Chapter 3
RACHEL
The rodeo grounds sat outside of town, past a stretch of flat land where the grass grew short and the fencing ran in long, straight lines. I drove out with the windows down, my old-school voice recorder on the passenger seat, and my new leather journal open on my thigh.
I smelled it before I saw it. The scent of dust mingled with cut timber, horses, and something metallic from fresh hardware.
The arena had gone up fast. All steel pipe and wooden boards, bleachers still getting their last rows bolted into place.
Trucks lined the outer fence. Workers moved across the grounds with the focused efficiency of people on a deadline.
Slade Kincaid found me before I found him. Had Ruby warned him she’d sent me his way? Had he been watching for me?
“You must be Rachel.” He came around the side of a flatbed, his dark hair curling up under the edges of a well-worn hat, his hand already extended. His smile held the confidence of a man who'd grown up with land and a name that opened doors. “Ruby called ahead.”
“I’m not surprised.” I shook his hand. “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.”
“Anything for the rodeo.” He gestured for me to follow. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”
The arena was bigger than it looked from the road. The main ring stretched out under open sky, with chutes lined up along the far end. Workers were installing the gates and testing the latches.
“How long has this been in the works?” I asked, pointing my recorder toward him.
“Officially, just about eight months. But this town's been wanting it a lot longer than that.” He stopped at the rail and rested his arms across the top.
“There have always been rodeo families in Mustang Mountain.
Folks have been running cattle and horses since before I was born.
The event just never had a home here. We've always had to travel out.”
“What changed?”
“I guess we finally reached a point where enough people finally wanted to do something about it.” He looked across the arena.
“But there's pressure with that. This is the first official one. If it goes well, we’ll build something that can last. If goes bad…
“ His voice trailed off and he shook his head.
“What does going bad look like?”
Slade sighed. “Poor turnout. Equipment failures. A horse that throws a rider wrong and puts someone in hospital. If anything like that happens, it will give the doubters a reason to say they were right.”
I kept pace with him as he moved around the outside of the arena toward the chutes.
He walked me through the timing system, the medical station behind the far bleachers, and the pen where they’d keep extra stock.
He knew the details without reaching for them.
That told me he'd been deep in the logistics himself, not just signing off on other people's work.
“Ruby’s notes said you used to compete as a bull rider,” I said. “How long has it been?”
“Too long.” He grinned. “But Morgan would leave me if I tried to enter. Rodeoing gets in your blood though. It’s hard to give it up.”
We rounded the far end of the arena and the grounds opened up. A second pen sat about forty yards back, smaller and not as finished. It looked like it was built for practicality rather than performance. I almost missed what was happening inside it.
Roman stood in the center of the pen with a reddish-brown horse the color of dried clay.
Broad-chested and restless, its ears were pinned flat and its tail flicked in short, agitated bursts.
The horse moved in circles around him, and he just stood there, letting the horse burn off all its anxious energy.
He held a lead rope loose at his side, and even from far away, I could see the deliberate stillness in his body, the quiet sureness of a man who knew pushing harder wouldn’t make the horse trust him any faster.
I stopped walking. “What's going on over there?”
Slade followed my line of sight. “That's a situation we're working through.” He leaned against the fence.
“The horse came from a supplier down south.
Bucking stock, good record, supposed to be well-conditioned.
But she's been off since she arrived. She won't load, won't settle, and spooks at things that shouldn't make a horse spook.”
“Is she going to be in the rodeo?”
“Not yet. You can't put an unstable animal in the chutes. Especially not for a debut event with green handlers and crowd noise and cameras. Someone could get hurt.” He crossed his arms. “Roman's been with her since yesterday afternoon.”
In the pen, the horse had slowed. She turned toward Roman and faced him, her head low and nostrils wide, like she was getting a read on him. Roman didn't move toward her. He shifted his weight slightly, dropped one shoulder, and waited.
“Is he good?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
“He’s the best I've ever seen with a difficult animal.” Slade kept his gaze trained on the horse. “He waits until they decide to come to him. Doesn't force anything. Takes longer, but it sticks.”
The horse took one step toward Roman. Then another.
Roman turned his hand over, his palm up, and let her close the rest of the distance herself. Something tugged in my chest as I watched him. He was good at this. Not just capable, but completely at ease in a way that made it hard to look anywhere else.
I thought about last night. How he’d crouched next to my car in the dark, moving with the same unhurried certainty. Then I thought about the way he'd looked at me. Heat coiled low in my belly.
I pulled my attention back to Slade before he noticed me studying Roman. “What’s the backup plan if Roman can’t get her to settle down?”
“We’ll pull her and find a replacement.” Slade pushed off the fence. “But Roman usually finds a way. That's why I called him in.”
Across the grounds, Roman clipped the lead rope to the mare's halter in one smooth motion. She stood and let him.
I took notes. But my pen moved slower than usual, and I wasn't entirely sure what I was actually trying to record.
ROMAN
The mare had been in the pen since dawn.
Hours later, I stood at the rail with my arms loose, watching her make long, restless circles.
She was a good-looking animal. Well-muscled, the kind that photographs well and checks every box on a supplier's form.
Sixteen hands, five years old, two seasons of documented rodeo conditioning, good temperament noted twice in the evaluation report.
The evaluation report had to be wrong. It wasn’t just one thing that led me to that conclusion.
It was an accumulation of little things, like the way she tracked movement at the far fence before it was close enough to matter, the set of her ears when nothing had changed, and the way she held still when she stopped circling.
That stillness wasn't her taking a rest. It was her holding her breath.
She wasn't a difficult horse. She was a horse that had learned to expect the wrong thing from people, and the difference mattered more than most handlers ever bothered to understand.
I stayed at the rail. Didn't step in yet.
The morning was cold enough I could see her breath in short bursts.
I let her burn through the first hour on her own terms and watched her tell me things the paperwork hadn't.
She favored her left side on turns. Spooked at shadows before sound.
And when she felt cornered, she swung her hindquarters toward the fence, which told me someone had crowded her before and ignored every warning she gave.
Slade's boots on the dry ground registered somewhere behind me. I didn't turn. She was at the edge of something, that point just before a horse either escalates or decides to come down, and pulling my attention now would cost me at least twenty minutes of reset.
The second set of footsteps was lighter. They stopped beside Slade, quiet for a beat, and I felt her attention land on me before she said a word. I knew who it was without turning around by the way my skin heated under her attention.
The mare completed her circle, cut toward the center, and stopped. She held her head low, her nostrils working, and looked straight at me. That was what I'd been waiting for.
“Hey, Roman.” Slade stopped at the rail about six feet to my left. “I brought someone to see the operation.”
The mare took one step toward me. Then she stopped and reassessed. I kept my hand loose at my side and let her work through it.
“How long has this one been in rotation?” I asked.
“The supplier said two seasons. She was pulled off the circuit last spring, reconditioned over the summer, and cleared for reinstatement in the fall.”
“Cleared by who?” I kept my voice low so I didn’t spook the mare.
Slade paused. “The supplier.”
She took another step toward me. I turned my palm out, kept it low, and waited.
The tension she carried was obvious. She had her neck slightly elevated even with her head dipped, like she wanted to relax but hadn't decided if she was allowed to.
I let her smell the back of my hand. She pulled back once, then came forward again.
Behind my back, I could feel Rachel watching me. Not the way Slade watched — running timelines, thinking about lineup slots. She was watching the process. Taking it apart while it was still happening.
The mare pressed her nose against my knuckles and exhaled. I ran my hand along her neck, felt her muscles jump, then slowly release. She didn't step back. We were making progress.
“Did she react to the chute?” I asked Slade.
“She wouldn't load this morning. The handler said she needed time to adjust.”
“You should pull her from the lineup,” I said without turning around.
“She's not mean and she's not green. But something went wrong in that reconditioning, and she's been compensating since. If you put her in the chutes on opening day with the noise from the crowd and a rider who doesn't know her signals…” I didn’t need to say anything else.
Slade's exhale was slow. “Can you fix it?”
“In a couple of weeks? No. But I can get her safe enough to evaluate properly. Then you'll know what you're actually working with.” I clipped the lead rope to her halter, taking it slow and easy. She tolerated me and didn’t back away.
Behind me, nobody spoke. Slade was probably running numbers and trying to figure out how much the mare’s issues would cost. But Rachel's silence was different. She wasn't taking notes, but she'd heard all of it.
And she'd understood — I didn't need to see her face to know that — not just what I'd said about the horse. About the gap between what something's documented to be and what it actually is when you're close enough to read it. She'd caught that too, I was sure of it.
I kept my eyes on the mare, but my jaw went tight in a way that had nothing to do with the horse and everything to do with the curvy blonde behind me.