Instead, he just nodded. "Okay. What's next?"
Thank God.
Jack matched my pace without complaint. He didn't ask about Wyatt. Didn't offer opinions. Didn't do anything except exactly what I asked, exactly how I asked it, with a calm competence that made me want to scream.
At one point, we ended up in the tack room at the same time—me grabbing a bridle, him reaching for a lead rope. The space was small. Too small. Saddles lined the wall, bridles hung from iron hooks, and the late-morning light cut through the gap in the boards in a single dusty stripe that landed right across his chest like the universe was staging this for maximum damage. He stepped back to let me pass, and our shoulders brushed, just barely, the faintest whisper of contact through two layers of clothing.
My whole body lit up like a brushfire.
"Sorry," he said, voice low.
"It's fine." My voice came out too high. I cleared my throat. "It's fine. Tight space."
"Mm."
He didn't move. Didn't step further back. Just stood there, close enough that I could see the flecks of gold in his eyes, close enough to smell leather and horse and him, close enough that if I leaned forward just a few inches?—
I grabbed the bridle and fled like the room was on fire.
From the main house porch, I caught a glimpse of my mother watching. Just standing there with her coffee, her gaze tracking between me and the tack room door where Jack was emerging at a normal, unhurried pace.
She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. Her raised eyebrow said plenty.
Mind your business, Momma.
I threw myself back into work with renewed intensity, because Jack Remington was exactly what the horse program needed.
He understood breeding. He had experience building programs from scratch. He could gentle a difficult horse with nothing but patience and soft hands. He saw things in our stock that would take most people months to notice.
If I had any sense at all, I'd be celebrating. Daddy had somehow hired exactly the right person at exactly the right time, and the horse program I'd been dreaming about for years finally had a real chance of becoming something.
But I couldn't celebrate. Because every time Jack was near—which was constantly—my body remembered before my brain could stop it.
I was losing my mind.
And the worst part was, he knew it. He had to know it. But he never pushed. Never let his mask slip. Never gave me anything I could point to and say,See, this is inappropriate, this is why we can't work together.
He was a perfect goddamn gentleman.
I wanted to kill him.
Ivy found me near the end of the day, hiding behind the equipment shed with a bottle of water and a tension headache.
"Okay," she said, settling beside me without waiting for an invitation. "What the hell is going on with you?"
"Nothing."
"Maggie. You've snapped at three people today. You rewrote the schedule twice. And you've been vibrating like a live wire since this morning." Ivy's expression was gentle but firm—thelook she gave difficult livestock right before she got them to do exactly what she wanted. "Talk to me."
"It's nothing. Just stressed about the expansion timeline."
"Try again."
"It's really nothing, Ivy?—"
"Is this about Wyatt?" She held up a hand before I could deflect. "I heard about your conversation this morning. He told me."
Of course he did. "Then you know there's nothing to talk about. He's right. The cattle program takes priority. End of discussion.” It didn’t matter that I was getting really sick of living by that mindset.
