Chapter 2
BELLA
I found a spot near the far rail and stayed there for a while, letting the grounds settle around me.
That was always how it worked. You couldn't push your way into a place and expect it to open up.
You had to let it forget you were there.
Let the volunteers stop glancing sideways, let the horses stop tracking you with their ears.
You had to become part of the background before anything real showed up in the frame.
I changed lenses and shot wide. The bunting. The chalked gate numbers. A pair of boots propped on a cooler while their owner ate a sandwich with his hat pulled down. Good texture, good color, but nothing with a pulse yet.
Western Dust wanted the soul of a small-town rodeo. The pitch I'd sold my boss on had been about community and heritage, about how these events functioned as social architecture in places where the nearest city was two hours away. I believed the pitch. I'd meant every word of it.
But I kept thinking about the man with the locked shoulders.
Jace Walker operated like someone who'd learned to carry the full load quietly, because asking for help had failed him before or because he'd never trusted anyone to hold the other end.
He hadn't raised his voice once during setup.
He'd corrected me without humiliating me, which was more than I could say for most handlers I'd dealt with.
And then he'd walked away before the conversation could become anything other than professional.
That kind of control didn't happen by accident. It was built, maintained, and quietly exhausting to sustain.
I raised my camera and caught a shot of him forty yards off, directing two younger hands with a loose gesture. His back was mostly to me. Good. He wouldn't object to what he couldn't see.
He was the story. Not the rodeo. Not the event programming or the bunting or the boots-on-the-cooler. The man running it all while nobody was looking at him.
I lowered the camera and made myself move on.
I'd been working the east side of the grounds for twenty minutes when I almost stepped on a girl sitting in the shadow of the announcer's box.
She had her knees pulled up and her phone braced against them, but she wasn't scrolling.
She was holding it horizontal, the screen dark, using the reflection in the black glass to frame something across the arena.
A specific kind of patience was required in the way she held it, and I could tell she'd been watching for a while.
“What are you shooting?” I asked.
She startled and pressed the phone flat against her thigh like I'd caught her doing something wrong. Dark hair fell over her face, and she pushed it back, cataloging me in one sweep before she'd decided what to do with me.
“Nothing.” Her voice came out flat and defensive and immediately too loud for how quiet she'd been a second ago.
“That's not a nothing angle.” I nodded toward the pen rail she'd been mirroring in the glass. “You had the gate frame lined up against the mountain ridge. That's a good composition.”
She stared at me. “I wasn't composing anything.”
“Okay.” I leaned against the scaffold post and lifted my own camera, working the same sightline she'd been watching.
Two handlers moved a gray quarter horse through the far gate, the mountains stacked blue and massive behind them.
Light was flat here in the shadow, but the background was doing all the work.
The girl's eyes tracked what I was doing.
“You can frame the same shot with your phone,” I said. “The light's even enough.”
“I wasn't—” She stopped, then started over. “My phone camera's not that good.”
“That doesn't matter. Good light and good composition beat equipment almost every time.” I took the shot. Let her hear the shutter. “I'm Bella.”
She paused, just long enough to be deliberate. “Rory Walker.”
“Walker?” I should have known the only man I’d found attractive in the past couple of years would be a family man. “Your dad’s the one who runs this operation, isn’t he?”
Her shoulders did something complicated, tightening and dropping at the same time. “He works here.”
“He does more than work.” I kept my eyes on the viewfinder. “Seems like he's the one keeping it running.”
Rory didn’t reply, but she turned her phone back over and held it up, tentative, aiming toward the gate. Her elbows braced against her knees, and she held the phone steadier than most adults I'd taught in the field workshops I'd run for Western Dust's outreach program.
“Breathe out before you fire,” I said.
She glanced at me sideways.
“Your body's stiller at the bottom of the exhale. You get less shake.”
She looked back at her screen. Breathed out. Fired the shot.
I watched her look at it.
“It's okay,” she said.
“Let me see.”
She didn't move.
“You don't have to.”
Three seconds of silence passed. Then she extended the phone toward me at arm's length.
I took it carefully and looked at the image. The framing was off-center in a way that shouldn't have worked but did. She'd caught the handler's hands on the lead rope as the focal tension point, and the mountain had gone soft and vast in the background.
“This is good, Rory.”
“It's fine.”
“It's better than fine. You framed it around what mattered.”
She took the phone back, her jaw set like she was bracing for the part where I explained what she'd done wrong.
“You've got an eye for this,” I said. “You’re a natural.”
“I just take pictures.” She pulled her phone against her chest. “It's not a big deal.”
“Who told you that?”
Her mouth closed. A flicker of something moved across her face, real and unguarded, and then she locked it back down.
“Rory.” Jace Walker's voice came from directly behind me. Even and level, but with an undertow of tension that said he'd been watching long enough to want to intervene.
I turned. He was ten feet out, his hat pushed back slightly, dark eyes shifting back and forth between me and his daughter like he was trying to figure out how the two of us had ended up in the same spot.
“I didn't know she was yours,” I said. Which was both true and entirely beside the point.
“She's supposed to be helping with registration.” He looked at Rory with an expression that was trying for stern and landing somewhere closer to tired.
Rory unfolded herself from the ground in one fluid motion. She slid past me without another word, close enough that I could have caught her arm, and walked toward the main gate without bothering to glance back at her dad.
Jace watched her go. His shoulders did that thing again, the thing I'd captured on film an hour ago. The locked-in stillness that was doing its level best to look like composure.
“She wasn't bothering me,” I said.
“She's got work to do.” He redirected his gaze to me. “So do you.”
I didn’t like being told what to do or when. That’s why I’d always preferred to work as a freelance photographer.
“Any idea where Slade might be this time of day?” I asked.
“Check the office.” Jace nodded the same direction Rory had gone. “And Ms. Robbins?”
“You can call me Bella.” I faced him, irritated that he’d called me out and also pissed at myself for being glad to see him again.
He shook his head, his jaw tight. “Leave Rory alone. She’s got plenty to do this summer and doesn’t need to be distracted by someone filling her head with big ideas.”
I bristled. “I’m not filling her head. She’s good, she’s—”
“Please. It’s for her own good.” He glanced up at me like it had cost him a portion of his pride to ask a stranger for a favor. Then he turned and headed back to one of the barns.
My jaw ached from grinding my teeth together as I watched him go. So far, nothing in Mustang Mountain was going my way.
I found Slade Kincaid twenty minutes later, sitting at a picnic table and sipping on cold coffee.
He rested one arm on the table and surveyed the grounds in an easy way of a man whose event was running on schedule.
He had the kind of natural physical confidence that came with being the best at a thing that required real courage, and he aimed a grin at me the second I walked up.
“You meet Walker?”
Warmth spiraled through my stomach as I thought about the dark-eyed cowboy. “Yes, we met.”
He read something in my face and his grin stretched. “Did he give you the speech?”
“The one about safety?” I smiled before I could stop myself. “Yeah, I got the speech.”
“He gives everybody the speech.” Slade finished the coffee. “If you want the behind-the-scenes access, he's the one you want showing you around. He knows where everything is, what time it happens, and which angles are going to get somebody kicked in the head.”
My stomach tightened. “You want me to follow him around?”
“I'm asking him to help you.” Slade got to his feet and walked over to drop the cup into a bin. “The difference is subtle, but with Jace, it matters.”
I looked across the grounds to where Jace was talking to an older man in a blue baseball cap, his arms crossed, and his head angled down. Listening. Processing. Probably already three steps ahead of whatever problem was being described to him.
I thought about the way he'd said don't when I'd lifted my camera at him. The flat, final weight of it.
“He's going to love that,” I said.
Slade let out a loud laugh.
“I’m going to take a break and go check into where I’m staying. I’ll find Jace when I get back if that’s okay.”
“Works for me.” Slade’s fingers went to the brim of his hat, and he tipped it my direction. “Good luck, Ms. Robbins. Let me know if you need anything else.”
A half hour later, I pulled into the gravel lot of the bed-and-breakfast I’d booked just outside of town and sat in my SUV for a long moment before I got out.
The place was exactly as advertised. White porch. Hanging baskets. A hand-painted sign with a horse on it. The kind of charming Montana lodging that would make a magazine reader sigh and start pricing flights if I photographed it in the right light.
My room was small but clean, with a quilt folded at the foot of the bed and a window that looked out toward the mountains. I dropped my bags inside, splashed cold water on my face, and told myself to be grateful.
I had a bed. I had a shower. I had a place to lock up my gear. All of which mattered more than whatever unreasonable part of me kept thinking about Jace Walker telling me to leave his daughter alone like I’d been handing her bad ideas instead of telling the truth.
I stayed away from the grounds until late afternoon.
Long enough to charge batteries. Long enough to edit a few shots. Long enough to pretend I wasn’t looking forward to finding him again.
By the time I made it back, the worst of the heat had given way to a gentle warm breeze, and the rodeo grounds had shifted into that golden hour hum that made everything look more forgiving than it was.
Vendors were packing up. Volunteers moved trash bags and folding chairs.
Horses hung their heads over rails, sleepy and dust coated.
Somewhere near the concessions tent, a kid laughed hard enough to make three adults turn and smile.
I worked the edges with my camera, catching hands on gate latches, sun on buckles, a little girl asleep against her father’s shoulder with a snow cone melting untouched in her fist.
They were good shots. Authentic and real, some of them were even great shots. But none of them captured the man I couldn’t stop thinking about.
I found Jace and Rory near the far paddock rail just as the sun slipped low enough to turn the mountain gold at the edges.
They didn’t see me at first.
Or maybe they did and chose not to acknowledge it. Either way, I stopped before I reached the open stretch of gravel and stayed where the shadow of the bleachers cut across the ground.
Jace had one boot propped on the bottom board, his forearms resting across the top rail, his hat tipped low. Rory stood next to him, close but not quite touching, her phone loose in one hand and her shoulders rounded in that careful teenage way that made a girl look smaller than she really was.
For a split second, before the world remembered itself, I saw them.
Not the rodeo boss and his daughter. Not the guarded cowboy and the girl who acted like she didn’t need anything from him.
Just a tired father and a teenage daughter standing in the evening light, trying to find their way toward each other without knowing where to start.
My fingers twitched to reach for my camera. The light was perfect. The angle was perfect. The horse in the paddock nosed through hay behind them, and Jace’s hand protectively shifted toward Rory.
It would have been a beautiful shot, but I left the camera hanging against my chest. Some moments didn’t belong to the person who saw them. Some moments belonged to the people still trying to figure out how to live inside them.
Rory said something too quiet for me to hear.
Jace turned his head toward her, and whatever she’d said changed him. His shoulders eased by a fraction, and his hand moved on the rail like he wanted to reach for her and knew better than to make the wrong move.
My chest tightened.
Then Rory glanced over and saw me.
The moment broke.
She straightened, shoving her phone into her back pocket. Jace’s shoulders came back up, his expression closing before I could pretend I hadn’t seen the softer version of him.
I lifted one hand in an awkward little wave. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You didn’t,” Rory said too fast.
Jace looked from her to me. “I thought you were checking into your room.”
“I did.”
His gaze flicked to the camera against my chest.
I touched it, then let my hand fall. “I came back for the light.”
Rory’s eyes narrowed like she knew exactly what I hadn’t done.
“You didn’t take a picture,” she said.
I shook my head. “No.”
“Why not?”
Because your dad looked like he loved you so much it scared him. Because you looked like you wanted to believe it and didn’t quite know how. Because my job meant noticing things like that, but that didn’t mean I had a right to keep them.
I only said, “The moment wasn’t mine to capture.”
Rory studied me for a second. Then she gave the smallest nod.
Jace didn’t say anything. But his gaze held on me just long enough to make me aware of the dust on my boots, the camera strap across my chest, and the strange, unsettled pull in my stomach.
He looked away first. “Come on, Rory. We still need to check the west gate before we leave.”
She rolled her eyes, but there wasn’t much heat in it. “I know.”
They started down the rail together, still not touching.
I watched them go until the light shifted and the shot was gone for good.
Then I turned toward my SUV with my camera quiet at my side and the uncomfortable certainty that the best story in Mustang Mountain wasn’t happening in the arena at all.