Chapter 6
RACHEL
The bell above the door rang as I left the Mercantile, and I stood on the sidewalk for a second, trying to shake off the feel of Roman standing too close. My pulse was still running too fast. Why?
Not from the conversation. From the way he’d looked at me in that hallway, like he wanted to say something and didn’t trust himself to say it. Then he’d pulled back before I could figure out whether he was warning me away from the story or from him.
His scar had pulled tight when he spoke. His jaw worked around words he didn't want to give me. And I'd stood there cataloging every shift in his expression like it was evidence. Because it was.
Roman Maddox knew what was wrong with the rodeo's supply chain, and he'd told me without meaning to. It was full of stretched finances, bad calls, and people standing too close when it came apart. He'd practically drawn me a map while telling me not to follow it.
I opened the journal right there on the sidewalk and wrote everything down: the missing vet documentation Dawson had confirmed for three horses, Jace’s clean deflection, the handler conversation about corners being cut, and Roman's quiet admission that pulling the mare meant admitting the supplier sent bad stock.
Once, I would’ve rushed straight for the hardest hitting version of the story. I would have wanted the headline, the angle, and the piece that made an editor look twice. But I’d learned the hard way that being right didn’t mean much if you left unnecessary damage behind.
I closed the journal, then tucked it back in my bag. He'd asked me to stop. Not demanded. Asked. And the way he'd said it, like he was trying to hold something fragile with his bare hands, told me more than any on-the-record quote ever could.
I wasn't going to stop. Not when I needed a story to get my name back out there.
A few days passed. I spent them the way I always spent the middle of an investigation. Moving through town like I belonged there, asking questions that sounded like conversation, paying attention to what people didn't say.
Tuesday morning I sat at the counter of the diner and listened to two ranchers argue about whether the rodeo would draw enough out-of-town money to justify the road closures.
One of them mentioned stock arrivals being behind schedule, then changed the subject when a server came around to refill his coffee.
Wednesday afternoon I walked the rodeo grounds with my press badge clipped to my jacket. The arena was taking shape with fresh lumber, fresh paint, and the smell of sawdust and ambition. I counted fourteen horses in the holding area. The lineup Slade had shown me listed eighteen.
They were four short and less than two weeks out.
I found Jace near the medical tent, clipboard in hand, barking at a volunteer about ice cooler placement. I asked about the lineup numbers, and he gave me a smile.
“Stock rotates in and out during prep. It’s perfectly normal.”
“And the vet clearances for the ones already here?”
“On file.” He turned his back. “Talk to Slade if you need specifics.”
I didn't talk to Slade. Instead, I talked to the farrier, who was too young to have learned which questions to dodge. He told me two horses had shipped in from the same supplier as the clay-colored mare. Both had been pulled from morning evaluation and moved to a separate pen.
“Roman's working with them,” he said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Same thing as before. They come in hot. He cools them down.”
“Hot how?”
He shrugged. “Flinchy. Head-shy. The gray one won't let anyone near its left flank.”
Head-shy. Flinchy. Won't let anyone near specific areas.
Those were the same behavioral markers Roman had identified in the mare. The same signs of rough handling, or worse, that any experienced horseperson would recognize. One problem animal was an anomaly. But three from the same supplier was a pattern.
Thursday, I sat on the tailgate of my truck in the rodeo parking lot with my notes spread across my lap.
My journal was filling fast. Timelines, names, gaps where documentation should have been and wasn't. I'd called the southern supplier's listed business number twice. It was disconnected both times.
Across the lot, a trailer backed toward the holding pens.
I watched two handlers unload a large horse that danced sideways on the ramp, its ears pinned, its nostrils wide. One handler yanked the lead. The other slapped its hindquarters. The gelding scrambled down and nearly took both men with it.
I wrote down all of the details… time… description… behavior.
Nobody came to check on the horse. It stood tied to the fence rail for forty minutes, shifting weight, his head low, the rope too short to let him get very far.
Then Roman appeared. He came from behind the stock barn, his hat pulled low and didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He didn't acknowledge the handlers. Didn't look toward the parking lot. Just walked to the gelding, loosened the tie, and stood next to it until the animal's breathing slowed.
I watched him the way I'd been watching him since the start. Like he was the center of a story he didn't want told. The difference now was that I understood why.
He hadn't been asking me to stop because he didn't want me to write about him. He'd been asking me to stop because he was already inside whatever was wrong here. And whatever was wrong here was bigger than three horses with documentation gaps.
I closed the journal slowly. My fingers were unsteady against the leather, and that surprised me. I'd worked harder stories than this. I'd been threatened by better-positioned people than Roman Maddox. None of them had ever made my hands do this.
I flexed my fingers. Set them on my thigh. Forced them still.
Across the lot, Roman ran his hand once down the buckskin's neck. The horse leaned into him. The handlers had moved off, their conversation petering out as they realized they were being watched without being looked at.
I'd come here to write a fluff piece about the opening of the rodeo. Five pages on community pride and a debut event. That assignment was somewhere in my rearview now, along with my objectivity and my plan to wrap everything up by Memorial Day weekend.
I wasn't going to stop, I couldn’t. But I was starting to wonder, watching Roman with his hand on a horse no one else had bothered to settle, what stopping would have cost me. What it would cost him if I didn't.
I found him at the far end of the holding pens, right where I knew he'd be.
That was the thing I'd noticed over the last three days.
Roman Maddox kept to a routine as fixed as the fence line itself.
Late afternoon, after the other handlers cleared out, he worked alone.
No audience, no oversight, no one close enough to ask questions.
I'd timed it twice without meaning to. The third time, I admitted to myself that I was timing it on purpose.
I pushed through the side gate and walked the length of the fence until I reached him.
He stood with his back to me, both hands braced on the top rail, watching the buckskin gelding move in slow circles inside the pen.
The horse had settled a little. His head was higher, his ears tracking rather than pinned.
Roman had done that using whatever quiet language he spoke that horses understood better than people.
“I need to talk to you.”
He didn't turn around. “I'm busy.”
“You've been busy every time I've come near you. It hasn't stopped me yet.”
He turned then. His eyes moved over me once—flat, measuring—and came to rest on my face with attention that made it hard to hold still.
“What do you want, Rachel?”
Not Miss Grable. Not a deflection dressed up as a question. My name, plain and direct, and something about the way he said it landed lower than I expected.
I pulled my journal from my bag and opened it to the page I'd marked.
“I've got three horses from the same northern supplier showing identical behavioral markers. A disconnected business number. Missing vet clearances on two of the new arrivals. And a logistics coordinator who shuts down every time I mention documentation.” I looked up at him.
“You knew all of this before I got here.”
His jaw tightened. The scar pulled at the corner. “I know horses.”
“You know what's wrong with them. Where they came from.
Why they're presenting the way they are.” I stepped closer, close enough that I could see the dust on his collar, the tiredness he kept pressed behind his eyes.
“You also know that somebody signed off on these animals entering the rodeo lineup and that whoever did it either didn't look hard enough or didn't care.”
“You don't know what you're talking about.”
“Then tell me what I'm getting wrong.”
Silence. The buckskin moved behind him, hooves soft in the dirt.
“Roman.” I kept my voice level. “I'm not printing something I can't support. I'm not here to burn this town down. But three horses came in rough, and if one of them goes into that arena on Saturday and somebody gets hurt—”
“I'm handling it.”
“You're handling the horses. Who's handling the supplier?” I held his gaze. “Who's handling the paperwork that doesn't exist? Who's handling the fact that Slade is five horses short of a lineup with a rodeo opening right around the corner?”
For half a second, his guard slipped. “Drop it.” His voice came out low. Almost quiet enough to be a request.
“I can't.”
“Rachel—”
“I know you're trying to protect something.” I closed the journal.
“I don't think it's the supplier. I think it's the people here.
The ones who built this thing from scratch and are too stretched to admit it's going sideways.” I paused.
“I think you've been carrying this by yourself because nobody else is looking at it clearly, and you don't know how to hand it off to someone who might actually help.”
He went very still.
That particular silence, the one that came right before a man either shut a door or walked through it—was one I recognized. I'd sat across it in a dozen different rooms. Offices, kitchens, the front seats of trucks. The moment where the story tipped.
Roman closed the distance between us in two steps. He stopped near enough that I had to tilt my chin up to hold his eyes, and I felt the heat rolling off him, the long afternoon sun still in his skin, the steadiness he wore like armor.
“You think you've got it figured out,” he said.
“I think I've got enough.”
“You've got pieces.” His voice was rough. “And pieces get people hurt when you go printing them like they're the whole picture.”
“Then give me the whole picture.”
His jaw worked. His eyes dropped to my mouth for just a second, fast, controlled, like he'd caught himself—and came back up. Whatever he'd been about to say didn't come out.
I didn't step back. That was the thing. I knew I should. The rational, professional part of me assembled a clean argument for why I should take two steps back and put my notebook between us like a reasonable person. The rest of me stayed exactly where I was.
Roman's hand came up and his fingers curved around my jaw. His touch was careful and demanding at the same time. Then he kissed me.
It wasn't urgent. That was what caught me off guard.
It was controlled and sure and thorough, the kind of kiss that came from a man who didn't do anything halfway when he finally decided to do it at all.
His thumb rested against my cheek. His mouth was warm, and I felt it everywhere, a slow pull from my lips down through my chest and into my stomach and then even lower.
So, I kissed him back. Because I'd been watching him for days and my body had already done the math my brain refused to finish. For about fifteen seconds, nothing else mattered.
Then he pulled back. He didn't go far. An inch, maybe two. His hand dropped from my face. His eyes were darker than they'd been, and his breathing wasn't quite as steady as his expression wanted me to believe.
“You need to stop digging.” His voice came out rougher than before. “Not because I'm trying to cover anything up. Because there are people attached to this who can't afford the attention you bring.”
“I know.”
“I mean it, Rachel.”
“I know you mean it.” I searched his face. “That doesn't change what I have to do.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Something in his expression shifted. Not toward anger, not toward resignation. Toward something more complicat.ed than either. He stepped back, picked up the lead rope he'd left on the fence rail, and turned toward the pen without another word.
I stood there with the late sun on my face, my journal pressed flat against my ribs, and my pulse doing things I'd deal with later.
The horse moved to the fence and stretched its nose toward Roman's shoulder, and Roman let it. He was quiet and patient and completely turned away from me, like he hadn't just kissed me like he had every intention of doing it again.
I walked back toward the gate. This wasn't a simple rodeo piece anymore.
It hadn't been since the night he stopped on the side of the road, since the moment I'd watched him in my rearview mirror and thought there's more to this.
The supplier, the horses, the gaps in the paperwork…
those were the story. But Roman standing in the middle of all of it, guarding it with his back straight and his hands sure— That was something else.
Something I didn't have a category for yet.
I pushed through the gate and didn't look back. But I already knew I couldn’t let it go. I’d return. To the story. To the truth he was sitting on top of like it was the last solid thing he owned.
To him.