allowed one night of being the center of the universe.
I was milking it. Obviously.
"Clay! Speech!”
I chuckled, shaking my head. "Not a chance, Dottie."
"Clay Blackwood, I watched you ride your first sheep at the junior rodeo, and I will get a speech out of you if it kills me."
"It might kill both of us, ma'am."
She swatted my arm and handed me a beer, and I grinned at her because grinning was what I did. It was my whole thing. The grin, the wink, the easy charm that made women lean in and my brothers roll their eyes so hard you could hear it. I'd been Clay Blackwood, Professional Charmer, since I was old enough to figure out that a smile got you further than a fist, and I'd been Clay Blackwood, Bull Rider, since I was nineteen and too stupid to know that climbing on the back of two thousand pounds of rage was a bad life plan.
Now I was Clay Blackwood, World Champion.
It had a ring to it. It had a belt buckle to match.
But underneath the noise — underneath the music and the laughter and the hands slapping my back and the women practically throwing themselves at me — my shoulder was grinding. The left one that the bull had clipped in round two at the finals, when I'd come off at a bad angle and hit the dirt with my arm pinned under me. I'd popped it back, taped it up, and rode the next round on adrenaline and stubbornness. That was three days ago. The adrenaline was gone. The stubbornness was holding, but barely.
My knee hadn't been right since Tulsa. My ribs were bruised from the finals — deep, dull aches that flared every time I laughed, which meant they'd been flaring all night. I rolled my neck and felt something grind in a way that thirty-one-year-old necks shouldn't grind, and for one second — just one, quick, before I shoved it down — a thought slid through:
What comes after this?
I took a pull of my beer and let the crowd swallow me back up. Tonight wasn't for that.
Wyatt was leaning against the paddock fence with a beer he was nursing slow and Ivy tucked under his arm like she'd been built to fit there. My oldest brother had always been the steadyone — the first to show up, the last to leave, the one who made sure everyone else was okay before he sat down. Ivy had made him lighter, happier, more likely to laugh at himself, but he'd always been warm underneath. He looked at me. Held my gaze for a beat. Then he grinned — wide, proud, the big-brother grin that still made me feel ten years old in the best possible way.
"There he is," he said. "World champ. You’re gonna be insufferable now,” he added with a teasing groan.
“We both know I was insufferable before." I hit him with the eyebrows — the full double-raise, the one that made women laugh and Wyatt want to hit me. "Now I've got a shiny new buckle to back it up."
He laughed and pulled me into a hug — solid, real, the kind Wyatt gave where he clapped your back hard enough to mean it. Ivy squeezed my arm when he let go. "He's been bragging about you to everyone all day. He told the gas station attendant."
"I did not tell the gas station attendant."
Ivy peered up at my brother, brown eyes glinting in that knowing way. ”You told the gas station attendant, Wyatt."
He shrugged. Didn't deny it again. That was Wyatt — he'd never say he was proud in some big speech, but he'd tell a stranger at a gas pump.
Liam appeared next. My brother — technically adopted, fully Blackwood, built like a man who spent his days working both the ranch and the Ranger station — pulled me into a hug that lifted me off the ground by an inch. Close to my ear, so only I heard: "Proud of you, bud. Real proud."
Something hit me that I wasn't going to examine at a party. I slapped his back and pulled away. "Don't go soft on me, Ranger."
He grinned. Liam grinned a lot these days — Stephanie had done that to him, moved into the ranch, and cracked him open until smiling was his default setting instead of his exception.
I looked toward the barn. Hunter was there — half in shadow, crouched by the barn door, doing something to the gate latch with a wrench and a headlamp. Nobody had asked him to fix it. Nobody ever asked Hunter to fix anything — he just saw what was broken and showed up with the right tool.
