Chapter 2
Mason
I can’t get her out of my head.
Two days. Two days since I stopped on a mountain road to change a flat tire for two women I’d never met.
I’ve changed a lot of tires. I’ve pulled over for a lot of strangers.
I grew up in a part of Texas where you stop when someone’s on the shoulder and you don’t think twice about it. It’s just what you do.
I didn’t think twice about stopping. I’ve been thinking about nothing else since.
She was standing on the gravel holding a tire iron like she’d never held one before, which she hadn’t.
Her hair was in a ponytail that was coming apart.
Her eyes were puffy, pink at the edges, the eyes of a woman who’d been crying recently and had put herself back together with whatever she had on hand.
She was in a T-shirt and her arms were bare and the evening was getting cold and she was beautiful.
Not pretty. Not cute. Beautiful. The kind of beautiful that lands in your chest like a horse kick and stays there.
Curvy in a way that her T-shirt didn’t hide and wasn’t trying to.
Full hips. Full breasts. A body that takes up space unapologetically and I looked at her for three seconds and wanted to put my hands on every inch of her.
I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve dated. I’ve been with women.
I spent ten years in real estate surrounded by people who wanted something from me and I learned to read intent the way I read property assessments: fast, accurate, looking for the flaws.
I’ve never looked at a woman and felt what I felt on that gravel shoulder.
The handshake. When her fingers touched mine, something ran through my hand and into my arm and settled in the center of my chest like a deed being filed.
Something permanent. Something recorded.
I gave her my jacket. I don’t know why. She was cold and I had a jacket and I put it on her the way you’d put a blanket on a horse that’s been standing too long in the cold.
Instinct. The instinct to cover her, protect her, keep her warm.
I’ve known this woman for ninety seconds and my body has already decided she’s mine to take care of.
That should alarm me. It doesn’t.
What alarms me is that I don’t know her age.
She could be twenty-two. She could be twenty-five.
She’s young. Young enough that the gray at my temples and the years behind my eyes make this complicated.
I’m not a man who fools himself. I know what I look like: a rancher in his late thirties who’s been alone long enough that the solitude has settled into his face.
I made peace with that. I bought this ranch three years ago and I’ve been happy here.
Quiet. Content. A man with seven hundred acres and good horses and no reason to want anything else.
Two days ago a woman named Paige shook my hand and the peace I’ve spent three years building cracked down the middle.
The bronco is a three-year-old gelding named Riot, which is the most honest name any horse has ever been given.
He’s been fighting the saddle for two weeks and I’ve been working him every morning, not breaking him, teaching him.
Those aren’t the same thing. Breaking is force.
Teaching is patience. You sit with the chaos and you wait for the animal to decide that trusting you is easier than fighting you. It takes as long as it takes.
I’m not thinking about Riot this morning. I’m on his back and my legs are gripping and my core is absorbing the bucks and my free hand is up for balance and I should be focused on the horse because a three-year-old bronco will put you in the dirt if you give him half a second of inattention.
I’m thinking about her hands. Small, with short nails.
The way they wrapped around the tire iron like it was foreign equipment.
The way they pulled my jacket closed, her fingers disappearing inside the sleeves.
The way they felt in mine, warm and light, and the current that ran between us when we touched.
I’ve shaken a lot of hands. I’ve closed deals with handshakes.
I’ve bought and sold properties with a grip and a nod.
I have never felt what I felt when Paige put her hand in mine.
Paige. I’ve been saying her name in my head for two days. Turning it over. A one-syllable word that sounds like a beginning.
Riot gives one more kick. I feel the shift in his weight before it comes and I’m already moving with it. The gelding settles. I swing off, clean, landing on my feet. I dust my jeans. Push my hair back.
I look up.
She’s here.
A Subaru in the drive. Her behind the wheel.
I can see her through the windshield and my body does something it hasn’t done in years.
It stalls. Every system, every process, every steady rhythm I’ve built into my days on this ranch, just stops.
The way a market freezes before a major trade. Everything suspended for one second.
She gets out. She waves. Small, slightly awkward. She’s holding my jacket up.
The jacket. She came to return my jacket. She drove to my ranch on the north side of the mountain to bring back a canvas jacket that cost forty dollars at the feed store in Bozeman. She could have kept it. She could have thrown it out. She drove here.
I walk to the fence. Slow. Steady. I don’t rush because rushing would show her what I’m feeling and what I’m feeling is too big to hand to a woman I’ve met once.
My hands go to the fence rail and I lean and she’s close now, close enough to see properly.
Dark hair, down today, not the ponytail.
She’s wearing a sundress and her shoulders are tan and her eyes aren’t puffy anymore.
She looks rested. She looks like a woman who slept in a warm place and woke up lighter.
She looks like everything I didn’t know I was missing.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
She holds the jacket out. I take it. Our fingers don’t touch and I feel the absence of what was there two days ago.
“Thanks for coming all the way out here,” I say. “You could’ve just kept it.”
“It looked expensive.”
It’s not expensive. I could buy a hundred of them and not notice the charge. But she doesn’t know that and I don’t tell her because a woman who drives forty minutes to return a forty-dollar jacket is a woman with integrity and I am not going to rob that moment of its weight.
She’s nervous. I can see it in her hands, the way they move to her hair, to her hip, back to her hair. She’s a woman who smiles when she’s nervous, I noticed that on the road. The smile is a shield. It goes up fast and it goes up bright and it covers everything underneath.
Right now the smile is flickering. Right now she’s looking at me and the shield is thin and I can see through it to something real. Something uncertain and hopeful and scared.
“So, um.” She starts talking. About her friends. About rafting. About Outfitters. She’s losing the thread as she goes, spiraling into qualifications and backtracking.
“I mean, would you want to come? With us? On the raft?”
She invited me. She stood at my fence and invited me on a rafting trip with her friends and the asking cost her something. I can see it on her face.
“When?” I say.
“Tomorrow. Nine AM. Wylde Mountain Outfitters.”
“I’ll be there.”
Her eyes widen. The surprise on her face is the most telling thing she’s shown me. She expected a no. Or a maybe. Or the careful, measured non-answer of a man who doesn’t commit. She expected to be managed. She was not expecting a man to just say yes.
“Okay,” she says. “Great. So. Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” I look at her. I let myself look.
Her face. Her shoulders. The neckline of the sundress and the collarbones underneath.
The curve of her hips and the way she stands, weight on one foot, the other angled, a woman who is always half-ready to move toward the next thing.
I look at her and I don’t hide what I’m looking at because I have spent thirty-nine years on this earth and I know when I see something that I want.
“See you at nine, Paige.”
Her name in my mouth. I like it there. I like the way it sounds when I say it out loud and I like the way her face changes when she hears it. Something softens. Something drops. A defense she didn’t know she was holding comes down an inch.
She gets in the car and drives away. I watch her go. I stand at the fence until it disappears around the bend and the dust settles and the ranch is quiet again.
Mark, my foreman, walks over. He’s been working horses in the ring for three years and he’s seen me handle every situation on this property without flinching. He looks at me now with the expression of a man who’s seeing something new.
“Boss? You good?”
“I’m good.”
“You’ve been standing at that fence for a while.”
“Have I?”
“Going on three minutes.”
I push off the fence. I pick up the jacket. It doesn’t smell like cedar anymore. It smells like her. Something warm, something like vanilla, something underneath that’s just skin and sleep and a woman who wore my jacket and brought it back and stood at my fence and asked me to go rafting.
I’m forty minutes from town. I’ve got seven hundred acres, a three-year-old bronco, fifty head of cattle, and a life I built with my own hands that has been enough for three years.
It was enough two days ago. It’s not enough now. A woman with dark hair and a nervous smile stood at my fence and looked at me and something I thought was settled shifted open. Like a gate I forgot I’d closed.
Tomorrow. Nine AM. Outfitters.
She’s young. She’s freshly hurt. She’s everything I shouldn’t want and the only thing I do.
I take the jacket inside. I don’t wash it.