Whiskey Skies (Cowboys of Copper Creek #4)

Prologue

Callie

I was convinced the fluorescent lights in Dallas Family Court hummed at a frequency designed to break someone.

Not loud enough to complain about. But not quiet enough to ignore, either. Just this low, insistent buzz like the building itself was as nervous as its occupants.

I sat in my chair with my jaw tight and my spine straight and my hands folded on the table in front of me because that's what you did in places like this. You sat still. You looked composed. You pretended that the worst day of your life was just a Tuesday.

My lawyer was beside me. Dressed in a sharp suit with even sharper eyes.

Savannah was calm in the way that people who win were calm.

She hadn't told me to relax. She knew better.

Women like me didn't relax in rooms like this — women who'd spent years learning exactly how much composure a man could demand before you forgot you were performing it. We didn't relax. We endured.

Across the aisle, Preston sat with his father's attorney — a silver-haired man who billed more per hour than I made in a week and looked at me like I was a line item on an invoice he intended to dispute.

Preston wore the navy suit. The one he saved for occasions that required the appearance of decency — court hearings, charity galas, the Christmas party where he'd put his hand on my waist and smile for the photographer while I counted the minutes until I could take my shoes off and breathe.

The Cartier watch caught the light every time he shifted his wrist. The signet ring.

The pocket square folded in three precise points.

He looked ridiculous.

He didn't look at me. He looked through me. The way he'd been looking through me for years — as if I were a window he no longer found the view worth noticing.

The papers were placed in front of me. Heavy paper. Expensive ink. The kind of document that costs a marriage and a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in legal fees, and arrives looking like a wedding invitation.

I picked up the pen.

My hand was steady. I'd made sure of that.

I'd practiced this signature eleven times last night at the kitchen table of the apartment Savannah found for me, writing my name over and over on the back of a grocery receipt while Maisie slept in the next room.

Callie Monroe. Callie Monroe. Callie Monroe.

Not Callie Ashford. Never again Callie Ashford.

I'd written it until the letters stopped shaking and the name felt like mine again, because I refused — refused — to give him the satisfaction of a tremor.

I signed.

And six years of a life I didn't choose ended with a flick of my wrist.

The ruling came down clean.

Primary custody to me. Maisie would live with me full-time, attend school wherever I settled, build her days on ground I chose.

My daughter. My decision. Those two words — my decision — hit me somewhere behind the ribs and stayed there, warm and terrifying, because I hadn't made a decision that mattered in so long I'd almost forgotten what it felt like.

Preston got visitation. Every second weekend in Dallas. Forty-eight hours, court-mandated and lawyer-approved.

It wasn't perfect.

Giving my daughter to that man for two days every two weeks made my stomach fold in on itself like wet paper.

Two bedtimes I wouldn't be there for. Two mornings where I couldn't check that she'd eaten something real, not whatever the housekeeper set in front of her while Preston was in his office with the door closed.

But it was the best I could get against the Ashford machine.

Senator Ashford's legal team had pushed for fifty-fifty.

They'd painted Preston as the devoted father, the pillar, the man with a family home in Highland Park and a trust fund with Maisie's name on it and every advantage money could buy.

My lawyer fought them back with documentation I'd been quietly collecting for two years — texts he forgot to delete, voicemails left at two a.m. from numbers that weren't mine, screenshots of cancelled visits, a timeline of absences so thorough it read like a rap sheet.

Every second weekend. That was the cost.

But every second Friday, I was going to put my daughter in a car and send her to a man who'd never once asked what her favorite color was. I was going to kiss her forehead and buckle her in and watch her face through the window and count the hours until she came home.

That was the price of freedom. And it cost more than anything Preston ever took from me.

We could survive it. We'd survived worse.

The judge spoke. Attorneys shook hands. The machinery of family court ground forward to the next shattered family waiting in the hallway, and I was already being forgotten.

Preston stood. He passed close as we filed toward the doors. Close enough that his cologne — the custom blend, sandalwood and something dark, two hundred dollars an ounce — hit the back of my throat like a memory I wanted to gag on.

"You'll never outrun me, Callie."

Quiet. Almost tender. The voice he used when he wanted the words to burrow under your skin and build a nest.

I didn't flinch.

I'd had years of practice.

The corridor was long and bright, and Savannah's arm was around my shoulders before the courtroom door clicked shut behind us.

"It's done," she said, assured in a way that steadied me.

She'd been steadying me since the afternoon I showed up at her office door with a split lip I'd gotten from walking into a cabinet — that was the truth, actually — and eyes that said everything my mouth couldn't. Preston never hit me.

He never needed to. Savannah hadn't asked me to explain.

She'd handed me a coffee, closed her office door, and said, Tell me what you need.

I gave her a jerky nod.

My hands were shaking now. Fine, rapid tremors I couldn't have stopped with a gun to my head. The composure was over. The courtroom was behind me. And my body was finally telling the truth my face had refused to.

"I need a minute."

Savannah let me go. No argument, no hovering. She understood that kind of alone — the kind where your body needs to fall apart, and your pride needs a locked door to do it behind.

I walked to the bathroom at the end of the corridor. Pushed through the door. Locked it. Gripped the sink with both hands until my knuckles went white.

One breath.

Two.

Three, and the air snagged on something in my chest — a sound, an ugly sound, the kind you muffle into your palm at three a.m. so your daughter doesn't hear. I pressed my lips together and breathed through my nose and stared at the woman in the mirror.

Blonde hair pulled back. Blue eyes ringed dark with sleepless weeks. Cheekbones sharper than they should've been because stress ate me from the inside out, and I forgot to eat back.

The woman in the mirror wasn't broken.

She looked tired. She looked stripped down to the bone.

But she looked like someone who'd walked through something that was supposed to destroy her, and hadn't let it.

I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. Straightened my spine — not because anyone was watching, but because I needed to feel it. The steel. The refusal. The part of me Preston tried to bury that kept clawing its way back up.

The parking garage smelled like exhaust and old concrete and the particular brand of despair that lives in places where people go to leave.

My car was on the third level. A white Honda Civic with eighty-seven thousand miles and a car seat in the back and everything I owned in the trunk.

Three boxes. Two suitcases. A garbage bag of Maisie's toys because I'd run out of boxes and time on the same afternoon.

Six years of marriage reduced to what fit in a sedan with room to spare.

It should have gutted me.

It felt like flying.

I set Maisie down in her car seat. Her head lolled as I got her settled, blonde ringlets hiding half her face.

Her stuffed horse — the one with the matted mane she refused to let me wash — was clutched in her fist the way she held everything she loved.

Too tight. Like she already knew the world took things.

She'd been an angel in the courthouse daycare.

Drew a picture of a horse with a purple mane because Maisie believed horses should be more colorful, and nobody in her world had told her she was wrong yet.

She saved her tears for bedtime, for the dark, for the whispered conversations she thought I couldn't hear about why Daddy didn't come to her school play.

She'd learned to keep her face still from watching me do it, and that knowledge sank through me and settled somewhere I couldn't reach.

I brushed a curl off her forehead, barely touching, the way you handle something you'd kill for. She didn't stir.

This child was the reason I stayed as long as I did, and the reason I finally left.

I closed her door softly. Got in the driver's seat. Adjusted the mirror so I could see her face.

Then I pulled out of the parking garage and into the Dallas sun and let the road take us.

The highway stretched west, and I let it unspool while Dallas grew further away in the rearview mirror. I didn't look back. Not really. I watched it go with relief, with bone-deep exhaustion, with the strange aching grief of losing something that was already ash before you struck the match.

And with every mile, something loosened. Something in the tight spool of wire that had lived at the base of my skull since the day I said I do. The further from Dallas, the easier I breathed. Like the city had been pressing on my chest, and I'd called it normal.

Maisie slept. I drove. The radio stayed off because my thoughts were loud enough.

Somewhere past Weatherford, where the highway dipped, and the land opened up into rolling green hills that didn't care about my problems, the thought arrived.

I was supposed to be in law school by now.

It slipped in sideways through a door I kept trying to nail shut.

The plan. My plan. The one I'd had since I was twenty-two and three months into my first paralegal job, watching the attorneys argue motions while I organized exhibits and knowing — knowing — that I was supposed to be the one standing up.

I'd had the LSAT scores. I'd had the applications drafted in a folder called "Next.

" I'd had the future laid out in front of me like a highway with no speed limit.

Then I married Preston.

You don't need law school, babe. Focus on us. There'll be time later.

There was never time later. That was the thing about Preston — he didn't steal. He eroded. And by the time I realized the dream was gone, I couldn't remember when he'd taken it.

I pressed the thought flat. Folded it up and put it away.

That dream belonged to a different woman. I wasn't her anymore.

Right now, all I needed was a fresh start. A town Maisie could grow up in. The job Savannah had set up for me at her law office’s location in Copper Creek. A door with a lock that only I had the key to.

Everything else could wait.

Another thought tried to sneak in after that one.

Quieter. Warmer. The memory of a cowboy at the Fort Worth rodeo last month — the one who'd found Maisie when she'd wandered off in the crowd.

Tall. Dark-haired. A grin that should've come with a warning label and eyes that crinkled at the corners when Maisie made him laugh.

He'd been so gentle with her. Crouched down to her level, tipped his hat like she was a queen, and carried her on his hip like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And when he'd looked at me — stumbling over his own words, all that swagger suddenly gone — something had flickered through me that I hadn't felt in years.

I caught myself smiling. Shook my head.

Nice to look at, Callie. That's all.

That chapter was done. Closed. The part of my life where I let men into my space — where I gave someone the power to chip away at the edges of me until there was nothing left — was finished.

Done and dusted. Maisie and I. The life we'd build in that little town up ahead. That was the whole story now.

I didn't need a cowboy with a devastating smile and a rodeo buckle. I didn't need anyone.

The sign appeared just past a bend in the road, right where the hills softened and the sky cracked open into something so wide it made my chest ache.

WELCOME TO COPPER CREEK.

Small. Sun-faded. The paint peeling at the corners like even the sign had given up on pretense.

Population something, the numbers too blistered to read.

Behind it, the town spread out in a lazy scatter of rooftops and live oaks and one-lane roads that looked like they hadn't been in a hurry since the day they were paved.

Nothing like Dallas. This was dust and distance and sky for miles. A water tower. A church steeple. A main street that looked like it could be walked end to end in ten minutes.

Perfect.

I slowed the car. Rolled down the window.

The air came in warm and immediate — cedar and sun-baked grass and the faint sweetness of something blooming that I didn't have a name for.

It smelled like a place that hadn't been curated.

Hadn't been approved or signed off on by a man who thought he owned everything, including the air in the room.

It smelled like a place where you could just be .

Maisie stirred in the backseat. I watched her in the mirror — the slow blink, the yawn, the tight squeeze of her fist like she was checking everything was still there.

"Are we there, Mommy?"

I looked at the sign. At the town beyond it. At the road that led to a rented cottage I'd never seen, paid for with money from a bank account Preston didn't know about — the one I'd been feeding in secret for two years, twenty dollars here, fifty there, every deposit a tiny act of treason.

"Yeah, baby. We're here."

She blinked at me. Sleepy. Trusting. She didn't know what we were driving toward. She didn't know what we were driving away from. She just knew I was here and the car was moving and her horse was in her hand, and that was enough.

She closed her eyes.

I turned back to the road. The town was quiet in the late afternoon light — golden, dusty, unhurried. A dog slept on a porch. A man in a cowboy hat raised a hand from a pickup truck like we were neighbors, like we already belonged here.

My eyes burned.

I looked at Maisie in the rearview mirror — asleep again already, ringlets against the car seat — and the words came out before I could think them through. Whispered, barely there, more prayer than promise.

"We're gonna be okay, baby."

The Civic rolled past the sign and into Copper Creek, and for the first time in six years, what came next was mine to decide.

I almost believed it.