Chapter 7
Clay
I'd spent three days figuring out how to ask a woman on a trail ride without it sounding like a date.
I tried casual. Texted Maisie mentioned wanting to see the ridge trail — you both free Saturday?
Then deleted it because including Maisie was cheating and I knew it.
I tried direct. Typed I want to take you riding.
Just you. Then stared at it for ten minutes and deleted that too because it sounded like a proposition and not the kind involving horses.
In the end, it was Momma who solved it.
"Take her up to the overlook," she said Wednesday morning, buttering toast without looking at me. "I'll keep Maisie. We'll bake cookies."
I hadn't told her I was planning anything. I hadn't mentioned the trail ride to a single person. Louisa Blackwood operated on intelligence that would make the CIA weep with envy, and I'd stopped questioning the source years ago.
"I haven't asked her yet."
"You've been pacing the kitchen for three mornings. The dog is confused." She handed me toast. "Ask her. I'll have Maisie. Saturday afternoon."
"What if she says no?"
Momma looked at me. Long and steady, the way she looked at all her children when they were being dense.
"Then she says no and you survive it. You've been thrown by two-thousand-pound bulls, Clay. A woman saying no to a trail ride won't kill you."
"It might."
She smiled. The dangerous one. "Saturday. I'll make extra cookies."
I called Callie at lunch.
"Hey. So I had this idea." Already fumbling.
Clay Blackwood, suddenly tripping over a phone call like a teenager asking someone to prom.
"The ridge trail on the north section — it goes up to this overlook above the property.
It's a good ride. An hour, maybe an hour and a half.
I thought maybe Saturday, if Maisie's okay with my mom, you and I could —"
"Are you asking me on a date, Clay?"
Direct. Amused. That dry edge in her voice that made my pulse do something inconvenient.
"I'm asking you on a trail ride."
"Is there a difference?” Not in my head. Definitely not in my heart.
"The trail ride involves horses."
"Dates can involve horses."
"This one involves a horse and a picnic that my mother is definitely already packing even though I told her not to."
She huffed a laugh. "So your mother is chaperoning via sandwich. That's a new one."
"She's a pioneer."
"Clay, I have a five-year-old and a caseload and a ficus that's on life support. I don't have time for trail rides that are secretly “not” dates disguised as outdoor recreation."
"It's not a date. It's a guided tour of ranch property with optional lunch."
"Optional."
“Well, Momma would be hurt if we didn't eat the sandwiches."
"So it's mandatory lunch on a guided tour that isn't a date."
"When you say it like that, it sounds worse."
"It sounds exactly like what it is." But there was something underneath the sharpness — a warmth she hadn't quite hidden in time. "Maisie would be with Louisa?"
"Baking cookies. Momma's already planned the menu."
"Of course she has." Another pause. Then, quieter: "Just a trail ride."
"Just a trail ride."
"No expectations."
"None."
"If I want to turn around at any point —"
"We turn around."
The pause was longer this time. I waited.
"Saturday," she said. "What time?"
I told her. She said fine. I said great. We hung up like two people who'd just negotiated a treaty instead of a horseback ride, and I stood in the barn aisle grinning at a stall door for a solid minute before Jack walked past and said, "You look stupid."
"Thank you for your kind observation, Jack."
"You're welcome."
Saturday. Two o'clock. Sun high and the kind of warmth that Texas hoards like a secret — the rest of the country in sweaters while we were still in shirtsleeves, pretending fall was optional.
I saddled Dusty for myself and Rosie for Callie. My shoulder protested as I lifted the saddle — I worked through the twinge the way I worked through all of them, because the alternative was admitting my body was keeping a scorecard I wasn't ready to read.
I checked the saddlebags — water, blanket, and yes, the basket Momma had left on the kitchen counter at seven a.m. with a note that said Don't forget the sandwiches.
And don't forget to be yourself. The real one, not the showman.
Because my mother couldn't resist a directive even when it was disguised as encouragement.
Callie's car came up the drive at two on the dot.
Because of course it did. She got out. Jeans, boots, hair pulled back in a ponytail that swung when she walked.
She tugged the hem of her shirt once — quick, barely there — and lifted her chin before she started toward the barn.
I'd seen bull riders do the same thing in the chute.
The private reset before the public brave.
"Hey."
“Hey, yourself." I was leaning against the paddock fence, which she clocked immediately.
"Are we doing this, or are you going to lean against things all afternoon?"
She turned to Rosie. Her hand came up before she seemed to decide to raise it — reaching for the mare's neck, fingers spreading into the coat. Her shoulders dropped an inch. Whatever Rosie was giving her, it was working faster than I could.
"She looks calm."
"She's a gem. Maisie's got good taste in horses."
She'd ridden as a kid — she'd mentioned that once, a fragment tossed out sideways, the way she gave personal information: in slivers, never straight on.
"Your mother gave Maisie an entire baking station," she said. "Maisie has an apron with her name on it."
My brows furrowed. "When did she have time to —"
"It was embroidered, Clay. That didn't happen overnight."
I closed my eyes, and sighed. "She's been planning this since the party."
"Your mother is a strategist."
"My mother is a menace."
"A well-organized menace with exceptional handwriting." She swung up into the saddle with an ease that caught me off guard. Good seat. Natural hands. Whatever she'd learned as a kid had stayed in her body, the way riding always did.
I mounted Dusty and led us out through the back gate toward the north pasture.
The trail started wide — two horses abreast, easy ground, the kind of riding that let you talk or not talk, whatever felt right.
For the first ten minutes, Callie kept her reins short and her spine straight — holding herself the way she held everything, like precision could protect her.
Then Rosie dropped her head to sniff at something on the trail, and Callie's hands gave without thinking, and I watched the stiffness leave her one vertebra at a time.
Watching Callie Monroe ride a horse was an experience I was not emotionally prepared for.
The way her hips moved with the saddle — fluid, natural, completely unconscious — was doing things to my blood pressure that my doctor would have opinions about.
She had no idea. That was the thing. She had absolutely no idea what she looked like up there — back straight, hips rolling, that ponytail swinging with every stride — and the fact that she didn't know made it ten times worse.
I shifted in the saddle and thought very deliberately about fence repair schedules.
Then she said, "I haven't been on a horse since I was sixteen."
"You ride like you were on one yesterday."
"Muscle memory. My body apparently kept the riding and deleted the algebra. Questionable priorities."
"Rosie's opinions are mostly about carrots."
"We have that in common."
The trail narrowed as it climbed, switching back through live oaks and juniper. Callie let Rosie pick her way through the rocks without micromanaging. Most people fought the horse on a trail like this. She trusted it. Which told me something about her that had nothing to do with horses.
"This is beautiful," she said. She'd stopped Rosie without realising it, one hand loose on the reins, the other resting on her thigh, her face turned toward the valley like she'd forgotten I was there.
"My dad used to bring me up here when I was a kid. Never said much. Just rode with me and let me sort myself out."
"Sounds like a great dad."
"The best."
"He told me once that the answer to every question I'd ever have was somewhere on this ranch. I was twelve. I thought he meant buried treasure."
She smiled. "Was there?"
"Momma's cookie recipe. Locked in a safe." She laughed — quick and bright, like it surprised her.
We crested the ridge and the overlook opened up — the whole valley, the ranch, the creek winding silver through the pastures, the rooflines catching the afternoon light.
I'd seen this view a thousand times, and it still stopped me.
Today, with Callie beside me, pulling Rosie to a halt and going still in a way that wasn't caution but wonder, it stopped me differently.
I dismounted. My knee let me know it was there. I ignored it.
"There's a flat spot just ahead. Thought we could eat."
She raised an eyebrow. "Louisa's picnic?"
"I tried to stop her."
“No, you didn't."
I shook my head, grinning. “No, I didn't."
She dismounted with an ease that caught me off guard. I spread the blanket on the flat rock overlooking the valley, set out the basket, and sat down.
Callie sat beside me. Not close. Not far.
She tucked one leg underneath her and kept the other stretched out, boot heel digging into the rock — half settled, half ready to stand.
She ate a sandwich with one hand and gestured with the other when she talked, which was new.
She didn't gesture at the office. She didn't gesture at the ranch with people watching.
But up here, with no audience and eight hundred feet of elevation between us and the rest of the world, her hands were telling me things her mouth hadn't gotten to yet.