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.
Thaddius Kern, humiliated by his public defeat at the contest and eager to reassert his standing in Lark's affairs, discovered Wade's altered survey report through a clerk at the county land office, who owed Kern a favor, and brought the discrepancy directly to the bank holding the Hartwell Mortgage, framing Wade's revised assessment as fraud intended to protect a woman he was, by that point, openly courting around town. The bank's manager, a cautious man named Aldis Whitmore, who had no particular stake in the Hartwell foreclosure beyond his institution's bottom line, summoned Wade to a formal meeting alongside an Ashkam Cattle Company representative, dispatched specifically to investigate the irregularity. Wade arrived at that meeting fully prepared to lose his position. understanding that a foreman caught deliberately misrepresenting a company survey rarely survived the consequences regardless of his motives, and found Josie waiting outside the bank's offices when he emerged from the confrontation having ridden into town the moment word reached her of Kern's accusation. " You lost your position over this?"
she said, studying his face for the damage the meeting had clearly done. " Over a report you altered for a woman you'd known barely a week when you first wrote it?" " Reckon I have," Wade said, "and I find rather to my own surprise that I don't regret the decision half as much as a sensible man probably ought to. " Some things matter considerably more than a company position, Miss Hartwell, and watching your father's land get swallowed by a lowball offer built on a survey I knew to be incomplete was never going to sit right with me, whatever the professional cost. " Josie's composure, carefully maintained through every hardship of the preceding two years, finally cracked at the plain weight of that admission, and she reached for his hand without any of the weariness that had marked their first conversation at the livery. "
I have spent two years believing I could trust no one's help but my own two hands," she said. " I find myself standing here considerably less certain of that particular belief than I was a week ago. " She did not let go of his hand as they walked back toward the livery together, and something in the easy silence between them carried a depth that surprised her, given how recently she had believed herself entirely closed to the possibility of leaning on anyone again. " I lost my brother in a stampede that nearly killed my father, too," she said quietly, the confession arriving unbidden in the gathering dusk. And I decided afterward that trusting anyone with the parts of me that could still be broken was a luxury I couldn't afford. "