Chapter 1 Mason
MASON
The fact that she’s beautiful doesn’t surprise me. I’ve done my homework. I know her as well as one can when you read through a hundred-page profile of someone.
What does surprise me is that I’m attracted to her.
I watch her without being watched—which is what I do best—from the far end of the bar at The Rusty Spur, where I sit with a tumbler of bourbon I haven’t touched.
The place is loud, wall-to-wall—the usual for a Friday night. A live band hammers out something heavy on steel guitar.
Nobody’s paying attention to the man in the corner. That’s by design.
I dress like the locals. I talk like them. I become them—wherever I am.
Taya Morningstar is twelve feet away, and she has no idea I exist.
She’s at a high-top with two women—one dark-haired and rancher-built, one blonde with the kind of easy laugh that fills a room.
I clocked them when I walked in—Aria Delgado Kincaid and Joy Kincaid.
They’re both in the file, tied to significant land in this valley through Maverick Kincaid—Aria’s husband and Joy’s brother. Impressive company for a woman who’s been here just over six months and has already worked her way into the fabric of the place.
I wondered how she’d embedded so fast—but one look at her tells me why.
Some women lean into what their beauty does to a room. Others don’t. That’s the difference between a woman who has female friends and one who doesn’t—and she clearly has them.
She leans forward, says something, and they all crack up. The laughter is contagious and attractive, and several cowboys glance their way. They turn away fast enough. Mav Kincaid, from my files, is known to be a hard-ass—no one in Wildflower Canyon would dare to fuck with someone under his aegis.
“And then it went poof,” she says.
I can’t hear her clearly, but I manage to read her lips. It’s another skill honed during years of working for Uncle Sam. The education I got on the military dime is profitable and handy now that I’ve gone mercenary.
She talks with her whole body. She’s not performing—I don’t think so. I think this is who she is.
Alive.
Her hair is down, dark, and thick past her shoulders. She’s in jeans and a blood-red blouse. She appears to be someone who dresses for herself and achieves something devastating in the process.
I was already impressed by what I read in her file.
Born in Denver, raised in Ignacio on the Southern Ute Reservation. She is Núuchiu.
Harvard Law—natural resources and water law. Top of her class.
Clerked for a federal judge handling water adjudication.
Six years at a top land-use firm in Aspen—partnership track until it got derailed.
Now she represents ranchers in water disputes against firms like the one she used to work for.
The file said she was formidable.
The file was an understatement.
I pick up my bourbon and take a sip.
Get it together, Brooks. She’s a job.
As a fixer, when someone powerful (read: wealthy) has a problem they want dealt with discreetly and well, they call me.
A month ago, Senator Otis Jessup called me to a corner office of a corporate client of mine in D.C. My client, the CEO of a DOD-friendly arms company, did the basic introductions and left.
Plausible deniability is a mantra in government circles.
The office was on the fourteenth floor of a building in D.C., designed to make one feel small. Big desk, American flag, framed photographs of the CEO with men like the Senator arranged in ascending order of importance—Jessup was number two. Number one was the President.
I’ve sat across from men like Jessup my entire career.
I know the type. I don’t like the type, but they spend their money the same as anyone else’s, and I stopped judging clients when I went independent.
That’s the difference between a government payroll and your own: you can say no.
I exercise that right occasionally, usually when the fee doesn’t match the work I see coming.
Also, I don’t do wet work. Not anymore. Within those two limits, my moral flexibility is considerable.
Jessup slid a file across the desk without touching it himself, like he didn’t want his fingerprints on the act. Men like him never do.
I flipped open the file and gave it a cursory skim.
“The lawyer. She’s the problem,” he commented.
Taya Morningstar, I read.
I saw her photograph, a professional headshot (one that did not do justice to the reality). The camera lens reflected back her sharp eyes and attractive face, but it didn’t translate her personality.
“She’s representing a rancher named Clara Whitman in a water rights dispute. If their lawsuit succeeds, it kills an acquisition. Two years of groundwork, three hundred million in investor commitments, down the fuckin’ toilet.”
Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Money.
I closed the file. “What do you need?”
He smiled the smile of a man who never had to do his own dirty work. “For her case to fall apart.”
Across the bar, Taya tips her head back and laughs at something the blonde says, and the sound cuts clean through the noise of The Rusty Spur and the steel guitar and the thirty years of acquired professional distance I keep between myself and anything that may matter.
She seems happy. I didn’t expect that either.
From the profile put together by an investigator I trust, another military man who went mercenary, life hasn’t been easy for Taya Morningstar lately.
She left the law practice at Aspen rather abruptly—right before what seemed to be an offer of a partnership. I dug into that gap, as I do with every gap, and found a senior partner named Griffin Cole. My investigator dug some more and found receipts: security camera footage, emails, and so on.
She doesn’t come across as the type to fall for the oldest line in the book—“Honey, I’ll leave my wife for you”—but I’ve heard that love makes fools of the smartest people.
To give Cole credit, he had been separated when Taya got involved with him.
That part was clean. What wasn’t clean was the exit.
When he went back to his wife, he didn’t just end things with Taya—he took her career with him.
His wife made it a condition of reconciliation.
No custody fight over their two kids meant no Taya.
And just like that, Taya’s years of work became a liability he needed to shed.
She left before they could push her out.
Barely.
I glance back at her. She’s listening now, head tilted, attention locked on whoever’s speaking.
I’ve read about that quality—interviews, colleagues’ quotes. She makes you feel like you’re the only one in the room.
I’d filed it under “useful trait” and “potential vulnerability”.
Experiencing it in person is different.
I drain the rest of my bourbon.
I wish I could see her eyes better. Is she guarded with these women or open?
People who’ve been burned by someone they trusted tend to armor up. That’s usually useful information. You find the seam. You press.
But Goddamn it, the kind of pressing I want to do has nothing to do with Otis Jessup’s job.
Her file said she was smart. It didn’t say she was the kind of person you orient toward without meaning to. It didn’t say her laugh sounds like it costs her nothing and means everything.
The file was incomplete.
I already knew this was going to be a delicate job. Now, I revise that delicately upward. And as I do, she glances across the bar—the unconscious scan of a woman who’s learned to be aware of a room. For one flat second, her eyes pass over me.
Nothing.
She doesn’t register me.
Why would she? I’m no one. Just a man at a bar with an empty glass, in a town I arrived at a day ago, with a job to do.
I look away, catch the bartender’s eye, and signal for another drink.
She’s a means to an end, Brooks.
I say it to myself the way I’ve said a hundred things to myself over the years. I do it to keep things clear and clean.
This time, however, it lands a little less cleanly than it usually does.