Page 82 of Second Chance Saloon

She turned the sheet over, and her heart overfilled with so much love she thought it’d burst.

Mitch had drawn her a sketch of her dream ranch.

Ever since they’d started talking about their future, Jackie told him about her vision for the house she’d want them to one day live in. And he drew it exactly the way she’d described, down to the blue wooden shutters and pink roses snaking up the stairs to the porch.

Her eyes welled with happy tears, and she pressed the note to her heart, wanting to absorb the words straight into it.

It was a silly tradition they started back in their freshman year, during one of the boring classes. Mitch passed her a short note on a page ripped from his notebook; he’d written the name of an artist and a song title. Jackie hid it in her pocket and after class, when Mitch went for swimming practice, bounced all the way back to her room, having stuck the earphones in and listened to the lyrics. She played the song on repeat and thought of one for Mitch.

It became their thing. With time, the notes evolved to be a bit longer. Sometimes it was still just a song title. Other times they forgot about it for weeks, or Mitch just left her drawings of roses.

Right now, in this moment, music and Mitch were the balm her heart needed.

She grabbed her headphones from the desk, plugged them into her phone and searched for the song. The music filled her ears, slowing her hammering pulse, as she imagined their future in the white house with blue shutters and pink roses.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

July, eleven years ago

Mitch

Mitch swung the looped rope around, getting used to its feel and weight. Biting his bottom lip when it almost hit him in the face, he shot an accusatory glare at Kit. “You’ve been lying, this is fucking hard!”

Kit shook his head, a wide grin on his mouth. He signed: “You wanted to learn how to rope.”

“Yeah, but you were meant to teach me, not stand there and enjoy my misery,” Mitch shot back from atop Diamond, holding on to the reins with his left hand.

Diamond snorted, letting Mitch guide him in a circle over the empty paddock.

Kit grinned. “You need to have your swing down and pointed directly at your target.” He gestured to the bale of hay into which he’d stuck a dummy plastic calf head earlier. “Don’t swing without your target in mind.”

Mitch blew a long exhale and positioned Diamond on the right of the dummy calf. He narrowed his eyes, urging Diamond forward and swinging the rope in his right hand, his gaze fixed on his target.

He threw the rope, and it fell into the dust, missing the hay bale. “Damn it!”

Kit walked up to him, his brow raised under his straw hat, and he signed swiftly. “Keep your eyes on the calf and get directly behind it, or on the left hip.”

“I thought you’re meant to have it on the right hip,” Mitch replied.

“Yes. But if you do it my way, you can choose where to put your slack. Roping on the right side of the calf limits your slack. And when the rope tightens, it presses on the horse’s cheek, moving the horse to the left.”

Mitch blinked, watching Kit’s hands signing with concentration. He’d picked up sign language since he started coming to the ranch, but when Kit—or Ali—were signing fast, he missed some words. The everyday conversations, he could manage well, but with so much of the language used at the ranch being jargon that was new to him anyway, Kit sometimes had to sign to him letter by letter, until Mitch learned the signs for new words.

“Sorry, can you repeat that? I’m not sure I got it,” Mitch said apologetically, lifting his hat off his head and wiping the sweat off his forehead with a spotted face towel he kept in his breast pocket. It was boiling today.

Kit nodded, signing the same message at a much slower pace.

Mitch smiled at him. “Easy for you to say, you’re the fastest roper I’ve seen.”

“Doesn’t mean much coming from you, how many rodeos have you been to? Ten?”

Mitch chuckled, swatting Kit’s shoulder with the towel. “Twelve and counting, thank you very much.”

He hadn’t really been to that many since Jackie had quit barrel racing, but they went out sometimes to the ones close to Austin, often with Lyla and Nick, who had been on and off for the past two years, but now were mostly on. They had this love–hate relationship where neither could live without the other, but they couldn’t really stay together long enough for the honeymoon phase to end so they could discover who they were as a couple. Personally, Mitch thought they were great together and hoped they would make it work.

“Hello, cowboys.” Jackie’s voice boomed across the paddock as she pushed the gate and strolled in, holding a wicker basket in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. “How is he doing, Kit?”

Kit bit back a smile and signed: “We’ll make a cowboy out of him, eventually.”