Page 14 of May's Cowboy Roman
I watched two handlers unload a large horse that danced sideways on the ramp, its ears pinned, its nostrils wide. One handler yanked the lead. The other slapped its hindquarters. The gelding scrambled down and nearly took both men with it.
I wrote down all of the details… time… description… behavior.
Nobody came to check on the horse. It stood tied to the fence rail for forty minutes, shifting weight, his head low, the rope too short to let him get very far.
Then Roman appeared. He came from behind the stock barn, his hat pulled low and didn’t seem to be in any hurry. He didn't acknowledge the handlers. Didn't look toward the parking lot. Just walked to the gelding, loosened the tie, and stood next to it until the animal's breathing slowed.
I watched him the way I'd been watching him since the start. Like he was the center of a story he didn't want told. The difference now was that I understood why.
He hadn't been asking me to stop because he didn't want me to write about him. He'd been asking me to stop because he was already inside whatever was wrong here. And whatever was wrong here was bigger than three horses with documentation gaps.
I closed the journal slowly. My fingers were unsteady against the leather, and that surprised me. I'd worked harder stories than this. I'd been threatened by better-positioned people than Roman Maddox. None of them had ever made my hands do this.
I flexed my fingers. Set them on my thigh. Forced them still.
Across the lot, Roman ran his hand once down the buckskin's neck. The horse leaned into him. The handlers had moved off, their conversation petering out as they realized they were being watched without being looked at.
I'd come here to write a fluff piece about the opening of the rodeo. Five pages on community pride and a debut event. That assignment was somewhere in my rearview now, along with my objectivity and my plan to wrap everything up by Memorial Day weekend.
I wasn't going to stop, I couldn’t. But I was starting to wonder, watching Roman with his hand on a horse no one else had bothered to settle, what stopping would have cost me. What it would cost him if I didn't.
I found him at the far end of the holding pens, right where I knew he'd be. That was the thing I'd noticed over the last three days. Roman Maddox kept to a routine as fixed as the fence line itself. Late afternoon, after the other handlers cleared out, he worked alone. No audience, no oversight, no one close enough to ask questions. I'd timed it twice without meaning to. The third time, I admitted to myself that I was timing it on purpose.
I pushed through the side gate and walked the length of the fence until I reached him.
He stood with his back to me, both hands braced on the top rail, watching the buckskin gelding move in slow circles inside the pen. The horse had settled a little. His head was higher, his ears tracking rather than pinned. Roman had done that using whatever quiet language he spoke that horses understood better than people.
“I need to talk to you.”
He didn't turn around. “I'm busy.”
“You've been busy every time I've come near you. It hasn't stopped me yet.”
He turned then. His eyes moved over me once—flat, measuring—and came to rest on my face with attention that made it hard to hold still.
“What do you want, Rachel?”
Not Miss Grable. Not a deflection dressed up as a question. My name, plain and direct, and something about the way he said it landed lower than I expected.
I pulled my journal from my bag and opened it to the page I'd marked. “I've got three horses from the same northern supplier showing identical behavioral markers. A disconnected business number. Missing vet clearances on two of the new arrivals. And a logistics coordinator who shuts down every time I mention documentation.” I looked up at him. “You knew all of this before I got here.”
His jaw tightened. The scar pulled at the corner. “I know horses.”
“You know what's wrong with them. Where they came from. Why they're presenting the way they are.” I stepped closer, close enough that I could see the dust on his collar, the tiredness he kept pressed behind his eyes. “You also know that somebody signed off on these animals entering the rodeo lineup and that whoever did it either didn't look hard enough or didn't care.”
“You don't know what you're talking about.”
“Then tell me what I'm getting wrong.”
Silence. The buckskin moved behind him, hooves soft in the dirt.
“Roman.” I kept my voice level. “I'm not printing something I can't support. I'm not here to burn this town down. But three horses came in rough, and if one of them goes into that arena on Saturday and somebody gets hurt?—”
“I'm handling it.”
“You're handling the horses. Who's handling the supplier?” I held his gaze. “Who's handling the paperwork that doesn't exist? Who's handling the fact that Slade is five horses short of a lineup with a rodeo opening right around the corner?”
For half a second, his guard slipped. “Drop it.” His voice came out low. Almost quiet enough to be a request.
