Chapter 1
I never was a lady, but now I think I’ve gone too far.
—Belle Martin’s Diary, July 1865
Jessie Jane Hancock was the proud owner of a whole collection of toxic traits.
Generally, she found them to be a good time at the very least. But currently, her desperate need to climb impossible mountains was eating at her. Making her life downright miserable, in fact.
So miserable that she got distracted and did something she rarely ever did: Jessie Jane missed a trick. Which was how she found herself tumbling off her horse face-first into the arena dirt.
“Whoa there.”
She popped up and looked across the arena at her older brother West, who was not on his way to help her up. Instead, he was sitting there on the back of his horse, his arms crossed across his broad chest as he stared at her.
“Thanks for the help,” she groused as she stood up and hauled herself up onto her own mount.
West only looked at her, the maddening fool. “If you fall off the horse, you have to get back on again. No one can do it for you.”
“Well, aren’t you a big old Magic Eight Ball.”
“I’ve been called a lot of things, Jess, but rarely that.”
“Rarelyisn’tnever, West.”
She was supposed to be rehearsing a new routine for this summer’s opening of Butch Hancock’s Wild West Show. Instead, shewas stewing. About the upcoming mayoral election. The thing was, everyone hated the current mayor.
Well. That wasn’t true; Danielle had been elected. But she was a mean girl. She had been a mean girl in high school, and she was mean now. She had very notoriously stolen the town librarian’s fiancé—though Jessie Jane definitely believed that the man in question needed to be held equally accountable. But the man in question was basically a turnip with testicles. So she gave him less credit for the seduction because he was an idiot.
Danielle wasn’t an idiot. For all that she was an awful human being.
Rustler Mountain was a small town nestled in the southern Oregon mountains only eight miles from the California border. It had a rich gold rush history, and was steeped in the myth and legend of the Wild West. The Hancock family had made money off that myth and legend for years.
With their reputation, there was nothing else to do but lean into it.
In Rustler Mountain, things were black and white. It was as simple as good guys and bad guys. Some of the town was descended from lawmen, while other folks … Well, they were outlaws.
The Wilder family being the most notorious of the outlaws, given that back in the late 1800s Austin Wilder had been shot dead in the main street of Rustler Mountain by Sheriff Lee Talbot. So when, one hundred and fifty years later, a Talbot and a Wilder had married, the narrative of the town had been suddenly disrupted.
It was like a mountain that had stood unchanging for centuries had suddenly ruptured, reordering the landscape around it.
Those clearly defined lines weren’t so cleanly delineated anymore.
There had been big pushes to correct some of the misinformation that had stood as history for well over a century, and as the local narrative changed, so did some of the ways that the whole town worked.
She couldn’t lie—it was a little bit annoying to have more of the nice townies in her favorite bar on the weekends. But it was also nice to have some more locals showing up to the Wild West Show.
The Hancocks’ show, which featured historical reenactments and trick riding, along with rodeo events, was extremely popular with neighboring communities, but was often wasted on their own. But again, that had to do with the reputation of the Hancock family.
A reputation that rarely bothered her. Except now …
“I can hear you thinking.”
“I doubt it. I assume deep thoughts operate at a frequency you can’t actually hear.”
West snorted. “If only. But unfortunately, I know you too well.”
“That viper is runningunopposed.”
