I almost believed it.
But when I closed my eyes that night, I didn't see problems to solve or crises to manage. I saw dark eyes that saw too much, hands that had left me loose and boneless and smiling into the dark, and a smile that had been just for me—back when I was only Maggie, and he was only Jack, and neither of us had any idea how complicated it was about to get.
Tomorrow, I'd be professional.
Tonight, I’d let myself remember.
And I tried very, very hard not to think about how much I wanted to do it all over again.
3
Jack
The Blackwood Fall Rodeo was controlled chaos.
I'd seen enough operations—military and civilian—to recognize the difference between chaos that worked and chaos that was about to collapse. This was the first kind. Loud, messy, constantly shifting, but underneath it all, someone had a plan. Someone was holding the strings.
It took me about ten minutes to figure out who.
Maggie Blackwood moved through the rodeo grounds like a general commanding a battlefield. She didn't raise her voice. Didn't need to. People just... oriented toward her. Asked her questions. Followed her directions. She solved problems before most folks even noticed there was a problem to solve.
She was impressive as hell.
She was also beautiful. So painfully beautiful.
Not in a fragile, ornamental way. In a way that hit low and stayed there like a full-body ache. Long legs in worn jeans that knew how to move through hard days. Sun-warmed skin. A body built for work and endurance, strong without needing to prove it. Her hair pulled back like she didn't give a damn what anyone thought—which only made it worse. Made you want to be thereason it came loose. Her mouth was expressive, sharp when she was focused, soft when she smiled—like those smiles were earned, not handed out.
Seeing her here, in her own territory, only sharpened the damage. The authority. The competence. The way the world seemed to rearrange itself around her. Watching her command space like that did something primal to me—made me want to strip away the control just to see what she looked like when she lost it. Like I’d done in that motel room last week.
And the worst part?
She had no idea how thoroughly she'd already undone me.
I'd spent one night with her and it had been living in my head ever since.
And standing here, watching her run this place like it was an extension of her body, I had the uneasy, unmistakable sense that one night hadn't been nearly enough.
She was also exhausted. I could see it in the tension around her eyes, the set of her shoulders, the way she kept moving like stopping might mean falling down. Most people wouldn't clock it—she hid it well, buried under competence and sharp humor. But I'd spent years learning to read people in situations where misreading them could get you killed.
Maggie Blackwood was running on fumes and willpower.
And she had no idea I was watching.
Sully pressed against my leg, a familiar weight that grounded me whenever my thoughts started to drift. He’d been alert since we arrived—new place, new people, new smells to catalog. But he wasn't anxious. Just watchful. Taking it all in the way he'd been trained to do.
"Easy, Sul," I murmured, reaching down to scratch behind his ears. "We're just getting the lay of the land."
He looked up at me with those steady brown eyes, and I could almost hear Brad's voice in my head: Dog's smarter than you, Remington.
Brad had always been right about that.
Staff Sergeant Brad Emerson. My best friend. My brother in everything but blood. The man who'd trained Sully from an eight-week-old pup into one of the finest working dogs I'd ever seen—and then hadn't come home from our last deployment.
The ambush had been fast and brutal. We'd been clearing a compound in a village whose name I still couldn't say without my chest going tight. Brad took point because he always took point. Said he didn't trust anyone else to do it right.
He was wrong that day.
An IED took him before any of us could react. One second, he was there, hand signal steady. The next second, he getting catapulted fifty feet away before smacking into some rubble hard enough that I could still hear the snap of his spine.
