Jake snorted. “He knows. He just doesn’t want to admit he’s selling because the horse won’t settle.”
“He’s young,” Gunner said. “Good bones, though. Nice shoulders.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Jake replied. “Give him a year, proper handling, and he’ll come good. I’ve got my eye on him.”
Gunner raised a brow. “You’ve got your eye on half the horses west of Denver.”
“Only the ones worth having,” Jake said easily. “This one’s different.”
“What’s special about this horse?” Miguel asked.
Jake rolled his shoulder, considering. “He’s smart,” he said finally. “Too smart for the rancher who’s got him now. A horse like that gets bored, starts acting up, and people think he’s trouble. He’s not. He just needs work. Consistency.”
Gunner nodded slowly. “He watches everything.”
“Exactly,” Jake said. “You put time into him, give him a job, he’ll give it back tenfold. You can’t rush that kind of animal.”
Miguel frowned slightly, thinking it through. “So, you wouldn’t work him hard straight off?”
“No,” Jesse said simply. “I’d let him settle. See what he is before you decide what you want him to be.”
Jake leaned back in his chair, considering. “He’s sound,”he added. “You rush him or change hands too fast, you’ll break what’s good in him.”
I loved listening to the ranch talk, the easy shorthand of it, the way everyone here knew their place without having to defend it. They talked about cattle and horses the way other people talked about family, with history folded into every sentence. If I’d come here when I’d been younger, if my grandfather had answered the phone instead of Abel, or fought harder to be part of my life, or not listened to what my mom told him, then maybe this would have been my education too. I might have been sitting here like Miguel, absorbing it all without thinking, learning from men who understood the land and the animals because they’d spent their lives earning that understanding.
It felt wrong to reduce all of this to numbers.
I can’t take this away from any of them.
The thought arrived fully formed, unwelcome, and impossible to ignore.
“Wanted to say something,” Jesse said after a pause in the conversation. He didn’t rush it. He waited, quiet and solid, until everyone was looking at him. “I’m gay.”
For half a heartbeat, the room went still. Not tense. Just paused, as if everyone was deciding how much weight the moment deserved.
Miguel nodded first, easy as anything. “Same.”
Jake shrugged, clearly unconcerned, but his eyes flicked between Jesse and me before he could stop himself. One eyebrow went up, slow and knowing, and heat rushed straight to my face. I dropped my gaze to the table, suddenlyaware of my hands, my breathing, the way my heart kicked hard against my ribs.
Gunner leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Well, duh. You’ve been, y’know…” He pointed at me, then at Jesse, made a loop with one hand and poked his index finger through it, grinning when Miguel nodded along.
“It’s cute,” Miguel added, then clapped a hand over his mouth as if he’d said too much.
Colt huffed a laugh. “More gorgeous women for me then,” he said, easy and joking.
Jesse cleared his throat. “And yeah, Lucas and I have been…”
“Oh, we know,” Colt said.
And that was it. No awkward silence. No questions. No one looked at Jesse as if he’d changed, or at me as if I were something different. The conversation picked back up, the world kept turning, and I sat there trying to get my head around how something that felt enormous inside my chest had landed so quietly in the room. Seemed it had never been a big deal at all—except to me.
“You sleeping with the boss to make him agree to sell this place?” Colt asked.
I winced internally but tried not to react.
“That’s out of line,” Jesse snapped, although he didn’t sound convinced, and I hated that for us.
“Sorry, boss, but y’know, it’s a question we’re all thinking. No disrespect, Lucas.”
