Page 12 of One Night Rancher

“There is no key chain,” said Flint. “It’s not about me.”

Point being, he was the only one of them that had tried a relationship, and it hadn’t gone well. Boone sure as hell wasn’t stupid enough to even try.

He just didn’t have it in him. He thought you had to be some kind of crazy to invest in a relationship like that. You had to be some kind of starry-eyed, and a hell of a lot of things he just wasn’t.

He would never drag a woman through that.

He had never wanted to. He had his family, he had Cara, and that was enough.

A moment later, she returned. “Well, I managed to get this all set up.” She had a tray of meat and cheese, and two wineglasses, plus a bottle of...

“Rosé?”

“You got a problem with that?”

“A prissy meat and cheese tray and a bottle of girls’ night out wine?”

She stared at him blandly. “Not when there’s no one else here.”

She sniffed as she settled onto her sleeping bag and set the tray out in front of her. “Your toxic masculinity is strangling you to death.”

“No.” He settled down on his own sleeping bag and reached out and took a wedge of cheese. “It would be if I refused to partake. But here in the sacred space...”

“You’re an idiot,” she said.

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Are you going back out to the rodeo?”

He had been avoiding that direct question. Not even his brothers had asked. Boone and Flint were still at it, but Buck had left a long time ago, with Kit and Chance retiring recently.

Jace was younger than Boone and Flint, but he knew he was getting to about the age where you had to start considering how many permanent injuries you wanted to walk around with for the rest of your life all for the sake of chasing continued glory.

He liked a little glory, it was true, but he also valued the fact that he didn’t walk with a limp, and the longer you stayed in the game the less likely that was to continue to be a thing.

Their father was on the verge of retirement, and he didn’t know that any of them were chomping at the bit to become the next Rodeo Commissioner. Or maybe they were; they hadn’t really talked about it. Jace wasn’t, that was all he knew. The family was more and more settled in Lone Rock. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

“Don’t know,” he said.

“You really don’t know?”

“I really don’t.”

“That doesn’t seem like you.”

“Maybe not,” he said, shoving some of his discomfort aside. “I don’t know. Stuff is changing. It kind of started with Callie getting married a couple years ago, and now... I don’t know. The family’s more settled here. For a long time it seemed like my dad was just running. Running from everything. Running from his grief and all of that... But they’ve expanded the ranch here so much, and I think he’s finally ready to quit moving around all the time. At his age, he probably should’ve done it a long time ago, but given that he’s him... I think it might be kind of a big deal.”

“That makes you think about change.”

“It just makes me wonder what I’m doing. The thing is, we’ve all won the top tier of all the events that we’ve ever competed in. There’s a point where the only way you can go is down. So then you ask yourself why you’re doing it.”

“Do you love it?”

It was a strange question. He never really thought about it. Rodeo was the family business. He knew there were spare few people for whom that was true. But since he was a kid, his father had been the Commissioner of the Pro Rodeo Association, and it had been a given that they would all grow up and compete. Callie had competed in saddle bronc events for a couple of years; she was taking a break to have a baby, which was great. That had meant a lot to her, breaking that barrier as a woman, and she had paved the way for a whole lot of other women who wanted to do the same thing.

She had a reason for being there.

Kit and Chance were top in their field. He had done bareback broncos for a number of years; he’d ridden bulls. That was all after he and his brothers had done a little bit of tie-down roping in their early years. He didn’t know that he loved it so much as that he wore it comfortably like a pair of battered old jeans. And he didn’t know what else fit. Ranching. They had a big family ranch.

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