"You did that on purpose," she breathed.
"Caught you? Yeah, I did."
Her eyes dropped to my mouth.
Then I picked up the bucket at my feet and dumped it over her head.
Her screech echoed across the entire ranch. She sputtered, wiped her eyes, and fixed me with a look of pure, delighted outrage.
"You—you?—"
"Sorry." I grinned, not sorry at all. "Hand slipped."
"I am going todestroyyou,” she said through clenched teeth, a fire in her eyes that made me feel alive.
"You can try."
The look she gave me promised retribution. The smile underneath it promised something else entirely.
Hunter had been standing off to the side through all of this, arms crossed, too cool for water fights. Until Stephanie snuck up behind him and got him square in the back with the hose.
His roar of indignation—betrayed, outraged, absolutely soaked—set everyone laughing so hard that work stopped completely.
"That's it," he announced, advancing toward Stephanie with murder in his eyes. "You're going in the tank."
Stephanie's shriek as Hunter chased her across the pasture was the soundtrack to the best afternoon I'd had in years. Liam took off after them, yelling something about nobody putting his girlfriend in a tank, and the three of them crashed into a pile near the fence line that devolved into more splashing and threats.
The chaos wound down slowly, reluctantly. Ranch hands drifted back to work, wringing out shirt hems and shaking water from their hats. Liam hauled Stephanie up onto the hay bales stacked near the barn, both of them collapsing flat on their backs to dry in the sun like a pair of lazy cats. Ivy murmured something to Wyatt that I didn't catch, and the two of them disappeared into the barn with the kind of casual stealth that fooled exactly nobody.
Hunter stood in the middle of the yard, surveying the carnage—overturned buckets, a hose still running, soaked saddle blankets draped over things they shouldn't have been draped over—and spread his arms wide.
"Cool. Great. I'll just handle all of this myself then."
Nobody answered him.
Maggie was leaning against the fence rail, hair dripping, shirt plastered to her body. She looked wrecked in the best possible way—flushed and bright-eyed and grinning like someone who'd remembered what fun felt like. Her chest was still heaving from the fight, and when she caught my eye, the grin shifted into something else.
Something that hit me right in the sternum.
She tilted her head toward the cabin path. Just slightly. Just enough.
I closed the distance between us. My own breath was still coming fast, heart still hammering, and not all of it was from the water fight. There was an energy vibrating between us—electric, urgent, the kind of charge that made the air feel thin.
"Your ankle—" I started.
"Don't care."
"Maggie."
"Don't care, Jack."
We made it about four steps down the path before I decided we weren't moving fast enough. I ducked, caught her around the thighs, and hauled her up over my shoulder in one smooth motion.
Maggie yelped. "Jack! What are you?—"
"Saving your ankle."
"My ankle isfine.”
