Chapter one
Sloane
Ican't remember the last time I cried. I'm close now, sitting in the back of a rideshare, watching Texas dirt kick up behind the tires. My windpipe is doing that thing where it narrows and burns, and I have to breathe through my nose to keep from breaking. Ridiculous. I'm thirty-eight years old. Vice president of operations. I don't cry in strangers’ cars.
The driver takes a turn too fast, and my stomach lurches. I grip the door handle and count my breaths. Four in. Hold. Four out. It doesn't help. Nothing helps except work. They took that away from me, swapping it for two weeks at some ranch in the middle of nowhere because I made the mistake of collapsing in front of witnesses. If I'd just made it to the bathroom, if I'd just held on ten more minutes, I'd be in Seattle right now closing the Harmon deal instead of staring at mesquite trees and trying not to scream.
The car slows. A wooden sign appears through the dust:Wild Vista Ranch. Hand-carved letters, faded paint. My chest goes tight.
"This the place?" The driver's first words in forty minutes.
"Yes." My voice is steady. Professional. The same voice I used when I told the paramedics I was fine, when I assured my CEO I just needed water, when I lied to everyone including myself about the fact that my body had finally given up on me.
He parks near the main lodge. I settle up through the app and climb out. The heat hits me first, dry and absolute, the kind of heat that doesn't apologize. Then the smell: dust and sage and something else, something I don't have a name for but recognize in my bones.
I've been here before.
The thought arrives with the force of a core memory. Spring break seventeen years ago, three days that I've spent nearly two decades trying not to think about. I press my hand to my chest and force myself to breathe. It's just a ranch. Just a place whose name I didn’t recognize. Coincidence that they sent me here. Nothing more.
The gravel bites at my suitcase, resisting until I give it a frustrated tug as the rideshare pulls away. I stand there alone as the engine noise dies out, a grit in the air and a cold, sinking feeling in my gut that this trip is going to cost me more than I’m ready to pay.
The lodge sits fifty yards ahead. It’s stone and timber, wide porch, exactly like I remember except for solar panels on the roof now. I start walking. My flats sink into the gravel with every step, and I'm hyper-aware of how wrong I look here. My jeans are new, and I’m wearing a cardigan. I look like I'm headed to brunch, not a ranch.
Movement catches my eye. To my left, there's a round pen. A horse is inside, anxious and untamed by the looks of it, dancing sideways with its ears pinned. And a man.
I stop walking.
He works the horse with a lead rope, waiting for it to settle. He’s tall and broad-shouldered. Sun-weathered by years, notvacations. He's wearing a faded gray T-shirt and jeans that have seen actual work, boots dusty and broken in. His touch is light and patient as he leans in like he’s whispering to the horse. He isn't fighting for control; he's just present, radiating the kind of stillness that says he’s exactly where he wants to be.
The horse drops its head, completely surrendered to him, and I realize I’m holding my breath. It’s been a lifetime since I felt this kind of pull, this magnetic, terrifying draw. He stops his whispering, his hand lingering one last time on the horse's coat, and then his gaze finds me. The world shrinks until it’s just the two of us and the heavy, electric silence of the ranch.
The world stops.
Not actually. I know that. But my heart doesn’t. My breath doesn’t. Everything in me goes still and silent and screaming all at once because it's him.
He’s older with lines around his eyes that weren't there before. Silver threads through his hair at the temples. But it’s unmistakably, impossibly him.
He goes still, too. The lead rope goes slack in his hand. He's staring at me across forty feet of ranch yard and seventeen years of silence, and I watch recognition hit him the same way it just hit me, like a freight train with no brakes.
Then he calls out my name.
"Sloane."
Not a question but a statement. Like he's been holding it in his mouth for nearly two decades, waiting for permission to say it out loud.
I can't breathe. Can't think. Can't do anything except stand there with my ridiculous flats and my heart trying to break through my ribs.
"Cash?" It comes out broken. Barely a whisper.
He ties the horse to a post and comes toward me, leaving the pen. The horse is forgotten, his eyes never leavingmine, and there's something in his gaze that's both familiar and devastating. Recognition. Heat. And underneath it all, something that looks dangerously like relief.
"You came back." His voice is lower than I remember. Rougher. Like he's spent seventeen years not saying the things he wanted to say and now doesn't know where to start.
I shake my head. Words stick in my throat. "I didn't know. When they sent me here, I didn't—" I can't finish. Can't explain that I've spent years not thinking about him, which is just another way of saying I've thought about nothing else.
He's closer now. Ten feet. Then five. Then near enough that I see the way his T-shirt pulls across his shoulders, the calluses on his hands, the pulse beating at the base of his throat. Close enough that I have to tilt my head back to meet his gaze.
He's taller than I remember. Or maybe I've just gotten smaller in my head, compressed under the weight of being someone I'm not.
