“You don’t get it. I could have joined the rodeo years ago. I have access to all the knowledge, and I have connections. I don’t want to be Wyatt Dodge’s little sister. I don’t want to be Quinn Dodge’s daughter. I want to be Jamie Dodge. And I want to see if I can do it on my own.”

He nodded slowly. “I can understand that. You know, as Hank Dalton’s son.” He cleared his throat. “But as a warning, even if you do it on your own, no one’s going to remember it.”

“Why?”

“As the voice of experience, I can definitely give you some whys. My father did not want me joining the rodeo, Jamie.”

“He didn’t? But you did exactly what he did. I would just assume that you were...taking after him.”

“That’s what everyone thinks. Which is kind of my point.” He chewed on his next words for a moment. This wasn’t something he talked about. Not with anyone. “My dad wanted me to go to college.”

Jamie let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a hoot. “Sorry. It’s not that I don’t think you could... I mean...”

“Go ahead. Laugh. I did. I wanted to be a rancher. My dad didn’t want me to be. He said that he didn’t work as hard as he did for a son of his to end up in the same damn place. He got money so that I could have it better. So that I could choose what I wanted. And when he said that...what he meant was so I had something that he wished he could choose, but hadn’t been able to. I just wanted to be a cowboy. Can’t say as I particularly wanted to be in the rodeo, but it served a dual purpose. Pissed my old man off, made me money.”

“So basically what you’re saying is that no matter what I do, people are going to assume I got there because of Wyatt?”

“Yep,” he said. “Some people. The question you have to ask yourself, Jamie, is what it means to you.”

It was a damned hypocritical thing, him talking to her like this. Lecturing her. Asking her what it meant to her, when he knew what it meant to him. But then, he had spent a lot of years avoiding deep thinking. And he wasn’t sure that was a bad way to do things.

He’d been happy enough, out on the circuit, and that was why part of him was eager to get back to it. Being around here... It made him think. It made him think about every time he’d wanted to run when a real man would have stood and faced life.

Made him feel even more like Hank Dalton than he did when he was out walking his boot steps in the rodeo.

The trail dipped downward, the trees seeming to close in overhead, giving a dark, cool space that felt like it was closed off from the rest of the world. And Jamie looked...well, she looked at home. Out here beneath the pines, on the back of a horse.