Chapter 22
Chapter twenty-two
All In
Riley
The grounds empty slowly.
That's always how it goes after a big rodeo, the crowd bleeding out in stages while the rodeo is still in progress.
The noise dropping by degrees, the lights cutting off section by section until what's left is the skeleton of the night and the people who have reason to still be standing in it by the time the rodeo ends.
I have reason.
So do the women sitting beside me.
Quinn found me at the rail about twenty minutes after the ride, appearing out of the crowd in her uniform with the unhurried certainty of a woman who always knows exactly where she's supposed to be.
Summer came from the other direction, Addie right behind her, and without a word being said the four of us arranged ourselves in the stands the way the McCallister women apparently do.
Shoulder to shoulder, watching the arena with the collective attention of people who all have something personal riding on what happens out there.
"Nobody talked much during the ride," Summer explains to me. "We didn't need to."
Quinn's radio crackled twice during the final seconds of the last ride. I watched her face when it did, the slight shift in her expression that told me something had moved on her end before she said a single word about it.
The buzzer sounded and the crowd came to its feet. Quinn leaned close to my ear. "Dusty's in custody," she said, calm and certain, like she was commenting on the weather. "He didn't make it ten feet past the back gate and we grabbed him."
I let out a breath I'd been holding for approximately four days.
Summer put her hand over mine without being asked. Addie passed me a water bottle from her bag with the quiet practicality that seems to be her natural mode of operation. I took it because my hands needed something to hold.
These women.
I didn't plan for them either.
Jace finds me twenty minutes later, still in the stands with Quinn, Summer and Addie. The arena half empty around us and the lights beginning their section by section shutdown.
He comes up the steps with that loose purposeful stride, worn in the way that has nothing to do with weakness, the particular exhaustion of a man who has been running on will and focus for weeks and is only now letting his body register the cost.
He looks good to me.
He looks like the best thing I've seen all night.
He stops at the end of our row and looks at the four of us. Something moving through his expression that's warm and grateful and a little undone all at once.
"Ladies," he says.
"Your wife kept us company," Summer says, and the word lands in the row like a small stone dropped into still water, rippling out in every direction.
Nobody corrects her.
Including me.
Jace holds my gaze across the row of seats, something quiet and significant passing between us, and then he holds out his hand.
I take it.
"Let's go home," he says.
Those three words land somewhere they've never landed before. I suddenly get tingles in my body.
Because home means the same place now.
For both of us.
The drive home feels different from every other drive we've taken together.
Lighter. Charged with something that isn't quite adrenaline anymore but hasn't fully settled into relief either.
The space between those two things, that's where we live for the forty minutes between the rodeo grounds and the house. We were talking so much, we were even talking over each other sometimes, laughing more than I expected to.
Replaying the night in the way you replay something that went right after weeks of waiting for it to go wrong.
"Quinn's face when she told me," I say, shaking my head. "She was so calm about it. Like she detains people behind rodeo back gates every Tuesday."
"She might," Jace says. "Wade's never real specific about her workweek."
I laugh, and it feels good, easy in a way that laughter hasn't felt since before any of this started. "Brooks had that look. You know the one."
"The,’ I already ran sixteen scenarios and this one landed exactly where I projected look’," Jace says.
"That's the one."
He grins, and the sight of it, full and unguarded, does something to me that I have stopped trying to talk myself out of. "Luke found those draw sheets in a paper file nobody had opened in four years. A paper file, Riley. The man is something else."
"Wade called Quinn before any of us knew he was going to," I add.
"That's Wade," Jace says simply. "Doesn't announce. Just moves."
We ride for a moment in the comfortable quiet of people who have been through something together and come out the other side intact. I look out the window at the dark Texas landscape moving past and feel the enormity of what tonight actually was settling over me properly for the first time.
It's done.
Not completely, not with Colt still out there, but the foundation of it, the thing Dusty spent twenty years building and protecting, the lie that nearly buried Jace under someone else's history.
That's done. Finished. Dismantled piece by careful piece by four brothers and a woman in uniform who doesn't miss.
"You rode that bull on a sabotaged gate," I say, because I need to say it out loud once before the night is over.
Jace glances at me sideways. "I knew it was coming."
"I know you did. I'm saying it anyway." I hold his gaze for a moment. "That took something, Jace. Don't minimize it."
He's quiet for a second. I can see him accepting that, letting the acknowledgement land instead of deflecting it the way he used to deflect anything that required him to take himself seriously.
"We all took something tonight," he says finally.
He reaches across the console and searches for my hand. I turn it over and let him take it, and we drive the rest of the way home hand in hand. Connected, easy, and carrying the specific satisfaction of people who fought for something worth fighting for and didn't flinch when it got hard.
Tonight was worth every bit of it.
The house is quiet when we get there.
Porch light on, swing moving easily in the night air, the property sitting still and dark around it in a way that feels safe instead of watchful for the first time in longer than I can remember.
I notice that. The difference between a darkness that feels threatening and one that just feels like night.
Tonight it just feels like night.
Jace unlocks the door and we go inside. The house wraps around us, warm, familiar, and that new wood smell.
I kick my boots off at the entry. He hangs his hat on the hook by the door, the one that has become so much a part of the landscape of this place that I'd notice immediately if it wasn't there.
Small things.
The small things are what got me in the end.
He moves to the kitchen and I follow, not because I want water or food or anything practical, but because that room is where we do our real talking and I'm not ready for the night to stop. Not Yet.
He leans against the counter with sweet tea in his hand. He looks at me across the kitchen, there's something in his expression I haven't seen before. Maybe I have seen it building toward this for weeks and tonight is just the first night it has nothing left to hide behind.
Open. Certain. Entirely without agenda.
"I want to say something," he says.
"Okay," I answer.
"I know we said things last night. Things that mattered." He holds my gaze steady. "But I want to say it again when it's not the middle of a crisis. When it's just this." He gestures at the kitchen, the house, the space between us. "Just us."
My chest tightens.
"I love you, Riley." His voice is low and even. The way it gets when he means something all the way down.
"Not because of Hadley, not because of what we've been through, not because the timing lined up. I love you because of who you are. The way you stood at that rail tonight. The way you said we and meant it. The way you stayed when every smart instinct you had was telling you to go."
I cross the kitchen to him.
Not slowly, not with hesitation, not with any of the careful measured steps I've been taking toward him for weeks. Just directly, the way you move toward something when you're done pretending you don't want to be there.
I stop in front of him and look up at his eyes. What I find on his face makes everything I've been holding for the past five years feel like it was just waiting for somewhere safe to land.
"I love you," I tell him. "I think I have for longer than I'm ready to admit out loud."
He reaches up and tucks my hair back, his hand settling against my jaw.
"You don't have to admit anything," he says. "You just have to be with me."
"I'll be here," I tell him.
His forehead drops to mine.
"Good," he says quietly. "Because I built the closet big enough for two."
I laugh, soft and real, and he pulls me in, and the night settles around us like something that was always going to end up here.
Like it was never going to go any other way.
We end up on the porch swing.
I'm not sure whose idea it is. Just one of those things that happens when two people are moving through a space together and arrive somewhere together without planning to.
He brings a blanket. I pull my knees up and he sits close enough that I feel the heat coming from him with his arm along my shoulders.
The swing moves in that easy back and forth way that doesn't require any effort to maintain.
The ranch spreads out in front of us in the dark.
It's something, this view. I've looked at it enough times now that it's become familiar, but familiar hasn't made it smaller.
The pasture running long toward the tree line, the main ranch house lights visible in the distance, the Miller land sitting quiet to the east where the house Jace built stands solid against the sky.
His house.
Our house, a voice in the back of my head says, and I don't argue with it the way I would have two months ago.
"Hadley wants a horse," I say.
Jace doesn't miss a beat. "I know. She told me three times this week."