Chapter 4
BELLA
The horses woke me before my alarm did. They weren’t noisy.
It was more the feeling of the barn shifting underneath me, those early-morning creaks and weight redistributions that had worked their way into my sleep patterns without even noticing.
I’d been sleeping in Jace Walker’s barn for a week, and I already knew the difference between Cutter moving to his water bucket and the heavier, slower sound of the mare circling her stall.
That was a problem for someone who never stayed in one place for long.
I stared at the exposed timber above me and listened to Jace's boots on the concrete below. He had a pattern, stopping at each stall in the same order. The low sound of his voice carried up through the floorboards. I couldn’t make out the words, just the tone.
His voice was softer and less guarded when he talked to the horses.
I'd been here for seven days, and I'd already catalogued the man's morning routine like it was something I needed to know. I got up, made coffee on the small two-burner, and told myself I was standing at the window because the light was good.
The light was good. Six-fifteen and the June sun was already coming in at a low, honeyed angle across the paddock, catching the dust Jace had kicked up moving bales, and he was working without his shirt.
My face heated, and I looked away.
Then I looked back because that kind of beauty deserved to be appreciated by someone.
And today, that someone was me. He had the kind of body that said he worked hard for a living.
Broad across the shoulders and tapered at the waist, with the kind of forearm definition that came from ropes and gates and giant hay bales, not cable machines.
He moved a bale from the cart to the rail with the same efficiency he did everything.
Then he reached up to push his hair back, and I sighed as the whole line of his back shifted and—
“You want to come down here and actually take a picture, or what?” He squinted as he stared up at the window.
I stepped back and almost tripped over my own foot.
He made a sound that could have been a laugh, though I wasn’t sure he was capable of humor.
I pulled on jeans and a t-shirt and went downstairs because I couldn’t spend all day avoiding him. It would be better to get it over with and move past the humiliation of being caught checking him out.
He had his shirt back on by the time I came through the barn door, which was either considerate or strategic.
Either way, it made it much easier to face him even if a small part of me wondered what it might feel like to run my hands down his back.
Heat threatened to race across my cheeks, and I fanned myself with my hand.
He didn't look up from the latch he was re-securing on Cutter's stall. “Coffee's on in the house if you want it,” he said. “Yours is better, though.”
“It's the same brand.”
“Different ratio.”
I leaned against the opposite stall. “You've had my coffee once.”
“Twice.” He tested the latch, then turned to look at me, and whatever charged thing had been sitting in the air between us a moment ago didn't dissipate—it just rearranged itself into something he wore better than I did. “Morning routine's not for photography.”
“I wasn't—” I stopped. He was waiting. “I had my camera upstairs.”
“You had your eyes down here.”
“Your barn is below my window. That's a you problem, Walker.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile exactly, but it could have passed for a smirk.
“Stay on the paddock side during chores,” he said. “I'll tell you when it's fair game.”
“And if I disagree with where the line is?”
“You won't.” He picked up the empty cart handles and started for the feed room. “Because you're smarter than you're currently pretending to be.”
I stood there for a moment after he'd gone, coffee going cold in my hands, aware that I'd just been complimented and corrected in the same sentence and had somehow come out of it less irritated than I'd walked in.
The art director, Edward, called at eight-thirty. I was out at the paddock rail with my long lens, working the morning light on the horses, when my phone buzzed in my back pocket. I knew from the ringtone it was him.
“Tell me you've got the father-daughter material,” he said.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Bella.” He cleared his throat. “The first piece pulled eight thousand shares in forty-eight hours.
The editor wants a follow-up that goes deeper.
Readers want the human angle—the rancher raising his kid alone, the rodeo community, the quiet life behind the gates.
You're sitting right on top of a goldmine.”
I watched Cutter pace the far edge of the paddock. “I've got the rodeo prep material. The grounds work, the community logistics—”
“That's not what I'm asking for, and you know it.”
I did know. And I knew what he meant by going deeper.
He wanted me to expose the moments that felt private.
Like the silence between Jace and Rory at the fence rail that I hadn't photographed the first night.
The way Rory's face changed when she thought nobody was watching her. The heaviness in Jace’s shoulders when Rory walked away from him.
“I'm working on the access,” I said.
“You're living above his barn. What's the access issue?”
“I'll have something for you by the end of the week.”
He paused long enough to make his opinion clear. “Don't get too comfortable out there, Robbins.”
He disconnected. I lowered the phone and looked at the paddock for a long moment.
If I wanted to, I could give him what he was asking for.
I could pull the candid shot I’d taken of Rory's profile in the shadows.
Then I could wait for Jace to look at his daughter the way he did when he thought nobody was paying attention.
If I captured it, and sent it to Edward, it would probably get at least eight thousand more shares.
I wasn't going to do that. I wasn't entirely sure when I'd made that decision, but standing there with Edward’s voice still in my ear, I knew it was settled. I’d send him amazing photos of the horses, the mountains, and fields of Montana wildflowers. He’d have to be satisfied with that.
In the short time I’d been around Jace and Rory, I’d started to feel something I’d never experienced before.
The only way to describe it was protective.
Jace would probably never talk about it with me, but I got the sense the two of them had been through enough, and I wasn’t about to exploit them for a few more shares on social media.
Rory found me right before lunch. She came around the side of the barn with her phone held out in front of her and something in her expression told me she'd put real thought into whether to come.
“I sorted the ones from yesterday,” she said. “If you want to look.”
I sat on the fence rail, and she stood beside me and we went through them together. She'd taken more than I'd expected: the barn textures I'd walked her through, some of the equipment details, and a wide shot of the paddock that had better composition than most people's first week attempts.
“This one.” I stopped on a frame. Hades stood at the tree line, his attention focused on something outside the frame. The light was low and the focus wasn't quite right, but the choice of the shot was instinctive. “You made a decision here. Most people would've waited for him to look at them.”
Rory looked at the screen. “He wasn't going to look at me.”
“Exactly.”
Her chin came up a fraction. She swiped forward and I let her control the pace.
Most of the barn interior shots were solid.
She had an eye for light and negative space that I hadn't taught her.
Then she stopped on one near the back of the sequence.
A close shot of the storage shelving, taken at low angle, where the morning light had caught the edge of something on the lower shelf.
It was the lockbox. She’d focused on the brass hardware and everything around it was soft shadow.
“I wasn't sure about this one,” Rory said. “The framing's off.”
“The framing's fine. What drew you to it?”
“The light on the metal. The way it looked old. Like it'd been there a long time, and nobody noticed.”
I studied the image. The composition was instinctive in the way that couldn't be taught. She'd felt something about that object and pointed a lens at the feeling without overthinking it.
“That's a real photograph,” I said.
“It's a lockbox.”
“It's whatever that thing made you feel when you looked at it. That's what you captured.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Dad doesn't like me touching the stuff in the back.”
She swiped past it. We went through the rest of the shots, and I was halfway through walking her through how to evaluate her own work when the barn door opened and Jace came out.
He clocked us on the fence rail. He clocked the phone. And then his eyes dropped to the screen. Rory had gone back to one of the shots of Hades again. Something in his posture eased a fraction before tightening again.
“I thought you were supposed to be at registration prep.”
“That's at two,” Rory said.
He stopped next to us, and I felt him look at the phone, then at me. “What are you looking at?”
“Her shots from yesterday,” I said. “She got a good sequence.”
Rory tilted the phone up and swiped back through, and I watched Jace's face as the storage shelf image came past. It was brief—just a narrowing of attention—but his jaw set, and his eyes came to me with a directness that asked a question I hadn't done anything to deserve.
“I took it,” Rory said, not defensive, just stating fact. “Bella didn't tell me to.”
He looked at the image for one more second. “Go get your registration kit. I put it on the kitchen table.”
Rory glanced up at me before she slid off the rail and went to the house without pushing back. Jace watched her go.