Chapter 21
Cowgirl
~OAKLEY~
“Horseback riding is your way of swaying me over, Deputy Torres?”
Deputy Torres.
She called me Deputy Torres.
Why is hearing her call me that going to give me a fucking hard-on.
I’m standing on the ground for once—boots in the paddock dirt, hands resting on the fence rail, looking up at this woman.
And the vantage point is doing something to me that I wasn’t prepared for, because in every interaction I’ve had with Hazel Martinez since she arrived in Sweetwater Falls, I’ve been at her level or above it.
Standing beside her in a hallway. Sitting across from her in a cruiser.
Looking down at her in a hospital bed while she slept off a neurotoxin and I monitored her fever and changed her into my flannel and tried not to think about the way her body fit against the fabric like it was designed for it.
But now she’s on a horse.
And I’m on the ground.
And the shift in elevation has rearranged something fundamental in my perception, because Hazel Martinez sitting in a saddle—spine straight, shoulders back, one hand resting on the pommel and the other holding the reins with a grip that looks more comfortable than it should for a woman who supposedly needs guidance—is a visual that my brain is going to be processing for the foreseeable future.
She’s in the black tights and the crop top.
Normal clothes.
Fitted clothes.
And I cannot help but admit—to myself, in the privacy of my own increasingly compromised thought process—that seeing her out of the chief’s uniform is doing things to me that the uniform never did.
Not that the uniform wasn’t attractive. It was.
The crisp authority of the pressed jacket and the regulation pants and the badge positioned over her heart carried a specific, competent appeal that I am man enough to acknowledge.
Hazel Martinez in a uniform is a woman who commands rooms and solves crimes and makes you want to salute even if you outrank her.
But Hazel Martinez in a crop top.
Fuck.
The black fabric cuts across her midsection at a height that exposes a strip of brown skin above the waistband of the tights—smooth, taut, carrying the lean definition of a woman whose physical fitness is a professional requirement and a personal discipline.
The tights themselves are performing an act of engineering that should probably be classified, the material conforming to the contours of her thighs with a precision that leaves approximately nothing to the imagination and everything to the increasingly vivid imagination that I am currently failing to manage.
She looks like a different person.
No. That’s wrong. She looks like the same person with fewer layers between her and the world.
Like the chief was always in there, but the chief came wrapped in institutional armor, and the woman sitting on this horse in October sunlight with her ponytail catching the breeze is what happens when you remove the armor and let the person breathe.
She blinks.
Stares at me.
Her dark amber eyes carrying the particular, evaluative patience of a woman who asked a question, is waiting for an answer, and has noticed that the man she asked is staring at her midsection instead of responding.
She tilts her head.
“Are you checking me out?”
I blush.
A little. The warmth spreading across my cheeks with the involuntary speed of a man whose face has been caught doing exactly what it was doing and whose pride is insufficient to produce a convincing denial.
“I’m one hundred percent checking you out,” I say, “because you’re hot in fitted clothes and pretending otherwise would be insulting to both of us.”
Her turn.
The blush that rises on Hazel’s face is extraordinary—not because it’s dramatic but because it’s rare.
A flush of color climbing from the base of her neck to her cheekbones with the slow, reluctant progression of a reaction she can’t prevent and didn’t expect.
Her eyes break from mine for a fraction of a second—the micro-avoidance of a woman who has been hit with a direct compliment and doesn’t have a defensive formation prepared for it.
She’s not used to it.
The realization lands with a quiet, devastating weight that has nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with comprehension.
Direct commentary. Honest, unambiguous, this-is-what-I-think-and-I’m-saying-it-to-your-face compliments. The basic, human act of telling someone that they’re attractive and meaning it.
She barely got any.
From the sorry excuse of a pack that used her body and mocked her for eating and cornered her in alleys and never once—not once, in however many years that arrangement lasted—looked at her the way I’m looking at her right now and told her the truth.
That she’s stunning. That the crop top is committing crimes against my cardiovascular system.
That seeing her on a horse with October light on her face and her constellation tattoos catching the sun is the single most attractive thing I’ve witnessed in my thirty years of existence and I’m including the time I accidentally saw a Victoria’s Secret commercial at an impressionable age.
They didn’t tell her.
And she stopped expecting to hear it.
And now when someone says it—when someone looks at her and tells the truth—she blushes like it’s the first time.
Because for all practical purposes, it is.
I store the information.
File it alongside the other data points I’ve been collecting since the day she arrived: the way she flinches at generosity, the way she tries to pay for things that are free, the way she asks permission to exist in spaces she’s been invited to.
Each one a scar that doesn’t show on the skin.
Each one a place where the previous pack’s damage left an absence where something warm should have been.
I’m going to fill every single one.
With compliments and cheek kisses and direct, unambiguous honesty until the blush stops being surprised and starts being expected.
But right now, we have a job to do.
The horseback riding is real—genuine, fresh-air, get-this-woman-out-of-a-hospital-bed-and-into-sunlight recreation that her body needs after eighteen hours of unconsciousness and her mind needs after a diagnosis that would break most people.
But it’s also strategic. Every element of the next two weeks has been mapped by Alaric’s methodical brain and approved by Roman’s tactical instincts and executed by my field operational training.
Alaric is already working.
Back at the house, running his checks—pulling records on each of the former pack members, cross-referencing financial transactions, mapping the shell company network that Hazel’s corkboard had started to identify.
He’s getting things into position with the silent, systematic precision of a detective who dismantles criminal operations the way a surgeon dismantles tumors: identify the connections, isolate the blood supply, remove the structure.
The next few days are distraction.
Visible, public, strategically photographed distraction.
Hazel and her new pack, doing pack things—riding horses, eating at diners, appearing in the neighboring towns with the relaxed, unbothered ease of people who are building a life rather than investigating a crime.
The visibility is the bait. Dr. Winters’ strategy, executed through the lens of operational deployment.
And if we pull enough strings—if the visibility is obvious enough, if the normalcy is infuriating enough, if whoever is watching Hazel sees her living her life with three Alphas who worship the ground she walks on—we won’t need to wait two weeks for them to take the bait.
A few days is all we need.
If they’re serious about trying to strip our girl of everything—her career, her investigation, her life—they’ll make a move.
Because what we’re presenting isn’t just a woman who survived an assassination attempt.
We’re presenting a woman who survived and is thriving.
And there is nothing more infuriating to a predator than prey that refuses to be afraid.
Not that we’ll allow them to get anywhere near her.
But they don’t need to know that.
She huffs.
The sound pulls me back from the tactical layer to the immediate one—the woman, the horse, the October paddock, the way the sunlight makes the icy blue of her hair look like it’s glowing.
I smirk.
“You sure you’ll be okay on the horse?”
She nods.
The motion is confident. Definitive. The nod of a woman who has been asked a question she considers beneath her capability and is answering out of courtesy rather than uncertainty.
“I’ll follow your lead,” she says.
I take her word for it.
Though something about the way she’s holding the reins—the relaxed wrist, the loose fingers, the specific angle of the leather running between her index and middle knuckle—tugs at a corner of my awareness.
That’s not a beginner’s grip. That’s the grip of someone whose hands have held reins before and remember the mechanics even if the rider hasn’t been in a saddle for years.
I shelve the observation.
Walk to my horse—a dark bay quarter horse named Beau who has been my trail partner since I arrived at the ranch and who tolerates my tendency to take corners too fast with the resigned patience of an animal who has accepted his rider’s personality as a permanent condition.
I saddle up.
The motion is automatic—foot in the stirrup, hand on the horn, the upward swing of my body landing in the seat with the practiced ease of a man who has done this daily for two years.
Beau shifts beneath me, adjusting to the weight, his ears rotating toward Hazel’s horse with the equine equivalent of interest.
I grab my hat.