6. Hunter
Hunter
Jessica was back on the workbench.
Less than two weeks and she'd made the workshop hers again — not by moving anything, not by changing anything, just by occupying it.
The same corner near the vise where the wood was worn smooth from years of exactly this.
She climbed up the same way she did at fifteen — hands flat, one hop, legs swinging before her ass fully landed — and settled in like the bench had been holding her spot for a decade and was quietly relieved she'd come back for it.
I was underneath the truck replacing a brake line, and she was talking.
"So I'm four slides into the Showcase timeline, and Penny leans forward, puts her elbows on the table, and clasps her hands like she's about to deliver a sermon and she says, 'Have we considered putting Garrett in charge of vendor coordination?'"
I yanked on the wrench a little harder than needed at the mention of him.
Jessica's legs swung hard enough that her heel clipped the bench. "Vendor coordination. My vendor coordination. The vendor coordination I have been building for weeks with spreadsheets that have spreadsheets."
"What did you say?"
"I smiled. I said I'd take it under advisement. And then I moved to the next slide and pretended the suggestion had never been made because I am a professional and professionals do not tell the Mayor to keep her golden boy out of my vendor list in front of six committee members."
I tightened a bolt. Her coffee cup scraped the bench as she picked it up.
"And then I get a call from an AV vendor in Austin.
He quotes me triple. Triple! For a county contract.
Because he heard government money and his brain went cha-ching and he assumed some small-town girl in Texas wouldn't know the difference.
" She took a sip. "So I said, sir, with the greatest respect, you can take that invoice and fold it into a shape that I will leave to your imagination, because I have been negotiating contracts since before your website had a functioning checkout page, and I will not be fucked with on a Tuesday. "
I bit back a smile. ”Was it a Tuesday?"
"It was a Wednesday. But fucked with on a Wednesday doesn't have the same ring."
I laughed and reached for the torque wrench. Jess always had a way with words.
"Oh, but this is the good part." Her voice shifted — lighter, warmer.
She pulled her feet up underneath her on the bench.
"I found a florist. In Millbrook. This woman gets it.
I said I wanted something architectural but approachable, and she didn't blink.
She didn't ask me what that meant. She just nodded and pulled out three arrangements, and every single one was exactly what I'd been seeing in my head.
I almost hugged her. I might have hugged her. I definitely hugged her."
"You hugged the florist."
"I hugged the florist. She was startled, but she recovered.
" Her accent was thickening the way it always did when she was on a roll — the vowels stretching, the consonants going soft around the edges.
She didn't hear it, but I did. "And Clara Mae — you know Clara Mae Henderson, Jerry's wife — she came to me after the last meeting with this layout idea for the vendor stalls, and I swear to God, Hunt, it was better than mine.
I'm standing there looking at her little hand-drawn diagram on the back of a church bulletin, and it's better than the one I spent two days building on my laptop. I could have kissed her."
"You hugged the florist and nearly kissed Clara Mae. Busy week."
"Shut up." Her foot swung out and caught the side of the truck. "And Dottie cornered me at the counter this morning and told me she'll cater the Showcase, but only if I promised that nobody else makes the potato salad."
"The potato salad."
“Apparently, there was an incident at the 2019 Harvest Festival. She wouldn't give me details, but her face suggested war crimes. She just shook her head and said, 'You don't want to know, sweetheart. Some things can't be unseen.'"
I slid out from under the truck. Sat up on the floor and wiped my hands on the rag.
She was sitting cross-legged on the bench now, her coffee cup cradled between both palms, her hair falling forward, her cheeks flushed from the talking.
The late afternoon light was coming through the west-facing doors, and it caught her face and turned her skin gold, and she was looking at me with her eyes bright and one eyebrow raised, waiting for me to laugh, daring me to find it as funny as she did.
I let the grin come. She saw it, and her whole face broke open, and she pointed at me with her coffee cup.
"There it is. I've been working for that grin for twenty minutes, Blackwood."
The afternoon disappeared. The light shifted from white to gold to the deep amber that meant the day was almost done, and neither of us noticed until she pulled her phone from her back pocket and made a sound.
"It's almost seven. How does that keep happening?"
I didn't answer. The answer was that it had always happened with us — time collapsing, hours compressing into what felt like minutes, the world outside the workshop going about its business while we sat inside it and forgot to check.
I didn't have a safe way to say that. So I tightened the fitting another quarter turn and said nothing.
She hopped off the bench. Stretched — arms above her head, her back arching, her shirt riding up to show a strip of skin above her waistband that I caught in my peripheral vision and immediately wished I hadn't.
She wandered to the doorway and leaned against the frame.
The sky beyond her was going orange over the ridge, the kind of color that only happens when the day has been hot and the dust is still hanging in the air.
"I want to ride up there," she said. "Tomorrow. At sunrise. I haven't seen a proper sunrise in ten years, Hunt. Not one that wasn't through a window or blocked by a building. I want the real thing. The ridge. The whole sky."
I wiped my hands on the rag. "Five-thirty in the morning isn't an adventure. It's an injury."
She turned, and the grin was there. Full voltage. The one that said, You're going to do it with me, and we both know you're going to do it with me, so let's skip the part where you pretend otherwise.
"I'll be at the barn at five-fifteen," she said. "If you're not there I'm going alone and I'll tack up wrong and get lost and it'll be your fault. All of it."
I shook my head. Said nothing. She knew what that meant. I'd be there. I always followed her crazy. It was our thing. It had always been our thing.
I got to the barn at five-fifteen, and she was already there, tacking up my horse with a confidence that was slightly wrong. The cinch wasn’t quite tight enough, the stirrups were two holes too long, but it was the thought that counted.
She was in jeans and boots she'd borrowed from God knows where and a flannel shirt that was too big for her.
It took me a second to realize it was mine.
She'd rolled the sleeves to her elbows and tied the front in a knot at her waist. The sight of her in my shirt, in my barn, tacking up my horse at five-fifteen in the morning like she belonged in every part of my life she walked into, hit me so hard I nearly tripped over my own feet.
I brushed the feeling off, and fixed what she'd done without comment. She didn't mention it. We both knew the deal: she started things, and I made sure nobody got killed.
The ridge opened up below us twenty minutes later — the ranch, the town beyond it, the hills going blue in the distance. Neither of us said anything for a long time; just soaked it in. The light was coming up across the grass, illuminating the new day in gold.
While Jessica was marveling at it, I was marveling at her.
For her, this was a revelation. For me, this was Tuesday.
I'd had a lifetime of these sunrises. A lifetime of watching the light come up over this ridge without thinking about it, without seeing it, without understanding that the thing I'd been watching was extraordinary because I'd never had anyone beside me who was seeing it for the first time.
But Jessica made it new. She made the ranch new. She made the morning new and the ridge new and the air in my lungs new, so I allowed myself, for three full seconds, to look at her the way I actually wanted to.
The light had turned her skin to honey. Her eyelashes cast tiny shadows across her cheekbones.
Her mouth was soft — not smiling, not performing, just open, receiving.
My shirt hung loose on her shoulders, and the collar had slipped to one side, baring the line of her neck.
A strand of hair had caught on her lower lip, but she hadn't noticed because she was somewhere else — somewhere between the girl who left this town and the woman who came back.
The gold was on both of them at once, and I’d never seen anything more beautiful in all my life.
Three seconds. My chest ached with it. Then I looked away, and the looking away cost me more than the looking.
On the way back, she kicked her horse into a gallop without warning.
No signal. No challenge. Just gone — leaning low over the neck, laughing, hair streaming behind her like a flag.
I swore under my breath and went after her, and the race wasn’t close — it was never going to be close, I knew this land with my eyes shut, every dip and rise and treeline committed to muscle memory.
But she reached the barn gate a half-length ahead because she cut the corner by the creek crossing, and I pulled up to avoid the rocks because I’m not insane and she is.
She was already off her horse by the time I reached the gate. Standing there with her hands on her hips, breathing hard, her face flushed and triumphant and entirely too pleased with herself.
"I won."
"You cheated,” I said and dismounted.
Her chin tilted with a smug grin. “No. I innovated."
"The creek crossing is dangerous at speed, Jess.”
"Hunt." She put her hand on my arm. Looked up at me with those eyes — bright, daring, the color high on her cheeks — and drawled, "I have been doing dangerous things at speed my whole life. Look how well it's turned out."
She winked, slow, sexy, playful, her mouth curving, her hand still warm on my arm. Then she turned and walked toward the barn with her hips swaying in a way I shouldn’t have noticed but did.
I shook my head. "God help me."
Fuck, she's gorgeous.
Our race argument started at the barn and followed us to the main house kitchen, where she announced to Mom — still breathless, still flushed — that she had beaten me in a horse race.
Mom looked at me over her coffee with an expression that said she was enjoying this immensely and planned to do nothing about it.
It was still going at dinner that night once everyone was gathered at the table.
"I beat you, Hunt,” Jessica said, pointing her fork at me across the table. "Fair and square. You can deny it all you want, but the horse and I have an understanding, and the understanding is that we won."
Wyatt choked on his water. Ivy thumped his back without looking up from her plate.
Clay put his fork down, stunned. "No, she didn't."
"Yes," Jessica said, "I did."
"She cut the creek crossing," I said.
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. "I took a creative line."
"You took a dangerous line. The rocks at that crossing —"
"Are perfectly manageable at speed if you have confidence and good balance, both of which I have in abundance, thank you.” She took a swig of her tea.
"Confidence is not a substitute for common sense, Jessica,” I scolded. If she had gotten hurt — no, I wasn’t going to think about that.
"Common sense is not a substitute for winning, Hunter.”
Wyatt was grinning. Maggie had her hand over her mouth.
Liam was watching me with the particular expression of a brother who had never seen me argue about anything with this much energy and was recalibrating everything he thought he knew.
Maisie was following the conversation like a tennis match, her head swiveling between us, delighted.
"Uncle Hunt, did she really beat you?" Maisie asked.
"No."
"Yes," Jessica said at the same time.
"She cheated,” I argued.
"Don’t be a sore loser. I innovated. There's a difference. Ask any CEO."
Dad, from the head of the table, without looking up from his plate: "Sounds like she beat you, son."
Jessica threw both hands in the air — devil horns, both fists, index and pinky fingers extended — and shimmied her hips in her chair and sang, in the most obnoxious sing-song voice a grown woman has ever produced at a family dinner table, "Winner winner, chicken dinner!"
The table erupted. Clay howled. Callie dropped her forehead to the table. Mom pressed her lips together in a way that meant she was laughing and refusing to show it. Maisie immediately copied the devil horns and the shimmy and added her own sound effects. Stephanie was filming on her phone.
And I sat there watching her — the absolute, unbridled, zero-shame jubilation of a woman who had won a horse race by cheating and was celebrating like she'd won Olympic gold — and something in me broke wide open.
My hand tightened on my fork. My jaw ached from the grin I was fighting.
Because this. This right here. This ridiculous, chaotic, completely unhinged version of her was the version I had missed all these years.
The real Jessica. Not the polished New Yorker, but Jess.
My Jess.
I let it go on for three days. Let her tell the story to anyone who'd listen.
Let her embellish it until the half-length became a full length and the creek crossing became a canyon, and I became the worst horseman in the history of Texas.
I didn't correct a single word. Every minute of it was a minute she was in my orbit, pushing me, daring me to push back — and I wasn't ready to let that stop.