Lights, Camera, Cowboy! (The Coast To Coast #3)

Chapter 1 Sadie

ONE

SADIE

“Bye, Sadie!” her father bellowed across LAX, waving both arms like he was directing air traffic instead of saying goodbye to his twenty-seven-old daughter.

Sadie Murphy did not turn around. This was a trap. If she made eye contact, he would escalate.

“BYE, BABY GIRL!” he tried again, louder, in case the entire Delta terminal had not yet been notified of her departure.

Sadie closed her eyes briefly as the TSA line inched forward. A woman in yoga pants glanced at her with open curiosity. A teenage boy actually pivoted to get a better look, like this was live entertainment.

Airports turned her father into a community theater production of Emotional Support Parent.

“Did you pack your inhaler?” her mother called, cupping her hands around her mouth like she was summoning cattle.

“Yes, Mom!” Sadie shouted back, cheeks burning. “I’m fine!”

“And the allergy pills? The blue ones! Not the white ones! The white ones make you sleepy!”

A businessman nearby gave her a soft, pitying smile. The kind reserved for children flying alone for the first time.

Sadie stopped responding. She lifted one final hand in surrender, spun on her heel, and power-walked toward TSA like she was late for a mission briefing and the fate of the free world was at stake.

Dear God, she had to get out of here.

She loved her parents but three months under their roof had turned into an experience that was far more educational and character-building than she had ever intended. It had taken exactly twelve days for her father to wander into her room holding a pair of black lace underwear between two fingers.

“Do these get folded or… displayed?” he had asked earnestly.

She hadn’t known there were stages of grief for lingerie, but she had discovered all five that morning.

That was the exact moment she decided that once this job wrapped, she was getting her own apartment.

It could be microscopic. It could have slanted floors and a radiator that hissed like it held grudges.

It could very well be haunted by a Victorian child with unfinished business.

She didn't care. At least the ghost wouldn’t separate her delicates by fabric type and leave helpful Post-it notes.

No more shared laundry cycles. No more gentle inquiries about whether she’d “considered magnesium for mood support.” No more walking into the kitchen to find her mother deep in a Google spiral titled, Is twenty-seven technically late to bloom?

Montana had never appeared on her vision board. Montana wasn’t sipping espresso in a chic kitchen with exposed brick. Montana wasn’t networking.

But Blood on the Prairie had. And unfortunately, it came with Montana attached.

Blood on the Prairie was a supernatural western featuring undead cowboys, morally conflicted ghosts, and enough arterial spray to make grown men shift in their seats and reconsider their popcorn choices. It was chaotic, dramatic, slightly unhinged, and completely brilliant.

The effects alone made her fingers twitch.

This wasn’t basic stage blood and a smudged bruise.

She’d be designing half-decayed faces, cracked-open rib cages, and full-blown nightmare fuel.

The kind of work that would make audiences squirm and lean over to whisper, “How did they even do that?” while she sat at home, serene and smug, knowing exactly how.

This job could be a turning point, her shot at leveling up from reliable special effects artist to must-have talent. Maybe even launch that cosmetics makeup line she’d been sketching ideas for since forever.

Sure, she’d be holed up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cows, pine trees, and probably no decent nail salon for miles. She could handle that. She had survived film school critiques delivered by men named Trevor who thought fake blood volume equaled artistic depth.

All she had to do was last a few months in rural Montana without losing her mind… or, you know, getting mauled by a bear. Or possessed by a ghost. Or dragged into a cult because someone offered her herbal tea and eye contact. Honestly, it felt like a manageable list.

“Boarding pass, miss?” said the airline worker, whose voice carried the unmistakable fatigue of someone who had seen too much humanity before noon.

She rifled through her tote bag like a raccoon in a dumpster. Lip balm, a granola bar, one rogue tampon, a crumpled receipt from who-knows-where. Finally, her fingers closed around the boarding pass.

She straightened just as her suitcase tipped backward with the grace of a tranquilized rhino and landed with a solid thunk.

The thunk was followed by a distinctly male, distinctly pained grunt.

“Oh my god, I am so sorry,” she blurted, bending to lift the suitcase off his foot at the exact same moment he did. Their heads collided with a soft, hollow knock that somehow rang louder inside her skull.

Stars burst behind her eyes, possibly an entire galaxy, and she swayed. “Fantastic,” she muttered. “I have officially started assaulting people.”

The guy blinked, rubbing his forehead. He was grimacing and definitely looked to be in pain.

He was also kind of hot. He was in his late twenties, tall and lean, with a military buzz cut and the kind of face that suggested he had never once been accidentally headbutted by a stranger in an airport terminal.

He lifted her suitcase like it weighed nothing and handed it back. “I come in peace,” he said, raising both hands.

She took the bag from him. “I’m sure you do, but I still have elbows and an entire beverage service ahead of me.”

She waved her boarding pass. The gate agent scanned her boarding pass with the hollow stare of someone one problem away from quitting and opening a pottery studio.

“You might be a danger to society,” the guy said, smiling carefully.

“You were standing in a high-impact zone,” she replied, already heading toward the jet bridge.

She made it three steps before stopping and turning back. “Let me buy you a drink on the flight. It feels like the bare minimum after giving you a mild concussion in Terminal B.”

He studied her for a moment, amusement tugging at his mouth. “Yeah, okay. That seems fair.”

They joined the slow shuffle down the aisle, shoulders nearly brushing as the plane filled with the sounds of overhead bins slamming and passengers negotiating for armrest territory.

“I’m fifteen C,” she said, checking her boarding pass.

“Sixteen D,” he replied, glancing at his with a small nod. “I’ll get your bag,” he added, already reaching for it, his hand closing around the handle with easy confidence, as if lifting strangers’ luggage was a regular part of his day.

“Thank you. I think it is best if we do not test whether I can punch a hole through the fuselage. Or your other foot.”

“Agreed. I have suffered enough today,” he said, stowing it with ease before ducking into his seat behind hers.

Once they were airborne, Sadie flagged down a flight attendant and ordered him a beer. When it arrived, she leaned back and passed it to him between the seats.

“Consider this penance for my sins,” she said.

He accepted it with a grin. “If beer is involved, feel free to headbutt me anytime.”

“That is a dangerous mindset,” she warned. “That is how cults get you. One drink later and suddenly you are farming turnips and calling someone Brother Leaf.”

He snorted and clinked his bottle against hers. “If we crash, I want you on my survival team.”

“That is a terrible decision,” she said sweetly. “You are tall, which means you would be the first one we eat. High protein. Very practical.”

She took a sip, eyeing him. “I would probably start marinating you by day two.”

He stared at her, clearly unprepared for that. She just smiled, turned, and sank into her seat like she hadn’t just offered to Hannibal Lecter him at cruising altitude.

Sadie poked at the in-flight screen, scrolling past rom-coms, car chases, and animated animals learning life lessons. And then she saw it. His face.

Quentin freaking Ramos.

She recoiled so fast she nearly baptized the man beside her in beer. Of all the movies on this plane, it had to be his, complete with that smug, perfectly chiseled jawline that had launched a thousand fan accounts and at least three think pieces about “the return of the leading man.”

Give her a mop infomercial and a barf bag. At least that would be honest entertainment.

Her stomach twisted the way it did right before food poisoning. Because she was about to be trapped on set with him for months. Months. Breathing the same air, sharing snack tables, and smiling politely while fantasizing about hurling herself off the nearest scenic overlook.

She had tried not to think about it. When she first heard he was cast as the lead in Blood on the Prairie, she stuffed the information into a mental box, duct-taped it shut, and buried it under six feet of emotional clutter.

That strategy had worked beautifully right up until now, when his face was twelve inches from her nose in high definition.

It was not just that he was famous. It was not even that he was offensively good-looking in a way that felt engineered by a focus group. It was that he knew it. He moved through the world like a man who had personally solved world peace and still had time to bake gluten-free muffins for the troops.

Everyone adored Quentin. The press adored him.

The fans adored him. Her Grammy-nominated sister-in-law, Eden, who otherwise possessed impeccable taste in human beings, adored him.

Eden and Quentin were friends in that aggressively wholesome way that suggested they bonded over green juice, charity yoga, and whatever emotionally stable people do on weekends.

Which meant Sadie had to see him. At family parties. At barbecues. At one truly traumatic Friendsgiving that featured tofurkey, a spontaneous ukulele circle, and Quentin harmonizing like the ability had been coded into his DNA at birth.

And every time they crossed paths, he looked at her the way a golden retriever might look at a tennis ball that refused to be thrown, confused and faintly wounded, genuinely bothered by the fact that she did not like him at all.

It was as if the idea that someone might dislike him simply did not compute, like a software error his brain kept trying to fix.

He could not wrap his head around it, and the harder he tried, the more obvious it became, which only made her want to hate him even more.

He had even asked Eden once, in all sincerity, why Sadie hated him, as if this were a mystery the group chat could solve.

It wasn’t his ego. Or the way perfection seemed to follow him around like a well-trained dog.

It was the fact that he did not remember the first time they met.

Sadie did. She remembered the room, the smell, and the exact moment she walked away thinking something important had just broken inside her.

The memory hit like a 3 a.m. brain ambush, the kind that strikes while you are brushing your teeth and forces you to physically shake your head like you are trying to erase an Etch A Sketch of shame.

And the fact that he had no memory of it at all was the cherry on her Rage Sundae. No sprinkles. Just fury, layered over something she refused to name.

So no, she didn’t see the Hollywood heartthrob. She didn’t see the charming goof Eden posted filtered selfies with, captioned things like “so proud of this beautiful soul.” She saw the truth. And the truth had nice hair, a perfect smile, and the emotional depth of a decorative soap.

She jabbed the screen with unnecessary force, as if aggression could uninstall Quentin Ramos from her brain. No luck. He was still there, lounging in her mental hard drive and taking up way too much space.

The plane thrummed beneath her, and somewhere between petty fury and mild turbulence, she drifted off.

Then came the captain’s voice, crackling to life like a harbinger of doom: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just landed in Montana.”

Sadie blinked awake, momentarily disoriented. She squinted out the window at the jagged mountains and dramatic sky.

She exhaled, gathered her things, and prepared herself for subzero temperatures, potential bear encounters, and worst of all, Quentin Ramos.