She rolled her eyes, but there was no real heat in it. "You're worse than my mother."
"Your mother has excellent instincts. I'll take that as a compliment."
The corner of her mouth twitched. More than I used to get.
The secrecy was gone, too. Not loudly—the Blackwoods didn't make announcements—but the careful distance Maggie used to maintain between us in front of her family had dissolved. She stood closer. Let her hand brush mine when she passed. Didn't freeze when someone caught her looking at me across a room.
The family absorbed it without fanfare. Wyatt gave me a look that was half warning, half grudging respect. Clay just grinned every time he caught us within ten feet of each other, which made Maggie want to murder him, which made Clay grin harder. Hunter said nothing, but I noticed he'd started setting out a fourth coffee cup at the barn in the mornings. Quiet inclusion. The Hunter way.
Owen treated me exactly the same as before our conversation. No special treatment, no awkward adjustments. Louisa was the only one who acknowledged it directly, and she did it with three words when I passed her in the kitchen: "About time, Jack."
Then she handed me a plate of breakfast and walked away.
Work continued, because ranches don't pause for anything. Fort Worth was two weeks out. The auction had been on the calendar since before the hog attack—Maggie's horse program proposal approved, Owen backing her. But the hog situation had pushed everything sideways for a few days, and now they were playing catch-up.
I found Maggie in her office that afternoon—the small room near the tack room she'd claimed as her own, organized chaos with color-coded files and Post-it notes and a whiteboard covered in projections. She was deep in the auction catalog, circling entries and making notes in the margins.
She looked up when I knocked on the doorframe, and her expression softened when she saw it was me.
"Hey." She pushed the catalog toward me. "Come look at this. The Raven Spur stallion is confirmed for Fort Worth. Copper King—fourth generation, perfect conformation, a temperament that makes him ideal for working cattle."
I settled into the chair across from her desk and picked up the catalog. She talked for twenty minutes straight—breeding strategies, bloodline compatibility, the five-year plan she'd been building since she was nineteen.
Not the careful, controlled version of Maggie. The version that forgot to hold back. Who lit up from the inside when she talked about something she loved.
"The numbers work if we're strategic about it," she said, spreading her budget projections across the desk. "The cattle expansion took most of the discretionary funds, but I've restructured the timeline so we can afford a foundation sire and two broodmares in the first year. We won't turn a real profit until year three, but by year five…"
She trailed off, caught herself being enthusiastic, and pulled back slightly. Old habit.
"By year five, what?" I asked.
She met my eyes. "By year five, we'll have the best quarter horse program in the whole country. Better than the Driscoll operation. Maybe better than Raven Spur."
"I believe you."
A charge passed between us—not heat, though that was always there. Quieter than that. Partnership.
"I've been looking at the Driscoll mare's foaling projections," I said. "The one we evaluated on the drive. If we pair her bloodline with Copper King's, the first generation crosses could be exceptional."
Maggie blinked. "You've been researching."
"On my own time." I shrugged. "It's a good program. Worth doing right."
The look she gave me was unguarded in a way that made my chest tight.
"It is," she said quietly. "It really is."
After I left her office, I drove into town. Not far—just to the county assessor's building on the square. I'd been thinking about it since my conversation with Owen, turning it over the way I did with things that mattered.
The inheritance had been sitting in a trust for years, accumulating interest, waiting for something I couldn't name.
I was starting to name it.
The parcels adjacent to Blackwood Ranch weren't many, and most weren't for sale. But there was a section to the northeast—two hundred acres of decent pastureland with creek access, currently held by an elderly couple whose kids had moved to Houston. It wasn't listed, but the assessor's records showed it hadn't been productively worked in three years.
I pulled the plat maps. Studied the topography, the water rights, the access roads. Two hundred acres wasn't a ranch, but it was a start. Close enough to Blackwood that the operations could complement each other. Far enough that it was its own thing.
I didn't mention any of this to Maggie. Not yet. She'd asked me not to rush her, and I meant to honor that. But I also wasn't a man who waited for life to hand him things.
