Chapter 2
TWO
NASH
I clock three things the second I step into the feed room: the map spread on the wall, the smell of burnt brake lining clinging to the air like a warning, and Delaney Coleman standing there looking like trouble I want to volunteer for.
Good different hits me like a body blow.
She was all colt legs and comet hair the last time I let myself really look.
Now she’s… finished. Sharper at the cheekbones, softer at the mouth.
City polish smudged by ranch dust in a way that makes my hands itch.
A button-down rolled to the elbows, skin sun-pinked where her sleeves don’t reach, hair twisted up like she fought with it and won.
There’s confidence in the way she sets her feet—hip-width, balanced, like she remembers how to brace against a kicking calf and a bad day.
And those eyes. Still creek-water green, still the first place I ever believed in “home.” Only now they’ve got the weight of things seen and survived. It’s a new kind of pretty—earned and a little dangerous.
I want to touch her. Full stop. The urge is primitive and inconvenient and immediate: palm at her waist to see if she still fits there; thumb at the corner of her lip to wipe away the dust she missed; knuckles down the tendon of her neck just to feel her shiver.
I keep my hands on my belt instead, because I’m not the boy who jumped from rope swings anymore.
I’m the man who knows how fast a good thing burns if you bring open flame too close.
“Inside,” Gray says, a low order with room for dignity. He’s good at that—getting people moving without making them feel handled. Mr. Coleman—Delaney’s father—nods once and leads us back into the room.
I take the corner where I can see the door, the window, the map, and Delaney’s face. Old habits die slow.
Gray plants both palms on the table. Mr. Coleman stands with one shoulder to the wall, hat brim low. He looks tired in the way men do when they won’t say out loud that it’s getting harder to bounce.
“Walk me through it,” I tell him.
He does. Matter-of-fact, no drama: tractor rolled, even though the ground was flat; south fence cut last week; light grain order; one frightened gelding bowed a tendon and the vet bill came like a punch.
He keeps his voice steady, but his fingers worry the brim of his hat the way a rope man worries a good lariat—looking for a weak spot.
“Two different hands,” I say when he’s done. “Somebody clumsy trying to make noise. Somebody careful laying groundwork.”
“Which one do I shoot first?” Mr. Coleman asks.
“The careful one,” Gray says. “But we have to find him before we can introduce him to consequences.”
Delaney stands straighter. “We can’t spook sponsors for Rodeo Days. If people think we’re under attack, they’ll yank checks. We have scholarships riding on this. The whole town does.”
The whole town. She says it like a vow, like she’d arm-wrestle a tornado if it meant keeping the lights on for somebody else. It puts a crack in me I don’t have tape for.
Gray’s gaze flicks to me. “I want you here, Hawthorne. Around the clock.”
That I expected. I nod, already on the logistics. “I can bunk in the—”
“No,” Mr. Coleman cuts in, sharp. “Whoever’s doing this knows this place. Knows us. The minute I put Lone Star trucks on my gravel, I might as well hang a sign that says ‘spooked.’”
He’s right. The careful one will go subterranean if he smells heat.
“So we camouflage the heat,” Gray says, already shifting the chess pieces. “You need coverage that doesn’t look like coverage.”
“The bunkhouse is full of hands,” Mr. Coleman says. “And anybody new gets sniffed faster than a stranger at Sunday potluck.”
My eyes slide to Delaney before my brain can stop them. She stiffens like she felt the heat of it. Color rises along her throat, then she lifts her chin and meets me, daring me to say whatever I’m thinking.
I don’t. Gray does.
“Fake dating,” he says, like he’s ordering coffee. “We give Valor Springs something better to look at.”
Delaney’s jaw drops. “Absolutely not.”
It hits me wrong and right all at once—wrong because using her feels like a holy thing misused; right because the animal part of me that’s been pacing since I saw her wants an excuse to orbit close and not apologize.
Mr. Coleman doesn’t blink. “Explain.”
Gray hooks a thumb at me. “Nash and Delaney. Everybody knows he and Delaney were thick as thieves back in the day.” His look to me says not my story to tell and don’t make me tell it.
“He shows up with a duffel and a grin, folks will assume he’s staying for reasons that have nothing to do with fences.
He’s around 24/7 without spooking our snake. He can watch, listen, dig.”
Delaney shakes her head so hard a piece of hair falls out of whatever system was holding it. “Nope. No. Find another cover.”
Gray’s voice gentles. “Got a better one?”
“Say he’s—” She flaps a hand. “—doing some… roping clinic. Training a green-broke. Something that doesn’t involve my face in a fake relationship.”
“People ask less questions about kissing than they do about clinics,” Mr. Coleman says, not unkind. “And folks will expect him to be where you are, which is the point.”
She turns on him, hurt flashing fast then gone. “Daddy—”
“I don’t like it either,” he says. “But I like somebody cutting our legs out from under us less.”
I keep my mouth shut and my heartbeat slow. The plan is clean. The execution will be messy. The risk is not just operational.
Gray looks at me. “You good with it?”
My throat goes rough. I say it anyway. “If it keeps her safe, I’ll hold her hand on Main Street and dip her under the bandstand at the street dance.”
Delaney stares, shocked all the way to her freckles. I shouldn’t enjoy that. I do. It’s petty and human and I let myself have exactly one second of it before I staple my restraint back on.
“No kissing,” she says, voice like a gallop being held in the first circle. “No… anything.”
“Public parameters are your call,” Gray says. “Private parameters…” His eyes cut to me. “Mission first.”
I give him a look back that says I know the difference. I do. I wish I didn’t.
Delaney chews her bottom lip, then points the chewed-up part of her patience at Gray. “What does this actually look like?”
Gray lays it out: I move into the guest room—temporarily—because the bunkhouse leak made the other room unusable and the contractors are “delayed.” Cameras go up under the cover of me “testing a rodeo documentary rig,” courtesy of a couple of unobtrusive trail cams and my own kit.
I escort her to town “dates”—grocery, sponsors, the co-op—so I can see who watches.
We stage a visible presence at the south fence repair—call it a “couples project,” let the gossips chew.
“Worst idea I’ve ever heard,” Delaney mutters. “Which is why it will work here.”
“Exactly,” Gray says.
She turns to me, and I feel the full weight of what she’s offering without wanting to. “You keep this about the ranch,” she says, voice low. “About my daddy. About the kids who count on those scholarships.”
“Yes, ma’am.” It comes out rawer than I intend. The ma’am isn’t distance. It’s respect. It lands, and her chin tips a degree, accepting, not yielding.
Mr. Coleman rubs the back of his neck. “You two gonna be able to pull this off without… killing each other first?”
“No,” Delaney and I say at the same time, for different reasons.
She does a tiny double take at our chorus, then blows out a breath, sees the chessboard like her father and Gray do, and squares her shoulders. “Fine. We fake it. For the ranch.”
It shouldn’t hit like a victory. It does.
“Alright,” Gray says brisk again, relief hidden. “Roles. Boundaries. Signals. If something feels off, we call it off.” He points at Delaney. “You do not go anywhere alone for the next two weeks. Not even to the mailbox. That an order you can follow?”
Her nostrils flare. “I can follow an order.”
I remember the teenager who could not, who would not, because she was born to be the order when nobody else would take it. The woman standing here looks like she learned the difference between stubborn and strong the hard way.
Gray turns to me. “You’ll wear the mic. Record everything. Quietly. If anybody asks, we’re testing a podcast about ranch life and romance.”
“God save us,” Delaney groans.
“From content,” I agree.
The plan settles like dust after a stampede—finer than you want, everywhere you look.
We run through practicals: code words (if she calls me “cowboy,” I listen harder; if she calls me “Nash Hawthorne,” something is wrong), exits, where to stash a go-bag.
I add a few things Gray doesn’t have to say—check the gates twice, trip my own sensors to make sure the alerts work, walk the fenceline in the dark with a red lens and my heartbeat turned down to a whisper.
Through it, my awareness of her is a steady hum under the language of work.
The scrape of her thumbnail along the edge of the table when she’s thinking.
The way she reads the map with her mouth, a whisper of silent words forming as her eyes track fence to creek to gate.
The little line that lives now between her brows—the one that wasn’t there when we were kids and thought promises were fences a storm couldn’t jump.
When Gray’s done, he checks his watch. “I’ll bring Josie by after school,” he says to Mr. Coleman, lighter now. “If that’s alright. She’s got cupcakes to repay Mrs. Coleman for saving the field trip last year.”
“You bring that girl any time,” Mr. Coleman says, warmth cutting through the weariness. “Barn misses her.”
Gray claps my shoulder once: call if. Then he’s gone, phone already to his ear, walking and planning at the same time.
Silence folds in after him, stretchy and thin. Mr. Coleman settles his hat, looks between us like a man who remembers how a match looks before it lights.
“If you’re gonna do this,” he says, “do it right. We’re Colemans. We don’t half-ass.”
“Noted,” Delaney says faintly, like she’s imagining believing it in public.
He starts for the door. “I’ll go make sure the hands know Nash is stayin’ for supper and—” His eyes twinkle once, brief. “—courting my daughter again.”
“Daddy,” Delaney warns.
“What? I was born to stir,” he says, and disappears, whistling like a man who finally handed a worry to someone else for five minutes.
That leaves the two of us and a map of land we both know better than we know ourselves.
I should talk logistics. I should ask about schedules and rooms and which doors stick and who hates me on sight. Instead I say, “You look good, Laney.”
Her breath catches, that betraying little hitch. She recovers fast. “You look… like a problem.”
“Always was.”
“True.” The corner of her mouth betrays her, wants to smile and doesn’t trust itself yet.
We stand there in the low murmur of barn swallows and far-off hammering and every unsaid thing. The want is a living animal now, pacing, testing the gate. I could step in. Close it with a joke. Or I could open it and let it run us down.
Mission, I remind myself. Her father. The scholarship kids. The rot we’re going to pull out of the fence posts and burn.
But I let myself have one thing. One truth that isn’t a tactical error.
“I won’t hurt you,” I say quietly. “Not with this. Not with the pretend. I know the difference.”
Her eyes lift to mine and hold. She searches, looking for the lie I don’t have time to tell. Whatever she finds relaxes something in her shoulders I didn’t know I was watching. “Okay,” she says. Just that. A door cracking open on a dark room.
“Okay,” I echo.
We’re still looking when a hand slaps the doorjamb and Penny leans in, grinning like a woman who already set the group text on fire. “Boss? Cowboy? Do I tell the crew to expect a very public display of ‘fake dating’ at the south fence or just medium public?”
Delaney groans into her palms. I can’t help it, and I let the smile happen. It feels like something I haven’t worn in a while finding its way back to my face.
“Tell ‘em,” I say, eyes on Delaney, “to expect me wherever she is.”
Penny whoops. “Copy that.”
Delaney drops her hands, cheeks flushed, chin high. “Fine,” she says, like a woman stepping into a cold creek on purpose. “Let’s go save my ranch, Hawthorne.”
“After you,” I say, because I like watching her lead.
She brushes past. Heat and honeysuckle and sweat and dust kiss my skin in her wake. The urge to reach out and catch her fingers is a live wire. I don’t. Not yet.
I follow her out into the light, wanting and ready in equal measure, the plan in my head and the promise in my chest, both of them heavy, both of them mine.