Fear, yes, steady and present and not going anywhere.
Love, bigger than the fear, which is new, which is something I am still getting used to.
Determination, underneath both of those, the quiet bedrock of a woman who has decided what she's fighting for and has stopped pretending she isn't fighting.
We pull into the grounds and the scale of it hits immediately. Bigger than the previous rodeos, louder, more people and more lights and more of everything. The kind of event that draws a crowd hungry for spectacle and gets one every time.
I scan the grounds the way I always scan them, looking for the things that don't fit. The angles and the edges and the spaces between things where intention hides, and what I find is exactly what I expected to find at an event this size.
Too many people to track.
Too many places to disappear into.
Too many variables for comfort.
Jace registers all of it the same way I do. I can feel it in the shift of his attention beside me, the way his eyes move through the crowd with that particular quality of awareness that I have come to understand means he is not just seeing what's there but calculating what it means.
He leans close enough that his voice reaches only me. "Stay with Wade if you can find him. He'll keep you visible without making it obvious."
"And you?" I ask.
"I'll be where I need to be," he says, and then he looks at me with an expression that carries everything we said last night and everything we didn't need to say because it was already understood between us.
He kisses me once, brief and certain, the kind of kiss that is a promise dressed up as a goodbye, says he loves me. He moves toward the chutes with the loose purposeful stride of a man walking toward the thing he was built for.
I watch him go until the crowd absorbs him.
Then I find my place at the rail and I hold onto it with both hands and I do the hardest thing I have ever done in a life that has required some genuinely hard things.
I wait.
The announcer's voice rises over the grounds, working the crowd into the particular fever pitch that only a rodeo this size can generate. The lights cut hard through the evening dark, and somewhere beyond the chutes a bull kicks against the gate with a sound that carries all the way to where I'm standing.
And then I hear it.
His name.
Over the speakers, loud and certain, Jace McCallister announced to the crowd like a beginning or an ending or something in between that hasn't decided yet what it wants to be.
He steps into the arena.
And the whole world holds its breath.
Chapter twenty-one
The Cowboy Way
Jace
The arena feels different tonight.
Not bigger, not louder, not more or less anything I can put a precise word to. Just different in the way that places feel different when you understand what they mean. The weight of every decision that led you to this spot on this night with this thing riding on what happens next.
I've been in hundreds of arenas.
I have never been in this one before when it is like this.
I walk the perimeter first. I always do that before a ride. I let my body move through the familiar routine while my mind does the other work.
