Chapter 7: The Challenge
By the end of the week, people stopped asking whether Joey could ride the stallion and started asking when Calder intended to honor his own challenge.
A million dollars, spoken publicly, had a way of growing teeth. Men who had laughed when the girl first stepped into the corral now repeated the offer as if testing Calder’s pride against his pocket. In the diner, someone wrote the number on a napkin and circled it twice. In the feed store, a pair of out-of-town buyers asked whether the horse would become the girl’s property if she completed the ride, or whether the prize was cash only.
Calder hated all of it.
He found Joey by the corral at dusk and came straight to the point.
“If you mean to ride him, I need to know.”
Joey kept her eyes on the stallion. “I can ride him.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
She was quiet for a moment, then nodded once. “I will.”
The simplicity of it left him with no room to maneuver. He could have withdrawn the challenge, claimed it had been talk, told the town the horse was too unstable for any official attempt. But the men who had failed in that corral would call it cowardice, and worse, the girl would know he had changed the rules only after she entered them.
“Not tomorrow,” he said. “He hasn’t been under saddle properly in months. You work him first. You show me control in the pen. Then we talk about an official ride.”
Joey turned her face toward him. For a child, her gaze was uncomfortably steady.
“You’re delaying.”
“I’m keeping you alive,” Calder replied. “There’s a difference.”
She looked back at the horse, and the stallion, as if in answer, moved closer to the rail.
“I’ll wait,” she said. “But not forever.”
May you like
After she left, Calder remained by the fence with the weight of his own boast settling harder across his shoulders. He had offered a fortune to make a point about dominance and impossibility. Now a silent girl from a ruined ranch was turning that offer into a promise he would have to keep—or break in front of everyone watching.
And either choice would cost him.
