Chapter 20
Jewel could smell it before she even got to the gate.
The mixture of livestock, leather, fried food, diesel, and sawdust that wasn’t found anywhere else on Earth.
The smell that told you exactly where you were before you even stepped through the gate.
And through all of it was the deep, earthy smell of cattle, calves, and cows penned and waiting—the very backbone of everything that happened here.
She’d parked in the far lot and walked in, giving herself a moment to observe the area before anyone noticed her. Over the years, she learned that she often gained more insight in the first five minutes of arriving somewhere unannounced than in the next hour of asking questions.
The Albany Rodeo venue was a mid-sized operation, featuring a proper arena and covered grandstands on two sides, already filling up.
However, the most active area was the section behind the chutes, where the warm-up zone was located.
Horses were everywhere—being walked, worked, tacked and untacked, and loaded or unloaded from trailers lining the perimeter in long, organized rows.
The warm-up arena was a kind of contained, controlled chaos, with riders moving at various gaits in different directions, all focused intensely on the rail and their horses.
Jewel made her way through it at an unhurried pace, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, watching everything. So far, she hadn’t spotted Trevor or Vivian, which was just as well, since she wasn’t sure she was ready to yet.
All morning, she’d been running through scenarios and kept coming back to the same question that had been nagging her since she confirmed his entry in the program.
Would he be willing to talk to her? Once he knew she was searching for him and why, the dynamic could change quickly, and once committed, she couldn’t undo that decision.
She needed to make sure she was ready to have the conversation before revealing herself as the one who wanted it.
So for now, she walked, watched, and thought.
There were cowgirls everywhere.
That was the only word to describe them, and she used it without irony because they didn’t deserve that.
They moved through the venue with an ease and ownership that only comes from belonging to this world completely, from having grown up in it, from knowing its rhythms and particular demands in the same way she knew a trail, a paddock, or the way Sundancer’s ear moved when she was thinking about spooking.
They were vivid, physical, and entirely unself-conscious, their energy the kind that comes from people about to do something that scares them, but they still can’t wait.
She watched a group of three young women near the warm-up gate, likely barrel racers, their horses already tacked and dancing as they ran through something with quick hands and quick laughs.
It was the easy bravado of people who had made peace with speed and its consequences.
They had that fearless, forward-leaning energy that couldn’t be faked.
It was just in them. They reminded her of Ashley.
As she watched them, she felt—and not for the first time, either—the quiet sense of observing something from the outside that she’d never been part of, and of being at peace with that. Mostly.
She had competed. She knew how it felt to prepare for something, to bring a horse to a course and ask it to be its best self alongside you.
She had faced early mornings, terrain reading, and the way she and her horse learned to move together over distance and ground at a pace that felt right rather than fast. And she’d loved every moment of it.
But that was nothing like this. For her, it had never been about the crowd, the clock, or the held breath of a grandstand full of spectators.
It had always been about the woods falling silent around her, her horse finding its stride, and the private satisfaction of two beings working perfectly in sync.
She’d never wanted what these women had.
Now, as she stood at the edge of the warm-up area with her hands in her pockets, she wondered if that was partly why Robert had grown bored with her.
She wasn’t vivid. She wasn’t loud or showy.
She didn’t fill a room the way some women do, didn’t arrive somewhere and immediately make the air around her sparkle.
She was good at her job, she loved her horse, and she figured she was relatively self-contained in a way that some people might find compelling.
Robert had found it compelling for a while, but then he hadn’t.
She thought about Ashley, who had a barrel horse and the kind of directness and fire that this world appreciated.
She remembered how she’d stood in a clearing and confessed she’d fallen for Robert’s charm with a candor that was almost hard to watch.
Robert and Ashley. It did make a kind of sense that sat uncomfortably in her chest.
She moved away from the warm-up gate and into the area right behind the chutes, where the atmosphere was different—calmer, more concentrated.
Here, people were doing serious preparations rather than just performing.
She looked over the printed program, found Trevor’s name in the bull riding section, and checked the time.
There were two more hours before his event.
Her mind drifted to how Ashley had said that once Cole met Vivian, he’d only had eyes for her.
Granted, the statement had been made with a hint of jealousy, but she’d said it without malice, as if it were a straightforward fact.
He met Vivian, and that was it; the story was written, leaving no room for anyone else.
She also knew the feeling of being on the outside of a love story.
Vivian had also been a barrel racer. She had moved through a world very much like this one—vivid, fast, and entirely at ease with herself.
There was no doubt in her mind that Vivian was the type of woman who arrived somewhere and immediately changed the atmosphere.
She had seen enough pictures of her to know that.
She’d appeared on horseback, in the ring, laughing at something outside the frame with her red hair loose and her whole face open.
Now, as Jewel stood here, surrounded by women who moved like Vivian and carried themselves the way she was sure Vivian did, she faced the truth she’d been carefully avoiding, settling into place with quiet finality.
She couldn’t compete with Vivian’s memory, not the memory of a lively, daring red-haired firecracker.
Even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t know how.
Standing here amid the noise and the flashing lights, with the announcer’s voice bouncing off the grandstand and the crowd pressing in from every side, she knew with certainty that she could never be like Ashley or Vivian.
This world, with its speed, spectacle, and performance, had never been how she lived.
She thrived in the woods on a cool morning with Sundancer moving beneath her, with nothing but the trail ahead, the trees around her, and the harmony that exists between a horse and rider who understand each other completely.
There was no flash, and it certainly wasn’t exciting to anyone watching.
But it was hers, and it was real, and she wouldn’t trade it for anything like this. Not even Cole.
She walked on, and then she saw him.
Or someone who might be him. She’d studied enough pictures of him online to get a pretty good idea of what he looked like.
He was tall and lean, with a certain way of carrying his shoulders.
His dark hair was slightly longer under his black Stetson.
The man she focused on was twenty yards away, with his back partly turned to her, his attention on something she couldn’t see, his posture relaxed and unhurried.
She stopped abruptly, her heart beating faster.
He was talking to a woman. And not in the way you talk to someone in passing.
This wasn’t a quick, nodding exchange between two people who just happen to be in the same space.
They were turned toward each other, leaning in close, and she was laughing at something he’d said.
His hand was on her elbow in a relaxed, familiar way.
The only problem was that the woman was dark-haired and compact, and nothing at all like Vivian.
She stood looking at them and feeling the investigation shift beneath her feet once again, the way it did when something didn’t fit the picture she’d been constructing.
Vivian had left Cole for Trevor. Vivian and Trevor had a history, a pull, something powerful enough to make her walk away from her son.
That was, at least, what the evidence suggested.
But the man twenty yards away, with his hand resting on a dark-haired woman’s elbow, didn’t look like someone mourning a lost love.
He didn’t appear to be someone living with a woman he’d taken from another life.
He looked like a man at a rodeo on a Thursday afternoon, completely at ease with where he was and who he was with.
She stood very still and thought about everything she thought she knew, wondering for the first time if she’d been wrong.
She was still watching him when the woman turned her head. Not toward her, but toward Trevor. The way you turned toward someone when you felt their attention shift away from you without warning. It was a small, instinctive movement.
Then she realized that Trevor had stopped looking at the woman beside him and was looking directly at her.
She froze, holding his gaze unintentionally, and for a moment neither of them moved.
The noise of the venue continued around them, the announcer’s voice echoing through the warm afternoon air, the smell of cattle, hot dogs, and hot dirt lingering, all of it going on regardless of the two people staring at each other across twenty yards of sawdust and crowd.