Chapter 1
Clay
I was having the best night of my life, and my shoulder was trying to ruin it.
The Blackwood Ranch was lit up like a county fair — string lights crisscrossing the yard between the Lodge and the barn, with music pouring out of the speakers Hunter had wired up that afternoon.
Half of Copper Creek was spread across the property with drinks in their hands and grins on their faces, and I was in the middle of it like the sun everything was orbiting.
Which sounded arrogant. I knew it sounded arrogant.
But when you've just won the Pbr World Championship — when you've stood on that platform in Fort Worth with the buckle in your hand and the roar of twenty thousand people in your bones — you're allowed one night of being the center of the universe.
I was milking it. Obviously.
"Clay! Speech!”
I chuckled, shaking my head. "Not a chance, Dottie."
"Clay Blackwood, I watched you ride your first sheep at the junior rodeo, and I will get a speech out of you if it kills me."
"It might kill both of us, ma'am."
She swatted my arm and handed me a beer, and I grinned at her because grinning was what I did.
It was my whole thing. The grin, the wink, the easy charm that made women lean in and my brothers roll their eyes so hard you could hear it.
I'd been Clay Blackwood, Professional Charmer, since I was old enough to figure out that a smile got you further than a fist, and I'd been Clay Blackwood, Bull Rider, since I was nineteen and too stupid to know that climbing on the back of two thousand pounds of rage was a bad life plan.
Now I was Clay Blackwood, World Champion.
It had a ring to it. It had a belt buckle to match.
But underneath the noise — underneath the music and the laughter and the hands slapping my back and the women practically throwing themselves at me — my shoulder was grinding.
The left one that the bull had clipped in round two at the finals, when I'd come off at a bad angle and hit the dirt with my arm pinned under me.
I'd popped it back, taped it up, and rode the next round on adrenaline and stubbornness.
That was three days ago. The adrenaline was gone.
The stubbornness was holding, but barely.
My knee hadn't been right since Tulsa. My ribs were bruised from the finals — deep, dull aches that flared every time I laughed, which meant they'd been flaring all night.
I rolled my neck and felt something grind in a way that thirty-one-year-old necks shouldn't grind, and for one second — just one, quick, before I shoved it down — a thought slid through:
What comes after this?
I took a pull of my beer and let the crowd swallow me back up. Tonight wasn't for that.
Wyatt was leaning against the paddock fence with a beer he was nursing slow and Ivy tucked under his arm like she'd been built to fit there.
My oldest brother had always been the steady one — the first to show up, the last to leave, the one who made sure everyone else was okay before he sat down.
Ivy had made him lighter, happier, more likely to laugh at himself, but he'd always been warm underneath.
He looked at me. Held my gaze for a beat.
Then he grinned — wide, proud, the big-brother grin that still made me feel ten years old in the best possible way.
"There he is," he said. "World champ. You’re gonna be insufferable now,” he added with a teasing groan.
“We both know I was insufferable before." I hit him with the eyebrows — the full double-raise, the one that made women laugh and Wyatt want to hit me. "Now I've got a shiny new buckle to back it up."
He laughed and pulled me into a hug — solid, real, the kind Wyatt gave where he clapped your back hard enough to mean it. Ivy squeezed my arm when he let go. "He's been bragging about you to everyone all day. He told the gas station attendant."
"I did not tell the gas station attendant."
Ivy peered up at my brother, brown eyes glinting in that knowing way. ”You told the gas station attendant, Wyatt."
He shrugged. Didn't deny it again. That was Wyatt — he'd never say he was proud in some big speech, but he'd tell a stranger at a gas pump.
Liam appeared next. My brother — technically adopted, fully Blackwood, built like a man who spent his days working both the ranch and the Ranger station — pulled me into a hug that lifted me off the ground by an inch. Close to my ear, so only I heard: "Proud of you, bud. Real proud."
Something hit me that I wasn't going to examine at a party. I slapped his back and pulled away. "Don't go soft on me, Ranger."
He grinned. Liam grinned a lot these days — Stephanie had done that to him, moved into the ranch, and cracked him open until smiling was his default setting instead of his exception.
I looked toward the barn. Hunter was there — half in shadow, crouched by the barn door, doing something to the gate latch with a wrench and a headlamp. Nobody had asked him to fix it. Nobody ever asked Hunter to fix anything — he just saw what was broken and showed up with the right tool.
"Hunt!" I called across the yard.
He looked up. Gave me a chin lift and a half-smile that was sixty percent shy, forty percent pleased to be noticed. Held up the wrench. Busy.
That was Hunter. The quiet one. Somebody needed to start paying attention to that guy. Not tonight — he'd hate the spotlight. But someday.
I made a mental note to call Luke tomorrow.
My youngest brother was off at college studying business management — which was a polite way of saying he was getting a degree while figuring out how to avoid coming home.
He'd texted a single line: Knew you'd win.
Now retire before you break something important. Little shit.
Momma found me near the dessert table, which was a strategic error on my part because Momma near a dessert table was a woman with leverage.
"There's my champion," she said, and her hands were on my face before I could dodge — warm palms against my jaw, the scent of vanilla and butter that lived in her skin, those brown eyes reading the fine print on my soul.
"Hey, Momma."
"Let me look at you."
"You've been looking at me for thirty-one years."
"And I'll look for thirty-one more, so hold still."
I held still. You didn't argue with Louisa Blackwood.
She studied me. Then, simple and true: "I'm proud of you."
But there was something else in her eyes. She'd noticed the quiet second at the arena after the win — when the crowd was on its feet, and I should've been whooping, but instead I'd gone still for a beat too long. Of course, she'd noticed. Momma noticed everything.
She didn't push. That wasn't her style. She planted.
"Maggie and Jack's breeding program is really coming along," she said, like she was commenting on the weather.
"Those quarter horses Jack brought in last spring — beautiful animals.
They could use someone with your eye for livestock.
You've always had that gift, Clay. Seeing what an animal could become before it became it.
" She sipped her wine. "Whenever you have time, of course. "
The sentence sat in the air like a door she'd cracked open and was pretending she hadn't.
Then, casual as breathing: "That young woman with the little girl seemed lovely. At the rodeo. The one you couldn't stop staring at."
I almost choked on my beer. "I wasn't staring."
"Honey, you were staring so hard I thought you'd strain something." She patted my cheek. "Don't worry. It's a good look on you."
She drifted off toward Ivy, leaving me with the distinct feeling that I'd just been managed by a professional.
That's when I saw her.
Savannah Tate came through the ranch gate first — Weston's wife, all blonde hair and lawyer energy. Weston was behind her, my best friend since the junior circuit, and then my mentor, laughing at something she'd said.
But behind them, slightly apart —
Her.
Time didn't slow down. That's a lie people tell.
What happened was worse — time kept moving at exactly the same speed, and everything else stopped mattering.
There was just a woman walking into the Blackwood Ranch with one hand on her daughter's shoulder and the other swinging loose at her side, and every thought in my head went white.
She was blonde and petite and built like God had taken his sweet time and enjoyed every minute of it.
The jeans she was wearing were doing something to me that should've required a permission slip.
Her hips, the curve of her waist, the way that shirt fell just right — my brain went from world champion to village idiot in about half a second.
I'd seen beautiful women. I'd seen a lot of beautiful women.
But I'd never gone physically stupid looking at one.
Guess there was a first time for everything.
Then the little one spotted me. Green eyes wide, mouth open with a gasp. "Clay! Clay! Clay!"
Maisie Monroe. Five years old, blonde ringlets exploding in every direction, pink cowboy boots I'd have recognized from space.
She broke free from her mother's hand and launched herself across the yard like a heat-seeking missile in a tutu, and I had about two seconds to set my beer on the fence post before she collided with my legs at full velocity.
"You said you'd teach me to ride! You promised! A pinky promise is a real promise!"
Her mother's face — Callie, her name was Callie, I'd learned it at the Fort Worth rodeo three days ago and hadn't stopped turning it over in my head since — was pure amusement.
She was shaking her head, arms crossed, one hip cocked, watching her daughter assault my kneecaps with the resigned affection of a woman who'd long ago stopped being surprised by anything this child did.
I crouched down to Maisie's level. "Hey, sweetheart. You made it."