Chapter One
Layla
I HAD THE BEST JOBin Texas and I was not being modest. Some people might disagree, but those people had probably never been paid to crouch in a field of Indian paintbrush on a Monday morning in June and photograph the Hill Country looking exactly the way the Hill Country always looked, which was so gorgeous it barely needed a photographer. Wild Vista Ranch hired me to capture it anyway: sunrises, trail rides, baby calves, wide-open skies over the limestone ridge. I pointed my camera at all of it, and it sold dude ranch vacations to people in cubicles. Two years of this, and I still couldn’t believe they gave me a paycheck.
The new rotation of guests had arrived yesterday, and eight of them were already on horseback, following Jake up the meadow trail in a single-file line through the wildflowers. You could always spot a Monday ride. Everybody sat too straight and held the reins with the focused determination of people who were not yet sure the horse was on their side. By Wednesdaythey’d be loose and grinning. By Saturday they’d be weepy at checkout and swearing they were coming back. I’d seen the cycle enough times to call it down to the Thursday evening where at least one person would tear up on the sunset ride and blame it on cedar pollen.
I waited for the woman in the middle to stop twisting around to take phone photos of her husband. Her horse had opinions about this, and they were drifting left. Then the line straightened and the light caught the ridge. I pressed the shutter. The frame held eight riders against that wide blue Hill Country sky, the bluebonnets and black-eyed Susans soft in the foreground. I checked the frame and smiled. Lucinda would have this one on the website by lunch.
I stood up, brushed the pollen off both knees of my jeans — occupational hazard — and pushed my floral scarf back up into my hair, where it had been staging a slow escape down my forehead all morning. The scarf was a lost cause. My hair was thick and wavy and auburn and it treated headbands as suggestions. I’d been fighting this particular battle since high school and the hair was winning. I slung my camera strap across my body and walked toward the Lodge with the sun already warm on my freckled shoulders and the cicadas tuning up in the live oaks. I’d grown up on a cattle ranch in this same stretch of Hill Country, and a Texas summer morning still felt the way home was supposed to feel.
The heat was already building, same as every June morning when the sun cleared the ridge and the Hill Country turned into a skillet. It was dry and blazing, a baking heat that pressed the dust into the air and made the live oaks shimmer at their edges. I’d slathered on sunscreen at six-thirty and would need another coat by noon. You didn’t grow up on a Texas ranch without learning that lesson early.
The Lodge dining hall was full when I walked in, guests loading up plates at the buffet, staff scattered at the long tables. The whole place smelled of bacon and strong coffee and whatever Marisol had done to the breakfast potatoes that made grown adults go back for thirds. I grabbed a plate, poured my coffee, and slid into the open seat across from Lucinda and Carl. Lucinda was already gesturing with a biscuit in one hand and her reading glasses in the other, which meant she was either excited or scheming. With Lucinda, those were usually the same thing.
“This week is going to be a big one,” she said, pointing the biscuit at me for emphasis. Carl took a calm sip of his coffee and gave me the look he always gave me when Lucinda was revving up, which was the look of a man who had been happily married for twenty-five years and knew when to just let her go. “Wade Bishop is coming in this morning for the week’s entertainment residency. Him and his band, they’ll do shows Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.”
I set my coffee mug down very carefully.
Wade Bishop. Wade Bishop was coming here.
Three years ago, the man had been a college junior in a small Texas town who played guitar at open mics and wrote songs in his dorm room. Then he’d auditioned for SoundStage, walked onto that stage with an acoustic guitar and a raw ballad that stripped the finish off every polished act that came before him, and forty million people watched him win the finale. His audition clip went viral overnight. A record deal followed, then a platinum debut album. The press started calling him “The Next Blake Shelton.” Suddenly Wade Bishop was everywhere — magazine covers, sold-out tours, country radio on heavy rotation, and the devoted attention of approximately every woman in America between the ages of eighteen and fifty.
I was one of them. I’d watched his SoundStage audition the night it aired, sitting on my bed in the employee cabin with mylaptop propped on my knees, and I had been a lost cause ever since. Three years of following his career, streaming his albums on repeat during late-night editing sessions, watching concert footage and interviews and behind-the-scenes clips when I should have been sleeping. I knew his hometown, his record label, the name of the song that made him famous, and the fact that his sophomore album had gone in a direction his fans were divided on. I knew all of this because millions of other women knew it too. The man was a superstar, and following his career was a perfectly normal thing to do. What was less normal was the amount of time I spent doing it, and the folder of saved concert photos on my phone that I would rather set on fire than show to another living human.
And now he was coming here. To my ranch. Where I would be photographing him from arm’s length while pretending to be a calm, professional person.
“Layla, you’ll be covering all his performances and rehearsals for the website and socials,” Lucinda continued. She was cheerful and apparently oblivious to the fact that my internal temperature had just spiked higher than the weather outside. “Wednesday and Friday nights at the Saloon, Saturday night at the Pavilion. Plus whatever daytime content you can get of him and the band with the guests.”
“Sounds great,” I said, with a smile I was proud of. The smile of a woman who had a job to do and intended to do it well, and who was not going to mention the saved photo folder or the concert clip she’d rewatched in bed last Tuesday night with a bowl of cereal balanced on her stomach.
Carl reached for the bacon. “Good guy. I booked him through his manager. He’s trying to get back to his roots a little, play some smaller venues. Should be a great fit for the ranch.”
I nodded, drank my coffee, and redirected my brain toward the eighteen professional tasks on my list for the day. Thebrain cooperated for about four seconds before informing me that Wade Bishop was going to be on this property in a matter of hours and I was wearing my lavender blouse with the little embroidered flowers and my oldest brown boots. This was perfectly fine for a normal Monday of photographing horses. It was not what I would have chosen for the day I met the man whose face had been on the cover of Country Music Monthly twice in the past year.
I cleared my plate, topped off my coffee, and headed outside. Most of the guests had scattered after breakfast. The trail ride group was out on the meadow, a handful of couples had claimed lounge chairs at the pool, and a small group had signed up for the morning nature walk along the river. The ranch hummed with its usual Monday rhythm, easy and familiar, while the dry heat pressed down from a sky so blue it looked painted. A hot breeze carried the smell of sage and dust across the yard and pushed my scarf sideways again. I pinned it down with one hand and cut through the yard toward the garden to shoot the roses.
I was checking my camera settings in the shade of a live oak when I heard the engine.
A black truck pulling a loaded gear trailer came around the bend and rolled up the main drive, kicking dust into the bright air. A second truck followed. I raised my camera and started shooting, because this was my job and photographing arrivals was part of the weekly content plan and my pulse spiking twenty beats per minute was my own private business.
The first truck parked near the Saloon and the doors opened. Four men climbed out into the blazing sunshine. They stretched and blinked with the stiff relief of people who’d been on the road since dawn. I stayed near the fence line, working the lens.
The first one out moved fast, tall and lean with dark hair curling past his ears, grabbing a guitar case and an amp in the same trip. He tossed a comment over his shoulder and the manbehind him shook his head with a slow grin underneath his ball cap. A third guy went straight for the drum cases, stocky and sun-browned, squinting against the glare without comment. From the second truck, a fair-haired man in a plaid short-sleeve was unloading guitar cases, whistling, looking perfectly content to be doing manual labor in hundred-degree heat.
Then Wade Bishop stepped out of the second truck, and every thought in my head went white.
The camera kept me steady. That was its gift. It put a frame between me and the world, and inside that frame I could be composed and in control even when everything outside it was falling apart. I took the shot and let my photographer’s eye do what it was trained to do.
He was taller than he looked on screen, and broader, and more real. People always are when you’ve spent three years watching them through a TV and they suddenly exist in three dimensions ten yards from where you’re standing. He had sandy blonde hair under a cream-colored cowboy hat, pushed back enough to show tanned skin, blue eyes, and a stubbled jaw. He wore a white t-shirt, jeans, and broken-in boots, and he moved with an ease that said he was comfortable in his body and on this earth. He grinned when the dark-haired guitarist called over to him and those dimples appeared — the same dimples that had launched a thousand fan accounts — and my stomach dropped straight through the soles of my boots.
His voice carried across the yard, and I wasn’t ready for it. It was deep and unhurried, with a natural rough edge at the bottom that recordings could never fully capture. It rolled across the hot dusty air between us and I felt it land low in my belly, a slow pull of heat that spread through my hips and down my thighs. My skin prickled under the thin cotton of my blouse. I pressed the shutter and got a beautiful frame of him lifting an amp from the truck bed, bare forearms flexing, white cottonpulling across his broad chest, and I remembered to breathe somewhere around the second shot.
Two women from the pool area had wandered over in their coverups and sandals, and I watched one of them grab the other’s arm. I couldn’t hear what she said from this distance, but the body language told the whole story: wide eyes, an urgent whisper, a phone coming out. They recognized him. Of course they did. You couldn’t walk through a grocery store checkout without seeing his face on a magazine. A cluster of guests near the Lodge porch had paused to watch, murmuring and pointing. A teenage girl was tugging her mother’s sleeve with the barely contained excitement of someone who was about to scream and was trying very hard not to.
I was a professional. I was a functional adult. I was going to survive this week, or at the very least most of it.
Carl and Lucinda came out to welcome them, and the next ten minutes were handshakes and introductions and Lucinda offering sweet tea before anyone had finished saying hello. I shot it all from a comfortable distance, catching the easy way Carl shook Wade’s hand, Lucinda already showing the dark-haired guitarist the Saloon stage through the window, the quiet bassist asking Carl a question while the drummer hauled equipment past them with a nod.
