"Where's your patch, Buckley?"
His grin slips a quarter-inch. "Working on it."
"That's right. Working on it. So, when you talk to a Lyle on this ranch, you say ma'am, or you say Miss Dakota, or you don't talk at all. We clear?"
He goes red under the collar of his cut. Mumbles a "Yes, ma'am."
I nod once and walk Jaeger off without another word.
But it sits with me through the rest of my drills. Not the flirting. I've been fending off bikers since I was fifteen, and I shut him down clean.
What sits with me is the calculation.
Buckley felt safe trying it because Spur isn't on the ranch right now.
Which means Buckley has been watching.
Which in turn means other men have been watching.
Which means whatever Spur thinks he's been hiding for years, the rest of the club has already done the math.
I finish my drills and walk Jaeger out to cool him.
I brush him down at his stall longer than I need to.
He drops his head against my chest while I work the curry comb across his shoulders, and for the first time today, my hands stop wanting to do something with themselves.
"Don't tell anyone I'm a mess, buddy."
Jaeger snorts.
"Yeah. Same."
I leave him with a flake of alfalfa and grab my saddle bag from the rack.
The barn aisle is quiet on the walk to the tack room.
Late afternoon at the compound has a specific kind of quiet to it—the brothers either out on the property or in the main barn, the prospects on whatever Pops has them doing, the women at the main house starting dinner.
The kind of quiet I usually like.
The tack room is empty.
It's been empty for an hour and the empty has a different shape than I noticed walking in.
I open the saddle bag.
My practice gloves are folded on top, where I always keep them. Cuffs out. The bottom of the bag still smells like the leather conditioner Bex makes by hand and gives every barrel racer in Sharp at Christmas.
I’ve known her for ages, and the fact I’m in the rodeo circuit, and she’s one of the best farriers around, just pulls us together even more.
There's a piece of paper on top of the gloves.
Folded in half. Notebook paper. The kind torn from a spiral with the perforated edge still on it, white feathered fringe along the side.
I don't move for a second.
Then I unfold it.
