Chapter 21 #3
She played me.
She played me.
The “I’ll follow your lead.” The “I’ll be fine.
” The patient, wide-eyed compliance of a woman who let me open the gate and check on her twice and ask if she was okay as if she were a porcelain figure on a carousel horse.
She sat there. Held the reins. Looked pretty.
And waited for the exact right moment to reveal that she could outride me on a horse she met twenty minutes ago.
“F—” I curse, but the word dissolves into action as my body overrides my astonishment and defaults to the only appropriate response: pursuit.
I whip the reins.
Beau, to his credit, does not need to be asked twice.
The quarter horse surges forward with the competitive energy of an animal who has just watched another horse sprint past him and considers this a personal insult.
His hooves dig into the trail, the acceleration pushing me back in the saddle as we barrel down the slope in the wake of a dust cloud that Hazel is already fifty yards ahead of.
I lean forward.
Hat brim cutting the wind. Reins gathered. The trail blurring beneath Beau’s hooves as we close the gap—thirty yards, twenty—and I can see her now, the shape of her on Goldie’s back, the ponytail whipping through the air like a dare made physical.
She looks back.
Over her shoulder.
And the grin on her face—
God.
It’s the biggest grin I’ve ever seen on Hazel Martinez.
Not the smirk. Not the controlled, one-corner acknowledgment of amusement that she rations out like a valuable resource.
This is the full expression. The unguarded, wide-open, teeth-showing grin of a woman who is doing something she loves and doing it well and has just outmaneuvered a man who thought he was the one with the advantage.
Her eyes are bright. Alive. The amber lit with a joy that I have not seen on her face since the day she arrived in Sweetwater Falls—a joy that the hospital bed couldn’t hold and the diagnosis couldn’t kill and the six-month countdown couldn’t suppress.
She is incandescent.
“You never asked if I knew how to ride, Cowboy!” she shouts, the words carried on the wind with a brightness that matches the grin. “You would have realized your girl was once a cowgirl!”
Your girl was once a cowgirl.
She said “your girl.”
She used my phrase. Took the possessive I deployed in the barn—“our girl”—and turned it singular and aimed it at me and delivered it at full gallop with the wind in her hair and a grin on her face that could power a city.
I’m going to marry this woman.
I mean—I’m going to—we’re going to—the pack will—
Focus, Oakley.
She winks.
At full canter, looking back over her shoulder on a horse she’s known for twenty minutes, Hazel Martinez winks at me. The gesture is devastating in its confidence—the casual, effortless flirtation of a woman who has the upper hand and knows it and is enjoying every second of the reversal.
Then she whips the reins.
Goldie responds with another gear I didn’t know the palomino had—a full gallop that eats the remaining trail with a speed that suggests Goldie has been waiting three years for a rider who would let her actually run and has decided this is the moment and this is the rider and fuck the gentle temperament because she’s going fast.
They leave me in the dust.
Literally.
A cloud of Montana trail dirt that Beau gallops through with the resigned energy of a horse who has been outrun and is processing it.
I watch the gap widen—ten yards, fifteen, twenty—as Hazel and Goldie descend into the valley with the fluid, inseparable motion of a pair that has found their rhythm and doesn’t intend to slow down for anyone, least of all a deputy in a Stetson who is currently experiencing the emotional equivalent of being picked up, spun around, and set back down facing the wrong direction.
I’ve never been so turned on in my life.
And I mean that with the full, unfiltered honesty of a man who is riding a horse at full gallop in pursuit of a woman who just outmaneuvered him and whose body is responding to the experience with an enthusiasm that the saddle is now making extremely, structurally, inescapably apparent.
She’s a cowgirl.
Hazel Martinez. City police chief. Academy valedictorian.
Case clearance record holder. Competitive.
Independent. Stubborn. Brilliant. Currently running away from me on a palomino horse in October sunlight with her ponytail streaming behind her and a grin on her face that rewrote every assessment I’ve made of her since day one.
A cowgirl.
With an expiration date she doesn’t deserve and a target on her back she didn’t ask for and a past that tried to destroy her and didn’t succeed because this woman was built from materials that don’t break—they just bend far enough to make you think they will and then snap back with enough force to leave you in the dust on a trail wondering what just happened.
She played me.
Let me lead. Let me check on her. Let me open the gate and ask if she was okay and feel like the experienced rider guiding the novice through unfamiliar terrain.
And then she showed me who she actually is.
Not the damaged Omega who needs protection.
Not the hospitalized patient who needs monitoring.
Not the woman with six months who needs saving.
A cowgirl who rides like the wind owes her money.
And I’m so getting payback.