A Photo Finish: A Small Town Second Chance Romance (Gold Rush Ranch Book 2)

“COLE MOVED IN TODAY.”

I shove my foot into my boot harder than necessary, grunting as I do, and then busy myself polishing it with the rag from the step stool beside me. Basically, I’m trying to ignore Billie, who is grinning at me like a maniac.

“You’re not going to say anything?”

I side-eye her and shrug. Because the answer is, no, I’m not going to say anything. Billie Black, my boss and the head trainer at Gold Rush Ranch, has become one of my best friends over the past year. And I’ve come to know her well. She’s like a bloodhound with a scent, she’s smart and intuitive, and anything I say she’ll stock away in her crazy memory vault until she unpackages it and extrapolates her data. And then she’ll figure out how I know Cole.

Which means I won’t be able to look her in the eye without turning fire engine red.

“Nope,” I say, popping the p sound, as I stand up in front of our tack stall and reach for the black and yellow Gold Rush Ranch silks.

“Viiiiii,” she moans, “this is killing me! It’s been a year. I saw your face that day. What did he say to you? Give me something.”

I feel the light sprinkling of heat crawling up over my chest. She is relentless. “Okay. We met online a couple of years ago. Chatted a bit.”

She rubs her long fingers over her chin as she regards me. “Like some sort of veteran pen pal thing?”

“Something like that.” I wave her off. “Now leave me alone. I need to go weigh in and get in the right headspace if you expect me to win.”

“Okay, okay. Come find me when you’re done, and I promise I won’t ask about this again.” She waggles her eyebrows as she stands to leave. “Until after the race.”

I roll my eyes as I walk down the barn alleyway toward the track offices. Toward the Bell Point Park winner’s circle. The very place where Cole Harding waltzed back into my life.

I remember sitting up on DD’s back, overwhelmed by our Denman Derby win, when a man who was clearly Vaughn’s brother approached me. I remember thinking he looked like an ominous storm cloud hovering over such a bright and joyful celebration. I remember the way his huge hand engulfed mine, the heat of it, the weight of it, as he crooked a finger for me to come closer. And I remember the warmth in my body evaporating and all the sounds around me fading to white noise when I leaned down to hear him say, “Nice to see you again, Pretty in Purple. I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”

Just recounting the memory makes me blush. But I am also still agitated by the way he took one of the happiest moments of my life and tainted it with that. The way he threw it in my face when he knew he had the upper hand.

You see, Cole Harding knew exactly what I looked like. What every inch of me looked like. And I still had no idea who he was—a real sore spot for me—until that moment.

Turns out he’s my boss’s boss. Billie’s future brother-in-law, and now he’s moving out to the one safe space I’ve created for myself over the last couple of years. A place where I can be a successful and independent version of Violet Eaton with no one coddling me. I’m not the same girl I was two years ago when I responded to that message. And what happened between Cole and me? It’s never going to happen again.

I don’t think my heart could take it. And definitely not my pride.

Which is why I pasted a wobbly smile on my face and told him to go fuck himself before sitting back up and forcing myself to enjoy the win.

When I accepted his chat request, I didn’t expect to spend months getting to know the man. And when I ghosted him in that chat room a year later, I didn’t expect to ever come face-to-face with him. Me anonymously pushing my own boundaries and living a little turned out to be a whole lot more. And now, my entire house of cards is about to come crashing down around me. Because he’s here, at the ranch, threatening that buffer that I’ve tried so hard to preserve.

I keep my head down as I get prepped for the evening race. I may have a Northern Crown win under my belt, but I still feel like the new girl on the block. Inexperienced and out of my depth. I still feel stuck in the mindset of living at home under the watchful eyes and overbearing involvement of my dad and three older brothers. I still feel like a little kid who doesn’t belong.

Once I’ve weighed in, I head back to DD’s stall and shove my headphones in my ears. A little Shania Twain never fails to get me in the right headspace. Reminds me of my childhood.

Before I became the in-house rider at Gold Rush Ranch, I was a lowly groom. A girl who moved out to British Columbia from her small-town home in Alberta with not much more to show for herself other than a good work ethic and a lot of desperation to pave her own way.

The thing is, I liked being a groom, but I’ve always wanted to be a jockey, and I lucked into the right body type to pull it off. Sometimes, I miss the quiet moments that came with working behind the scenes. Those times when it was just the horses and me. It’s why I still live above the barn in my tiny apartment up that long, narrow flight of stairs. I like walking through the stables at dusk, hearing the quiet munching on hay. I like taking care of my own horses. I like the soothing rasp of brush bristles across their coat rather than the loud buzzers and speakers as I blast through mud, trying to make it across the line first.

So, I try to create those quiet moments for myself. And this pre-race ritual has become part of that. No one bugs me—Billie makes sure of it—and I get a bit of time to go inward and just be with my horse.

Right now, that horse is DD, our little black championship-winning stallion, with long legs and an intelligent disposition. Once I’ve put the finishing touches on his grooming, I lead him out into the bright sunshine—something we don’t see much in Vancouver in April. This area brings a whole new meaning to April showers bring May flowers. At this time of year, we pretty much live in a mud puddle, so even though it’s sunny, the track is wet.

When DD’s hooves clop loudly onto the asphalt road that leads down to the track, Billie pops up, seemingly out of nowhere. She’s always ready and waiting for me. We talked strategy earlier in the day, so at this point, we can just walk together in a companionable silence.

She comes to stand beside me, bends down, and cups her hands behind me, ready to give me a leg up. “Up we go, Tiny Soldier.”

I feel my cheek twitch; Billie’s terms of endearment that reference my size never end. Where she’s tall for a woman, I’m petite, and where she’s curvaceous, I’m . . . well, flat as a board.

I drop my knee into her waiting hands, and she hefts me up into the tack, gives my knee a squeeze, and sends me on my way. The rest of my journey into the starting gate is a blur, as usual. The pony horses, the stewards, the other jockeys and horses around me, it all blends together, and I focus on DD and getting us to that finish line safely and quickly. When our pony horse steps up, the rider gives me a friendly nod. The pony rider is completely different from a jockey. They ensure we get to the gate safely, like a security blanket for a nervous horse. An important member of the team.

At the gates, he sends me off with a “Good luck.”

DD is a great stallion, reliable and smart, talented beyond compare, but claustrophobic. And when they close the gate behind him, I feel him coil up like a ball of energy, like an elastic pulled back too far, ready to explode out of the small space.

This is where my vision narrows. All I see is what’s between his long, pointy ears. The rest of the world seems to go soft and blurry as we both settle into our focus.

Until I hear a voice that sends a slithering sensation down my spine. “Hey. New girl.”

I ignore Patrick Cassel. He’s one of the most sought-after jockeys in this area. He rode DD in one race last year, but he defied Billie’s instructions on how to ride the race and, well . . . let’s just say that didn’t end well for him. Now he’s on Gold Rush Ranch’s blacklist—we all basically pretend he doesn’t exist. And when he sees Billie coming, he promptly turns and walks the other way.

Looks like that level of avoidance doesn’t apply to the quiet little blonde, though.

“Dinner after this, and I might let you win. What do you say, Princess?”

I try not to shudder at the thought. Patrick is slimy and entitled and makes me feel like I have bugs stuck under my clothes. Based on Billie’s retelling of their encounter, he’s condescending and sexist to boot. I want nothing to do with the man.

“I’m pretty sure princesses only kiss frogs in fairytales, Patrick,” I mutter. “I’ll pass.”

And before he can say anything, the bell rings, and the gate flies open. DD and I are off, and that interaction with Patrick disappears from my mind as we thunder down the track, staying toward the back of the pack through the first turn. Exactly where the little black horse likes to be.

I stay low and light on his back, mostly letting him do his thing. This horse was bred to run—and he loves it. When we push out of the clubhouse turn everything is going according to plan. Now is where we move up.

Until I feel a dark bay horse move in beside me. From the corner of my eye, I see Patrick Cassel’s lime green silks. As he pulls ahead, I try to ignore him and reserve my focus for DD.

Until he shouts over the pounding of hooves, “Time to learn a lesson, little girl.”

My instincts shift into overdrive as I watch his hands move ever so slightly to change his path. Dread courses through my veins. And before I have a chance to react, he’s cut us off sharply, bumping DD’s shoulder with his harsh angle, killing our forward motion. And on the slippery footing, the results are disastrous.

With his head and neck already slung low, and legs stretched out in a gallop on a slippery track, DD stands no chance.

I feel our motion shift downward and before I know what’s happened, DD and I are both down in the mud.

“I’M GOING TO KILL HIM.” Billie paces at the bottom of my hospital bed. “Like, literally murder him.”

I’m in too much pain to react much to her meltdown. My leg is swollen like a tree trunk, and they won’t give me any painkillers until they have time to look at my X-rays and MRI scans. Like you need a medical degree to confirm that it’s fucked up.

“You need to tell Vaughn that I love him and to get the bail money ready. Because I’m going to tear Patrick limb from puny limb.”

A ragged sigh escapes my lips as I look around my room. The walls are that signature pale mint color, a color I imagine they produce solely to paint hospital walls, and all I can smell is that harsh, sterile scent that permeates every single hospital I’ve ever been in. Which is a lot because my brother Rhett is a walking disaster. A rodeo prince with no fear. And even though I’m a year younger than him, I was always the one stuck playing caretaker at the hospital while he was treated for one injury or another. It was the only way my dad could run our farm and keep us afloat enough to take care of the four of us.

So, I hate hospitals. I don’t care about Patrick. But I am worried about DD. He came down on my leg but didn’t walk off without a limp either. I scrub my hands over my face and force a deep breath into my lungs.

It could have been so much worse.

“Any word from Mira on DD?” Mira Thorne is our friend and our newly hired farm veterinarian. She takes care of all the horses in the Gold Rush Ranch program, both at the track and at the farm.

Billie nibbles at her lip nervously now and shoves her hands into her pockets, obviously worried about our boy too. “She said he’s fine,” is her quiet reply. “She’ll call as soon as she knows anything more.”

“You should have gone with her.”

Billie rolls her eyes. “And what? Left you all by yourself? Mira’s got this.”

I let my lashes flutter shut and sink back into the lumpy pillow. It’s like they want you to be uncomfortable in the hospital. With my eyes closed, all I can see on the back of my eyelids is this entire season swirling down the porcelain bowl with a loud flush. My chance to prove I’m good at this, rather than just the girl who got the ride on one of the world’s most exceptional racehorses and struck gold.

This fucking sucks.

“Okay, Miss Eaton,” a middle-aged man with a white coat over his slacks and dress shirt breezes into the room, “I have good news for you today.”

I furrow my brow. Nothing about today screams good news to me.

“The imaging we had done tells me that nothing is badly broken.”

I stare at my black and blue leg. It looks pretty broken.

“Are you sure?”

He laughs good-naturedly. “Very sure. There’s a lot of bruising. Soft tissue trauma in the knee. And a small fracture in your fibula.”

I continue to stare at my leg, still not fully convinced that it’s not totally shattered.

The doctor takes my silence as an opportunity to keep talking. Looking down at the clipboard in his hands, he continues, “No surgery required. But you need to take it easy for at least a month. Crutches at the start, at least until the swelling goes down. Try to keep off any stairs. And definitely no riding.”

I snort. Yeah. That’s not going to happen.

“Miss Eaton, I’m serious. I know how athletes can be. But if you fracture the bone further, or tear something in your knee, you will require surgery. And the rehabilitation timeline for that is much longer. You’re lucky it’s not worse. Don’t squander that.”

Lucky?

Billie steps in now. No doubt reading the look on my face. “No problem, Doc. I’ll keep her on the straight and narrow.”

The man barely looks at Billie. Instead, he raises his eyebrows and inclines his head toward me, obviously seeking some sort of affirmation. I wave one hand in the air dismissively before crossing my arms. He won’t know what I do once I leave this place.

“Got it,” I mumble, dropping my eyes and sighing, feeling more than a little chastised.

“Good. Let me grab you some painkillers, and then we’ll get you discharged.”

I force my cheeks up into some semblance of a smile. Too sore and pissed off to do much else. I’m ready for some pain relief and my own bed. He turns on his heel and strides out of the room.

“Don’t worry, Vi. We’ll find you somewhere comfortable to stay.”

“What?” I look at Billie, confused.

“You’re not doing those crazy stairs up to your apartment right now. And back down?” She shudders. “I don’t even want to hear about it.”

“Okay, mom. Where are you planning on putting me then?”

Billie scrubs her face, clearly stressed, even though she’s trying to play it cool and hold it all together for me.

“I’ll get Vaughn to stay with his brother at the main house and you can stay with me at the cottage.”

“In the love shack?” I blurt out just as a nurse walks in with a small white cup and hands it to me.

“The love shack?” Billie looks confused as I eye the two pills in the paper cup, toss them back, and then chase them with the water from the table beside me. I almost spit it back up. City water tastes all wrong.

“Yeah. I’m not staying at the love shack and splitting you two up.”

“Is that what you call our house?” she barks out, clearly amused.

I can’t help but smile now. She and Vaughn are living in some blissed-out bubble. “Billie, that’s what everyone at the ranch calls it.”

She blows out a tired breath and drags her hand back through her chestnut hair. “I’m not gonna lie. I kind of love that. You’re still staying with me, though. Vaughn will survive.”

“Billie, there’s not even a bathroom on the main floor of your place.”

“Shit.” She looks instantly deflated. “Right. Okay . . . why don’t we move Cole into your apartment and let you take the house. Just for a few—”

Yeah, that can’t happen. “No. He’s not going in my apartment. That’s my space.”

“Okay then, Violet, what’s your solution here? Wanna go back to Alberta for a few weeks? Stay with your dad? Or I don’t know . . . ” Agitation seeps into her voice. “You gonna go live at the farmhouse with Cole? Because there’s a spare room and bathroom on the main floor.”

I can tell that she’s joking. But that’s looking like the best option at this current juncture.

Yup, today is just full of good news. I’m so lucky.