Page 18 of The Reckless Rookie

That’s the one I can’t argue with. Animals don’t read press. Bonita, who has bitten two of my hands and thrown a third, drifts to the rail every single time he crosses the yard. She’s a few months from foaling and meaner than ever and she picks him, the restless mare choosing the restless man, and I stand here reading it, and I dislike what it tells me.

It tells me the horse sees the same thing I see. And the horse has better instincts than I do about exactly nothing except this.

It isn’t only the horse that’s clocked it. Sierra calls on a Sunday. She’s in law school, spent last spring doing clinic hours on the program’s paperwork, and we stayed friends after, and she’s dating one of the Stampede besides, a big warm one named Mack.

Which is how I found out, earlier that season, that the county had dropped one of Mack’s own teammates on my doorstep.

“How’s your criminal?” she says, because she thinks it’s the best joke in Texas.

“He’s a placement, Sierra.”

“He’s a placement,” she says back, and something in how she hands it over tells me she caught a note in my voice I didn’t mean to leave in it. She doesn’t push. That’s why I like her.

I have rules.

I don’t cross the line with the men in my program. Never, not once in eight years, not the charming ones or the sad ones or the ones who looked at me like I was the first person who’d seen them straight. The line is the whole reason the program works. It’s the reason Diaz sends me his hardest cases and the bench trusts me with men they can’t trust anywhere else. The day I blur it is the day I’m just a woman with a ranch and a terrible decision, and every man who ever passed through here becomes a question mark instead of a success.

The line is not negotiable. I built my life on the line.

So that I’m standing in a tack room watching a placement reset fence posts like there is something worth watching: that’s a problem. Not his. Mine.

I know exactly how much a problem like this can cost.

The last one taught me.

I don’t think about it past those four words. I’ve gotten good at that, at letting the door open half an inch and shutting it before anything comes through. There was a placement, before, that I believed in. High-profile, like this one. I read him right in every way but the one that mattered, and it went the way it went, and I nearly lost everything I’d built proving I could tell a good man from a good story.

I learned. I don’t make that mistake twice.

I put my eyes back on the work and remind myself that O’Sullivan is not a man. He’s six months. Six months and a headline and a felony hanging over both of us, and the smartest thing I can do is remember the horse is wrong.

The horse is not wrong. But it’s the smartest thing I can do to pretend. He catches me watching, once.

I don’t look away, because looking away is admitting there was something to look away from. I hold it, the way I’d hold any man’s eye, and he holds it back, and then he does what I keep not being ready for. He reads me.

“Long day for you too,” he says. Not a question. He’s looking at me the way I look at everybody else, seeing underneath, and what he sees is that I’m tired in a way that isn’t about the work.

“Every day’s long.”

“Sure.” He wipes his hands on a rag that isn’t helping. “But you carry the light ones different. Today you’ve been carrying it in your shoulders.”

And he’s right, is the problem. My mother called this morning. Sebastian’s name came up in a way I’m not ready to deal with. And I’ve spent the whole day with it sitting in my shoulders exactly like he said, and no one else on this ranch noticed, and no one is supposed to, because I am the one who reads the room, not the one the room reads.

He turns to return the rag, and for once neither of us steps away quickly enough. He is close enough that I can smell sun, soap, and the dirt worked into his shirt. Close enough that I have to tip my chin to hold his eyes.

His fingers stay around one end of the rag while mine close over the other.

“Careful,” I say.

His gaze drops to my mouth and comes back. “I am.”

He lets go first. The restraint is deliberate, and it follows me long after he walks toward the bunkhouse.

“Get your rest, O’Sullivan,” I say. “Post-holes tomorrow.”

He almost smiles. It’s a good almost-smile. That’s a problem too.

It’s the wine that does it. I’d like to blame something more interesting.