Page 1 of Tessa and Nash

CHAPTER ONE

Nash

January 1st

Three…

Two…

One…

“Happy New Year!”

The cheer rolls through the town square, loud and bright and a little sloppy, echoing off brick storefronts and bundled bodies. Someone pops a bottle of cheap champagne. Someone else whoops as if they’ve just won the lottery. Fireworks crack overhead, bursts of color bleeding into the low winter clouds.

I smile. I clap. I shout it back.

And then, not even twenty minutes later, I’m heading out of town with my brothers and their families, the noise fading behind us.

Buckhorn Ranch greets us the way it always does. Quiet, solid, unchanged by the calendar flipping over. Snow crunches under our boots. The house beams warm against the dark, a promise more than a celebration.

Once we get home, Rose corrals Ellie and Wyatt inside towards their bedroom. Faith scoops Lila up without a word, murmuring soft words into her hair. The night winds down without ceremony.

I grab three beers from the fridge and head back out onto the porch with Boone and Dallas.

Rusty beats us there, tail wagging once before he circles and drops at our feet with a satisfied grunt. He’s checked the perimeter and declared the year officially safe.

Boone leans against the railing, shoulders broad, staring out at the pasture. Dallas sits on the step beside me, elbows on his knees, breath fogging in the cold.

I hand them each a beer.

“To Clay,” Boone says quietly.

Dallas lifts his bottle. “To the circuit.”

I clink mine against theirs. “And to him finally figuring out what he’s chasing.”

The glass taps are soft, swallowed by the night.

Clay should be here. He should be pacing the porch, restless and sharp-tongued, pretending he doesn’t care how far he’s pushed himself. Instead, he’s somewhere on the road, chasing dirt and adrenaline and something that finally feels his.

The pasture stretches out in front of us, fence lines cutting dark shapes through the snow. Buckhorn Ranch looks the same as it always has. Dependable. Unmoving.

Dependable doesn’t mean untouchable, though.

Dallas mentioned it last week, as an afterthought. Feed costs creeping up again. Repairs we’ve been putting off another season because the numbers never quite line up the way we want them to. Boone hasn’t said it out loud, but I see it in the way he studies the pasture lately. He’s running calculations he doesn’t want to share.

Buckhorn’s survived worse than this.

But surviving isn’t the same as being safe.

Maybe that’s the problem.

“I’ve been thinking about this year,” I say, the words spilling out before I can second-guess them. “About where we’re headed.”

Dallas turns his head slightly. Boone doesn’t, but I know he’s listening.

“I don’t think cattle alone is gonna be enough forever,” I continue. My hands start moving, sketching ideas into the air. I can already see them there. “Costs keep rising. Weather’s unpredictable. And Buckhorn… town’s barely holding steady as it is.”