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Then, through the sleepy fog, she finally thought to ask, “Resisting what temptation?”

“The temptation to go out and harass Cody while he’s working,” her mother said as she came into the kitchen and headed for the coffeepot.

She blinked. “What?”

“Didn’t you get his message? He said he’d texted.”

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and looked at it blearily. She had to open the app and hunt down his name, but didn’t say anything about that, not really wanting her parents to know she’d muted him. He was still on the contact list in case of emergency anyway. She hated the guy, but not enough to risk the ranch or her horses. She knew if something happened close by, like a fire or flooding, he likely would be the one to let the neighbors know about it. And her parents weren’t always here, after all.

With a reluctant sigh, she unmuted him as she called up the contact, then looked at the conversation list. There wasn’t much to go through under his name, obviously, so she quickly found the short, blunt message.

Video flyover near NW boundary Tuesday morning starting before sunrise. Stay away.

Well, that was tactful. Not.

“Nice of him to let us know, wasn’t it?” her father said.

Britt thought he was asking her so grabbed a swallow of coffee so she couldn’t answer. But then her mother was answering blithely as she sat down at the kitchen table, “So good to have good neighbors. And he’s such a sweet boy.”

Britt almost choked on her swallow of coffee. Sweet?

Sweet.

Cody Rafferty.

She escaped with her coffee before she said something stupid. Like that Cody Rafferty was anything but a boy. He was one hundred percent man, and a Texas man at that.

And she had the bare-chested images infecting her brain to prove it.

*

Cody heard his mother take in a breath as she watched the screen on the drone remote. He smiled; it was working even better than he’d envisioned so far. He’d started a little farther out than he’d initially planned because they’d found a spot that had sprouted more flowers than usual, and happened to be where the slowly brightening sky sent the faintest bit of light through a couple of outcroppings, given just a hint of what was to come as the camera flew by. If he didn’t like how it turned out, he could edit it to start when he’d originally planned.

He guided the agile little craft he called Vid—for obvious reasons—around an outcropping, careful not to go too fast so that, as his mother had pointed out, they didn’t make motion-sensitive people airsick by proxy.

“Let me know if you see anything to worry about.”

“Like?” Mom asked.

“Like a hawk deciding to take on the invader,” he said, his mouth twisting at one corner.

“All right.” There was a moment of silence before she said, “Not worried about the champion next door?”

Champion.

He bit back a retort because it would have been something about smug arrogance, and even he knew that didn’t apply when you could back it up. And Roth could. She had come home a national champion two years in a row, and she’d finished respectably every year before that since she’d started professionally.

“She’ll be a world champion before she’s through,” his mother predicted.

“Mmm,” he muttered noncommittally.

His mother just smiled at him, but stayed quiet now, as she’d promised she would once it got close.

He kept his gaze fastened on the remote screen. The sky was getting slowly lighter, that moment he wanted to capture nearer. Timing. It was all timing… He looked at the timer he’d clipped onto the remote, counting down the seconds before his best calculations told him the sun would be close enough to rising that those colors would match.

He remembered Kaitlyn’s quick, knowledgeable assessment of what he was trying for, and why. Ry had gotten lucky there. But then, so had Chance, and then some. And, he admitted, Keller. Despite his own efforts. He’d disliked Sydney the moment she’d shown up. And he’d let it show, hoping she’d give up and go back to her life on the road.

She hadn’t.