Chapter Two
The fury carried Tessa through the morning.
It carried her through the tire shop, where the mechanic took one look at the slashes and asked if she wanted to file a police report.
It carried her through the feed store, where she bought the grain her horse needed and ignored the looks from men who'd clearly heard something already.
It carried her back to the RV park on the edge of Greenville, where she paid by the week for a hookup spot and a place to stable her horse.
But fury couldn't last forever.
By evening, alone in her trailer with ice on her palms and the mirror showing her the split lip she'd almost forgotten about, reality started catching up.
Three men had thrown her out of the saddle.
Three men with steel-toe boots and construction vests had blocked her road, slashed her tires, grabbed her horse's bridle hard enough to hurt him, and put her in the dirt like she was nothing. Like she was an obstacle on a job site that needed clearing.
She'd come up swinging. Got one of them in the knee, another in the face. But three on one wasn't a fight she could win, and they'd let her go only because she wasn't worth the paperwork of a real beating.
Not yet.
Tessa pulled the ice pack off her palms and looked at the gravel still embedded in the heels of her hands. She should pick it out, clean the wounds properly, but her hands were shaking and her chest was tight and the small space of the trailer suddenly felt like a cage.
She needed to move.
She pushed out the door and found the fisherman sitting on her truck's tailgate.
"Jesus Christ." She pressed a hand to her chest, heart slamming. "How long have you been there?"
"Hour or so."
He said it like it was nothing. Like sitting on a stranger's truck in an RV park at dusk was the most natural thing in the world.
"You could have knocked."
"You needed time." Muddy slid off the tailgate, moving with that slow deliberate patience she was starting to recognize. "Figured I'd wait."
"For what?"
"For you to be ready to hear what I've got to say."
Tessa crossed her arms over her chest, aware suddenly that she was wearing a tank top and shorts, her hair still damp from the shower she'd taken to wash off the road dust and the blood. The fisherman's eyes didn't dip, didn't wander. He looked at her face and nowhere else.
It was almost insulting.
"Fine," she said. "Talk."
"Hugh Tatum." Muddy leaned against her truck, arms loose at his sides.
"Owns Tatum Construction, the biggest contractor in Greenville.
Three years ago, he figured out that intimidation wins bids faster than estimates.
Started sabotaging competitors, burning material yards, sending crews to convince property owners to sell. "
"Convince."
"Break bones. Burn equipment. Kill animals if they have to." His voice was flat, unemotional. Just facts. "The sheriff's in his pocket. County government too. Nobody's coming to help the people he's targeting."
Tessa's stomach turned. "And I'm one of them now."
"Your training route runs through the corridor he's developing. River-road properties, south of Greenville." Muddy's eyes held hers. "He's been acquiring that land for two years. Any witness to what his crews do at dawn is a problem."
"I'm not a witness. I'm just trying to train my horse."
"Doesn't matter. You're on his road. You see things. You won't sell, won't move, won't change your route." Something shifted in his expression—not quite a smile, not quite approval. "That makes you a problem."
"So what, I'm supposed to run? Give up the only flat ground in twenty miles because some construction asshole wants to build condos?"
"No."
The word surprised her. She'd expected him to tell her to be smart, to back down, to find another route and let the Destroyers handle it.
"No?" she repeated.
"I said the Destroyers have been watching Tatum. I didn't say we were going to let him keep operating." Muddy pushed off the truck and moved closer, and Tessa felt the space between them shrink in a way that made her breath catch. "You're in his crosshairs now. That means you're in ours too."
"I don't need protection."
"Didn't say you did." He stopped a foot away from her, close enough that she could smell river water and motor oil and something underneath that was just him. "Said you're not safe on that road alone. Those are different things."
"How?"
"Protection means I keep you locked up somewhere until the danger passes. Not safe alone means I watch your back while you do what you're going to do anyway." His voice dropped lower, rougher. "I know which one you'd choose."
Tessa stared at him. The light was fading fast, Delta dusk painting everything in shades of purple and gold, and the fisherman's face was half in shadow. He didn't move closer. Didn't touch her. Just stood there with that patient stillness, waiting for her to decide.
"Why do you care?" she asked. "You don't know me."
"I know you got thrown out of the saddle by three men and came up swinging.
" Something flickered in his eyes—something warm, something almost human.
"I know you're chasing something that matters to you so much you'd rather fight than run.
And I know Tatum's been hurting people on my river for three years while I watched and gathered intelligence.
" His jaw tightened. "I'm done watching. "
The words landed somewhere in her chest and stayed there.
"Your river?"
"The Delta Destroyers claim the Mississippi from Greenville to Vicksburg. That water, those roads, the people who live along them—that's ours." Muddy's voice carried weight now, conviction. "Tatum thinks he can take what he wants because nobody's stopping him. He's wrong."
Tessa thought about the morning—the trucks blocking the road, the hands on her bridle, the gravel biting into her palms as she hit the ground. She thought about the qualifying math, the rankings, the nationals window that was closing one day at a time.
She thought about doing all of it alone, the way she'd been doing everything alone for six years.
"What happens now?" she asked.
"Now I brief my club. Tell them what happened, who did it, what we know about Tatum's operation." Muddy's eyes never left hers. "And then we figure out how to end him."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that."
It should have scared her. The casual certainty of a man talking about destroying another man's life.
But Tessa had grown up on a cattle operation with brothers who settled arguments with fists and a father who shot the coyotes that came for the calves.
She understood direct solutions to direct problems.
And Hugh Tatum had made himself a problem.
"I'm still training tomorrow," she said.
"I know."
"Same road. Same time. Dawn."
"I'll be there."
She raised an eyebrow. "Fishing?"
"I'm always fishing." The corner of his mouth twitched. "Just happens I'll be fishing that stretch of river at five-thirty tomorrow morning."
"Convenient."
"River's full of convenient coincidences."
Tessa almost smiled. Almost. But the split lip pulled and the ache in her palms reminded her that nothing about this situation was actually funny.
"Why are you really doing this?" she asked. "The truth."
Muddy was quiet for a long moment. The cicadas were starting up in the trees around the RV park, that constant Delta night sound that she'd grown up with and never quite stopped hearing.
"I lost my boat three years ago," he said finally.
"Spring flood took it. Took my livelihood, my purpose, everything my family built for three generations.
" His voice was low, stripped of the flat affect he usually carried.
"I spent two years drifting before the Destroyers gave me a place to stand.
Now I've got brothers, territory, something worth protecting. "
"And me?"
"You're chasing something with both hands and no safety net.
Reaching for the future like it might actually give you what you want.
" His eyes held hers, dark and steady. "I stopped doing that when the flood took the boat.
Watching you do it anyway..." He shook his head.
"Maybe I want to see what happens when someone doesn't give up. "
The honesty of it hit her like a punch.
This man—this quiet, patient, river-reading man—had looked at her and seen something worth watching. Worth protecting. Not because she was weak, but because she was still fighting.
It was the first time in six years anyone had seen her that way.
"I'm not changing my route," she said quietly. "The nationals qualifying window closes in three months. That straightaway is the only flat ground where I can condition him properly. I need every training day I can get."
"I know."
"I'm not giving it up. Not for Tatum, not for his crews, not for anyone."
"I know that too."
She studied his face in the fading light, looking for judgment, for condescension, for the particular male assumption that she needed to be managed or controlled. She didn't find any of it.
"If you're going to sit outside my trailer all night," she said, "you can at least tell me your real name."
The almost-smile that crossed his face was the most expression she'd seen from him since they'd met.
"Connor," he said. "Connor Walsh. But nobody's called me that since I got my patch."
"Why Muddy?"
"Three generations of river fishermen. Walsh men have had mud on their boots since before the Civil War." He shrugged. "The name fit."
"Muddy." She tested it on her tongue. "Suits you."
"Most things do, eventually."
They stood in the gathering dark, the trailer behind her and the man in front of her, and Tessa felt something shift in her chest. Not trust—not yet. But the beginning of it. The acknowledgment that maybe the fisherman who'd pulled her out of a ditch this morning was exactly what he appeared to be.
A man who read the current. A man who didn't let people drown.
A man who might actually be worth having at her back.
"Dawn," she said. "Five-thirty."
"I'll be on the river."
"Watching."
"Always watching." He touched his forehead in something that wasn't quite a salute. "Sleep light, Tessa Mayhew. Tatum's men know where you are."
"I always sleep light."
"Good." He turned toward his truck, parked two spaces over. "Then you'll hear me if anything moves."
She watched him walk away—slow, deliberate, unhurried—and thought that the fisherman who never wasted words or motion might be the first person in six years who actually understood what she was running toward.
And what she was willing to lose to get there.