Chapter 5
Paige
The group chat achieves a volume I didn’t think was possible for a text-based medium.
Jules: I’M SORRY. THE BILLIONAIRE RANCHER WHO CHANGED YOUR TIRE AND GAVE YOU HIS JACKET AND THEN IGNORED YOU ON THE RIVERBANK IS NOW MAKING YOU DINNER? THE MOUNTAIN IS A MACHINE. AN ACTUAL MACHINE.
Marissa: What are you wearing?
Claire: What time will you be home? Do we need a check-in protocol?
Tori: He’s a good guy, Paige. Kai says the ranch hands all respect him, which is the only reference check that matters in a small town.
Jenna: Wear your hair down. Trust me.
Me: You guys I’m just going to dinner!! It’s not a big deal!!
Jules: You used two exclamation points per sentence. Your baseline is three. You’re NERVOUS. Paige Mitchell is nervous about a DATE. Screenshot. Saved.
I put the phone down. I am nervous. I’ve been nervous since the sidewalk this morning when Mason Lane stood in front of me and said “I can’t stop thinking about you” like it was a property deed he was filing. Permanent. Notarized.
I wear my hair down. Jenna was right. I wear jeans and a thin sweater that’s simple and fits well and I put on mascara and lip gloss and I look in the mirror and I think: you are a twenty-six-year-old woman going to dinner with a man who said you were worth the reach.
Don’t mess this up. Don’t be too loud or too eager or too.
I stop. I stop because that voice isn’t mine. That voice is Ryan’s. Ryan who told me my enthusiasm was exhausting. Ryan who is now engaged to someone who is apparently the right amount of everything I was the wrong amount of.
I look in the mirror. I take a breath. I’m going to be exactly as much as I am. If that doesn’t work for him, I’ll find out tonight.
Mason knocks on the door at 4:58. Two minutes early. Claire opens it because I’m in the bedroom having a last-minute crisis about earrings and I hear Claire say “she’ll be right out” in her CPA voice, the one that’s professional and neutral and currently being deployed as a security screening.
I come out. He’s standing in the doorway and he looks like a man who showered and put on a clean shirt and thought about it while he was doing it.
Dark jeans, a white button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, boots that aren’t work boots.
His hair is pushed back and his jaw is clean and he smells like something cedar and masculine and I want to press my face against his neck and breathe.
“Hi,” I say.
His eyes move down my body and back up. Not fast. Not hiding it. The look of a man who sees what he likes and doesn’t apologize for looking.
“You look beautiful,” he says.
Just like that. No qualifier. No caveat. Not “you look nice” or “great outfit.” Beautiful. The word lands in my chest and sits there.
“Thank you.” My voice is steady. Small miracle.
He opens the truck door for me. I climb in and the cab is clean and smells like leather and the radio is on low, something country and old and warm. He drives with one hand on the wheel, relaxed, the way men drive when they know the road and the truck and the distance and none of it worries them.
“How’d you end up on a mountain in Montana?” I ask.
He tells me. Growing up in Texas, a small town south of Austin.
Always wanted land and horses. Worked through high school, worked through college, bought a run-down duplex his senior year and fixed it up and rented it to friends for cheap.
That duplex became two duplexes. Two became a small apartment building.
The small building became a bigger one. He had an eye for properties that other people overlooked and a patience for the work that other people wouldn’t do and somewhere in his late twenties the portfolio stopped being a side project and started being a career.
“I had a partner,” he says. “Guy from Wylde Mountain. Dane Walker. We worked well together. He handled the deals, I handled the properties. He invited me out here to visit and I drove through the valley and saw the mountains and I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That I was done. That I’d been building toward something and this was it. I sold most of my portfolio. Kept enough to not worry. Bought the ranch.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Some decisions don’t need a spreadsheet.” He glances at me. The corner of his mouth. “Though I hear spreadsheets have their place.”
I laugh. He’s making a Claire joke. He met Claire once and he’s already making Claire jokes and the fact that he’s paying enough attention to my friends to make jokes about them does something to me that I’m not going to analyze right now.
I tell him about me. Growing up in rural Georgia, land and horses and a dad who taught me to shoot before he taught me to drive.
Moving to Atlanta for college. Meeting the girls.
Nashville after for the music. Teaching third graders to play recorder and singing at open mic nights and writing songs on my kitchen floor at midnight.
“What kind of songs?” he asks.
“The kind where you smile the whole time you’re singing them and nobody notices the lyrics are sad.”
He’s quiet for a beat. His hand shifts on the wheel.
“I’d like to hear one sometime,” he says. Like it matters.
The ranch in the evening light is a different animal than the ranch in the morning.
The mountains behind it are going gold and pink and the stone house glows warm and the windows catch the last of the sun and the whole property looks like a place someone built because they knew what peace was supposed to feel like.
He cooks. Steaks on the deck grill with a view that makes me understand why a man would sell everything he’d built to stand in this exact spot.
I try to help and he lets me, which surprises me.
I expected the kind of man who says “sit down, I’ve got this.
” Instead he hands me a cutting board and a knife and says “tomatoes, thick slices” and we work side by side in his kitchen and the ease of it scares me more than the attraction does.
I’ve never been easy with anyone this fast. I’ve never chopped tomatoes next to a man I’ve known for less than a week and felt like the kitchen had been waiting for both of us.
We eat on the deck. The steaks are perfect and the view is impossible and the conversation is the kind that makes you forget you’re eating because the words are better than the food.
After dinner, inside. I notice the guitar in his study. An acoustic, leaning against a bookshelf, a little dusty.
“That’s not yours?”
“Came with the house. Previous owner left it. I keep meaning to move it but it looks right there.”
“Can I?”
He nods. I pick it up. It’s a good guitar, a Martin, well-made and warm-toned even out of tune. I tune it by ear, the way I’ve been tuning guitars since I was fourteen, and I settle into the chair by the window and I play.
I don’t think about what to play. I play the song I’ve been writing in Nashville, the one about smiling so much that nobody asks you why you’re tired.
The one I couldn’t finish. I play the verse and the chorus and I sing and my voice fills his study and I close my eyes because I always close my eyes when I’m singing something true.
When I open them, Mason is standing in the doorway. His shoulder is against the frame. His arms are at his sides. His face is doing something I’ve never seen a man’s face do while I’m singing. Most men listen politely. Some nod along. Ryan used to scroll his phone.
Mason is looking at me like I just rearranged every piece of furniture in his life and the new arrangement is better.
“You have the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard,” he says. Not loud. Not performed. A fact, delivered the way he delivers everything. Directly. Without escape route.
I open my mouth to say something self-deprecating. Something about how I’m not that good, how the guitar needs new strings, how the song isn’t finished. The words are right there, the automatic deflection, the dimming of the light so other people feel comfortable.
I don’t say them. I look at him and I don’t say them.
“Thank you,” I say. Meaning it.
His phone rings. He glances at it. His jaw tightens.
“Mark,” he says. “My foreman.” He answers. Listens. His posture changes. The relaxed man by the doorway becomes something harder, more alert. “How many missing? Which pasture? We’ve had wolves on the north fence for two weeks.” He looks at me. “I have to go.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Cattle in the north pasture aren’t accounted for. Could be wolves.”
“I’m coming with you.”
He hesitates. One second. He’s looking at me and doing the calculation, the same one he did on the raft. Whether to protect me by keeping me here or respect me by letting me choose.
“Can you ride?”
“I grew up on a horse in Georgia.”
“Can you shoot?”
“Yes.” No hesitation.
His eyes change. Something hot and dark and impressed moves through them. He nods once.
“Rifles are in the mudroom.”
~~~
Riding out at dusk on a Montana ranch is not something I planned for when I packed for this trip.
I’m in a borrowed jacket (his, again, because of course it’s his, the universe has decided I belong in this man’s jacket) and boots that are too big but laced tight.
We’re on horseback, Mason and me and two ranch hands named Mark and Jimmy who exchanged looks when Mason said I was coming.
Dubious looks. The looks of men who think a woman they don’t know doesn’t belong on a night ride.
Mason caught the looks. “She rides and she shoots,” he said. His voice left no room for discussion. The looks stopped.
We split up. Mark and Jimmy head east toward the creek.
Mason and I ride north, toward the tree line where the wolves have been seen.
The light is fading and the mountains are going purple and the air is cold and I am riding a horse next to a man I’m having dinner with and we’re looking for wolves and this is the most alive I’ve felt in months.
We find them in a clearing. The missing cattle, a group of six, huddled in a tight cluster.
One is down. Injured. A gash on her flank, still bleeding.
And near the edge of the clearing, in the tree shadows, I can see one.
Eyes. The low shape of a wolf, circling, waiting for the dark to finish what it started.
Mason dismounts. He walks toward the downed cow, slow and steady. He crouches to look at the wound. His attention is on the animal.
The wolf comes from the left. From a blind spot, behind a fallen tree. Moving fast and low and wrong. The gait isn’t right. Too direct. Too fearless. A healthy wolf wouldn’t charge a man standing upright. A sick one would.
“Mason!”
He looks up. The wolf is closing. Ten yards. He turns toward his horse, toward his rifle, but the wolf is fast and the angle is wrong and he’s not going to make it.
I breathe in. I breathe out. I raise my rifle.
The world goes quiet the way it goes quiet when I’m singing. Everything falls away except the one thing that matters. The sight. The target. The breath. My dad’s voice in my head: take a breath, let it out, squeeze.
I fire.
The wolf drops. Five yards from Mason. It hits the ground and doesn’t move.
I lower the rifle. My hands are steady. They’ll shake later. Right now they’re steady because the moment demanded it and my body answered.
Mason is staring at me. He’s standing next to the downed cow in the last of the light and he’s staring at me on the horse with the rifle and his face is doing something I can’t read because I’ve never seen it before.
Not surprise. Not shock. Something deeper.
The face of a man who just watched a woman save his life and is rearranging every assumption he’s ever made.
I swing off the horse. I walk to him. My legs are shaking now, the adrenaline arriving late, the reality of what just happened catching up with the instinct that made it happen.
“You are,” he says. He stops. Starts again. “You are unlike any woman I’ve ever met.”
And then he kisses me.
His hands on my face. His mouth on mine.
Hard and desperate and shaking, both of us shaking, the adrenaline turning into something else, something hot and electric and alive.
He kisses me and his hands are in my hair and his mouth is urgent and mine is urgent and the mountains are going dark around us and I’m kissing a man who I saved and who is holding me like I’m the only thing standing between him and the rest of his life.
We break apart. Breathing hard. His forehead against mine. His hands still in my hair.
“That was the most amazing kiss I’ve ever had,” I say.
“That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” His voice is rough. His thumbs are on my cheekbones. “You shot a wolf off me.”
“I told you I could shoot.”
He laughs. Short and rough and full of something I can feel in my bones. The sound of a man who has been surprised by joy.
The ranch hands arrive. They heard the shot. They see the wolf. They look at me. The dubious looks are gone. What’s replaced them is something closer to respect. I hear Mark radio a wildlife officer as we leave.
Mason keeps close to me the whole ride back. The stars come out over the ranch. The horses walk slow. The night is cold and his hand when he reaches for me is warm and I am a woman who just killed a wolf and kissed a cowboy and I don’t feel like too much. I feel like exactly enough.