16. Chapter 16
Tana
The name catches me halfway through the morning meds check and turns my hands useless for a second.
I’m in the office with Wade, cross-checking delivery notes against the revised transport schedule, when he flips to the next page.
"Mercer Logistics is handling the southbound haul if Ashford signs off," he says, almost absently. "Sloan’s name is still on the broker side, though, so I want eyes on the paperwork before anything moves."
The pen slips in my fingers.
Wade looks up. “You know him?”
“No.” The word comes out too fast, old panic still reaching for the nearest lie before anything better can get there.
I make myself slow down. “Not him. The name.”
He doesn’t say anything. Just waits.
I look back at the page, at the typed line that ought to be meaningless and isn’t.
SLOAN EQUINE TRANSPORT CONSULTING.
It sits there clean and respectable in black type, and that is what turns my stomach. Derek was always easiest to miss when he looked put together—shirt pressed, voice even, one hand low at your back like help until you noticed he was steering.
“My ex’s last name is Sloan,” I say. My voice sounds flatter than I feel. “I don’t know if it’s him.”
That is true in the narrowest possible way, which does nothing at all to make it better.
Wade’s expression sharpens without changing much. "You want me to flag it?"
The answer is right there, and I still dodge it. "How long has that vendor been in rotation?"
"Not long. Broker recommendation through a secondary contact. Why?"
I cap the pen hard enough for it to click twice. “No reason,” I say. “I’d just like to read the paperwork before anything gets signed.”
Wade slides the file toward me without argument, and I take it to the tack room because I don’t want to look at it in the office where anybody can ask the wrong question at the wrong time.
I read it once standing up, one hip against the tack box, and the first pass doesn’t do much except throw a lot of clean business language at me.
Dates. Insurance terms. Route windows. Vendor coordination.
The kind of words people use when they want risk to sound ordinary.
On the second pass, my eyes catch where the names shift.
Mercer is handling the haul. Sloan is lower down, threaded into the lines most people would skim right past …
scheduling, vendor coordination, reroute authority if something goes wrong on the road.
My thumb stops on the page.
I go back and read the section again, slower this time, my nail digging into the margin hard enough to leave a dent in the paper.
I set the file on the tack box and pick it right back up, like changing the angle might change what I saw.
It doesn’t. Sloan is still there, tucked off to the side, with exactly the kind of room Derek always liked best: close enough to steer, far enough not to be the name anybody remembers first.
Something in my middle draws tight.
Not the pregnancy. Something older than that.
I brace my hand on the tack box and keep looking at the line until the letters start to feel less like print and more like pressure.
If Derek finds a way to touch this ranch through me, then I didn’t leave my past behind. I delivered it here.
Outside, a feed bin lid slams and Midge answers somebody’s curse with a sharp bark. For a second the ranch sounds like itself again, and that only makes the next thought worse.
This reaches farther than me.
Rebel finds me there twenty minutes later with the paperwork still spread across the tack box and my head spinning with issues I can’t outright discuss.
He stops in the open doorway with his hat in one hand and that set, deliberate look he gets when he has already decided something. Usually that would set off my spidey-senses on sight. Today I’m too busy trying to make the Sloan file look like ordinary ranch business.
"I need you with me this afternoon," he says.
I glance up. "That sounds ominous."
"There’s a special-invite prospect review at a Quarter Horse sale barn in Fort Worth."
I stare at him long enough that he pushes off the doorframe. “Take Cassie,” I say. “Or Holt.”
“I’d rather you go.”
He says it like a work decision, plain and steady, but it still lands wrong in me.
A second later he seems to hear it too, because his mouth tightens before he adds, “The colt’s got a hitch behind that nobody can agree on. You’ll see what they miss.”
That is the problem with him. He keeps asking for the one thing I still know how to give.
I look back at the paperwork. Fort Worth means leaving the ranch with Rebel while Derek is still sitting like a burr under my skin. It means more time alone with a man I’m already lying to, and a few more hours in a world where I’m always too aware of what I don’t match.
“You don’t need me for that,” I say, though there isn’t much force left in it now.
“Yes,” he says. No softness. No room in it either. “I do.”
Something low in me gives at that, and I resent it immediately.
I square the papers, cap the pen, and keep my face blank when I stand. “Fine. But if I have to listen to rich men tell the same horse story three different ways, you’re buying me dinner on the way back.”
That gets a smile out of him. “You planning to eat it this time?”
“Keep talking and dinner gets expensive.”
Then he is gone, leaving me alone with the transport paperwork and the fact that even now, with fear coming at me from every side, Rebel can still ask for my help and make me want to say yes.
Fort Worth feels like somebody else’s life dressed up as a destination.
By the time we pull into the sale barn lot, the sun has dropped low enough to turn the rows of polished trucks and gleaming horse trailers into a display of wealth pretending it is merely practical.
Walking through the aisles are men in pressed shirts with pearl snaps, and boots that have never once met a muck pile on purpose. The women are lined along the showring, all dressed like they're here for a high-stakes business meeting.
I’m suddenly, painfully aware of my own boots.
It’s not that I came in dirty. I scrubbed them before we left and changed shirts in a gas station bathroom twenty miles back when the ranch dust started getting under my skin.
It just doesn’t matter. I’m wearing the good jeans, the pair I save for town, fitted enough through the hips and thighs that they usually make me feel pulled together, but next to these people they read exactly as they are: practical, worn in, bought because they hold up.
Rebel, meanwhile, steps out of the truck looking like the whole place is a language he was born speaking.
Of course, he’s wearing his favorite custom-made black Stetson hat, white button down dress shirt and dark navy blazer.
Money is so settled into him, it doesn’t need announcing.
Men nod to him before he reaches the gate.
A woman at registration smiles too quickly when she says his name.
I hang back just long enough to make myself angry about it.
Then I follow him inside and get hit with the second wave of not belonging when the woman at the private review desk looks straight past me and says, "Assistants can wait in the side lounge unless Mr. Ashford needs handling help."
Nothing about it is openly cruel, but it’s the kind of slight that passes for ordinary because it arrives so neatly packaged.
Rebel stops mid-step. "She’s with me for the review," he says, and his tone flattens the air between us. "If we need the side lounge, I’ll let you know."
The woman blinks, recovers, and slides a second credential across the counter.
"Of course."
I take the badge without looking at her. My face is hot in that old, familiar way, half humiliation, half fury at myself for still being surprised.
Rebel waits until I look at him.
"You all right?" he asks quietly.
No. But I straighten the lanyard, pin on a look I know how to wear, and say, "Lead on, cowboy. I’m dying to hear what a six-figure limp sounds like in a sales pitch."
An hour later, Evelyn Hart finds me in the side paddock behind the sale barn, where the noise drops off just enough to question things.
Rebel introduced her that morning as his late mother’s best friend, but “friend” feels too soft for a woman who looks at him like she has been seeing through his excuses for years.
I’m standing at the rail with a paper cup of coffee gone cold in my hand, watching a gray filly pin her ears at a handler who keeps mistaking tension for defiance. It gives me something to look at besides the polished crowd drifting in and out of the warm light behind me.
"You have his expression," Evelyn says, coming up beside me.
I glance over. She looks exactly like this world expects her to … beautiful coat, fancy boots, sparkling jewelry, not one thing on her arranged by accident.
"Whose?"
"Rebel’s, when he wants to set fire to a room and is trying to remember he was raised better." She takes in my face, the untouched coffee, the ring traffic beyond the fence. "I think you’re hating this more than you’re letting on."
"I’m surviving it," I say.
"Yes. He trusts women who can endure too much, because that lets him tell himself they are safe when they really are not."
That gets my attention.
Evelyn folds her gloved hands over the rail and watches the gray filly with me.
"Rebel believes distance keeps him clean," she says.
"He learned that the hard way, when he was young.
He also thinks wanting someone is the same as endangering them, which would be noble if it were not occasionally so destructive. "
I let that sit between us for a second. "That sounds like a very elegant way of saying he scares easy when things matter."
One corner of her mouth lifts. "You’ve got it exactly right."
I look back toward the sale barn doors, where Rebel’s visible through the glass.
"He makes it look easy," I say.
"He makes everything look easier than it is," Evelyn replies. "Don't confuse polish for peace, Montana. Men like Rebel can build a whole life sturdy enough to impress strangers and still not know what to do with tenderness once it is real."
It sounds like a warning, but what reaches me is harder to bear than that, because it feels too much like kindness.
I let the preview finish before I go after him. By the time I catch him in the narrow hallway behind the main ring, the sale noise has dropped to a muffled swell under fluorescent light.
He’s standing there with one hand in his pocket, collar open at the throat, which on Rebel counts as visible wear.
The prospect didn’t make the cut. He trusted my read over the consignor’s polished pitch and walked away from a six-figure mistake without blinking.
To anybody passing, he would look composed.
What I see is a man who has been thinking too hard in a room that rewards that by calling it control.
“You were right about the hitch,” he says when he sees me.
"I know."
His mouth finally gives, and the smile that slips through is small enough to look almost unfamiliar on him, like it got out before he could decide whether to stop it.
It changes him more than it should. For a second he looks younger, less guarded, and when his eyes come back to mine there is something in them that lands warmer than amusement and a lot more dangerous.
Neither of us says anything right away. Out here, with the sale still going on somewhere behind us, the quiet feels thinner and more private at the same time, like we stepped half an inch outside the rest of the day and don’t know yet what that costs.
I can still hear Evelyn’s voice in my head, cool as cut glass and twice as inconvenient: he trusts women who can carry too much, then calls that safety.
“Tana,” Rebel says.
The way he says my name strips the strength out of my knees faster than the nausea has all week.
If I’m going to tell him, it has to be now, before the drive back, before Derek, before my own fear gets there first and starts deciding things for me again.
So I take one step toward him.
"There’s something I need to …"
"Ashford?" a man calls from the corridor behind us. "They’re ready to discuss the second lot, if you still want first right of refusal."
And just like that, our conversation halts.
Rebel looks at me, then toward the voice, and I see the split second where he weighs both directions. He chooses me first with his eyes, and for one unsteady second I think I might say it anyway.
Then someone else brushes past with a catalog, the ring announcer’s voice rises through the wall, and all at once the words in my throat start to feel huge.
"It’s ok, later," I say, hating the sound of it as soon as it leaves me.
His attention sharpens. "You sure?"
No.
I make myself nod. "Go handle your empire."
He studies me another beat, as if he knows something mattered and cannot yet see its outline. Then he touches my elbow once, brief enough to be deniable, and turns away.
I stay where I am until he disappears into the crowd.
The truth had been right there. Now it’s dropped back inside me, heavier than before, like every second I wait gives fear more say in what happens next.