Epilogue
CLAY
Fort Worth Stockyards | Championship Rodeo | Six Months Later
There was no better place on God's green earth than behind the chutes at a championship rodeo on a Saturday night.
That wasn’t an opinion. That was fact. I'd put it up against anything—a cold beer on a hot day, a woman's laugh in a dark room, the smell of Texas dirt after rain.
All excellent things. But nothing beat the hum of a sold-out crowd, the snort and slam of two thousand pounds of pissed-off bull in the pen below you, and the bone-deep certainty that you were about to do the thing you were put on this earth to do.
Fort Worth Stockyards Championship Rodeo. Biggest stage of the season. Fifteen thousand people packed into the coliseum, the air thick with dust and beer and adrenaline, and every single one of them was about to watch me do what I did best.
Win.
I leaned against the rail above the chutes and let the energy settle into me. Rolled my shoulders. Cracked my neck. Felt the familiar buzz start low in my gut and spread outward—that electric, alive feeling that only came when I was minutes from climbing onto something that wanted to kill me.
God, I loved my job.
Thirty-one years old. Ranked first in the national standings with a lead wide enough to make lesser men complacent. I was not a lesser man. I was a Blackwood, which meant I'd been bred for exactly two things: working hard and refusing to lose.
I scanned the crowd. The stands were a sea of hats and neon and sunburned faces. Sponsors' banners snapping in the breeze. Kids on their daddies' shoulders. Women in cutoffs and boots, tanned shoulders catching the arena lights.
Target-rich environment.
Some men were built for settling down. Wyatt had Ivy.
Liam had Stephanie. Jack somehow wrangled my little sister, Maggie—and watching my sister finally let herself be happy had been one of the best things I'd witnessed in thirty-one years.
But that was their wiring. Mine was different.
I loved my family, loved my job, loved the road and the roar and the rush of a life lived exactly the way I wanted to live it.
If that made me selfish, I'd be selfish with a smile on my face and a buckle on my belt.
"You're doing that thing again."
Weston Tate climbed up beside me, a roll of tape in one hand and the easy grin of a man who'd spent fifteen years in these same chutes and now got to watch from the other side.
Retired last year. Married Savannah. Settled in Wild Creek.
But on championship night, your best friend still stood behind the chutes.
"What thing?"
"That thing where you stare at the crowd like you're a lion at the watering hole."
I grinned, knowing he got that off a brochure at a doctor’s office or somewhere. Things like that didn’t come to him. “Beautiful metaphor, Weston. Truly.”
"Savannah's. She texted from the stands that you look—and I'm quoting—'like a predator at a buffet.'"
I laughed. "Tell your wife I'm flattered."
"I'm not telling my wife that." He leaned against the rail beside me. "Big draw tonight. Hellfire's in the rotation. Two thousand, one hundred pounds. Threw Danvers in three flat last month."
"Danvers rides like he's got somewhere else to be."
Weston shook his head, smiling. "You're something else, Blackwood."
"I'm the best, Tate. There's a difference."
He didn't argue. Couldn't. We both knew it was true—not because I was arrogant, though I freely admitted to that, but because I'd put in the work.
Every early morning training with Weston multiple times a week, every bruised rib, every ride that went sideways.
I'd earned this. Tonight's championship buckle was already mine in every way that mattered.
"Sav's got her family across the other side," Weston said. "But yours are out in force. Whole damn Blackwood army."
That landed warm. Championship night meant mandatory attendance—Momma's rules, not mine. She'd have everyone there. Dad, Wyatt, Ivy, Hunter, Liam, Stephanie, and Sophia. Maggie and Jack had made the drive up from the ranch.
"They look disgusting together. All the eye contact and the hand-holding. Stephanie cried at Sunday dinner last week because Jack tucked Maggie's hair behind her ear."
Weston laughed. "Just you wait, brother. Your turn's coming."
My face scrunched with something close to disgust. "My turn for what? Voluntary imprisonment? I'll pass."
He shook his head while checking my rope. "Sure you will."
He said it the way he always said it—like he knew something I didn't. Which was annoying, because Weston had been saying it for two years and I'd yet to prove him right.
Wasn't planning to start tonight.
I clapped his shoulder. "I'm going to check on the bulls. Keep the faith, old man."
"I'm thirty-three."
"Retired at thirty-three. Basically elderly."
He flipped me off with the hand that wore his wedding ring, which only made me grin harder.
I dropped down and cut through the back area toward the stock pens. The noise was different here—less crowd, more animal. Low rumble of bulls shifting in their pens, clang of metal gates, sharp whistles from stock hands. I knew this world the way I knew my own heartbeat.
I was halfway to the pens when I heard it.
Crying.
Small. Scared. The kind of crying that came from real fear.
She was standing near the stock pen fence, half hidden behind a concrete barrier.
Tiny. Four of five, or maybe an overgrown three.
I never really knew how to gauge the ages of children.
Blonde ringlets in full rebellion against whatever hair tie had been tasked with containing them.
Pink cowboy boots and a denim dress, and a stuffed horse clutched to her chest like it was the last solid thing in her universe.
Her face was red. Her eyes were enormous. And she was completely alone.
Something in my chest dropped straight to my boots.
I looked around. No frantic parent scanning the crowd. No security guard heading her way. Just a lost little girl in a sea of fifteen thousand people, and the stock pens—with two thousand pounds of unpredictable animal behind a fence—about ten feet away.
I crouched down slowly—the way I'd approach a spooked filly. No sudden moves, no looming. Just making myself small enough that she didn't have to look up to see me. "Hey there. You okay, sweetheart?"
She looked at me with those huge, tear-filled eyes. Her bottom lip was trembling so hard it was practically vibrating.
"I lost my mommy," she whispered.
"Okay. We're going to find her. Can you tell me your name?"
She sniffed hard, wiped her nose on her hand, and studied me with the suspicious intensity only small children and federal agents could pull off.
"Are you a real cowboy?"
That knocked a laugh out of me. "Yeah, darlin'. I'm a real cowboy."
She considered this. Looked at my hat. My boots. My competition number. "My mommy says I'm not s'posed to talk to strangers."
"Your mommy sounds like a smart lady."
"She's the smartest." Absolute, unshakeable conviction. "She knows about dinosaurs and she knows how to make the bestest grilled cheese and she knows all the words to 'Let It Go.'"
My mouth twitched. "That's a pretty impressive résumé."
"What's a rezza-may?"
"It means she sounds amazing."
She nodded solemnly. Then her face crumpled again. "But I can't find her and I been looking and looking and there's too many peoples and I want my mommy."
"Hey, hey." I held up both hands. "I'm going to help you, okay? That's what real cowboys do. We help people."
"Pinky promise?"
I extended my pinky. Hers barely wrapped around mine, and the fierce way she gripped it—like she was holding on with everything she had—hit me somewhere I wasn't expecting.
"I'm Clay."
"I'm Maisie. Maisie Elizabeth Ashford-Monroe. My mommy says I have to say the whole thing so peoples know which Maisie."
"Well, Maisie Elizabeth Ashford-Monroe." I tipped my hat.
Her green eyes went wide with a gasp. "You tipped your hat! Like in the movies!"
I stood and held out my hand. She slipped hers into mine—warm, small, sticky in the way children's hands were always sticky, from some unknowable source that probably involved candy.
"Where we going?" she asked, practically jogging to keep up. I shortened my steps.
"To find my mom."
Maisie looked up at me, curiosity etched into her little features. "Is she nice?"
"She's the nicest person I know. She also makes the second-best grilled cheese in Texas."
She frowned. ”Who makes the bestest?"
"Your mom, apparently. We'll have to set up a competition."
Maisie giggled, and the sound hit me like sunlight after a week of rain—bright, sudden, completely disorienting.
"Clay?"
“Yeah, sweetheart?"
"Can I wear your hat?"
I glanced toward the chutes. Maybe twenty minutes before my ride. Twenty minutes to get this kid somewhere safe, get my head straight, and get on a bull.
"Tell you what—after my ride, you can wear it as long as you want."
Her eyes sparkled, and something in my chest swelled. “Promise?" she asked, voice tiny and sweet.
"Promise."
Five minutes ago, I'd been scanning the crowd for buckle bunnies. Now I was holding a kid's sticky hand and making promises about hats, and somehow it didn't feel like a detour.