15. Jessica
Jessica
The Blackwood Ranch Fundraiser was mine, and it was perfect, and I was standing at the center of it in a black dress, red lipstick, and heels that sank into the grass every time I stopped moving, which meant I didn't stop moving.
Marquee lighting turned the east paddock into something out of a magazine — warm gold against the dark, the bulbs strung between the oaks in long swooping lines that caught the breeze and swayed.
Long tables ran beneath the trees, white linen, wildflower centerpieces that Clara Mae and I had argued about for two days before arriving at something that was simultaneously rustic and sophisticated and that neither of us had started with.
The catering was flawless — the Austin crew I'd hired after firing the first one had delivered everything I'd asked for and three things I hadn't thought to request. The night was warm and clear, and the stars above the marquee were absurd — the kind of sky New York doesn't know exists.
Three weeks of logistics. Vendor calls at midnight.
A fight with a caterer that I'd won through sheer force of will and a backup generator I'd sourced myself when the first one died forty-eight hours before the event.
Every detail, every contingency, every crisis averted before it became one.
And now Copper Creek's wealthiest landowners and community leaders were arriving in trucks and good boots and walking across Blackwood land under lights I'd hung and sitting at tables I'd dressed and drinking wine I'd selected and every version of me — New York and Copper Creek, the professional and the girl who'd left — had landed in the same body at the same time and for the first time since I came home, neither one was fighting the other.
I noticed it twenty minutes in.
The stage. The small raised platform where the speakers would stand and the band would play later — I'd briefed the setup crew on dimensions and materials and left the build to them. Except this wasn't what the crew had built. This was something else.
This was Hunter.
The woodwork was precise — clean joins, hand-sanded smooth, the kind of finish that comes from someone who understands grain direction and takes the time to work with it instead of against it.
I crouched down. Ran my fingers along the edge of the step — the grip texture, fine grooves cut into the wood so nobody would slip in heels.
I'd never mentioned heels. I hadn't put that in the brief.
He'd thought of it because he'd thought of me and the way I moved through events and the shoes I wore and the fact that a smooth stage edge plus stilettos plus a woman running at full speed equaled a broken ankle, and he'd built the solution into the wood without telling me.
Angled bracing underneath, structural and elegant.
Cable channels routed into the frame so nothing trailed across the surface.
I pressed my palm flat against the stage floor.
The wood was warm from the day's sun and smooth under my hand and I could feel the hours in it — the sanding, the planing, the patient repetition of a man who built things the way he loved: quietly, with his hands, without expecting anyone to notice.
I found him near the back fence talking to Owen. His good shirt — the dark blue one, the one that made his shoulders wider and his jaw sharper and his eyes the color of coffee — his weight settled on Blackwood land in a way that said the land was holding him the way it always had.
I watched him from across the grass. Owen said something.
Hunter's mouth moved — barely, the ghost of a response — and Owen nodded and the two of them stood in their quiet the way they'd been standing in it for years.
Father and son. Side by side. Needing nothing except the proximity. My throat tightened.
I walked over. Owen saw me first.
"The stage is different," I said to Hunter.
"The old one was a liability."
"You built it."
He said nothing. His jaw shifted. His eyes met mine — steady, warm, something flickering underneath that he pressed back down before it surfaced.
Owen picked up his drink. Walked toward the marquee. Didn't look back.
I stood in front of Hunter in the marquee light.
The grip edge. The cable channels. The hours of sanding.
The heels he'd thought of without being told.
Thank you was too small. The word couldn't hold what his hands had done — couldn't hold the fact that he'd built something beautiful for an event that wasn't his because the woman running it mattered to him and this was how he said it.
"It's beautiful, Hunt."
His eyes softened. His mouth pulled. "It's a stage."
"It's not just a stage and you know it."
He looked at me. I looked at him. The marquee light swayed and the gold shifted across his face and my eyes were doing something they had no business doing at a professional function so I turned away before they could finish and walked back toward the drinks table with my jaw tight and the ghost of his sanding still under my fingertips.
The event was a triumph.
The speeches landed. The auction raised more than projected — twenty percent more, which meant my spreadsheet was wrong and I was going to have to buy Clara Mae a drink because her predicted numbers had been closer to the mark than mine.
June Parker told Dorothy Sullivan, within my earshot and clearly intended for my ears, that "the girl did good.
" Dorothy adjusted her glasses and said nothing.
From Dorothy, that was a standing ovation.
Clara Mae caught my arm as I passed the dessert table. Her fingers squeezed. "This is what we needed, Jessica. This right here." Her eyes were bright, and the squeeze was fierce, and the words landed in me like a gift I hadn't known I was waiting for.
The Blackwood family was everywhere. Maggie and Jack at the horse demonstration — Maggie explaining bloodlines to county officials with the intensity of a woman who considered horses a religion and their breeding a sacred text.
Clay carrying Maisie on his shoulders through the crowd, Maisie issuing commentary on the food stations from her elevated position.
Callie talking to donors near the auction table with the easy precision of a woman who understood contracts and understood people and made the understanding look effortless.
Wyatt and Ivy at the far table. Liam and Stephanie near the bandstand.
Louisa presiding over the food tables with the quiet authority of a woman who considered the entire ranch an extension of her kitchen.
I watched all of them and the word that arrived — unbidden, unplanned, settling into me like a stone finding the bottom — was home.
I was mid-conversation with a county official about the January Gala timeline when I felt it.
Not a touch. A look.
The back of my neck prickled. My skin tightened. I turned.
Hunter was across the marquee. Leaning against a post, one hand holding a drink he wasn't drinking. And he was watching me.
Not casually. Not the way he watched a room.
His lips were parted. His jaw was soft. His body was leaning toward me from twenty feet away, his weight shifted forward on his boots like the distance between us had a pull he'd stopped resisting.
And his eyes — his eyes were naked. Want and pride and something wrecked and steady at the same time, like a man looking at something he wanted and refused to hide it anymore.
The mask was gone. Everything was on his face.
My stomach dropped through the floor. My skin tightened from my scalp to my heels.
The county official was still talking — something about permits, something about January — and I couldn't hear him because my entire nervous system had rerouted to the man across the marquee who was looking at me like I was the only person in a room full of two hundred people.
His eyes met mine. He didn't flinch. He held it. The full weight of it, everything, nothing behind his eyes but the truth.
My hands were shaking. My vision had narrowed.
The professional words I'd assembled for this conversation had dissolved into white noise, and my throat was doing something that was either emotion or cardiac arrest, and the distinction didn't matter because either way I needed to not be standing in front of a county official right now.
"Excuse me," I said. "I need to — I'll be right back."
I walked to the drink station on legs that were not trustworthy.
Picked up a glass of water. Didn't drink it.
Stood behind a floral arrangement, breathed, pressed the cold glass against my wrist, and pressed my other hand against my stomach, where the drop was still happening, and his eyes were still on me through the flowers.
I could feel them. The heat of them. The weight.
The rest of the evening was unbearable in the best possible way.
His hand found my lower back and stayed — not for show, not for Garrett, just because his hand went there now, the way his lungs took air.
I leaned into his side during the band's first set and didn't move away, and his arm came around my waist, and his thumb began moving against my hip through the fabric of my dress — a slow, absent circle that he was probably not aware of and that was setting every nerve ending below my waist on fire.
The band played something slow. His thumb kept circling. My breathing had gone shallow, and my skin was hot under the dress, and the friction of his thumb through the thin fabric was sending pulses of heat down into my thighs. I pressed closer. His arm tightened.