Chapter 3
JACE
The photos Bella Robbins had been taking started showing up on social media on Wednesday.
By then, she’d gone back to wherever she came from, but come Friday, Slade had fielded calls from three travel publications, a podcast that covered rural tourism, and some lifestyle blog out of Denver that wanted to do a feature on “authentic cowboy towns.”
Ruby had put a handwritten sign in the window of the Merc that said, “As Featured in Western Dust” and sold out of huckleberry muffins before nine.
I'd been expecting quiet. Hell, I'd been counting on it. Instead, I got a phone call from Slade telling me Western Dust had extended Bella's assignment through the end of June, that she'd need to stay on somewhere local, and that Ruby had already volunteered the apartment above my barn.
“She can’t do that,” I said.
Slade chuckled. “She already has. You know how Ruby is.”
I did. That was the problem.
The apartment hadn’t been used in over four years. Not since I’d moved out of the house to live over the barn while Rory’s mom packed up her shit and took off to live with the man she’d been seeing behind my back.
The space wasn’t much, but it would work, and it had an exterior staircase with its own entry so Bella wouldn’t have to walk through the barn to get in or out. That meant less of a chance of us running into each other.
I didn’t have a good reason to say no. Slade knew it, and Ruby had known it before him, which was why neither of them had called me first to see if I’d mind having a gorgeous, curvy photographer living too close to ignore.
Bella moved in the following Saturday morning. In addition to a giant duffel, I hauled in two camera bags and a box of supplies. She emptied the rest of her SUV, including a cactus in a terracotta pot that she carried like it required handling instructions.
As I showed her around, I went over some guidelines. “The apartment is yours. The outside stairs, the east side of the barn, and the access lane from the main road are all fair game. But inside the barn, the equipment storage, the horse paddock, and the back field are mine.”
“Sounds like you’ve given this some serious thought.” Her boots kicked up dirt as she followed me from the outside ring toward the barn.
I stopped just outside the door. “My place, my rules. If you want to take pictures of anything else, it’s fine as long as you don’t go into the rings with the horses. And don’t distract Rory from her chores.”
My daughter had already been disappointed by one woman who’d filled her head with unrealistic dreams. I wouldn’t let Bella Robbins do the same.
Bella cocked a hip and stared up at me through long, dark lashes. “And if I need to photograph something on your side of the line?”
“You ask.”
“And you'll say no.”
“I'll say whether I'm saying no or not when you ask.”
She nodded like she didn’t quite agree with me but picked up the last bag and headed up the exterior stairs without another word.
I didn’t want to watch her go, but somehow my eyes tracked her retreating backside. The way that woman filled out a pair of jeans should have been illegal. I dragged my gaze away and rubbed at my chest, pissed at myself for noticing.
Everything was fine for a few days. She was good about the rules. Better than I'd expected, which turned out to be its own problem.
She didn't push. Didn't angle for access she hadn't been given. When she photographed the horses, she stayed at the rail, and she was so steady out there that Cutter—the bay gelding who'd spooked at everything from wind to his own reflection for three years—stopped skittering when she was around.
She shot at dawn most mornings before I was done with the first feeding, and by the time I came back around, she was usually gone, her boot prints in the soft ground near the fence the only sign she'd been there.
It would've been easier if she'd overstepped. Something I could point to. A reason. Instead, she was just there. Careful and quiet and entirely too good at disappearing into the background of a place she'd only been living in for a few days.
Rory was the problem I'd seen coming and hadn't figured out how to stop. She'd been circling Bella's orbit since the rodeo’s opening weekend.
I was replacing a split rail on the south fence when Rory came out from the barn direction instead of the house, which meant she'd been inside, which meant she'd been where she wasn't supposed to be without telling me.
“You were in the barn.”
“Bella was taking texture shots.” Rory pulled her hair over one shoulder, not quite meeting my eye. “She said it was okay.”
“I said she could take texture shots. I didn't say you could.”
“I was just watching.”
“You've got chores.”
“I finished them all.” She looked at me like she wanted to dare me to argue with her. “She was showing me how she brackets exposures. It's not like I was in the way.”
I set the post driver down. “Rory.”
“I want to help. She said I could assist—”
“No.”
My voice came out louder and rougher than I meant it to. Rory's whole face closed off in that way she had, like a shutter coming down. I recognized it because she'd learned it from me.
“Fine,” she said.
She walked back to the house, and I stood there with the fence post and the poor excuse I hadn't even had the decency to say out loud.
It wasn't about the chores. It wasn't about Bella.
It was about Rory spending time building something with a woman who had a return ticket to wherever she'd come from, and me having no idea how to explain that without sounding like I was the problem.
Which maybe I was.
The June workload at the rodeo grounds became relentless. Between the article Rachel had written and the pictures in Western Dust, Mustang Mountain had become a destination instead of a small-town people accidentally discovered.
After the success of opening weekend, the town was scrambling to build a Father's Day Family Rodeo. Slade wanted it bigger with more handlers, more events, a family clinic, and a kids' barrel course.
That meant I was splitting my time between the rodeo grounds and managing my own property. My days consisted of coordinating stock, reviewing layouts, and arguing with an equipment rental company about arena panels that had a four-week lead time.
Bella shadowed me through all of it. That was what Slade wanted. She kept to the edges the same way she kept to the edges of my property. Camera up, close enough to work, far enough that I could almost forget she was there.
Father's Day was all anyone could talk about. I kept running into the phrase in planning documents, on the whiteboard in the events office, and in Slade's emails. Each time I did, my gut pulled the same direction.
My ex, Dana, had been inconsistent since the divorce. That was the nicest way of putting it. Working on the kind of event built around the theme of happy families doing happy family things had a way of sending my blood pressure climbing.
I’d tried to work things out for my daughter’s sake, but Dana was hellbent on getting out of Mustang Mountain and had no interest in taking our daughter with her.
Not that I would have let her. I would have fought that battle down to my last breath.
It just pissed me off that my kid was left with a hole in her heart that I couldn’t fix.
I was reviewing the arena layout on Thursday afternoon when Bella's camera clicked somewhere to my left.
“You're doing that thing,” she said.
“What thing?”
“The shoulder thing.” She lowered the camera. “From Memorial Day.”
I looked at her. She wasn't smiling, but there was something in her expression that was close to it. Like she was aware she was walking near a line.
“I'm reading a schematic,” I said.
“You're grinding your back teeth. I can hear it from here.”
I wasn't going to confirm or deny that. “Did you get what you need from this angle?”
“I’m getting there.” She studied me for another second, then lifted the camera again. The shutter fired off several times in a row.
I followed her line of sight. Hades stood near the tree line.
I'd seen him on the property before. He moved through Mustang Mountain like he'd been granted some kind of territorial exemption, belonging to no one and accepted by everyone.
He stood at the edge of the cottonwoods near the east fence, watching the grounds with that flat, assessing calm look of his like he was just letting us use his land.
Rory walked around the edge of the building and stopped when she saw the big wolf. She had her phone out and was angling for a shot before I could tell her to stay put.
“Rory—”
“I'm not moving.” She held her phone out at arm's length. “I'm just framing it.”
Hades didn't move either. He looked at Rory with that still, patient attention he had, and his tail moved once, in a single slow arc.
I let out a long, slow breath.
Bella stood about three feet behind Rory, her own camera down, watching the two of them. She caught my eye when I glanced over and gave me a look that landed somewhere in the vicinity of, she's fine without being condescending about it.
Hades slipped back into the cottonwoods a few minutes later. Rory spent the rest of the afternoon looking at the photos she'd gotten with a focused quiet I hadn’t seen in her before.
Satisfied neither of the women under my care was going to go chasing a wolf through the woods, I walked back toward the office. Bella followed.
“She’s got real talent,” Bella said under her breath. “I’d be happy to work with her if she’s interested.”
I grunted, not a yes, but not a no, either. Rory had already had her heart broken by a woman who didn’t stick around. I could see how this would end. Bella would go back to wherever the hell she’d come from and I’d be here, picking up the pieces. Again.
“Jace.” Bella put her hand on my arm and stopped moving.
I could be a jerk, but I wasn’t a complete asshole, so I stopped next to her. My heart slammed into the side of my chest as she tightened the pressure on my arm.
“What do you want me to say?” I stopped resisting and stared into her eyes. I’d been trying not to look at her too closely, trying to hold her at a distance. In that moment, all the walls I’d put up fell away.
Her eyes locked on mine and her voice came out soft. “I want you to say yes.”
Fuck. Me. When she looked at me like that, with hope and heat and concern all swirling together in her eyes, I wanted to give her everything. Instead, I gave her the barn.
“Fine. As long as she has her chores done and it doesn’t get in the way of her schedule at the rodeo grounds.” I tugged my arm out from under her hand. I couldn’t afford to let her get to me. Not now, not ever. Not if I wanted to stay in control.
Bella tilted her head like she was trying to get a read on me. Her hair fell forward and it took every bit of willpower I possessed not to reach out and tuck it behind her ear.
“Thank you, Jace.”
“I’ve got work to do.” I left her standing there but felt her eyes on my back until I turned the corner.
Saturday morning, while I was getting ready to head out and check fence lines, Bella asked Rory if she wanted to work on some texture shots.
I hadn’t seen my daughter light up like that in years.
The two of them linked arms and started talking in a language I didn’t understand about light balance and shadows.
I ran into some trouble replacing a post and came back an hour later than I'd planned.
They were at the back of the barn. Rory crouched down with Bella’s smaller camera in her hands while Bella walked her through something about shadow and grain.
The barn light was coming through the high window, turning the old timber walls into something worth photographing.
I understood, looking at it, what Bella had seen.
“It's a different language,” Rory was saying. “That's what you mean.”
“The light's the same light,” Bella said. “You're just learning to read it.”
I leaned against the door frame and didn't announce myself.
Rory moved to the next section, and that was when she stopped. She was crouched near the base of the storage shelving, where the old wooden crates had been pushed back to make room for equipment two summers ago, and she was looking at something low on the shelf.
“What's this?”
I straightened.
It was a lockbox made out of dark wood with brass fittings, the kind of thing that came from an era before fireproof filing cabinets.
I'd moved it twice without opening it. It had come with the property when I bought out the old Walker parcel from my uncle's estate, and I'd always assumed it was tools or documents related to the sale that had already been settled.
“Old property records,” I said. “Nothing useful.”
Rory ran her thumb over the brass latch. “Is it locked?”
“Leave it.”
She pulled her hand back.
“I'll move it to the house,” I said, mostly to close the subject.
I picked it up on the way back through and carried it to the mudroom shelf. Set it down. Didn't look at it again that evening.
But later, when Rory was in bed and the barn lights were off and Bella's window above the loft was dark, I stood in the mudroom doorway and looked at the box sitting on the shelf.
I'd bought the parcel from my uncle. My uncle had inherited it from my grandfather. And my grandfather, I knew in the way you know things that have never been discussed directly, had kept records that nobody had ever volunteered to explain to me.
The Walker land sat where it sat. Right between the Kincaid grazing boundary and the old Hollister fence line.
And I'd never once thought to ask why.