Chapter 1
I never was a lady, but now I think I’ve gone too far.
Jessie Jane Hancock was the proud owner of a whole collection of toxic traits.
Generally, she found them to be a good time at the very least. But currently, her desperate need to climb impossible mountains was eating at her. Making her life downright miserable, in fact.
So miserable that she got distracted and did something she rarely ever did: Jessie Jane missed a trick. Which was how she found herself tumbling off her horse face-first into the arena dirt.
“Whoa there.”
She popped up and looked across the arena at her older brother West, who was not on his way to help her up. Instead, he was sitting there on the back of his horse, his arms crossed across his broad chest as he stared at her.
“Thanks for the help,” she groused as she stood up and hauled herself up onto her own mount.
West only looked at her, the maddening fool. “If you fall off the horse, you have to get back on again. No one can do it for you.”
“Well, aren’t you a big old Magic Eight Ball.”
“I’ve been called a lot of things, Jess, but rarely that.”
“Rarely isn’t never, West.”
She was supposed to be rehearsing a new routine for this summer’s opening of Butch Hancock’s Wild West Show. Instead, she was stewing. About the upcoming mayoral election. The thing was, everyone hated the current mayor.
Well. That wasn’t true; Danielle had been elected.
But she was a mean girl. She had been a mean girl in high school, and she was mean now.
She had very notoriously stolen the town librarian’s fiancé—though Jessie Jane definitely believed that the man in question needed to be held equally accountable.
But the man in question was basically a turnip with testicles.
So she gave him less credit for the seduction because he was an idiot.
Danielle wasn’t an idiot. For all that she was an awful human being.
Rustler Mountain was a small town nestled in the southern Oregon mountains only eight miles from the California border. It had a rich gold rush history, and was steeped in the myth and legend of the Wild West. The Hancock family had made money off that myth and legend for years.
With their reputation, there was nothing else to do but lean into it.
In Rustler Mountain, things were black and white. It was as simple as good guys and bad guys. Some of the town was descended from lawmen, while other folks … Well, they were outlaws.
The Wilder family being the most notorious of the outlaws, given that back in the late 1800s Austin Wilder had been shot dead in the main street of Rustler Mountain by Sheriff Lee Talbot.
So when, one hundred and fifty years later, a Talbot and a Wilder had married, the narrative of the town had been suddenly disrupted.
It was like a mountain that had stood unchanging for centuries had suddenly ruptured, reordering the landscape around it.
Those clearly defined lines weren’t so cleanly delineated anymore.
There had been big pushes to correct some of the misinformation that had stood as history for well over a century, and as the local narrative changed, so did some of the ways that the whole town worked.
She couldn’t lie—it was a little bit annoying to have more of the nice townies in her favorite bar on the weekends. But it was also nice to have some more locals showing up to the Wild West Show.
The Hancocks’ show, which featured historical reenactments and trick riding, along with rodeo events, was extremely popular with neighboring communities, but was often wasted on their own. But again, that had to do with the reputation of the Hancock family.
A reputation that rarely bothered her. Except now …
“I can hear you thinking.”
“I doubt it. I assume deep thoughts operate at a frequency you can’t actually hear.”
West snorted. “If only. But unfortunately, I know you too well.”
“That viper is running unopposed.”
“The viper?”
“Danielle LeFevre. There is no other mayoral candidate, and just three days left to declare.”
“Not your problem.”
“It’s everyone’s problem. You know that noise ordinance she’s been amping for is going to affect us—which isn’t even fair.
Her parking permit stuff is outrageous, and she’s misallocating funds—you can be sure of that.
She wants to gut funding for the Historical Society, and she’s now reversing her stance on the new plaques in town saying we’re …
revising history or something when you know it was about correcting lies and making sure people know the truth about the history of this place. ”
“I agree with you. She sucks. But why you?” West asked.
She didn’t answer that question directly. “I just can’t understand why no one else is running against her.”
“They aren’t dying to be in charge of a town with under two thousand people so they can lord their supposed authority over everyone around them?”
“All right. When you put it like that.”
“Danielle isn’t your problem. She’s just going to do what she’s going to do. Spend money on silly trips that probably should’ve gone to patch cracks in the sidewalk. End up stealing the librarian’s fiancé, which I wouldn’t even kick up a fuss about except that he has the same name as her brother.”
Jessie made a face. “Ugh.”
“But hey,” West continued, “our ancestors were full-on betrayers and murderers.”
“Not all of them. Just one of them was.”
“One of them was a courtesan.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Jessie Jane grinned widely at her brother.
“No, I didn’t. I’m just pointing it out.”
“If something is in demand, it’s a smart business decision to go into that business. And I think we know what sells. Always,” she pointed out.
“I’m certainly not dragging the great and glorious Belle Martin. Not for any reason at all. My point is, we have an eclectic history.”
“Sure.”
And that history pretty much never included walking the straight and narrow. Oh sure, they were on the up and up with the Wild West Show. But Jessie couldn’t deny that she had some side hustles that were a little less than scrupulous. Her farrier business, on the other hand, was totally scrupulous.
And anyway, regarding the gambling, it was her opinion that if people wanted to bet their hard-earned money on horse races, fistfights, and football games, it wasn’t her job to talk them out of it. And she made a little bit of cash whenever she talked them into it.
She was good at explaining a position. Holding it.
If she knew one thing, it was that she was … Well, one of her friends in high school had said that she should start a cult. Because for all that she was rough around the edges, she had a way with people.
A hard-earned way.
Not with everybody, though. Flynn Wilder came to mind.
He was not charmed by her. Not at all. Annoying, because he was a sexy bastard.
Another unclimbable mountain, but one that Jessie had long ago accepted she would never scale.
There were a lot of handsome men. If she wanted to hook up, she could just …
pick one of them. She didn’t need to borrow trouble with a Wilder.
But what a spectacle it would be …
“You’re literally scheming,” West said.
“I’m not scheming.” West continued to treat her to the patented hard glare that many women about town called sexy and she called annoying. “Okay. I’m lightly scheming. It’s a mild scheme. But it will probably never make it out of the scheming phase.”
He lifted his brows. “And if it does?”
“At that point it will become a plot,” she explained.
“Tell me more.”
“If we execute it, then it’s a crusade. Maybe even a quest.”
“We?”
Jessie looked out at the mountains, at the jagged line where the pine trees met the wide blue sky. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to involve you in anything. Yet.”
“What I would like to involve you in is a perfectly executed trick-riding routine where you don’t break your neck.”
“I can do that.”
She urged her horse forward, but she couldn’t keep the idea from turning in her head, over and over again.
She had lied to her brother. This was more than just a scheme. More than a plot.
She had a feeling that before the day was out, it was, indeed, going to become a quest.
And when Jessie Jane Hancock went on a quest, she didn’t come back home empty-handed.
Flynn Wilder was happy that his brothers were happy. He really was. But there was some complexity to that happiness on his end.
Austin and Carson being happily hitched changed the dynamics at the family ranch. It was all good. Of course it was.
It was only that it meant things were different. They didn’t all go down to The Watering Hole in a big group anymore. Most days it was just Dalton, his lifelong best friend, and his younger sister Cassidy. And he was getting a little tired of Cassidy hanging out with them.
She had a crush on Dalton, and everybody knew it. It was damn near embarrassing to witness. He never wanted to say anything about it, but it wasn’t like Dalton didn’t know. It was impossible to not know.
Though he was pretty sure Cassidy didn’t know, or rather, she pretended not to know.
“Your sister’s a nice girl,” Dalton had said just the other day. “But I have literally known her since she was a snot-eating child.”
“She was nine when she moved here. She wasn’t exactly a snot-eating child.”
He wasn’t sure if calling what Cassidy had done “moving here” was the correct choice of words. She had been abandoned by her mother at Christmas, brought to live at the Wilder Ranch when she had never met her father’s side of the family.
He was well aware of the complexities of family issues. He might have different ones from his younger sister, but he had plenty.
Hell, they all did, really. His older brothers were actually his half brothers. Their mother had taken off when they were young. His mother lived in town but …
She’d married into a real family. The right one. All respectable and rich, and definitely nothing to do with their dad and his bad reputation and all of his issues.