8. Chapter 8
Rebel
Sleep never really starts.
I drift off just far enough to lose the room, then surface again with the same image waiting for me as if it never moved. Montana turning under bar lights with Holt’s hands at her back and looking like she hadn’t a care in the world.
What keeps needling at me isn’t Holt himself. I could make him insignificant if I wanted to. He’s just a local man with an easy smile and handsome enough to look good under string lights. That part’s easy.
What I can’t shake is the look on her face.
She was lighter with him ... unguarded in a way I haven’t seen before, as if one song with a man who meant nothing had given her ten minutes without the need to analyze anything.
And I walked into that room and hated him for it.
I cross to the window and pull the curtain back with two fingers. The yard is black except for the security light near the lower drive. It throws a pale circle over the gravel and leaves the barns shaded at the edge of the dark.
I should be thinking about the prospect file on my desk downstairs, about bloodlines and numbers and the call I need to make by eight if I want to get ahead of the buyers circling that stallion in Oklahoma.
Instead, I’m standing here at three in the morning replaying the angle of another man’s hand at Montana’s waist and the look on her face when she saw me.
Jealousy is too small a word for what hit me in that bar. Jealousy belongs to boys, drunks, and men surprised by their own appetites. It came in fast and territorial, which would be humiliating enough if I had any claim on her at all, which I don’t.
The fact that she’s someone I’ve crossed lines with twice already and, more importantly, an employee temporarily living under my roof, means I need to put distance back where it belongs … and keep it there.
So why did I follow her outside?
Maybe it was the fact that she looked more at home in a crowded bar with a stranger than she ever has across a table from me.
And that’s something I want for us, more than anything.
I let the curtain fall shut, then reach automatically to the dish on the dresser where I dropped my keys and pocket knife. My fingers close around a toothpick instead. I set it between my teeth and bite down until the wood gives.
That’s what I’m still carrying.
If this is possessiveness, that would be a failure of discipline, and if I let that failure keep growing, it won’t stop at a parking lot and a near ...kiss. It’ll move into the ranch, and the decisions I make when money and breeding lines are on the table, where there’s no room for sentiment.
I know exactly what men become when they start believing want entitles them to space inside another person’s life, because I was raised by one.
The memories of that should be enough to kill this where it stands, but when I lie back down, the only thing on my mind is Montana.
And that thought keeps me awake until dawn.
By 7:30 am, I’ve made enough decisions to prove I can be functional.
By 8:00 am, I’m in the office with the prospect file open under my hand, photographs clipped to the front and pedigree notes marked in the margins where I went through them once after dinner and again in the middle of the night.
The colt is eighteen months old, still raw enough to be more promise than certainty, but the promise is expensive. He has good hips, clean shoulders and a sire line I’ve been watching for two seasons. If he vets clean and his mind is as good as the breeder claims, he changes my next five years.
That’s why I should take Wade.
He knows how I buy … when to shut up and when to point out the thing I’m too irritated by or too interested to see clearly.
I pick Montana instead.
I don’t overthink it. That’s the story I stick to while I’m calling Cassie for her location. Cassie mentions that she's over near the wash rack, helping one of the younger hands with a mare that pins her ears for everyone else but Montana.
I hang up and head for the barn.
The wash rack's still wet when I step into the aisle, the concrete holding a dull shine where the morning light reaches it. Cold air slips through the open side doors, carrying the diesel thrum of a tractor starting somewhere out in the yard. Montana's standing at the mare’s shoulder with one hand tucked under the halter strap and the other moving along the neck in slow, steady passes. She isn’t talking much.
The mare’s eye has lost its hard edge, and one hind foot is resting now instead of set to strike.
Montana looks up when she hears me, and whatever she finds in my face, she leaves it there.
“That one finally decide not to kill anybody?” I ask.
The stable hand barks out a laugh. Montana glances at the mare’s pinned ear, then back at me. “I think she’s still weighing her options.”
It almost passes for ordinary.
Almost.
I stop at the edge of the wash rack and keep my eyes on the mare, because the mare is simple and Montana never is. “Get your things,” I say. “We’re taking a drive.”
The younger hand looks from me to her. Montana stays exactly where she is.
“For what?”
“Prospect inspection. Out near the Oklahoma line.”
That catches her attention.
“Don’t you have staff for that?”
“I do.”
She waits me out.
So I say the part that matters. “You read horses better than anyone I’ve got right now. I want another set of eyes on the colt before I put money behind him.”
The words carry more force than they should, maybe because they’re the closest thing to clean praise I’ve given her since she got here. The stable hand finds a reason to get busy wrapping up the hose and drifts out of earshot without being told.
Montana’s hand stays easy under the halter. “You sure this isn’t a terrible idea?”
Probably … but in this case, usefulness matters more.
“We leave in twenty minutes,” I say.
Her gaze holds mine a beat longer than it needs to. “That wasn’t an answer.”
“No,” I say. “It’s the plan.”
For the first time all morning, something in me settles. Not because she agrees ... she hasn’t yet ... but because when the horse matters, I still trust her enough to bring her with me.
By the time we pull out of Wild Mercy, the file is on the console between us and the day has narrowed to one question: whether this colt is worth the kind of risk I usually refuse on principle.
The drive south takes us through ranch roads first, then highway, then the flatter stretch where fence lines cut black across the bleached and scoured land.
Montana opens the file at the first stop sign and reads without speaking for almost a minute. Then she says, “You didn’t mention he’s by Ashford’s Mercy.”
“I assumed you knew the line.”
“I know the line.” She turns a page. “I also know that you don’t usually touch anything that close to it.”
That part’s true.
Ashford’s Mercy was a great horse with a bad mind and enough brilliance to make men feel smarter than they were. My father loved horses like that, and so did half the buyers who came after him. They got speed, flash, and more wreckage than they ever admitted in public.
I keep my eyes on the road. “He isn’t Ashford’s Mercy, but that doesn’t mean the blood won’t show.”
Montana turns the page with her thumb. “No. It just means you think you might get the engine without paying the full price for the mind.”
The truck goes quieter after that.
She keeps reading, one thumb braced under the page, while I let the lane lines unspool ahead of us and remind myself why I’m doing this at all.
The maternal line is unusually steady, and if the breeder’s notes are honest, stating that the colt has the engine without the volatility, I can use him to rebuild a section of the program I’ve been breeding around for years.
The money isn’t the gamble. The gamble is taking the risk of damaging my program with one bad decision.
I reach into the cup holder for the toothpick I shoved there after we left Wild Mercy and roll it between my teeth.
The heater hums under the dash, tires running a steady note against the highway.
Every now and then the thermos gives a dull click against the cup holder when the truck hits a seam in the road.
Montana rides with one boot braced against the floorboard and the file closed on her lap, her hand resting over it as if she doesn’t entirely trust what’s inside.
She watches the highway, and the miles of pastures with the same quiet attention she gives a horse she hasn’t decided is safe.
She doesn’t fill the silence, she just keeps track.
That gets harder to ignore in close quarters.
A truck cab shows details a barn can blur. The chip in her thumbnail polish. The pale freckle near the base of her thumb when the light hits the console just right. The way her body language always seems to reflect some kind of guardedness.
I keep my eyes on the road … mostly.
Somewhere past the state line, she reaches for the radio and glances at me first.
She turns the dial through static, preacher talk, and farm reports until an old country song comes through clean. Nothing flashy. Steel guitar and a little ache in it.
“That one pass?” she asks.
“It passes.”
She leaves it there, one song running into another, and then another. By the fourth, the atmosphere in the truck has seemed to mellow. And somewhere between one exit marker and the next, I realize the road is doing exactly what I knew it would if I gave it enough time.
It’s making room.
We stop at a diner just over the Oklahoma line because the sky has gone flat and white enough to promise weather and because Montana hasn’t eaten anything heavier than gas station peanuts.
The place sits off the highway with a gravel lot, a hand-painted sign, and windows gone cloudy around the edges from years of grease and weather. Inside, the heat is turned too high and the coffee smells burnt, but the grill is working hard.
I let Montana go in ahead of me. I want to see what she does before she remembers she is being watched.