We stayed like that for a second. The set moved around us—crew repositioning, someone adjusting a light, the second AD talking into her headset.
"Heel down," I said.
"Heel down," she agreed.
I squeezed her knee once and stepped back.
She gathered her reins. Rolled her shoulders. Looked out at the course—the fence post, the saddlebag hanging from it, the line she'd run enough times her body knew it without her brain.
She clicked her tongue.
Bishop went.
She went from standing to a full gallop in four strides, the duster flaring out behind her, the hat somehow staying exactly where it was, and she looked like she'd been doing this her whole life. Because she had been, now—months of early mornings and cold paddocks and Bishop teaching her the language of it, all of it visible in the way she moved with him instead of against him. He was more her horse now than mine.
That felt right too.
The fence post came up fast. Her right hand stayed on the pommel. Her left arm dropped, loose and certain.
She didn't look at the post.
She leaned out.
The saddlebag came off clean.
Ellis said, from behind the monitor: "That's why we call her One-Take Wilder."
I grinned…proud, because my girl's star was rising.
Daniela brought Bishop around in a wide arc and came back toward me at a trot, the saddlebag in her hand, her face smug as hell but trying not to crow about it immediately.
She was losing the fight.
"Well?" she said.
"Adequate," I said.
She pointed at me.
"Very adequate," I said.
"Sawyer Holt, I will get off this horse?—"
"You were perfect," I said. "You were absolutely perfect."
The smile broke through completely. The real one, full and unguarded, the one that had nothing to do with Daphne Wilder and everything to do with the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
She looked down at me from Bishop's back—hat low, duster settling, the woman who'd shown up at craft services in New Mexico in a wool costume she was dying in and thrown her armsaround my neck like she'd been looking for something solid to hold onto.
She'd found it.
So had I.
"Again?" she said.
"Again," I said. "They need another angle, but that was great. Just want options…now do it perfectly again.”
She rolled her eyes and wheeled Bishop back toward the start mark, muttering in Spanish under her breath, and I stood there in the Hill Country sun and watched her go and felt something so simple and complete that I didn't have a word for it.
