2. Chapter 2
Raiford
Dane asked me to take his girlfriend’s cousin on a trail ride and I said yes because Dane is the closest thing I have to a brother and you don’t say no to your brother over something as small as a trail ride.
I expected an hour. I expected a woman from the East Coast who’d need a gentle horse and a slow pace and a lot of reassurance about bears.
I expected to be patient and polite and done by noon.
I did not expect Elise Carter.
The first thing that went wrong was the handshake. She stepped out of Dane’s truck and I shook her hand and her grip was firm. Confident. I noticed it and I filed it and then I looked at her face and everything I’d filed got thrown out and reorganized.
Sandy hair in a braid that looks like she did it without a mirror because she’s done it ten thousand times.
No makeup. Freckles across her nose and her cheekbones that look like the mountain put them there.
And her eyes are blue. The kind of blue that makes you think of the sky on a clear summer day.
She has curves in all the right places, hips that fill her jeans, the kind of body that suggests she’s never once worried about a gym membership because the ranch did the work for her.
Her tank top under the open flannel shows the line of her collarbone and the swell of her chest and I notice this the way I notice a break in a fence line: involuntarily, completely, and with the immediate understanding that I’m going to have to deal with it.
I said “ma’am” because that’s what I say. That’s what my parents taught me to say when meeting a woman and I’m not going to stop saying it because a woman with blue eyes makes it feel different.
Then she asked about my fencing.
She asked about my fencing methodology on the north pasture from the driveway. She identified continuous woven wire from sixty yards. She asked about my rotation schedule and told me my three-week cycle was aggressive for this elevation. She had opinions about my grass.
Nobody has opinions about my grass. My ranch hands have observations about my grass.
My vet has data about my grass. My mother has questions about my grass.
Nobody walks up to my barn and has opinions.
Except apparently Elise Carter, who stood in my driveway in boots that have actual mud on them and discussed my forage quality like she was reviewing a financial report.
I put her on Birdie. This was a test and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Birdie is a good horse with a strong opinion about who belongs on her back.
I’ve watched Birdie dump ranch hands who’ve been riding their whole lives.
She’s not mean. She’s selective. If you don’t belong, she lets you know.
Elise swung up like she was stepping onto a porch. Weight centered, seat deep, hands soft. She adjusted the stirrups by feel. She didn’t look down. She didn’t fumble. She settled into the saddle the way water settles into a creek bed, finding the shape without effort.
Birdie tossed her head. The test. The moment where the horse says “prove it” and the rider either proves it or doesn’t.
Elise sat still. She let Birdie have her moment.
One adjustment with her legs, barely visible, more intention than motion, and Birdie settled like she’d been waiting for this rider her whole life.
I watched this from my horse and I thought two things. The first was: she’s been doing this since she could walk. The second was: I need to stop looking at her.
I didn’t stop looking at her.
The ride was supposed to be an hour. I took them on the six-mile ridge trail, which is not the one-hour trail.
It’s the trail I ride alone, early mornings, when I want to see the property from the top.
I’ve never taken visitors on this trail.
I didn’t decide to take them on this trail.
My horse turned onto it and I followed because apparently my horse has opinions about Elise Carter too.
She rode behind me. Single file through the narrow sections, side by side where the trail opened up.
I could hear her horse’s hooves on the packed dirt.
I could hear her breathing, steady and unhurried, like someone who is comfortable with effort.
I could hear Dane and Jules behind us, Dane talking, Jules contributing editorial commentary, the two of them filling the mountain with noise the way they fill every room.
Elise was quiet. Not uncomfortable quiet.
Someone paying attention to the land she’s riding through and didn’t need to narrate the experience.
She looked at the fences when we passed them.
She looked at the cattle in the east pasture.
She looked at the tree line along the north boundary and the irrigation setup on the south meadow.
She was reading my ranch the way I read it: as a system. As something alive that needs tending.
The creek crossing was where I lost the argument with myself.
I called back: “It’s slick. Take it slow. Single file.” This is what I tell everyone. This is the standard instruction. The creek runs fast and the rocks are uneven and I’ve pulled ranch hands out of that water more than once.
Elise read the current from the bank. I could see her doing it, her eyes tracking the water flow, picking the line the way an experienced rider does.
She put Birdie through at a trot. Not a walk.
A trot. Through fast water on slick rock with a horse she’d been on for forty minutes.
She came out clean and pulled up next to me on the bank like she’d just crossed a parking lot.
“Good creek,” she said. Like the creek was a menu item she was reviewing favorably.
I stared at her. I’m not a man who stares. I’m a man who glances, assesses, moves on. I run a twelve-thousand-acre operation. I manage fifty employees. I make decisions about livestock and land and weather and money every day before breakfast. I do not stare at women on horseback.
Her face was flushed from the ride. Her braid was coming loose, strands of sandy hair stuck to her neck with sweat.
She was breathing through parted lips and her chest was rising and falling and she was sitting on Birdie with river water on her boots and mud on her jeans and she looked like she’d been put on that horse by someone who knew exactly what I needed to see and didn’t care what it would cost me.
“You ride,” I said. Which is the understatement of my life. She doesn’t ride. She is one with a horse. She’s the best natural rider I’ve seen since my father, who could sit a horse in a thunderstorm and make it look easy.
“I ride.”
“You didn’t mention you ride.”
“You didn’t ask.”
And there it was. The thing I’d been doing wrong.
I didn’t ask. I looked at her and made assumptions and she let me have them and then dismantled them without a word.
She didn’t correct me. She didn’t announce her credentials.
She just mounted Birdie and crossed the creek and let the riding speak for itself.
My father used to say, “Watch what people do, not what they say. The people worth knowing are the ones who let the work talk.” He said this about ranch hands and neighbors and the men who showed up at the property line every spring to help with fencing without being asked.
He said it about my mother, who ran the library for thirty years and never once mentioned the award she won from the state.
He said it about the kind of people who build their lives on doing, not telling.
Elise Carter is that kind of person. I’ve known her for ninety minutes and I know this with the certainty I have about my land and my stock and the weather patterns over my valley.
She told me her family had a ranch in Virginia. Third generation. Her parents sold it last year.
I said “I’m sorry” and I meant it. I know what land means when it’s been in your family long enough that you stop knowing where the property ends and you begin.
She lost that. A year ago. And she’s been using everything she knows to build someone else’s legacy ever since. A woman who was raised to run a ranch, building someone else’s operation instead.
I know what that costs. I saw it on her face when she said it, just for a second, before she put the calm back on.
They left at noon. Dane drove. Jules was in the passenger seat composing what I can only assume was a dramatic retelling of the morning for whatever group chat she uses as her personal broadcast network. Elise was in the back seat. She waved once as the truck pulled out.
I stood at the barn and watched the truck disappear down the drive and I didn’t move for two minutes. Beckett came up behind me.
“Boss?”
“Yeah.”
“The south fence needs checking. Mark said there’s a section that’s sagging near the draw.”
“I’ll take it.”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been standing at this barn for a while.”
“I’m thinking about the south fence.”
Beckett has worked for me for four years. He’s a good hand. He knows when I don’t share the whole truth and he knows when to leave it alone. He left it alone. He walked back to the barn and I stood in the drive and I was not thinking about the south fence.
I was thinking about blue eyes and curves and a woman who crosses creeks at a trot and discusses fencing methodology and let me underestimate her without correcting me.
I went inside. I sat at my kitchen table.
The house is big for one person. Four bedrooms. The kitchen my grandmother designed, the living room my grandfather built the fireplace in, the hallway with photographs of four generations of Wyldes on this land.
My father in the doorway of the barn, 1987.
My grandfather on horseback, 1962. My great-grandfather standing on the ridge with the valley behind him, 1929.
Wylde men on Wylde land, looking at the camera like they owned the ground and the sky above it.
I’m the last one. The last Wylde. No siblings.
No cousins who matter (Cash exists, but Cash is rodeo and unreliable and hasn’t set foot in Montana in three years).
The name ends with me unless I do something about it, and doing something about it requires a woman, and women on this mountain have a way of looking at the ranch and the name and the legacy and seeing a burden they don’t want to carry.
I don’t blame them. It is a burden. A twelve-thousand-acre, fifty-employee, five-generation burden that wakes me up at 4 AM and requires every ounce of attention I have.
I don’t resent it. I love this land the way my father loved it and his father before him. But loving something that big doesn’t leave a lot of room.
I ate dinner alone. I sat on the porch with a bourbon and watched the sun set behind the mountains and I thought about a woman who understands what land means because she lost hers.
I also thought about her mouth. The way her lips move, full and soft.
The way she almost smiled at me on the bank after the creek crossing.
The way her mouth would feel against mine.
I thought about that last one longer than a man sitting alone on a porch with a bourbon should think about anything, and when I finished the bourbon I went inside and stood in the kitchen and my hands felt empty in a way that had nothing to do with the glass.
My phone buzzed.
Dane: Thank you for today
Me: It was nothing. Happy to.
I want to ask about Elise. I’m about to when he starts typing again.
Dane: She asked about you at dinner.
Me: Asked what?
Dane: How long you’ve been running the ranch alone. She asked about your dad. She asked if you ever take a day off.
Me: What did you tell her?
Dane: I told her five years, he was the best man I ever knew, and no.
Me: That’s accurate.
Dane: She said “that’s a lot for one person.” Anyway, we enjoyed it. Thanks again.
I put the phone down.
My heart rate is elevated. My heart rate does not increase because a girl asked about me. I am not in middle school. Yet here we are.
She said, “that’s a lot for one person.”
It is. I’ve never admitted that to anyone. Not Dane. Not Beckett. Not my mother. Because Wylde men don’t complain about the ranch. We run it. We protect it. We hand it to the next generation in better shape than we found it.
But Elise took one look at my life and saw the part I never talk about. She sees me. That’s the thought I can’t shake.
I finish my bourbon. I go inside. I walk past the photographs in the hallway.
I think about her on Birdie. The creek crossing.
The way she sat the horse like she was born to it.
The way she said “you didn’t ask” without accusation or smugness, just fact.
The way she looked at my land with the quiet appreciation of a woman who lost hers and recognizes what she’s looking at.
Tomorrow I need to check the south fence. I need to review the vet schedule for next week. I need to call the supplier about the feed order for September.
Tomorrow I also need to not think about Elise Carter.
I’m going to fail at that last one. I know it the way I know weather. The front is already here. The change is already happening. I can see it coming and I can’t stop it and I’m not sure I want to.