Page 10 of Broken Ride

"You've been sitting in an empty lot with transport manifests since the last event cleared." He tilts his head toward the paperwork. "Nobody does that for fun."

I hold his gaze. He doesn't blink.

Most men out here fill silences the way they fill their trucks, with whatever's closest and loudest. Ashcroft does the opposite. He takes up space by being still, and the weight of it makes me aware of exactly how much distance is between his body and mine.

"I'm doing my job." I square the paperwork into a stack. "You need a vet, the on-call number's on the board by the office."

"I don't need a vet."

"Then you're burning your own daylight standing here."

The corner of his mouth moves, not quite a smile, something sharper. "You always this friendly, or am I getting special treatment?"

"This is the friendly version."

"Noted." He stays exactly where he is. No weight shift, no glance away, none of the small concessions people make when they've been dismissed and are deciding whether to accept it. The dismissal rolls off him like weather. "The barrel horse you flagged the other day. The one that was off. Anything come back on her?"

The question lands differently than small talk.

He wasn't in the pens when I examined that mare. He'd have to have heard about it secondhand, so he was paying attention to something most competitors would ignore entirely. A barrel horse's neuro workup doesn't affect a bronc rider's season.

"She's improving." I straighten the binder on my knee. "Her owner pulled her from competition."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the answer you're getting."

He watches me for a long beat, and I feel the assessment move across my skin the way you feel a change in air pressure. He's reading me the same way I've seen him read a bronc in the chute, all that focus compressed into stillness. Being the thing he's focused on sends warmth crawling up the back of my neck.

"Fair enough," he says. "You don't trust me. No reason you should."

"I don't trust anyone out here. You're not special."

"I wasn't trying to be." He lets a beat pass. "But I've been riding these rodeos since before you had a veterinary license, and I know what it looks like when the paperwork doesn't match the livestock. So when you're done not trusting me, I might be worth talking to."

The confidence isn't bluster. It sits in him like bone structure, and the irritating part is that he's probably right.

Years on these roads means he's seen things the records will never show me. Relationships, patterns, the small corruptions that everyone agrees not to notice. He's a resource I'd be stupid to ignore.

He's also six-three with shoulders that block the last of the sunset. I can smell leather and something warm underneath it from where I'm sitting. My awareness of those details is a problem I'm going to set aside and deal with never.

"I'll keep that in mind," I say.

"You do that." He pushes off the fence rail he was leaning against and straightens to his full height.

The movement is slow, controlled. I catch the way his left shoulder rolls when he stands, the slight hitch in his stride that he compensates for so smoothly most people would never notice. His left shoulder is guarding. His right hip loads to compensate. I'd call it chronic mechanical lameness in a horse.

Old injuries, the kind that accumulate over decades of getting thrown from twelve-hundred-pound animals. The discipline in how he carries them reads as something closer to dangerous than damaged.

He takes two steps, then stops. Turns his head just enough that I see his profile, the brim of his cap cutting a hard line against the first stars.

"You check under your truck every night before you get in." He says it flat. An observation, not a question. "Might want to vary your routine. Patterns are easy to track."

"How long have you been tracking mine?"

He looks at me over his shoulder. The last copper light catches the edge of his jaw, and the expression on his face isn't apologetic.

"Long enough."