2. Chapter 2
Beckett
She drives a truck with Texas plates and she walks like she owns every piece of ground she steps on.
I watched her pull up from the tack room window. I didn’t go out. I had work to do. I always have work to do. The gray’s left front has been tender and I’m not leaving a tendon unchecked because some horse trainer from Amarillo decided today was a good day to show up and rearrange my life.
I knew she was coming. I’ve known for two weeks.
Two weeks of Elise mentioning the “new program” and the “new hire” and the “new direction for the horse operation” like she’s narrating a brochure.
Two weeks of Raiford saying, in his Raiford way, that the program expansion is happening and that’s that.
I can’t leave. The ranch is the only thing I have.
Before the Wylde Mountain Ranch, I had a string of bunkhouses and seasonal work and the kind of résumé that says “good with his hands” and “doesn’t stay long.
” I was twenty-seven when Raiford hired me.
He shook my hand, showed me the barn, and said, “The horses are your responsibility. Don’t make me regret this. ”
Over four years. Four years of not making him regret it. Four years of building a routine, a system, a life that fits me the way a good saddle fits a horse. This ranch is the first place I’ve ever been where I wake up knowing where I’ll be tomorrow.
And now tomorrow has a complication from Texas.
So I stayed. And I told Raiford I’d work with whoever he hired. And I meant it the way you mean things you say to your boss when the alternative is unemployment. With the bare minimum of sincerity required to keep a paycheck.
Then she walked into my barn.
Five-foot-four. Maybe five-five in the boots, and the boots had real wear on them, the heels worn down on the outside the way they do when you spend more time in a stirrup than on flat ground.
Dark hair pulled back in a braid that was functional, not decorative.
Jeans that fit like she actually works in them. A snug thermal under a flannel.
She carried a notebook. Not a tablet, not a phone. A notebook with a pen clipped to the spiral. And she looked at my horses like each one matters. Like the barn is sacred ground.
She looked at Birdie and her expression went soft. She looked at Rebel and her eyes went sharp and assessing and I saw her write something in the notebook without looking down, her hand moving by feel while her eyes stayed on the horse. She was cataloguing him. Reading him like I do.
That should have been the good part. Instead it made everything worse.
Because someone who doesn’t know horses, I can dismiss.
Someone who’s here for the title and the paycheck, I can wait out.
She’ll make her plans and they’ll fail and she’ll leave and my barn will go back to normal.
I’ve seen it before. Ranch owners get ideas.
They hire consultants. The consultants come and go and the people who actually know the horses keep doing what they’ve always done.
But Brynn Hartley looked at my horses and she knew.
She looked at Birdie and saw the steadiness.
She looked at Rebel and saw the fear, not the aggression.
She looked at the gray’s leg and I could tell she wanted to ask about the tendon even though she didn’t because she was being polite and restraining herself.
She’s the real thing. That’s the problem.
Because the real thing means she’s staying. And staying means changes. And changes mean everything I’ve built in this barn for four years gets rearranged by a woman with a Texas accent and a notebook and the full authority of the owners backing her up.
Full authority. Over MY horses.
I’m in Raiford’s kitchen at six PM because Raiford asked me to come up for a beer. He’s at the counter with two bottles, and Elise is at the table with a stack of ranch paperwork. She looks up when I come in and smiles.
“She’s qualified,” Raiford says. No preamble. No warm-up. Raiford communicates the way a fence post communicates: straight, solid, minimal. “Top of her field. Every reference checked out. She built the cutting program at Redstone Creek in Texas.”
I know about Redstone Creek. Everyone in the horse world knows about Redstone Creek. It’s one of the best cutting horse operations in the Southwest. If she built that program, she’s not just qualified. She’s overqualified.
“Give her a chance,” Elise says. “She’s not here to take anything from you, Beckett. She’s here to build something new.”
“On top of what I already built.”
“Alongside it. Not on top. Not replacing.”
“I’ll work with her,” I say. Because I’m not going to let a personnel disagreement jeopardize the one good thing in my life. “I won’t make it easy.”
“She’s here to make the ranch better,” Elise says.
Like it’s obvious. Like wanting to resist the woman who’s going to rearrange my entire operation is the unreasonable position.
“The program is a big deal, Beckett. Nationally competitive cutting horses from the Wylde ranch. That puts us on a different map.”
I know what it does. I know the business case. I know the breeding potential and the competition revenue and the prestige that comes with a winning cutting program. I’m not stupid. I’m territorial, which is different.
I finish my beer. I leave. I walk to the barn because the barn is where I go when the world doesn’t make sense, which is most of the time.
The barn at night is mine. Nobody else comes down here after dark.
The hands go home or go to the bunkhouse.
Raiford is in the house with Elise. The barn is empty except for me and twelve horses and the sound of hay being chewed and hooves shifting in bedding and the occasional low nicker from an animal who knows my footsteps.
I check every horse. Every stall. I check water buckets and hay nets and the latch on Rebel’s stall that sticks if you don’t jiggle it right. I check the gray’s left front again. Still warm. Not swollen, but warm. I’ll cold-wrap it before I leave.
Hank is next. Dozing. I check Birdie last because Birdie is the old lady of the barn and the old lady gets the last visit.
She’s dozing when I open her stall door.
She lifts her head, blinks at me, and goes back to dozing.
We’ve had this conversation a thousand times.
She knows I’m here. She doesn’t need to make a fuss about it.
“Got a new boss,” I tell her. Because I talk to horses.
Not to people. Horses don’t argue. Horses don’t show up with notebooks and authority and a way of standing that makes five-foot-four look taller than it has any right to look.
“Five-foot-nothing from Texas. Thinks she’s going to restructure your turnout schedule. ”
Birdie chews hay.
“She looked at your leg,” I add. “Nobody notices that old injury unless they know what they’re looking at.”
Birdie has no opinion on this.
“She’s going to be a problem.”
Birdie doesn’t respond.
I finish my rounds. I cold-wrap the gray’s leg. I straighten the tack room because the tack room is organized MY way and it’s going to stay organized my way until someone physically moves me out of it.
There’s a note on the tack room door.
Not a note. A schedule. A new training schedule, tacked to the door with a pushpin. “PROPOSED TRAINING ROTATION: WEEK 1″ at the top, and below it a grid of horses and times and methods and notes.
I pull it off the door. My blood runs hot and I can feel my pulse in my temples.
She’s been here less than twelve hours and she’s posting schedules on MY tack room door.
I stare at it for a minute before crumpling it.
Then I stand in the dark tack room holding a ball of paper and I think about the grid. The way she’s grouped the horses. The conditioning intervals. The rest days.
I smooth the paper out. I read it again.
The groupings are smart. She’s separated the horses by temperament, not age. The conditioning intervals are staggered so no horse works two hard days in a row. The rest days account for weather patterns.
She’s accounted for weather patterns. After twelve hours.
I’ve been here four years and I track weather in my head and adjust the schedule morning by morning. She built weather adjustments into the grid. Like a system. Like a professional who’s done this enough times to know that weather isn’t a surprise. It’s a variable you plan for.
The mare groupings bother me the most. Because they’re better than mine.
Not by a lot. By the thin margin that separates someone who’s very good from someone who’s exceptional.
She grouped Josie with Birdie and the paint, which creates a calming influence on a nervous horse through herd dynamics.
I had Josie grouped by age, which is logical but ignores temperament. She’s grouping by psychology.
She’s right and I hate it.
I put the schedule back on the door. I don’t use the pushpin. I use tape, which holds better. Then I stand there looking at it for another minute, reading her handwriting. It’s neat and practical. No flourishes.
I’m not going to tell her the schedule is good. I’d rather eat my hat.
I walk out of the barn. The night is clear and the stars are up and the cabin down the hill has a light on. Her cabin. She’s in the cabin that used to be Elise’s. She’s three minutes from my barn, which is three minutes too close.
I think about her face. The sharp eyes. The way her mouth curved when she said “twenty-three, actually,” like my annoyance was a game she was winning.
The way her voice went flat and certain when she talked about the program, all the Texas sass dropping out and pure authority replacing it.
I noticed the way she stood in front of me and didn’t flinch at my abruptness.
I also noticed more than I care to admit. The curve of her hips in those jeans. The line of her neck. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear while she wrote in that notebook. The freckles on her collarbone where the flannel gaped.
I noticed the freckles. I was looking at her collarbone. In a professional context. While she was talking about turnout schedules. I was looking at freckles instead of listening to legitimate operational information.
No.
I’m not doing this. I’m not noticing the body of the woman who’s here to dismantle my operation.
I don’t care that she smelled like something clean and warm.
I don’t care that her hands are small and capable.
I don’t care that when she looked at my horses, her face changed into something softer than the woman who stood in front of me and told me she had full authority.
I go to my place. I shower. I eat leftovers standing up because sitting down for dinner is for people who have someone to sit with. I lie in bed and I stare at the ceiling.
She’s good. I know she’s good. Her schedule proves that. Her references prove she’s good. The way she looked at Rebel and knew he was scared proves she’s good.
If she were bad, this would be easy. I could wait her out. I could let her fail. Instead she’s good and she’s here and she has a schedule on my tack room door that I secretly taped up because it’s better than anything I would have written.
I close my eyes.
The barn is fine. The horses are fine. Everything is fine.
I’m going to make her life difficult because that’s what I know how to do with things that threaten the only stability I’ve ever had.
I’m going to question every decision and challenge every method and stand in her way with my arms crossed and my jaw tight until she either proves she belongs or leaves.
Brynn Hartley is going to ruin my barn and my routine and my carefully maintained system of not caring about anyone outside these fences. I can feel it the way I feel weather coming. The front is here. The change is happening.
I hate her already.