“Huck!” Sierra started after him, but Rowan grabbed her arm.
“Huck!” Rowan boomed.
But Huck wasn’t listening anymore. He sprinted toward Jasper. The paint horse stood ground-tied where Huck had left him, reins dragging in the dirt.
“Huck, no!” Sierra shouted, but her son was already there. In one fluid motion, born of years in the saddle, Huck grabbed the saddle horn and swung himself up onto Jasper’s back. The horse sidestepped once, sensing the tension radiating from his young rider, but Huck was already gathering the reins with hands that shook with hurt and fury.
“Huck, wait!” Rowan called out, moving toward them, but it was too late.
Huck dug his heels into Jasper’s sides, and the paint horse exploded into motion. They shot across the pasture like a bullet, Huck leaning low over the horse’s neck as they headed straight for the fence line at a dead gallop. Sierra’s heart stopped—there was no gate in that direction, just barbed wire and?—
But Huck knew this ranch better than anyone. At the last possible second, he wheeled Jasper toward the creek crossing, the place where the fence dipped low enough to clear. Jasper took the jump without hesitation, sailing over the wire with room to spare before disappearing into the thick stand of cottonwoods beyond.
“Sheesh.” Rowan was already vaulting the corral fence, moving toward one of the other horses with grim determination. “Stay here. I got this.”
Rowan didn’t waste time with a saddle. He slipped a bridle over Thunder’s head and swung up bareback, the old cowboy in him turning his movements sure.
“Rowan, be careful,” Sierra called as he turned the quarter horse out of the corral.
“I’ll find him,” Rowan said. Looked at her. “I’ll bring him home.”
Then he took off, his mount stretching into a gallop across the pasture.
Sierra watched him, the drumbeat of hooves fading until all she could hear was the wind in the grass and her own ragged breathing.
What if his horse threw him and Rowan lost his son before he even got to be his father?
The thought hammered through Rowan as he watched Huck disappear across the fields. Sierra’s confession still echoed in his ears—You’re the one, Row. You always have been—but that overwhelming declaration would have to wait. Right now, his ten-year-old was riding pell-mell across dangerous terrain, rutted with prairie dog holes and cattle hoofprints, clearly emotionally out of control.
Like father, like son, maybe.
Aw, he’d handled that badly. Shoot.
Huck was a quarter mile ahead now, coming up fast to the creek that cut through the south pasture.
Please don’t fall—please don’t fall!
But Jasper picked his way down the rocky slope into the ravine, as if the old horse could read Rowan’s mind.
They reached the bottom.
Huck’s scream cut through the evening air like a blade.
Rowan’s blood turned to ice as he watched Jasper rear up, front hooves pawing the air while Huck fought to stay in the saddle. Even from this distance, Rowan could see the way Huck’s hands grabbed for the saddle horn.
He missed and tumbled off and landed in the creek bed.
And in that second, Rowan was again eight years old, watching his father throw himself between those deadly hooves and the little boy who’d been chasing a barn cat. The sickening thud of impact. The way his dad had crumpled to the ground and never gotten up.
Not again. Not his son.
Rowan drove his horse down the slope, stones scattering under its hooves as they plunged toward the creek bed, and spotted what had spooked Jasper—a coiled rattlesnake sunning itself on a flat rock near the water’s edge.
Now it had coiled tight, as if to strike, its rattle sizzling in the air.
Jasper reared again, just above Huck.
Without thinking, Rowan launched from the horse’s back, caught Huck around the waist, and pulled him clear just as Jasper’s hooves crashed down where the boy’s head had been seconds before.
