I opened it and handed her the phone, heart pounding as she scrolled. Her expression shifted—you could almost track it in stages: confusion, recognition, a flash of hurt, then something else. Something harder. Wilder.
She snorted.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," she muttered, squinting at the screen. "'Ranch employee'? That's rude. I run this ranch."
"Win—"
She kept reading, lips moving silently until she got to the socialite quote. Her jaw tightened for half a second, then she huffed out a laugh.
"Pattern of using people when he's bored." She slanted me a look, eyes glinting. "Damn, Sterling. You out here patterning on me?"
"This isn't funny," I said, even though she was making it hard to breathe and think at the same time. "They're coming after you. They're implying I'm… exploiting you. They're dissecting your life and you don't even know it."
"Well, I do now." She scrolled down to the comments, winced once, then shrugged. "Yeah, okay, that one's nasty. And that one. And that one. People on the internet are bored and need hobbies. None of this surprises me."
"It should," I snapped, more harshly than I intended. "They don't know you. They don't know anything about this place. They're calling you a phase. A downfall. Like you're… collateral damage in my tantrum."
She looked at me for a long beat, then set the phone gently on the coffee table like it was a misbehaving child.
"Beau," she said slowly, "do you think this is the first time somebody's decided who I am without knowing me?"
I blinked. "What?"
"Reporters called meyesterdayasking if I was using you for money. The town has been side-eyeing me since Pops and Nana brought home a Black baby out of nowhere." Her mouth quirked, but there was steel under it. "People have been telling themselves stories about me my whole life. This?" She nodded at the phone. "This is just new scenery."
The shame hit like a slap. "I should've told you earlier."
"Yeah," she said easily. "You should've. But I'm tipsy enough to let you off with a warning."
My head snapped up. "You're… not mad?"
"Oh, I'm mad," she said, but her smile softened it. "Just not at you. Not really. Have I thought about people saying I'm out here chasing your money? Sure. Have I wondered what your mom or your boardroom friends would think of me? Yeah. But some bored rich lady running her mouth in a magazine?" She shrugged. "She doesn't get to decide whether I stay in my own life."
I swallowed hard. "Your face is basically there, Win. Anyone in town—"
"Anyone in town already knows I work this ranch, that we dance at the Spur, that you’re here. Half of them probably recognized us from the first blurry pictures anyway. Honestly?" She smirked. "I'm more offended they called me an employee."
Despite everything, a laugh escaped me. It was sharp, helpless, half-choked, but it was real.
She leaned in, bumping her shoulder into mine. "Hey. Look at me."
I did. I always did.
"This article?" she said softly. "It sucks. It’s invasive. It makes me want to find whoever took that photo and shove their phone up their ass."
"Same."
"But it doesn't scare me the way you think it does. I'm not made of glass, Beau. I can handle people talking. I'm more worried about you spiraling yourself into a hole and making decisions for me that I didn't ask you to make."
My throat closed around the words I hadn't said yet. "My dad's pulling me out in two weeks."
She went still. The humor didn't disappear, exactly—it just stepped aside to make room for something else. Something sharper.
"Two weeks," she repeated. "Like… two weeks from now, you're gone?"
"That's the plan," I said, the words tasting poisonous. "Board meeting tomorrow. He wants me to say we're just friends, that the article is exaggerating, that I'm focused on 'personal growth' and ready to come back early. If I don't, he cuts me off. No trust fund. No safety net."
"Okay," she said.
