Unbridled

Chapter 1: Homecoming Dust

The highway into Copper Creek, Montana, smelled like sage and diesel and the particular brand of failure that clings to a woman driving twelve hours in yesterday's mascara.

Cassidy Monroe gripped the steering wheel of her leased Audi—a car that had no business on a gravel road and would be repossessed inside of ninety days if she didn't figure out her finances—and watched the familiar silhouette of the Bitterroot Range sharpen against the late afternoon sky. She'd grown up under those mountains. She'd spent eighteen years desperate to escape them. And now, at thirty-one, she was crawling back with a suitcase full of wrinkled blazers and a phone she'd turned off somewhere around Billings because the notifications had started making her physically ill.

The video had 2.3 million views the last time she'd checked. Two point three million people had watched Cassidy Monroe, rising star of Rocky Mountain Sports Network, lose her composure on live television during a post-game interview with the Broncos' defensive coordinator. She hadn't yelled. She hadn't thrown anything. She'd simply frozen—mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-breath—and the silence had stretched for eleven seconds before she'd pulled her earpiece out and walked off set. Eleven seconds of dead air. An eternity in broadcast.

The internet had done what the internet does. Someone auto-tuned her silence into a dance remix. Someone else spliced it with footage of fainting goats. Her agent had called it a "temporary optics challenge." Her producer had called it career suicide. Her therapist had called it a panic attack, which was the only honest assessment anyone had offered.

She'd resigned before they could fire her, packed her apartment in Denver in two frantic days, and pointed her car north toward the only place left that might take her without requiring an explanation.

The ranch gate appeared around the final bend—two weathered timber posts connected by an iron arch that read MCBRIDE CATTLE CO. in letters that had been losing their paint since before Cassidy was born. Her father had always meant to repaint them. Her father had meant to do a lot of things before the stroke felled him like a pine tree eighteen months ago, leaving him in a care facility in Missoula where he could name every cow he'd ever owned but couldn't remember how to button his shirt.

Cassidy turned under the arch and followed the dirt road toward the cluster of buildings she knew by heart: the main house, white clapboard with a green tin roof; the barn, massive and red and slightly listing to the east; the bunkhouse; the equipment shed; the round pen where she'd learned to ride before she could read. Everything looked smaller than she remembered and more tired, as if the ranch itself had aged in her absence.

A border collie she didn't recognize materialized from nowhere and ran alongside her car, barking with the manic enthusiasm of a dog who viewed every vehicle as a personal challenge. Cassidy parked beside her brother's mud-caked F-350 and sat for a moment, engine ticking, watching dust settle on her windshield.

Her phone was still off. She left it that way.

The screen door of the main house banged open, and Tucker McBride stepped onto the porch. Her brother was thirty-five but looked forty-five—sun-carved lines around his eyes, a jaw that hadn't seen a razor in days, shoulders that carried the particular tension of a man holding something together by force of will alone. He was wiping his hands on a rag that was dirtier than whatever he'd been cleaning.

"Well," he said. "Look what the wind blew in."

"Hi, Tuck."

He came down the steps and opened her car door, and the smell of home hit her—hay and horse and wood smoke and the mineral tang of the creek that ran behind the barn. She stood up and he pulled her into a hug that was brief and hard and said everything his face wouldn't.

"You look like hell," he said into her hair.

"Thank you. That's very kind."

He released her and held her at arm's length, studying her with the same critical eye he used to assess livestock. "You eat today?"

"I had a gas station burrito in Great Falls."

"Jesus Christ, Cass."

"It had green chile in it. I'm practically thriving."

He didn't laugh, but the corner of his mouth moved. "Come inside. I've got stew on. You can tell me whatever version of the story you're ready to tell, and I won't push for more."

It was, she thought, the most generous thing anyone had said to her in weeks.

The house was the same and different. Same scarred pine floors, same stone fireplace, same kitchen with the yellow curtains their mother had hung before she'd died when Cassidy was twelve. But their father's absence was everywhere—in the empty recliner, the silent radio that used to play country stations from dawn to dark, the stack of unopened mail on the counter that suggested Tucker was drowning in paperwork he didn't know how to handle.

She sat at the kitchen table while Tucker ladled stew into bowls. The border collie—Pepper, Tucker told her, a rescue from a neighboring ranch—pressed against her leg and sighed with the contentment of a creature who'd found a new person to adore.

"How's Dad?" she asked.

"Same. Good days and bad days. More bad lately." Tucker set a bowl in front of her. "He asked about you last Tuesday. Called you by Mom's name, but he meant you."

Cassidy's throat tightened. She ate a spoonful of stew to avoid speaking.

"Ranch?" she asked after a moment.

Tucker sat across from her and rubbed his face with both hands. "Honest answer?"

"Please."

"We're about eight months from losing it. Maybe six if the winter's bad."

The stew turned to cement in her stomach. "Tuck."

"Dad leveraged everything before the stroke. I didn't know how bad it was until I started going through the books. We've got a balloon payment on the second mortgage due in October, and the operating account is—" He stopped. Breathed. "It's thin, Cass. Real thin."

"What's the plan?"

"Regional livestock auction in September. If I can get our yearlings and the horse string in shape, we can clear enough to cover the payment and buy another year. Maybe two, if prices hold." He paused. "I hired a horse trainer. Outside guy. He's been here three weeks, working the string."

"Can we afford a horse trainer?"

"Can't afford not to have one. Those horses are worth twice what the cattle will bring, but only if they're finished right. This guy's good. Best I've ever seen with green stock."

Cassidy nodded, too tired to probe further. The weight of everything—her career, her father, the ranch—pressed down on her like a physical thing, and she wanted nothing more than to crawl into her childhood bed and sleep for a geological era.

"Your room's the same," Tucker said, reading her face. "Sheets are clean. I changed them when you called from Billings."

"You didn't have to—"

"Cass." His voice was gentle in a way that almost undid her. "Go to bed. We'll figure everything out tomorrow."

She climbed the stairs with legs that felt borrowed from someone else and pushed open the door to her old room. Twin bed, faded quilt with the flying geese pattern, a shelf of rodeo trophies from her barrel racing days, a corkboard still pinned with photos of friends she'd lost touch with and horses she'd loved. The window faced east, toward the barn and the round pen and the mountains beyond.

She didn't unpack. She kicked off her boots, fell onto the bed fully clothed, and was asleep before the light finished fading from the sky.

---

She woke to the sound of hoofbeats.

Not the lazy clip of a horse being led to pasture—this was rhythmic, controlled, the cadence of a horse being worked in a circle by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Cassidy lay still for a moment, disoriented by the geometry of her childhood ceiling, then rolled over and looked out the window.

The round pen was lit by the early morning sun, gold and sharp, and inside it a man was working a blue roan mare on a longe line. He stood at the center of the pen with the stillness of a fence post, his body angled in a way that directed the mare's movement without apparent effort. He wore a battered hat, a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and jeans that had been washed to the color of smoke. The line in his hand was an extension of his arm—alive, communicating, responsive to shifts so subtle Cassidy couldn't see them from this distance.

The mare moved beautifully. Collected, balanced, her transitions smooth as water. Whatever this man was doing, the horse trusted him completely.

Cassidy watched for a full minute before the man turned his head, just slightly, and the angle of his jaw caught the light, and her entire body went cold.

No.

She pressed her forehead against the glass.

No, no, no.

Nash Kincaid.

The name detonated in her chest like a grenade she'd been carrying for four years. Nash Kincaid, Tucker's college rodeo teammate. Nash Kincaid, who'd shown up at Tucker's wedding looking like something carved from hardwood and silence. Nash Kincaid, who'd found her alone behind the reception hall at midnight, both of them three whiskeys past good judgment, and kissed her against a cottonwood tree with a deliberateness that had ruined her for every man who came after.

One kiss. One devastating, world-altering kiss that had tasted like bourbon and want, his hands in her hair, his body pinning hers to the bark, his mouth moving against hers like he was trying to memorize her. And then he'd pulled back, said "I can't," and disappeared from her life completely. No call. No explanation. No forwarding address. Just a void where a man had been, and the phantom pressure of his mouth on hers that she could still feel in weak moments.

He was the horse trainer. Tucker's outside guy. The best he'd ever seen with green stock.

Of course he was.

Cassidy stood up, caught her reflection in the dresser mirror—yesterday's clothes, pillow-creased face, hair that looked like it had been styled by a tornado—and made a sound that was half laugh, half sob.

"You've got to be kidding me," she said to the empty room.

The room, wisely, did not respond.