"Hunt!" I called across the yard.
He looked up. Gave me a chin lift and a half-smile that was sixty percent shy, forty percent pleased to be noticed. Held up the wrench.Busy.
That was Hunter. The quiet one. Somebody needed to start paying attention to that guy. Not tonight — he'd hate the spotlight. But someday.
I made a mental note to call Luke tomorrow. My youngest brother was off at college studying business management — which was a polite way of saying he was getting a degree while figuring out how to avoid coming home. He'd texted a single line:Knew you'd win. Now retire before you break something important.Little shit.
Momma found me near the dessert table, which was a strategic error on my part because Momma near a dessert table was a woman with leverage.
"There's my champion," she said, and her hands were on my face before I could dodge — warm palms against my jaw, the scent of vanilla and butter that lived in her skin, those brown eyes reading the fine print on my soul.
"Hey, Momma."
"Let me look at you."
"You've been looking at me for thirty-one years."
"And I'll look for thirty-one more, so hold still."
I held still. You didn't argue with Louisa Blackwood.
She studied me. Then, simple and true: "I'm proud of you."
But there was something else in her eyes. She'd noticed the quiet second at the arena after the win — when the crowd was onits feet, and I should've been whooping, but instead I'd gone still for a beat too long. Of course, she'd noticed. Momma noticed everything.
She didn't push. That wasn't her style. She planted.
"Maggie and Jack's breeding program is really coming along," she said, like she was commenting on the weather. "Those quarter horses Jack brought in last spring — beautiful animals. They could use someone with your eye for livestock. You've always had that gift, Clay. Seeing what an animal could become before it became it." She sipped her wine. "Whenever you have time, of course."
The sentence sat in the air like a door she'd cracked open and was pretending she hadn't.
Then, casual as breathing: "That young woman with the little girl seemed lovely. At the rodeo. The one you couldn't stop staring at."
I almost choked on my beer. "I wasn't staring."
"Honey, you were staring so hard I thought you'd strain something." She patted my cheek. "Don't worry. It's a good look on you."
She drifted off toward Ivy, leaving me with the distinct feeling that I'd just been managed by a professional.
That's when I saw her.
Savannah Tate came through the ranch gate first — Weston's wife, all blonde hair and lawyer energy. Weston was behind her, my best friend since the junior circuit, and then my mentor, laughing at something she'd said.
But behind them, slightly apart —
Her.
Time didn't slow down. That's a lie people tell. What happened was worse — time kept moving at exactly the same speed, and everything else stopped mattering. There was just a woman walking into the Blackwood Ranch with one hand on herdaughter's shoulder and the other swinging loose at her side, and every thought in my head went white.
She was blonde and petite and built like God had taken his sweet time and enjoyed every minute of it. The jeans she was wearing were doing something to me that should've required a permission slip. Her hips, the curve of her waist, the way that shirt fell just right — my brain went from world champion to village idiot in about half a second. I'd seen beautiful women. I'd seen alotof beautiful women. But I'd never gone physically stupid looking at one.
Guess there was a first time for everything.
Then the little one spotted me. Green eyes wide, mouth open with a gasp. "Clay! Clay! Clay!"
Maisie Monroe. Five years old, blonde ringlets exploding in every direction, pink cowboy boots I'd have recognized from space. She broke free from her mother's hand and launched herself across the yard like a heat-seeking missile in a tutu, and I had about two seconds to set my beer on the fence post before she collided with my legs at full velocity.
"You said you'd teach me to ride! You promised! A pinky promise is arealpromise!"
