My jaw tightened. I didn't like being read. I especially didn't like being read by a woman who was going to be inside my operational radius for the next seventy-two hours.
“Stay behind the lines, Ms. Robbins.”
“Bella.”
I didn't repeat it.
She waited another beat, her gold-green eyes holding mine with something I might have called a challenge if she'd put any weight behind it. She didn't have to. She just stood there until the silence belonged to her, then turned and walked toward the arena, her camera already rising, her loose hair catching the sunlight as it slipped from its knot.
She walked confident and unfussy, like somebody who'd never doubted whether the floor would hold her.
I watched her longer than I needed to.
She paused near the bleachers to frame a shot of two volunteers stringing bunting along the rail. Then she crouched low again, but in open space this time. There was nothing behind her but packed dirt and sky. She'd taken the warning and adjusted. Maybe she was competent after all. Just reckless about what she'd put her body between when the image had her.
Someone called my name from the south gate. Slade's hinges. The paint gelding still in the trailer. Fourteen things in the next hour that needed my attention.
I turned away. But the image of her stayed. I could still see her crouched in the dust, her camera up, seeing what most of the grounds didn't see they were showing her.
Including me.
CHAPTER 2
BELLA
I found a spot near the far rail and stayed there for a while, letting the grounds settle around me. That was always how it worked. You couldn't push your way into a place and expect it to open up. You had to let it forget you were there. Let the volunteers stop glancing sideways, let the horses stop tracking you with their ears. You had to become part of the background before anything real showed up in the frame.
I changed lenses and shot wide. The bunting. The chalked gate numbers. A pair of boots propped on a cooler while their owner ate a sandwich with his hat pulled down. Good texture, good color, but nothing with a pulse yet.
Western Dust wanted the soul of a small-town rodeo. The pitch I'd sold my boss on had been about community and heritage, about how these events functioned as social architecture in places where the nearest city was two hours away. I believed the pitch. I'd meant every word of it.
But I kept thinking about the man with the locked shoulders. Jace Walker operated like someone who'd learned to carry the full load quietly, because asking for help had failed him before or because he'd never trusted anyone to hold the other end. He hadn't raised his voice once during setup. He'd corrected me without humiliating me, which was more than I could say for most handlers I'd dealt with. And then he'd walked away before the conversation could become anything other than professional.
That kind of control didn't happen by accident. It was built, maintained, and quietly exhausting to sustain.
I raised my camera and caught a shot of him forty yards off, directing two younger hands with a loose gesture. His back was mostly to me. Good. He wouldn't object to what he couldn't see.
He was the story. Not the rodeo. Not the event programming or the bunting or the boots-on-the-cooler. The man running it all while nobody was looking at him.
I lowered the camera and made myself move on.
I'd been working the east side of the grounds for twenty minutes when I almost stepped on a girl sitting in the shadow of the announcer's box. She had her knees pulled up and her phone braced against them, but she wasn't scrolling. She was holding it horizontal, the screen dark, using the reflection in the black glass to frame something across the arena. A specific kind of patience was required in the way she held it, and I could tell she'd been watching for a while.
“What are you shooting?” I asked.
She startled and pressed the phone flat against her thigh like I'd caught her doing something wrong. Dark hair fell over her face, and she pushed it back, cataloging me in one sweep before she'd decided what to do with me.
“Nothing.” Her voice came out flat and defensive and immediately too loud for how quiet she'd been a second ago.
“That's not a nothing angle.” I nodded toward the pen rail she'd been mirroring in the glass. “You had the gate frame lined up against the mountain ridge. That's a good composition.”
She stared at me. “I wasn't composing anything.”
“Okay.” I leaned against the scaffold post and lifted my own camera, working the same sightline she'd been watching. Two handlers moved a gray quarter horse through the far gate, the mountains stacked blue and massive behind them. Light was flat here in the shadow, but the background was doing all the work.
The girl's eyes tracked what I was doing.
“You can frame the same shot with your phone,” I said. “The light's even enough.”
