CHAPTER 1
JACE
The bay gelding in trailer six still wouldn't back out.
He'd planted his hooves on the trailer floor with the particular stubbornness of an animal who'd decided the world outside the trailer was worse than the trailer. Eleven horses already unloaded, three vendor trucks moved, one panicked volunteer talked down off a bull pen rail, and it was still ten minutes shy of seven a.m. The gelding was the tenth thing on my morning checklist and the first thing that wasn't going to work on schedule.
“Easy.” I kept one hand flat against his shoulder, my voice in the lower register horses settle into. “Nobody's asking you to like it. I just need you to move. Backward. One foot at a time.”
His ears swiveled, but his weight stayed put.
Behind me, the grounds were already roaring. Generators chugged, gates clanged into place, somebody's truck radio bled country music into the dust-thick air. We’d had months of planning compressed into one Memorial Day weekend, and every seam showed if you knew where to look. I knew where to look. That was what they paid me for.
I let the gelding stand. Pressure wouldn't move him. Only time would and time wasn’t really on my side.
I scanned the grounds while I waited. Two handlers walked broncs from the north lot — on schedule. Concession trailers lined up along the east fence — on schedule. Dawson's crew bolted the last panels on the catch pen — behind by maybe twenty minutes, but they'd finish. The vendor with the lemonade rig was supposed to be parked thirty feet east of where she'd parked, but I'd let her find that out when the corn dog truck showed up at seven thirty. Some lessons stuck better that way.
Then a flash of red on the south side caught my eye.
A woman with a telephoto lens crouched behind the trailer Dawson's crew was working. Her blonde hair was coming loose from a knot, and she had on fitted jeans and a press lanyard half-tucked into her tank top. She was framing a shot of the catch-pen build with the focus of someone who hadn't lowered the viewfinder in over a minute.
I clocked her, filed her, and moved on. Press credentials meant Slade had cleared her. It also meant she wasn’t my problem. Good, because I had enough of them to last me a lifetime.
The gelding shifted his weight. I felt it through my palm before he committed to it.
“There you go.” I guided him backward one step, then another, until his hooves hit packed dirt and the trailer wall stopped being his horizon. His head dropped. Tension bled out of his neck the way it always did for a horse once they remembered what sky looked like.
I clipped on a lead rope and walked him toward the holding pens.
The photographer had moved.
I tracked her on instinct with the same scan I ran on every body within forty feet of an active gate or pen. She'd worked her way along the trailer line and now crouched behind trailer eight. It was the two-horse bumper-pull with the roan mare and the paint gelding needed for the barrel warm-ups. It was also the next rig I had to open. The rig whose rear gate, when released, swung in a hundred-and-twenty-degree arc that needed to clear the patch of ground she was kneeling on.
I settled the gelding fast. Latched the pen. Started walking.
She was still crouched down when I got there with her camera pressed to her face. Both knees rested in the dirt and her boots were angled wrong for a quick rise. Her whole body had committed to the shot.
“Hey.”
She didn't hear me. Or registered the sound and filed it under not-relevant. Her finger pressed the shutter. Click. Click. Click.
I reached for the latch with one hand and caught the gate with my forearm before it could swing. Three hundred pounds of steel jarred up through my shoulder and stopped six inches above her head.
“You need to move.”
She startled. Jerked the camera down and twisted, her eyes wide — hazel, gold-green in the early light — and found me holding the gate with one arm and my body angled between her and the metal.
“What—”
“You're in my swing zone.” I kept my voice level. The mare inside the trailer stamped at the noise. “If I open this gate, it hits you. You need to move. Now.”
She scrambled up. Caught her boot on something and stumbled sideways. She steadied herself against the trailer fender and straightened fast. Color climbed her cheeks.
“I didn't see—” She stopped. Reset. Squared her shoulders instead of shrinking. “Okay. That was my fault. I wasn't paying attention.”
I let the gate swing the rest of the way. Guided it with both hands now that she was clear. The mare inside shifted, eager to move.
“You can't kneel behind active rigs,” I said. “Stay clear of anywhere on the grounds where a gate or a panel can swing. Same rule applies to the catch pens, the bucking chutes, the loading ramps. You stand or you stay out.”
