Page 56 of Wild Sanctuary

“Two hundred.” Another voice from another stranger.

“Two-fifty.”

The bids climb in easy increments, the crowd enjoying themselves, nothing charged about it. Just people opening their wallets for a good cause, and I find myself starting to relax. Maybe this won’t be so bad. Maybe I’ll get a nice dinner at the Blackstone Inn with some perfectly pleasant rancher and we’ll talk about cattle and the weather and I’ll go back to my cabin and⁠—

“Eight hundred dollars.”

The tent goes quiet.

Not the gradual trailing-off kind of quiet. The sharp, sudden kind—like a needle dragged across a record. Every head in the crowd turns toward the voice, and I helplessly follow their gaze.

He’s standing near the center of the tent, half a head above the people around him. Dark hair and darker eyes with a jawline that could cut glass and a smile that screams old money. He’s wearing a sports coat over a button-down shirt and no hat in sight. The only man in the room who looks like he’d be more comfortable in a boardroom than in a barn.

I don’t know him. But something about his face snags at the back of my brain, and I can’t place it until someone at the table nearest the stage mutters, just loud enough for me to hear: “Holden Blackwood’s biddin’ now.”

The ground shifts beneath my feet.

Blackwood.

The name hits me like a physical blow, and suddenly I can see it—the echo of his father in the line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders. The same family. The same smile. The one I watched from across an auction house while my father’s land changed hands.

And now his son is standing in a tent full of twinkling lights, bidding on me like I’m something that can be owned.

“Eight hundred from Mr. Blackwood,” Shelby announces. “Do I hear eight-fifty?”

A tentative hand goes up near the middle. “Eight-fifty.”

Holden doesn’t even look at them. “A thousand.”

The hand drops and no one else budges. He just topped Colt’s winning bid without flinching, and the casual bidders who were having fun with this five minutes ago have scattered into the wind.

Holden catches my eye and smiles charmingly. The kind of smile that’s been practiced in mirrors and deployed on hundreds of women who probably found it devastating. I feel nothing but the cold crawl of nausea up the back of my throat.

“Do I hear eleven hundred?” Shelby tries, but the silence is absolute.

My nails bite into the felt of the hat brim. The stage lights are too hot and the tent is too small and a Blackwood is buying my time with the same ease his father bought my birthright.

I want off this stage.

I want to be anywhere else.

“Going once.” Shelby’s voice reaches my ears as though from a distance while I stare straight ahead. My eyes are fixed on a point above the crowd where the string lights disappear into the branches of an apple tree as I tell myself to breathe.

It’s fine.

“Going twice.”

It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fi⁠—

“Fifteen hundred.”

The words come from the back of the tent. Low and steady, spoken with the kind of quiet authority that doesn’t need volume to fill every inch of the space.

I know the voice before my eyes begin to search for the face.

Wyatt.

He’s moved from the tent pole where I last saw him with Shelby. He’s standing near the back now, alone with his shoulders squared and his hat low.