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Mac slid his arm around her as they started walking toward Harold at his vehicle. “Baby. It’s gotta be something good.”

“What if he’s realized they don’t need me?”

Mac grinned. “Then he’s lost his damned mind.”

Jodie stopped in her tracks. She looked up at him, shocked. “Thomas MacAllister, did you just do a swear in front of me?”

“Damn straight I did, Ranch Girl.” He chuckled. “Sorry, there’s a second one. Just don’t tell my mom when you meet her.”

Jodie snugged into his side for a moment. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

Harold had his radio up again. Willow had come back and stood beside him, looking at something on her phone.

Harold raised his voice.

“Can I get everyone’s attention. Unless fire conditions change before first light, the gather is still scheduled to proceed.”

For several seconds, nobody said anything. Then Willow closed her eyes.

They’re going to add more horses to the problem.

Mac looked west, out past the barn roof. The sky flickered.

He waited on the thunder. Counted to forty and got Goblin’s nails on the gravel, a truck door shutting down by the pens, nothing else.

Too far off to hear. For now.

The next flash gave him the shape of the storm. A high, flat top leaning east above the fire, lit from the inside like a lamp under a sheet. He’d spent his boyhood watching for that over the foothills in July, and so had every neighbor his father ever borrowed a baler from. You read the top of the cloud, and then you either got your hay in or you didn’t.

Nobody else in this yard was looking at it except Jodie. His Ranch Girl. They exchanged grim looks.

“Dammit.” He said his third—and last, he promised himself—swear in front of Jodie.

Less than an hour ago, he’d stood outside the tent and read the air coming down off the high ground, cold and smelling of smoke, and he’d been glad of it. Drainage flow held while nothing bigger pushed on it.

Now, something bigger was about to push hard.

Mac stepped in beside Harold and kept his voice down. “There’s a cell west of the fire.”

Harold lowered the radio. “Forecast had a chance of storms tonight. Rain would do us a favor.”

“Rain’s not what gets here first.” Mac tipped his chin west. “Air rolls out from under a cell ahead of it. That wind’ll be on us a long while before a drop is.”

“How long?”

“No telling. Twenty minutes, two hours.” Mac shook his head. “But it doesn’t come on gradual. Forty miles an hour out of a brand-new direction, and the whole thing turns inside of a minute.”

Harold said nothing.

Mac continued. “Whatever that fire’s spent the night doing, lying down quiet in the cool, it’ll quit doing. A fire’s only got a side to it until something leans on the side.” Mac let that sit a beat. “And it won’t be leaning out of the west when it hits.”

Willow had stopped looking at her phone.

Harold looked west. He stared for a good while, long enough that Mac let himself hope.

“I’ll pass it along,” he finally said. “Fire weather’s a dispatch call. If the order changes, we’ll know.”

“Fair enough.” Mac nodded west, where the smoke lay over the Basin in flat sheets, hardly moving at all. “Look at it, though. That smoke’s sitting.”