10. Jessica
Jessica
The Spring Ranch Showcase was mine from the ground up, and I was running it in heels and a headset and a white linen dress that had no business being within a mile of a working cattle ranch.
Marquee tents were scattered across the east paddock. Catered stations at every turn. Guided ranch tours with Wyatt leading the county's wealthiest landowners through Blackwood property in boots that had never touched actual dirt.
I was mid-crisis number four — a speaker system malfunction that I'd diagnosed, delegated, and resolved in under three minutes — when Maggie appeared at my elbow with an expression that meant opinions were about to happen.
"The horses are in the wrong order."
"The horses are in the order the judges requested, Maggie."
"The judges don't know what they're looking at. If you put Sovereign's Legacy third in the lineup, you're burying the best animal on the property behind two yearlings who aren't ready for this level of —"
"What if we lead with Sovereign's Legacy? Open with the strongest, set the standard, let the yearlings follow."
Maggie stopped. Her mouth was still open around the next argument. She closed it. Opened it again. "That's... actually good."
"I know."
"I hate that it's good."
"I know that too."
She looked at me for a moment — appraising, recalibrating — and the corner of her mouth twitched. "Fine. Lead with Legacy. But if anyone asks, it was my idea."
"Maggie, it was always your idea."
She turned and walked toward the paddock. I watched her go with my clipboard pressed against my hip and a grin I couldn't quite get off my face. Maggie and I were going to be a problem. The best kind.
By noon, the marquee was full, the tours were oversubscribed, and the county assessor had used the word "impressive" three times in my earshot.
And standing at the edge of it all — at the far fence line, doing something practical with a gate hinge while everyone else was dressed up and mingling — was Hunter.
My fake boyfriend. I hadn't seen him since the other night when he agreed to be my fake boyfriend.
We’d negotiated our rules of engagement two days earlier in a brief, practical conversation that I'd handled like a contract meeting and Hunter had handled by saying "Fine" to everything.
Public touches when necessary. His arm around me when Garrett or Penny were present. Hand-holding if the situation required it. A united front at events. Simple. Professional. The word easy had been used. I'd been the one to use it.
None of this explained why, when Hunter walked up behind me at the catering station and put his hand on the small of my back to say something about the east paddock gate, every nerve ending in my body detonated at once.
His palm was warm. Large. It settled against the curve of my lower back like it had been designed for exactly that spot — the heel of his hand against my spine, his fingers spread wide enough that I could feel each one through the linen of my dress like five separate points of heat.
The contact was casual. Easy. The gesture of a man who'd been touching me like this his whole life.
Because he had. Hunter had touched me plenty of times. Even in that exact same spot, but it never felt like that.
I kept talking to the catering manager. I didn’t move away from his hand.
I didn't breathe properly for about forty-five seconds, and I covered it by asking detailed questions about the dessert station that I already knew the answers to because I can run a county event while my body is combusting and nobody will ever, ever know.
But then Hunt's thumb shifted. A micro-movement — the pad of it dragging a quarter inch along my spine through the fabric.
He was probably adjusting his grip. It was probably involuntary.
Either way, it sent a bolt of heat from the base of my spine straight down between my legs.
I pressed my thighs together. My jaw locked.
My hand tightened on my clipboard while the catering manager kept talking, none the wiser that my entire body was throbbing.
"The east gate latch is sticking," Hunter said, his voice close to my ear. Low. Quiet. The voice he used when he was talking to me and not the room. It gave me chills. "I'll fix it before the afternoon tour."
"Great." My voice was steady. My knees were not. "Thank you."
His hand stayed on my back for three more seconds. Then he was gone — moving toward the gate with his unhurried stride, and the spot where his palm had been went cold. I had to stop myself from following the warmth across the paddock like something leashed to it.
Penny arrived at two with Garrett beside her — cream blazer, sport coat, both scanning the property like people with opinions about Blackwood land. I had four seconds before Hunter materialized at my side and his arm went around my shoulders.
The weight of it settled across the back of my neck.
The full length of his body pressed against my side — warm and solid, his ribs against my shoulder blade.
His scent hit me. I could feel his heartbeat through his shirt.
Slow. Steady. Of course it was. Mine was doing something that required medical intervention.
"Penny," Hunter said, nodding once as they approached. Polite. Steady. Giving nothing away. "Garrett."
Garrett's eyes moved from Hunter's arm to Hunter's face, and the pleasant expression flickered — the mask recalibrating, the cold flash from the dinner there and gone.
Then Hunter turned to me. He looked down — his face close, his eyes warm in a way that wasn't for show and was doing catastrophic things to my circulatory system — and he pressed his lips to my forehead.
Slow. Deliberate. A kiss that landed on my skin and sank through it and reached places I didn't have names for.
His mouth was warm and soft, and he held it there for a beat longer than casual, and when he pulled back his hand squeezed my shoulder before sliding down my back as he pulled away.
"I'll be around if you need me, baby."
Baby.
He called me baby. In front of Penny Calloway and her son and the entire east paddock and God and everyone.
He said it low and easy like he'd been saying it for years, and then he sauntered off — and I mean sauntered, that unhurried Hunter stride that covered ground without appearing to rush, shoulders loose, the walk of a man who had just staked a claim so casually and so completely that there was no way it could be misconstrued as fake.
Hell, even I believed it, and I knew it was a fake.
Penny watched him go. Then she turned to me, and her face was doing something that required effort to maintain — the smile still in place, but the architecture behind it shifting, load-bearing walls being relocated in real time.
"Jessica." She clasped her hands in front of her. "I didn't realize you and Hunter were... together."
"It's new," I said. My voice came out approximately one octave higher than intended, and I corrected it mid-sentence by clearing my throat in a way I hoped passed for casual and probably didn't. "It's — yes. It's new."
"I thought you weren't dating." Garrett's voice was pleasant.
His face was pleasant. His eyes were not.
They sat in his face like two flat stones — watchful, calculating, the charm stripped back to something leaner.
"You said you weren't dating. At the committee meeting. When I asked you to dinner."
My stomach tightened.
"I — well, we weren't. Then. We've been friends forever, Hunt and I, and it was always —" I pushed my hair behind my ear. Smiled. The smile felt crooked. "It was always there, I think? We just — the timing wasn't right before, and now it is. It's just the right time. Right person, right time.”
Penny's expression held. The recalculation was happening behind her eyes — I could see the machinery working, the plans being adjusted, the Garrett-and-Jessica project being shelved but not deleted. She was too smart to push. She was also too invested to let go cleanly.
"Well," she said. "How lovely for you both."
How lovely. Again. The two words that meant the opposite.
Garrett said nothing. He stood beside his mother with his pleasant face and his flat eyes, and I couldn't tell if he was buying it. Whether he filed the fumble under lying or newly in love was something I couldn't read on a face built specifically to prevent reading.
They moved on. Garrett was half a step behind his mother, his eyes finding me once over his shoulder before he turned away.
My forehead was still burning. The word baby was still ricocheting around the inside of my skull like a pinball.
Hunter had called me baby and kissed my forehead and walked away like it was nothing, and I was standing in the middle of my own event with my professional composure in pieces on the ground.
The arrangement was supposed to be simple and professional and easy, and none of those words applied to anything that had just happened to my body.
That was the point, I reminded myself. Make it look real. That was the only point.
The Showcase was winding down. The last tour group was heading back.
The caterers were packing the dessert station.
I was walking the property doing a final check — tent pegs, cable covers, the portable restrooms that I'd insisted on positioning downwind because I wasn't an amateur — when I rounded the corner of the barn and stopped.
Hunter was at the far paddock. Alone. He didn't know I was there.
He'd stripped down to a white t-shirt that was doing things to my brain hadn't consented to. A section of fence had come loose during the event, and he was fixing it. Of course, he was, he'd seen it, he'd gone to it without being asked, because that was who Hunter was.