Chapter 5 Maggie #2
I didn't argue. He was right—the geometry of it made sense. And there was something in his voice, in the way he shifted from relaxed to razor-focused, that told me he'd done this before. Not the slow, patient gentling of the training paddock. This was triage.
I sprinted for the gate, rain plastering my hair to my face. Lightning cracked—close, the kind that makes the air taste like metal—and Dancer screamed. The sound cut through the wind, high and panicked, the sound of an animal who'd stopped thinking and started running on pure terror.
Jack was already in the paddock. No halter, no rope. Just his body and his voice and whatever the hell he did that made frightened animals stop and listen.
He didn't approach her. Didn't chase. He positioned himself between Dancer and the failing fence, angling his body to redirect without cornering.
His hands were low and open. He was talking—I couldn't hear the words over the storm, but I could see his mouth moving, see the deliberate calm in every line of him.
A man who didn't flinch in a crisis. Not performing steadiness—just being it, the way some people are left-handed or blue-eyed. Built in.
Dancer wheeled, head tossing, and charged toward the broken fence.
Jack moved—fast, explosive, nothing like the patient trainer from four days ago.
He cut her angle, not blocking but redirecting, using his body like a sheepdog working an ewe.
Dancer spun, confused, and in that half-second of hesitation, Jack closed the distance.
His hand caught her mane. Not grabbing—just contact. Connection. An anchor in the chaos.
Dancer trembled. Fought. Almost reared.
Jack held on, one hand in her mane, the other on her neck, absorbing the force of her panic without matching it. Rain was sheeting sideways. Lightning split the sky again. I had the gate open, my heart somewhere in my throat.
"Come on," I whispered. "Come on, come on—"
Jack turned her. Slow, muscling against her momentum, using his weight and her confusion to redirect her toward the gate.
Dancer fought him for three strides. Four.
Then something broke—not her spirit, her resistance.
She stopped pulling against him and started moving with him, trusting whatever signal he was sending through his hands.
They came through the gate at a controlled trot, Dancer blowing hard and trembling, Jack soaked through and breathing like he'd run a mile.
Sully appeared from somewhere—I hadn't even tracked the dog—and flanked Dancer's offside without being asked, instinctively closing the channel toward the barn.
We got her inside. Got the door shut. Got a blanket on her and put her into a stall where the walls would hold her safe.
And then it was just us. Standing in the barn aisle, rain hammering the roof like it was trying to get in, both of us soaked to the bone, chests heaving.
I was shaking.
Not from cold. Not from fear, exactly. From the adrenaline dump, from the relief, from the raw physical intensity of the last fifteen minutes. My hands trembled against Dancer's stall door, and I couldn't make them stop.
"Hey." Jack's voice, close. I hadn't heard him move. "She's okay. Fence held long enough. She's safe."
"I know." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I know she's safe."
"You're shaking."
"I'm aware."
He stepped closer. Not crowding—just near. Near enough that I could feel the warmth of him despite the wet clothes, near enough that when he put his hands on my shoulders, the weight of them cut through the adrenaline like an anchor dropping.
I didn't pull away.
I should have. Every rule I'd set, every boundary I'd drawn, every pep talk I'd delivered to my own reflection said pull away.
But my body was vibrating like a plucked wire and his hands were warm and solid, and God help me, I just wanted to stand still for one minute and let someone else be the strong one.
So I stood there. His hands on my shoulders, both of us dripping rainwater onto the barn floor, the storm raging outside like it wanted to tear the world apart.
"You did good out there," he said quietly. "The gate timing was perfect."
"You're the one who grabbed a twelve-hundred-pound panicking horse barehanded."
"She wasn't panicking by the time I got to her. She was deciding. I just helped her decide the right direction."
I almost laughed. "Is that what you do? Help things decide the right direction?"
"When they let me."
His thumb moved. Just once. A slow stroke along my collarbone where my wet shirt had slipped sideways, barely a whisper of contact against rain-cooled skin.
My entire nervous system detonated.
It wasn't a big movement. Wasn't deliberate, maybe wasn't even conscious.
But I felt it everywhere—a cascade of heat that started at that single point of contact and flooded outward until my fingertips tingled and my breath caught and the space between us felt like it was filled with something combustible.
I looked up. He looked down. His eyes were dark, rain-damp hair pushed back from his face, and the expression there wasn't careful anymore. It wasn't controlled. It was hungry, and seeing it hit me low and hard because I'd been pretending for four days that this wasn't exactly where we were headed.
His hand stilled on my shoulder. I could feel his pulse through his palm, faster than his expression let on.
One inch. That's all it would take. One inch forward and his mouth would be on mine, and four days of professional restraint would go up in smoke.
"Hey, Mags! Y'all get the filly in?"
Clay's voice, cutting through the barn from the far entrance. Boots on concrete. Getting closer.
Jack dropped his hands.
I stepped back.
By the time Clay rounded the corner, we were three feet apart. Jack was checking Dancer's legs for injuries, calm and methodical. I was leaning against the stall door with my arms crossed, looking exactly like a woman who'd just handled a crisis and nothing more.
"She okay?" Clay asked, peering into the stall. His eyes moved between us—quick, unreadable. My youngest brother was sharper than people gave him credit for, behind the golden-boy charm and the easy grin.
"She's fine," I said. "Spooked but no injuries. Jack got her out before the fence went."
Clay looked at Jack. Something passed across his face—assessment, maybe. Curiosity. "Nice work, man. That filly doesn't let anyone near her on a good day."
"She just needed someone to make the choice easier," Jack said, not looking up from Dancer's foreleg. "Storm was making the decisions for her. I just gave her a better option."
Clay nodded slowly. Then his gaze slid back to me, and there was something in it that I didn't like. Not accusation. Not even suspicion. Just... noticing. The way he noticed the angle of a bull's charge before it committed, or the tell in a poker player's hands.
"You're soaked, Mags," he said mildly. "Might want to get dried off before you catch something."
"I'm fine."
"You look cold."
"I said I'm fine, Clay."
He held up both hands, backing off with that easy grin. "Alright, alright. I'm just the messenger. Momma sent me to check on you. You know how she gets during storms."
"Tell her the horses are fine. Tell her I'm fine. Tell her to stop sending recon."
Clay laughed and ambled out, and I let out a breath I'd been holding since he walked in.
When I turned back to Jack, he was standing. Watching me with an expression that was carefully neutral and absolutely failed to hide what was underneath.
"You should get dried off," he said.
"Don't start."
"I'm agreeing with your brother."
"That's the first time anyone's said that sentence."
Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. Almost-smile. The dangerous kind. "Go, Maggie. I've got Dancer. I'll check the fence when the storm breaks and patch what I can."
I didn't want to go. I wanted to stand in this barn and let the storm drown out every rational thought in my head and close that one inch of distance that was going to haunt me for the rest of the night.
Instead, I nodded. "Let me know the fence damage by morning."
"Yes, boss."
I left. Walked through the rain to my cabin without hurrying, because hurrying would mean I was running, and I was not running from Jack Remington.
I was strategically retreating.
There's a difference.
I showered, changed, and sat down at my desk with the horse program proposal pulled up on my laptop.
I had work to do. Real work. Important work. The proposal for Wyatt, the stallion research, the five-year projections that could change everything for me if I got them right.
This was what mattered. This was my dream, finally within reach, and I was not going to let it get derailed by a man with good hands and a talent for showing up at exactly the wrong moment.
I typed for an hour. Solid, focused work.
Budget projections, mare evaluations, breeding line analysis.
I pulled up the Fort Worth auction catalog and cross-referenced it with the bloodline research I'd been compiling for years.
I was in the zone—the good place where the numbers made sense and the vision was clear and everything felt possible.
Then I got to the section on sire line compatibility and realized I needed Jack's input.
His knowledge of the Raven Spur line was firsthand. The Montana breeding background, the temperament profiles, the genetic tendencies across generations—that was information I couldn't get from a catalog. It was expertise that lived in a person, not a spreadsheet.
Which meant I was going to have to sit down with him. Alone. Go over bloodlines and stud fees and five-year breeding projections while pretending my pulse wasn't doing something stupid.
I muttered something unprintable into the wood of my desk.
My phone buzzed. Ivy.
"Tell me everything," she said when I picked up. "Wyatt came home looking like a man who'd had a feeling and didn't know what to do about it."
I laughed despite myself. "He looked at the projections."
She gasped. "He did? And?"
"He told me to put together a formal proposal. Wants it by Thursday so Daddy can see it at dinner."
Ivy's squeal nearly took out my eardrum. "Maggie! That's—do you know what that means?"
"It means he's willing to listen. It doesn't mean yes."
"It means the door is open. You've been pushing against that door for two years, and it's finally open."
I leaned back in my chair, letting myself feel it. The warm glow of something that might actually happen. “This wouldn’t have happened without you, Ivy,” I said, hoping she could hear how much it meant to me.
"Maggie." Her voice softened. "You deserve to want things for yourself. Not just for the ranch. For you."
The words landed somewhere I wasn't prepared for. Not in the place that was thinking about horse programs and stallion auctions. In the other place. The one I kept locked down and barricaded and pretended didn't exist.
"I know," I said quietly.
"Do you? Because you're the most capable person I know, and you're also the worst at believing you're allowed to have things just because they make you happy."
I didn't have an answer for that. Mostly because she wasn't just talking about horses anymore, and we both knew it.
"The proposal's coming together," I said, steering us back to safe ground. "I'll need some of your genetics data for the crossover section—how the horse breeding would complement the cattle program instead of competing with it."
"I'll send it tonight." She paused. "Maggie, can I ask you something? And you can tell me to shut up if you want."
"I frequently tell you to shut up. It never works."
"When's the last time you let someone in? Not for the ranch. Not for the family. For you."
The question landed like a stone in still water. "I don't know what you mean."
"I mean..." She chose her words slowly. "I've known you forever.
And in all that time, I've never once seen you let a man get close.
Not really close. You date occasionally—polite dinners, safe choices, guys who never stick around past the third week because you don't let them.
And I've never pushed because it's your business, but I watch you take care of everyone else like it's breathing, and then when it comes to yourself, you just..
." she trailed off. "You lock up. Like trusting someone with that part of you is the one thing you can't make yourself do. "
My throat went tight.
She wasn't wrong. And she didn't even know the half of it.
She didn't know about Daniel. Junior year, UT Austin, the first man I'd ever loved with my whole chest—the first man I'd given all of myself to without holding anything back. I'd thought that was what love was supposed to look like. All in. No guardrails.
And he'd looked at me across his apartment the night he ended it and said, “You're too much, Maggie. You're just... too much.”
Too much need. Too much intensity. Too much of everything that made me who I am.
I'd driven home to Copper Creek that night and rebuilt every wall I'd ever taken down, and I'd never let another man close enough to confirm what Daniel had already told me: that the full, unfiltered version of Maggie Blackwood was more than anyone wanted to deal with.
"I'm just careful," I said lightly. "Nothing wrong with careful."
“Yeah, there's nothing wrong with careful," Ivy agreed. "But there's a difference between careful and closed. And I'm not sure you know which one you are anymore."
The silence sat between us for a long beat.
"Goodnight, Ivy," I said softly.
"Goodnight." Her voice was gentle now. Less teasing, more tender. "Love you, Mags.” She hung up. I stared at my phone for a long moment.
Then I turned back to the proposal, to the section that needed Jack's expertise, to the professional conversation I was going to have to arrange with a man whose thumb on my collarbone had nearly undone four days of perfectly constructed restraint.
We'd talk about horses. Only horses.
And I would absolutely, under no circumstances, think about the way he'd looked at me in that barn—like he'd been waiting, and waiting, and was very close to being done with waiting.
I pulled up the Raven Spur bloodline data and started typing.
One thing at a time, Blackwood, reminded myself.
First the dream.
Then... whatever came after.