Page 43 of Chains and Vows

He points his egg-loaded fork at me like it's a gavel. "At first, I thought—it's not gonna work. The will, ya know?" He pauses just long enough to shovel the eggs in, chewing with the un-self-consciousness of a man who has never once eaten in front of a camera.

Then he just keeps talkin’, like the pause was punctuation, not a stop. "It's iron-clad. Trust me, I have hired lawyers to pick that thing apart. Several of them. Cost me buckets of money too." He sets the fork down, and I notice he's looking at me steadily now, not performing, not circling—just saying it flat. "But there's no loophole, Savannah. You cannot marry Legion."

I place my napkin in my lap, a motion so embedded in my muscle memory that I could do it in a coma, and I shake my head with the composure of a woman who sat through four years of formal dining instruction at Rimrock and still knows how to look unbothered when she is very bothered indeed.

I pull the silver warmer off the plate and set it aside. My breakfast is all protein. Bacon, and eggs, and ham, and sausage, and steak, arranged like a rancher's manifesto.

I just stare at it for a moment. Then I look up and find Wyatt grinnin' at me from across the table.

"What the hell is goin' on with you?” I snap. "Did you tell them to make this plate?"

"You're thinkin'," Wyatt says, slow and satisfied, like I hadn't even asked him a question. Like he's just narrating what he already knows. "That if you get pregnant, you could offload the inheritance to your baby." He stabs the air with the fork again. "If… you have a girl."

I practically giggle. I can't help it. My head is already shakin'. "You have lost your mind, Wyatt Ashby. I am not pregnant."

"Not yet," he concedes, with the serene confidence of a man who thinks he's already won. He nods toward the meat festival on my plate. "But it's never too early to plan."

"You mind your own business, all right? Even if I were, the baby would not be a legitimate heir—because the baby would be Legion's, and since we cannot marry, that child inherits exactly nothing."

Wyatt stands, and the chair scrapes the flagstone loud enough to make me flinch. He grabs his orange juice and downs the whole glass in one long pull, sets it back down without a sound, then picks up his Stetson from the empty chair beside him and puts it on with the deliberateness of a man making a point out of a gesture.

He tips it at me—just barely.

"Exactly," he says.

And then he simply turns and leaves.

CHAPTER 11

Miles City sits where the Tongue River gives itself up to the Yellowstone, a cow town in the truest and proudest sense.

It was founded in 1876 in the shadow of Fort Keogh, fattened on the open-range cattle boom, and was never entirely convinced that the twentieth century was somethin' it should care about.

I-94 doesn't pass Miles City so much as bow around it, one long arc along the town's southern flank, and Cash blows past the first exit while the whole town slides by me on the right.

There are two ways in off the highway—the back and the front which run north and south respectively—and Cash takes the southern exit because an Ashby only uses the front door.

After doublin' back across the Tongue River, we land on Main Street. It's lined with brick blocks from the 1880s and '90s and sits under Montana's famous big sky.

The town made its name on horses and held onto it—home of the Bucking Horse Sale every May, home of saddle makers whose work rode in every outfit on the northern range, home of the Montana Bar with its original back-bar and steer-horn mounts, where a century of cattle deals were closed on a handshake and a whiskey.

Murals of longhorns and trail drives cover the brick walls, and every third pickup on Main has a dog in the bed.

It's unhurried, unglamorous, and unapologetic—a town that was the beating heart of the range cattle empire and still carries itself like it, because out here, nobody ever told it the empire ended.

Harmon & Sons, which I have been by, but never been in, sits on its corner of Main looking like a Masonic Temple because that's exactly what it used to be. A three-story neoclassical block in pale stone with tall, arched, and corniced windows on the second floor behind a full colonnade of columns across the upper facade.

The ground level has less fanfare and the window display hasn't changed since Eisenhower—a saddle, a pair of boots, a bolt of wool.

That's the public entrance. If I had ever gone in, that's all I'd have ever seen.

But the upper floors, behind those columned windows, are only available to the invited.

The initiated.

The rich.

But my ignorance ends today, because that's where we're goin'.