Whiskey Moon

Prologue

Ten Years Ago

Blaire

* * *

“So … what’d you wish for?” I ask as we leave the Whiskey Moon festival in downtown Whiskey Springs. The flashing carnival lights, laughter, and heady sweet scents of cotton candy and funnel cake grow distant by the second.

I slip my hand into his, taking in the orange-pink moon in the late June sky. Most people would call it a strawberry moon, but a hundred years ago or so, some locals got the good idea to call it a “Whiskey Moon” and make it into an annual celebration. Legend has it that any wish you make under this moon comes true—one way or another.

“I’ll tell you what I wished for,” I volunteer since the cat’s got his tongue, though that’s nothing new.

He slides his keys from his tight jeans pocket and unlocks the passenger door of his truck for me.

Wyatt gets like this sometimes—unbearably quiet. Lost in his head. Though I’ve never quite figured out where he goes when he tunes the world out like this.

“Say something. Tell me what you’re thinking about.” I nudge Wyatt’s shoulder, knowing full well that he hates it when I ask him what’s on his mind. It’s for his own benefit, though. It’s not healthy to be stuck in your own head all the time, holding everything in.

He sniffs, adjusts his faded hat, and then flashes some semblance of a smirk before kissing my forehead and heading around the truck bed. A minute later, we’re headed west, beyond the city limits, and his gaze is trained over the dash of his dusty pickup.

Gravel plinks against the underbelly of his ‘76 F-150 as plump summer bugs meet their maker in the golden headlights. Cracking my window, I drag in a lungful of tepid mountain air.

“Wyatt. Come on now.” I lean closer, ignoring the protest of my seatbelt. The perpetual scent of freshly cut hay, worn leather, and ozone fills the narrow space between us as I trail my fingertips up his forearm. “Two months from now, there’ll be no one here to pick your brain. You’ll have all those beautiful thoughts in there and no way to get them out.”

Lord knows I’m teasing about the last part, but then again, am I? I’m told Wyatt never said a word until he was three years old. He was toddling around the mechanical barn at his family’s ranch when his daddy took a fall on some spilt oil and hit his head against the side of a sickle attachment. Calm and steadfast, he made it back to the house to find his mama in the basement doing the wash. Tugging on her shirt, he pulled her toward the stairs, uttering the word “Dada” again and again. Wyatt’s Mama was so overjoyed with tears at the fact that her little boy was finally talking, that she didn’t pick up on the urgency of the situation … at first.

Either way, it all came up roses. Wyatt saved his daddy’s life and saved his mama from wondering how they were ever going to get their son the proper medical diagnosis and help he needed while managing a barely profitable farm in the middle of nowhere.

“What are you going to do when I’m gone, huh?” I relax into my half of the bench seat, slide my sandals off, and kick my feet onto the dash. “What are you going to do when there’s no one else to bug you?”

“I’ve got Cash for that,” he says, referring to his precocious youngest brother.

“Who’s going to keep all your secrets?”

“I’ll write ‘em down in my diary.” He keeps a straight face, but his aquamarine gaze glints in the dark, reflecting against the electric moon over the horizon.

“Who’s going to ride the line with you? Someone needs to keep Ginger straight. You know how she gets when she hasn’t been ridden in a while.”

I think of my spirited red mare, though she isn’t technically mine. She lives with and belongs to the Buchanans. Wyatt found her at a sale barn a few years back. The poor thing had a reputation for being feisty. Rumor was no one wanted her because she had too much personality and was beyond her best taming years. But she reminded Wyatt of me—or so he says. Anyway, he bought her for the low, low price of three hundred and fifty bucks and spent an entire summer breaking her so I’d have something to ride.

“Mama says she’ll keep her ridden for you,” he says.

“Your mama’s already got enough on her plate …”

Renata Buchanan is a force of nature who both fascinates and terrifies me. A former rodeo beauty queen, she married Ambrose at the age of twenty-one, traded in her tiara for a cowgirl hat, and birthed not one, not two, but four rowdy, rough-and-tumble boys. She’s equal parts gentle and tough, loves hard, and protects her own harder.