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Hattie gasped, gripping her kettle corn as though it were a rosary. “Oh honey, you’re in for a treat. I haven’t seen him ride since before he’d left for New York.”

My brain registered the words, but my eyes were locked onto him as if they’d been waiting for this moment their whole misguided lives.

“What do you mean, before he’d left for New York?” I asked, barely managing sound. My gaze didn’t move. Not an inch. Even when someone behind us sneezed loudly, and I felt something wet on the back of my neck. I grabbed a napkin Hattie had in her lap and frantically wiped it off...but I still kept my eyes on him.

Hattie waved her hand. “He went off and worked at some hedge fund for who knows what reason. Wore suits. Lived in skyscrapers. Terrifying, really.”

I swallowed, because the version of him currently rolling his shoulders and adjusting his grip on the rope was decidedly not a man who belonged behind a desk.

“I’m glad he’s come back to his senses,” Hattie added, popping a kernel into her mouth. “He belongs in Blackwood. He’s a rancher through and through. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.”

Nothing could have prepared me for the way Sterling Hayes looked in that moment.

He moved with an easy confidence, his hat tipped low so the arena lights brushed over the hard angles of his face. His jaw alone could have convinced a saint to misbehave, carved in a way that made restraint feel like a lost cause.

The worn cotton clung to his chest like it was begging for mercy, stretched over muscle built by work that had no business being that obscene. Lower, his forearms flexed around the rope, tendons shifting, veins rising, everything in him tightening with the kind of strength that could pin a body down and keep it there.

My body.

Nope. I would be ignoring that thought—and all others like it. And ignoring the heat curling low through my insides and the sudden dampness in my panties.

Stop.

The gate slammed open, and the bull tore into the arena in a burst of muscle and dirt, twisting so hard the air seemed to snap around it. Dust burst upward, hanging in a thick, shifting haze that swallowed half the view. Hattie and everyone around me screamed more than cheered, the crowd exploding into pandemonium. But in the arena…

Sterling didn’t flinch.

He moved with the animal’s fury as if the two of them shared a pulse, every shift of his hips and shoulders answering the bull’s rage with something steadier, stronger. Power rippled through him, and it seemed like he understood the creature’s wildness on a level that didn’t require words or fear.

The bull slammed sideways, its hooves digging deep as its body twisted in a brutal attempt to throw him. Sterling leaned into the motion, his legs clamped tight as his back arched, one hand raised as if the chaos beneath him was something he could shape.

My breath hitched, and I realized my fingers were locked around the edge of the bleachers so tight my knuckles were aching.

Hattie leaned closer. “If you start drooling, just tilt your head forward so it doesn’t hit the woman below us.”

I couldn’t even form a half-hearted protest at her words. All I could do was watch the way his body flexed and held, the way something inside me woke up in a slow, stunned shock.

Eight seconds.

The buzzer finally shrieked, and the crowd detonated. The noise blended. For several seconds, I couldn’t hear anything but a dull, buzzing hum that didn’t match the riot around me.

Hattie was right. Sterling belonged here.

He released his grip and dismounted with lethal grace, dropping into a crouch to absorb the impact before rising again as though his body weighed nothing at all. He jogged away from the bull as the clowns moved in, one hand braced on his thigh, and his chest rising and falling hard.

My breath rushed out of my lungs like he’d punched it from across the arena.

“Lord have mercy,” Hattie sighed, fanning her face. “I see that man in town every week, and it still feels like a religious experience. You good?”

No, I was not good.

I was…something else. Something hot and unsettled and too awake in my own skin.

I forced my fingers to unclamp from the metal bleacher. “Fine,” I lied. “I’m normal. Totally unaffected.”

“Uh-huh.” She popped another piece of kettle corn into her mouth. “If that’s your version of normal, honey, we need to get you exorcised.”

I snorted at that…because little did she know.