She grins. “Key’s under the mat. Harleigh can show you. Have a good night.”
Once they’re out of sight, I turn to Harleigh. My thumb brushing lightly across her knuckles.
“You want me to go?” I ask quietly.
She doesn’t answer out loud, just shakes her head slightly as she stares down at our hands.
Something in my chest tightens.
I glance back toward the gravel road leading out of the ranch.
Then at her again.
Fuck it.
I pull closer to the barn and park.
Harleigh finally looks over at me.
“Where are these cabins?”
The ranch is quiet at this hour.
Not silent—ranches are never silent—but quieter than it ever is during the day. The wind rustles through the trees, horses shift in their stalls, and the metal gate of the round pen clinks softly against a post.
I reach for the door handle.
“I’ll show you,” I say.
Porter cuts the engine and climbs out on the other side.
The barn lights cast a hazy golden glow across the yard, leaving everything beyond the paddocks in shadow. When he walks around the front of the SUV toward me, my stomach does a little flip.
I start walking before he reaches me.
“This way.”
He falls into step beside me.
We cut around the side of the main barn, where the light fades quickly and the path narrows into packed dirt that winds between it and the academy’s freshly paved parking area.
The night has turned freezing cold, and the icy air helps sober me up. I pull my jacket even closer as we walk, even though the thin fabric doesn’t offer much protection.
Ahead of us, the massive shape of the indoor arena rises out of the darkness.
“That’s the new rodeo school arena,” I explain, pointing toward the long metal building. “They finished it last spring.”
Even in the dark, you can see the scale of it—big sliding doors, tall overhead lights mounted along the roofline, the smell of fresh wood and sand still lingering around the place.
Porter glances toward it, impressed. “It’s huge.”
“Yeah,” I say. “They’ll run winter training in there.”
We continue past it, the path curving along the back side, where another long row of buildings stretches beside the arena.
“And those are the stables for the school,” I add. “It’ll have its own livestock. Bucking horses, calves, steers, and bulls.”
The path bends again, and the lights from the main ranch fade completely behind us.
