Then I got to the section on sire line compatibility and realized I needed Jack's input.
His knowledge of the Raven Spur line was firsthand. The Montana breeding background, the temperament profiles, the genetic tendencies across generations—that was information I couldn't get from a catalog. It was expertise that lived in a person, not a spreadsheet.
Which meant I was going to have to sit down with him. Alone. Go over bloodlines and stud fees and five-year breeding projections while pretending my pulse wasn't doing something stupid.
I muttered something unprintable into the wood of my desk.
My phone buzzed. Ivy.
"Tell me everything," she said when I picked up. "Wyatt came home looking like a man who'd had a feeling and didn't know what to do about it."
I laughed despite myself. "He looked at the projections."
She gasped. "He did? And?"
"He told me to put together a formal proposal. Wants it by Thursday so Daddy can see it at dinner."
Ivy's squeal nearly took out my eardrum. "Maggie! That's—do you know what that means?"
"It means he's willing to listen. It doesn't mean yes."
"It means the door is open. You've been pushing against that door for two years, and it's finally open."
I leaned back in my chair, letting myself feel it. The warm glow of something that might actually happen. “This wouldn’t have happened without you, Ivy,” I said, hoping she could hear how much it meant to me.
"Maggie." Her voice softened. "You deserve to want things for yourself. Not just for the ranch. For you."
The words landed somewhere I wasn't prepared for. Not in the place that was thinking about horse programs and stallion auctions. In the other place. The one I kept locked down and barricaded and pretended didn't exist.
"I know," I said quietly.
"Do you? Because you're the most capable person I know, and you're also the worst at believing you're allowed to have things just because they make you happy."
I didn't have an answer for that. Mostly because she wasn't just talking about horses anymore, and we both knew it.
"The proposal's coming together," I said, steering us back to safe ground. "I'll need some of your genetics data for the crossover section—how the horse breeding would complement the cattle program instead of competing with it."
"I'll send it tonight." She paused. "Maggie, can I ask you something? And you can tell me to shut up if you want."
"I frequently tell you to shut up. It never works."
"When's the last time you let someone in? Not for the ranch. Not for the family. For you."
The question landed like a stone in still water. "I don't know what you mean."
"I mean..." She chose her words slowly. "I've known you forever. And in all that time, I've never once seen you let a man get close. Not really close. You date occasionally—polite dinners, safe choices, guys who never stick around past the third week because you don't let them. And I've never pushed because it's your business, but I watch you take care of everyone else like it's breathing, and then when it comes to yourself, you just..." she trailed off. "You lock up. Like trusting someone with that part of you is the one thing you can't make yourself do."
My throat went tight.
She wasn't wrong. And she didn't even know the half of it.
She didn't know about Daniel. Junior year, UT Austin, the first man I'd ever loved with my whole chest—the first man I'd given all of myself to without holding anything back. I'd thought that was what love was supposed to look like. All in. No guardrails.
And he'd looked at me across his apartment the night he ended it and said, “You're too much, Maggie. You're just... too much.”
Too much need. Too much intensity. Too much of everything that made me who I am.
I'd driven home to Copper Creek that night and rebuilt every wall I'd ever taken down, and I'd never let another man close enough to confirm what Daniel had already told me: that the full, unfiltered version of Maggie Blackwood was more than anyone wanted to deal with.
