Loving The Sunshine Cowboy (The Nashville Hearts #3)

1. The Deadline and the Texas Plates

The Deadline and the Texas Plates

LILA

First Note Farm — Tuesday Morning

The horse takes three tentative steps closer during the second verse, while the deadline for losing my dad’s ranch drums behind every chord of the upright piano.

Good. That means it's working.

I haven’t been back to the family ranch in a long time, and what to do with it looms constantly in my mind.

But I keep the progression steady. C to G to Am to F, the same slow loop I've been running for forty minutes. Nothing complicated. Nothing that demands anything from the horses or the people or the October air.

The morning is cool, the barn door is open behind me, and the sound moves out into the paddock in a way that feels less like music and more like weather, something the horses can stand in without being asked to respond to it.

That's the goal. That's always the goal.

At First Note Farm, I’m the soundtrack, quiet piano pulses that keep horses and humans breathing in the same calm rhythm. Steady and unobtrusive, whatever the horses and the people in the paddock need the air to feel like.

Angel Harte built this program on the land she bought adjacent to Sycamore Ridge, the equine therapy operation next door, where she worked for a year before starting her own.

The philosophy is the same as Sycamore Ridge: get people into their bodies, out of their heads, into something honest. The medium is different. At Sycamore Ridge, Ivy Brooks uses horses and silence.

I know because I was in her program. It’s a good one.

At First Note Farm, Angel uses horses and music.

My job is to provide the music part.

The upright piano is against the east wall of the barn, under the window that catches the morning light.

Slightly sharp on the high end, warm everywhere else, Angel found it at an estate sale outside Franklin, and I tuned it twice and left the imperfection alone.

Something about a piano that isn't quite perfect makes it easier to play, honestly.

I don't examine that thought too closely.

Kit, the trainer who works part-time here, is running a lead rope exercise in the south paddock with the two participants from this morning's session.

She moves with the unhurried competence of someone who has done this a thousand times and never made it look like it. The taller of the two, a session guitarist, three weeks into the program, holds the rope too tight, the grip of a man afraid of what happens if he loosens it.

Kit will get there with him. She always does. The horses are patient with the ones who grip.

The other participant is a songwriter. Second week. She's further along than she knows, which is often how it goes; the ones who think they have the furthest to travel arrive faster than they expect. She has started loosening her rope hand without being asked.

I keep the music low and steady. The horses hear it, and they know what it means, which is: nothing is required right now. You can just be.

So is she.

So am I, mostly.

My phone buzzes against the piano bench.

I don't look at it.

Shadow, the bay gelding at the far paddock fence, takes another step toward the rail. He's been doing this for the last twenty minutes, closing distance in increments so small I almost missed the first one.

That's how he works. Unhurried and certain, like he already knows where he's going and is in no particular rush to get there. The farm named him Shadow for the way he moves so quietly you don't register him until he's already arrived.

He puts his nose over the fence rail.

I keep the progression going.

My phone buzzes again, the vibration zinging up my arm and knocking my right hand half a beat off rhythm.

I finish the phrase and let it resolve before I reach for it.

Tommy. Two texts. Four minutes apart.

The bank called again, Lila.

I set the phone face down on the bench.

Our father left us a failing ranch—$287,000 past due—and a bank deadline only sixty-eight days away. The debt had been building for years, quietly, the way things build when a proud man keeps his books to himself and his troubles closer.

Tommy had been sitting with the real numbers alone since the estate settled, carrying them the way our father carried everything, without asking for help, without saying how bad it actually was, without once giving any of us the chance to do anything about it while there was still time.

Dad was good at being quiet.

We both came by it honestly.

The deadline is real. The bank has been patient, but won't stay so much longer. I know that. Tommy knows that. What neither of us has figured out yet is what comes after knowing.

I close the text thread and text back.

I'll call tonight.

It isn't enough. It's what I have.

Shadow stretches his neck over the rail and exhales against my shoulder, warm and deliberate.

"Yeah," I say quietly. "I know."

I run the progression one more time and let it run its course.

* * *

Kit wraps the session twenty-five minutes later. I watch the participants walk their horses back toward the south paddock, and I stay at the piano until they're through the gate.

Kit crosses the yard toward me. She has the posture of someone who is always assessing and never showing the assessment, straight-shouldered, economical, the kind of woman who says the useful thing and doesn't say the rest.

"Shadow came all the way to the rail," I say.

She glances at the east paddock. Notes it. Doesn't make a thing of it.

"The guitarist loosened his grip in the last ten minutes," she says. "Good session."

"He did."

She heads back toward the barn without anything further, which is exactly right. A good session is a good session. You don't explain it to death.

I fold the piano bench and carry it inside.

* * *

The barn is empty—the session over, horses settled, participants gone, Angel somewhere on the property.

I sit at the piano.

A truly empty room is different from a merely quiet one; quiet is a condition, emptiness permission.

I play four bars of a half-finished song that keeps circling the same unresolved note, sounding like October flat land. Only four people know I write at all—three back in eastern Tennessee, and Angel, who discovered it by accident and never mentions it.

Alone at a piano, the truth spills out; the room insists on it.

I play the phrase again.

Footsteps crunch on the gravel. I lift my hands—old habit, quick as breathing.

Angel steps in, checks the feed chart, jots a note, and, as always, says nothing about the music. It’s one of the reasons I’m grateful for her.

"How'd Shadow do?" she asks.

"Came all the way to the rail."

She makes a note. Something in her expression shifts, the satisfaction of a program director watching her work. She built this from nothing in a year. Six months ago, there was no waiting list. Now there is.

"Tommy again?" she asks.

"Tonight."

She writes something else down and doesn't push.

That's the thing about Angel. She understands the difference between being present and being in your business. We've worked alongside each other for a year now, shared mornings, session debriefs, the shorthand of two people doing something they both believe in.

She knows about Promised Land Ranch, the deadline, the debt, and the fact that the last real conversation I had with my father ended with both of us saying less than we meant and neither of us calling back.

She and Cash are the only ones who know any of it.

Cash Wilder, her husband, country music star, former professional bull rider, the man who found his way out of his own locked room and had the good sense to stay out, keeps other people's secrets the way he keeps his own. Without being asked, without making it a thing.

Angel gives me a look. Not quite maternal, not quite exasperated. Something in the middle I've never had a name for.

"You ate this morning?" she says.

"Coffee."

"That's not food, Lila."

"It's warm."

She points toward the farmhouse. "Cornbread. Left side of the stove."

I go.

* * *

Cash and Angel's kitchen is a room people actually use.

The three plants on the windowsill, of different heights, are doing well.

Coffee maker in its place. The smell of last night's cooking still in the walls, something with garlic and something slow.

A guitar on the kitchen table that I would bet real money has been there since yesterday.

That's Cash. The man cannot be far from a guitar.

I find the cornbread on the left side of the stove and eat it standing at the window.

From here, the entire cluster is visible.

First Note Farm at the center, Angel's program, the land she bought and built into something of her own.

Sycamore Ridge is directly next door, Ivy's equine therapy operation, where Angel worked before she started this.

The Sterling property is beyond that, where Ivy lives with her husband, Hayes. On the other side, Porch Light Farm, Cash and Angel's place, is close enough that their porch light is visible from the barn on clear nights.

Four properties sharing fence lines and the same stretch of Tennessee sky.

It's a small world, this cluster. Smaller than Nashville and quieter and more real, and I've been grateful for it every day of the year I've been working here.

Nashville has a particular weight to it, the industry, the sessions, the constant negotiation of who you are versus who the room needs you to be.

Out here, nobody is asking for anything except the truth.

I lived in that negotiation for years. I was good at it. I am still good at it when I go in for sessions, which I do twice a week, sometimes three times, sitting behind a drum kit in a studio off Demonbreun and being exactly what the track needs and nothing it doesn't.

I drive home, and I cross the county road, and the cluster of properties comes into view, and something in my shoulders drops.

I did not expect to find this. I wasn't looking for it.

My phone sits in my pocket, with Tommy's texts still on the screen, the deadline still running, and the four hundred acres of Promised Land Ranch still there, whether I deal with it or not.