I'll thank you for the assistance at the contest, Mr. Sutter. Though I confess, I find myself considerably suspicious of a company man's motives for defending a rancher's daughter he's been sent to survey for foreclosure. " Wade set down his currycomb, understanding that whatever answer he gave now would matter considerably more than any smooth explanation could account for. " You're not wrong about my errand, and I won't insult you by pretending otherwise," he said. I came to Larkspur to survey your father's water rights ahead of a lowball offer my company intends once the bank forecloses.
What I didn't expect was watching you outshoot every man on that field with your brother's coat on your back. " And I find myself since that moment considerably less interested in finishing the errand that brought me here. " Josie studied him a long moment, weighing the plain honesty of the admission against every reason she had to distrust a company man's word. " That's either the most foolish thing a company foreman has ever admitted to a rancher's daughter or the most honest," she said finally. " I confess I haven't yet decided which. "
The contest purse, once collected, proved substantial enough to cover the overdue portion of the Hartwell mortgage, but not the full note, leaving Josie and her father with breathing room rather than genuine security. A fact Josie explained to Wade 3 days later when he returned to the ranch, ostensibly to deliver a formal notice of his surveys postponement, but genuinely because he had found himself unable to simply ride on without seeing her again. Wendell Hartwell, initially wary of any man connected to Ashkam Cattle Company, warmed to Wade's plain manner over the course of an evening's conversation about grazing management, cattle breeding, and the particular hardships of ranching land that had turned unreliable in recent seasons. " I've been considering a different report to my company entirely," Wade said, once Wendell had retired for the evening and left Josie and Wade alone on the porch in the cooling autumn dusk. " One that emphasizes the water rights disputes and grazing complications this parcel actually carries, complications that would considerably reduce Ashkam's interest in pursuing the purchase at all regardless of what happens with the bank note "You'd falsify a company survey," Josie said, "on my behalf, having known me all of four days?" "
Wouldn't call it falsifying so much as reporting the parts of the truth my employers find inconvenient," Wade said. " Any survey ought to include the difficulties alongside the advantages, and I'd call four days a fair amount of time to recognize something worth risking a company position over, if I'm honest about it, Miss Hartwell. " Something in his voice carried a weight considerably beyond simple business calculation, and Josie found herself, for the first time since her brother's death, allowing herself to consider that a man's steadiness might be trusted rather than merely tolerated. They fell into an easy quiet after that, the kind neither of them felt obligated to fill, and when the harvest socials fiddle music drifted across the fields from a neighboring barn, where half the county had gathered to celebrate the fair's closing, Wade rose and extended his hand toward her, without any of the practiced smoothness of a man accustomed to courting. " I've got no particular skill at dancing," he admitted, but I find myself considerably reluctant to ride back to my rented room while that fiddle's still playing. "
And you're still sitting on this porch. " Josie studied his outstretched hand a long moment, weighing the wisdom of trusting a company man's intentions against the plain, uncomplicated pull she felt toward him, and found the pull won out considerably more easily than her caution had any right to allow. They danced two full songs in the packed dirt yard beside the barn, Wade's clumsy footwork drawing a laugh from her that surprised them both with its genuine warmth, and when the fiddle slowed into something gentler, he drew her closer without asking permission first, and she did not pull away. Neither of them spoke of what was building between them that night, both too wary of naming something so new too quickly. But Josie rode home afterward with her heart considerably fuller than it had been in the two griefheavy years since her brother's death, and Wade lay awake long past midnight, turning over the plain, unavoidable fact that he had ridden into Larkspur to survey a parcel of land, and had instead found something he had no intention of ever willingly riding away from again.