Chapter One

The One That Got Away

Cole

The stars don’t feel like they’re mine tonight.

They stretch across the Colorado sky same as always—a blanket of silver pinpricks against the endless black—but instead of comfort, they look like cold reminders of everything I just lost. Each one burns with the kind of distant light that takes years to reach you, and I wonder if that’s what love is too. Something that shines bright and beautiful until you realize it died a long time ago, and you’re just now seeing the aftermath.

Laney’s gone.

I know it in my bones, the way I know when a storm’s coming or when a horse is about to buck. It’s that deep-seated certainty that settles in your gut and refuses to leave, no matter how much you want to deny it.

No note. No explanation. Just silence that stretches across Bennett Ridge like a held breath.

The wind picks up, carrying the scent of hay and leather and the faint sweetness of the wildflowers she used to pick along the fence line. It stirs the dust around my boots where I stand in the doorway of the empty barn, and for a split second, I swear I can smell her perfume—that vanilla and jasmine combination that used to drive me crazy when she’d lean close to whisper something in my ear.

But it’s just memory playing tricks on a broken man.

One day she’s in my arms—laughing at my stupid stories about rodeo clowns and broncs named after ex-girlfriends, stealing my favorite Stetson off my head just to watch me chase her around the corral, whispering promises against my neck in the dark of my truck cab that I thought we both believed in like gospel.

The next, she’s dust on the road leading away from everything we built together.

And I’m still here, standing in the doorway of an empty barn that echoes with ghost conversations, holding the silver bracelet she left behind like it means something now. Like it’s some kind of lifeline instead of just another piece of jewelry gathering dust.

Hell, maybe it does mean something.

Maybe it always did, and I was just too damn stubborn to see it.

The bracelet catches the moonlight as I turn it over in my palm—a delicate chain with a tiny horseshoe charm that I bought her for her birthday three months before she left. She never took it off. Said it was her good luck piece, that it reminded her of me when I was on the road.

Now it’s all I have left of the woman who turned my world upside down and shook it until everything I thought I knew fell out.

I pocket the bracelet and make my way to the hayloft ladder, each rung creaking under my weight like it’s protesting my presence. The barn feels too big tonight, too full of empty spaces where her laughter used to echo. She’d sit up here with me sometimes after a long day of working the ranch, her legs swinging over the edge while she braided pieces of hay into little crowns that she’d place on my head with mock ceremony.

“King of Bennett Ridge,” she’d say, her green eyes sparkling with mischief. “Ruler of all he surveys and too stubborn to admit when he’s wrong.”

I’d pull her close then, taste the sweet tea on her lips, and tell her she was the only crown I needed.

God, I was such a fool.

I settle on the edge of the hayloft now, boots dangling over the rail like they did all those nights when she was here beside me, and pull out the bottle of Jack I grabbed from the house. The whiskey burns going down, but it’s nothing compared to the fire in my chest that’s been building since I came home to find her things gone and her side of the bed cold.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

We had a plan—me heading off the rodeo circuit one last time to chase the big purse at the National Finals in Vegas, stacking some serious cash so we could finally start the breeding program we’d been dreaming about. She said she’d wait. Said she believed in me and my eight-second addiction, even when the bruises painted my ribs purple and the concussions left me dizzy for days.

“You’ve got one more championship in you, Cole Bennett,” she’d tell me while patching up whatever injury I’d collected that weekend. “I can see it in the way you sit a horse. Like you and that bronc are having a conversation only you understand.”

And maybe she did believe in me.

Right up until she didn’t.

The night breeze carries the sound of cattle settling in the far pasture, a low murmur that usually soothes me. Tonight it just reminds me how quiet the house will be when I finally drag myself back there. How the coffee pot will only need enough for one cup, how her side of the bathroom counter will stay cleared of all those mysterious bottles and tubes that somehow made her smell like heaven.

I rake a hand through my hair—it’s gotten too long, past my collar now, but Laney always liked it that way. Said it made me look less like a businessman and more like the wild cowboy she fell for—and force myself to breathe through the tightness in my chest. Not the familiar ache that comes from eating dirt after a bronc throws you into next week, or the sharp pain of ribs that got too friendly with an arena fence.

This is different.

This is the kind of hurt that starts deep in your soul and spreads outward like ink in water, staining everything it touches. The kind that comes from watching your whole damn future—the one you’d been building in your head piece by careful piece—vanish before your eyes like smoke from a campfire.

The worst part? I should’ve seen it coming.

Looking back now, I can trace the signs like a trail of breadcrumbs leading to this moment. The way she got quiet when I talked about Vegas. How she stopped asking about the ranch’s finances and started spending more time in town with her friend Maya. The phone calls she’d take on the porch, walking to the far end where she thought I couldn’t hear her voice drop to a whisper.

But I was too caught up in my own plans to pay attention to hers.

Too focused on the championship buckle and the prize money to notice that the woman I loved was slowly pulling away, one conversation at a time.

I should’ve told her that night—three weeks ago when we sat right here under these same stars—how I was really going to Vegas to win enough money to buy her a proper engagement ring. How I planned to ask her to marry me right here in this barn where we shared our first kiss, to make Bennett Ridge home again in a way it hadn’t been since my parents died.

Hell, I even bought the ring.

It’s still sitting in the drawer under my sock collection, hidden like some dumb secret I thought I’d get to surprise her with. A vintage setting with a pear-shaped diamond that reminded me of a teardrop—not because I thought she’d cry when I proposed, but because it caught the light the same way her eyes did when she laughed.

Now it’s just metal and regret, gathering dust next to belt buckles I don’t wear anymore and photos I can’t bear to look at.

I take another swig from the bottle, longer this time, and let the whiskey burn away some of the memories crowding my throat. The liquid courage doesn’t help much, but at least it makes the stars look a little blurrier, a little less like witnesses to my failure.

From here, I can see most of the ranch spread out below me—2,000 acres of rolling pasture and creek bottom that my great-grandfather carved out of nothing with determination and a good horse. The main house where I grew up sits about a quarter mile from the barn, its windows dark now except for the porch light I left burning. A habit Laney started, claiming it made the place look more welcoming.

“Like someone lives there who’s worth coming home to,” she’d say.

Now it just looks lonely.

The cattle are settling down for the night in the near pasture, their dark shapes moving like shadows across the silver grass. Beyond them, I can make out the silhouette of the mountains that frame the valley, peaks that have watched over Bennett Ridge for longer than there have been people here to appreciate them.

Laney always said this place was in my blood. That the land had a heartbeat, and mine matched it beat for beat. She’d press her ear to my chest sometimes when we lay in bed after making love, claiming she could hear both rhythms at once—mine and the ranch’s—like we were all part of the same song.

“You belong here,” she’d whisper against my skin, her breath warm and soft. “This place needs you, Cole. It’s been waiting for you to come back and make it whole again.”

Now it just echoes hollow, like a song with half the notes missing.

Because the one person who made it feel like home—who turned a collection of pastures and buildings into something worth fighting for—she’s gone. And she took the music with her.

I close my eyes and lean back against a hay bale, letting the whiskey and exhaustion pull me toward something that might pass for sleep. But behind my eyelids, I can see her as clearly as if she were sitting beside me right now.

Laney Shaw, with her wild auburn hair that never stayed put no matter how many bobby pins she used, and those green eyes that could go from laughing to storming in the space of a heartbeat. The way she looked in the morning with sunlight streaming through the bedroom window, her face soft with sleep and her hair spread across my pillow like spilled wine.

The way she felt in my arms during those perfect moments when the rest of the world disappeared and it was just us, just this, just love so pure and simple it hurt to breathe around it.

I picture her now in the passenger seat of some dusty sedan—maybe that old Honda Maya drives, the one with the dent in the bumper and the radio that only gets country stations. Windows down because the air conditioning doesn’t work, music turned up too loud to drown out the sound of her own thoughts. Wind whipping through her hair and tears streaming down her cheeks that she’d never let me see, because Laney Shaw doesn’t cry where anyone can witness her breaking.

She’s proud that way. Stubborn.

It’s one of the things I fell in love with first—the way she’d set her jaw and dig in her heels when she believed in something, even if the whole world was telling her she was wrong. The way she’d fight for what mattered to her with everything she had, consequences be damned.

I just never thought she’d fight her way right out of my life.

The bottle is getting lighter in my hand, and the stars are starting to blur together in ways that have nothing to do with unshed tears. I should go inside, try to get some sleep before the morning chores demand my attention. The horses will need feeding, the cattle will need checking, and the ranch will keep running whether my heart’s in it or not.

That’s the thing about land—it doesn’t care about your personal disasters. It just keeps demanding attention, keeps needing water and work and someone who gives a damn about keeping it alive.

But I can’t make myself move yet.

Can’t face that empty house with its silent rooms and the coffee mug she left in the sink, still stained with her lipstick around the rim. Can’t walk past the bathroom where her toothbrush used to sit next to mine, or the closet where the hangers now swing empty in the space her clothes used to fill.

So I stay here in the loft, surrounded by the sweet smell of timothy hay and the distant sound of night birds calling to each other across the pasture. I stay here where her ghost is strongest, where I can almost pretend she’s just running late from town and will come climbing up that ladder any minute with some ridiculous story about Mrs. Henderson’s escaped chickens or the new scandal at the feed store.

The horses are still restless down below, shifting in their stalls and nickering softly to each other. Thunder, my big bay gelding, keeps pawing at his stall door like he’s trying to tell me something. Maybe he misses her too—Laney always brought him carrots and called him her “gentle giant,” even though he’s anything but gentle when there’s a bronc rider on his back.

Animals know things. They sense changes in the air before humans do, pick up on emotions we try to hide. Thunder probably knew she was leaving before I did.

Hell, maybe everyone knew except me.

I drain the last of the whiskey and let the bottle dangle from my fingers, too tired now to care if it falls and shatters on the barn floor below. The alcohol has done its job, blunting the sharp edges of my grief until it’s more of a dull ache than a knife between my ribs.

But it hasn’t erased the questions that keep circling in my head like buzzards over roadkill.

Why didn’t she tell me she was unhappy? Why didn’t she give me a chance to fix whatever went wrong? Why did she leave that bracelet behind—was it a goodbye gift, or did she just forget it in her hurry to escape?

And the biggest question of all, the one that’s eating me alive from the inside out: where is she now?

Is she safe? Is she happy? Is she thinking about me at all, or has she already started the process of forgetting that Cole Bennett ever existed?

The wind picks up again, rattling the barn doors and sending a chill through the loft that makes me wish I’d grabbed a jacket before coming out here. But the cold feels appropriate somehow, like the night is matching my mood.

I pull out my phone and stare at her contact information for the hundredth time today. Laney Shaw, with the little heart emoji she added to her name when I wasn’t looking. Her number is probably already disconnected—she’s thorough that way, wouldn’t leave loose ends for me to tug on.

But I could try. I could call and maybe, just maybe, she’d answer. Maybe she’d tell me this is all some terrible mistake, that she’s coming home, that we can work through whatever scared her away.

My thumb hovers over the call button.

But I don’t press it.

Because deep down, past the whiskey and the wishful thinking, I know the truth. Laney Shaw doesn’t do anything halfway. If she left, she meant it. If she wanted me to find her, she would’ve left a trail.

The bracelet wasn’t an accident. It was a message.

This is all of me you get to keep.

I close my eyes and lean my head back against the hay, letting the alcohol and exhaustion finally drag me toward unconsciousness. Tomorrow I’ll have to figure out how to live without her. How to run this ranch alone, how to sleep in a bed that’s too big, how to make coffee for one and eat dinner in silence.

Tomorrow I’ll have to start learning how to be Cole Bennett without Laney Shaw.

But tonight, for just a few more hours, I can sit here in this barn where we were happy and pretend she’s just running late. I can hold onto the memory of her laugh and the way she said my name like it was something precious.

Tonight, I can still be the man who loved her.

Even if I’m already the man she left behind.

Laney Shaw.

My wild girl. My lightning strike. My shooting star that blazed across my sky and disappeared before I could make a wish.

The one I couldn’t hold onto.

The one that got away.