"Yeah." I leaned into him. "I always thought—when I was a kid, I used to imagine getting married here. Having my dad walk me down the aisle, my mom crying in the front row."
"And now?"
I turned to look at him. "Now I want you to be at the end of that aisle. I want it, Jack. All of it.”
His arms tightened around me. “I think we can make that work.”
"I want everything," I whispered. "The ranch. The horses. The life we're going to build. I want Sunday dinners with my family and late nights in the barn with you. I want to wake up every morning knowing you're beside me."
"Then that's what we'll do." Jack tilted my chin up and made me meet his eyes. "One day at a time, one choice at a time, until we've got roots so deep nothing can pull them up."
I looked at the man beside me. At the tree that had watched over my family for a hundred years.
"I love you," I said.
His eyes softened. "I love you too."
"I'm going to marry you under this tree,” I declared without an ounce of fear. It just might’ve been the most certain I’d ever been about anything in my life.
Jack’s smile widened. "I'm counting on it."
I laughed—bright and joyful, the sound carrying across the quiet ranch. Then I took his hand and led him back toward the house, where the lights were still on and my family was still celebrating and the future was waiting to be built.
Behind us, the wedding tree stood patient and eternal, its roots reaching deep into Blackwood soil.
Ready for one more love story to make them grow.
Epilogue
CLAY
Fort Worth Stockyards | Championship Rodeo | Six Months Later
There was no better place on God's green earth than behind the chutes at a championship rodeo on a Saturday night.
That wasn’t an opinion. That was fact. I'd put it up against anything—a cold beer on a hot day, a woman's laugh in a dark room, the smell of Texas dirt after rain. All excellent things. But nothing beat the hum of a sold-out crowd, the snort and slam of two thousand pounds of pissed-off bull in the pen below you, and the bone-deep certainty that you were about to do the thing you were put on this earth to do.
Fort Worth Stockyards Championship Rodeo. Biggest stage of the season. Fifteen thousand people packed into the coliseum, the air thick with dust and beer and adrenaline, and every single one of them was about to watch me do what I did best.
Win.
I leaned against the rail above the chutes and let the energy settle into me. Rolled my shoulders. Cracked my neck. Felt the familiar buzz start low in my gut and spread outward—that electric, alive feeling that only came when I was minutes from climbing onto something that wanted to kill me.
God, I loved my job.
Thirty-one years old. Ranked first in the national standings with a lead wide enough to make lesser men complacent. I was not a lesser man. I was a Blackwood, which meant I'd been bred for exactly two things: working hard and refusing to lose.
I scanned the crowd. The stands were a sea of hats and neon and sunburned faces. Sponsors' banners snapping in the breeze. Kids on their daddies' shoulders. Women in cutoffs and boots, tanned shoulders catching the arena lights.
Target-rich environment.
Some men were built for settling down. Wyatt had Ivy. Liam had Stephanie. Jack somehow wrangled my little sister, Maggie—and watching my sister finally let herself be happy had been one of the best things I'd witnessed in thirty-one years. But that was their wiring. Mine was different. I loved my family, loved my job, loved the road and the roar and the rush of a life lived exactly the way I wanted to live it. If that made me selfish, I'd be selfish with a smile on my face and a buckle on my belt.
"You're doing that thing again."
Weston Tate climbed up beside me, a roll of tape in one hand and the easy grin of a man who'd spent fifteen years in these same chutes and now got to watch from the other side. Retired last year. Married Savannah. Settled in Wild Creek. But on championship night, your best friend still stood behind the chutes.
"What thing?"
