Chapter One
HARRISON
The cedar comes down clean.
I watch it fall the way I planned it, hinge holding till the last breath, crown swinging wide of the creek, trunk meeting the clearing floor with a crack that sends a pair of crows screaming off the ridge. Bark dust drifts. The forest settles back into itself.
Nobody tells you the best part of dropping timber is the quiet after. Men chase the noise, the violence of a hundred feet of tree giving up its grip on the sky. I'm here for the silence that lands once it's done.
I pull my ear protection and let the morning back in. Wind moving through the firs. The creek running low. My own breathing, even and slow.
Closest thing to peace I've got these days.
I roll my shoulder, work out the ache that's lived in it since a logging job in '21 went sideways and a widow-maker branch reminded me I'm mortal. Forty does that. Tells you in smallways every cold morning that you used to bounce and now you just land.
The section Gabe wants cleared sits on the northeast end of the property, where the timber thins toward meadow. Two acres of grade-A pine and cedar standing between Wild Peak Ranch and the grain field they need for the distillery. My job is simple. Take it down, mill it, give the good lumber back for fence repairs and whatever they're building this season, haul the rest to my own yard.
Clean work. Honest work. Best of all, solitary work.
I gas up the saw and move to the next mark, a fir I scouted yesterday, lean angled toward the open ground. Forty feet of it, maybe more. I drop to a knee and read the base. Check the wind. Picture the fall before I ever pull the cord.
Measure twice. Cut once. My granddad's voice, and the only thing that man left me worth keeping.
The saw bites. Wood screams white and sweet. I cut the face, then move around, and start the back, watching the hinge, feeling for that first soft give in the fibers that tells me she's about to go.
She goes.
I step back along my escape line and let her come down right where I wanted, square across the two cedars I dropped at dawn. Three trees, neat as cordwood already.
Sweat runs into my beard. I drag a forearm across my face and take stock of the morning's work, and a man could do worse than this. A ranch nobody's heard of. A cabin deep enough in the trees that the only thing knocking is wind. A truck, an axe, a mill, and not one single soul who knows my last name or my brother's face or the way my mother used to hum in the kitchen back when I still thought family meant something.
Texas is a thousand miles behind me. I aim to keep it there.
I kill the saw and reach for my water jug.
That's when I hear the horse.
Not a vehicle. Vehicles I'd have caught from the gravel road. This is hoofbeats, unhurried, coming up the grade through the treeline, and my whole body goes still because nobody's supposed to be out here. Gabe gave me this stretch. Told me his hands would stay clear and let me work my way.
The horse comes through the firs at an easy walk. A buckskin mare, good lines, well kept. And on her back, looking down at me like she's already decided something about me she doesn't much care for, sits the problem I didn't see coming.
A woman.
Dark hair loose past her shoulders, dark enough it eats the morning light. A brown felt hat shading eyes I can't read from here. Denim shirt worn soft, sleeves rolled to the elbow, turquoise at her throat catching the sun. Belt buckle big as my fist. She rides easy, hips moving with the mare, reins held loose in one brown hand, and she's got the kind of mouth that's been getting people in trouble since the dawn of time.
My body notices before my brain catches up. Heat pools low in my gut, unwelcome and immediate.
I plant the saw on the stump and fold my arms.
She reins up ten feet out and looks at the three downed trees. Then at me. Then back at the trees.
"Huh," she says. "Gabe said you were fast. Didn't say you were rude enough to start without your welcome wagon."
"Didn't ask for one."
"Most people don't." She swings down off the mare, boots hitting dirt, and loops the reins over a low branch without breaking eye contact. "Doesn't stop me coming."
She's small. Top of her head would hit my chin if she stood close, and I find I'm doing the math on exactly that and I make myself stop. She walks the clearing like she owns it, toeing one of my cedars, running a hand along the cut face of the fir like she'sreading it. She knows what she's looking at. I'll give her that much.
