Six O’Clock
1070 Words
I join him for the ride.
I tell myself it’s strategic. The grounds are large. Riding with him means access to parts of the estate I haven’t mapped yet. Paths. Gates. Outbuildings the floor plan didn’t show. It has nothing to do with the way he looked at me in that corridor this morning and said almost nothing and somehow made it feel like everything.
It’s strategic.
That’s all.
He’s already at the stables when I arrive at six. Two horses saddled and waiting — which means he expected me to come even though I never gave him an answer. He stands with his back to me, adjusting the stirrup on the larger horse with the focused efficiency of a man who has done this ten thousand times.
He doesn’t turn around.
“You ride English or Western?” he asks.
“English,” I say.
He nods once. Moves to the second horse and checks the girth without being asked. I watch his hands while he works — careful, precise, unhurried. The same way he does everything.
I think about those hands signing his name on the contract. Bold and clean and certain.
I stop thinking about his hands.
“Her name is Mara,” he says, stepping back from the grey mare. “She’s responsive. Don’t fight her and she won’t fight you.”
I approach Mara slowly, let her smell my hand before touching her. She huffs warm breath against my palm and something in my chest loosens slightly — animals have always done that to me. Dropped my guard in ways people can’t.
“You’ve ridden before,” Kade says. Watching me.
“My mother loved horses,” I say.
The words come out before I decide to say them. Too honest. Too unguarded. I feel the slip the moment it leaves my mouth.
I don’t look at him.
I mount Mara in one clean motion and gather the reins and stare straight ahead at the open stable door and the grey morning beyond it.
He mounts his own horse — a large black stallion that stands perfectly still for him, no fidgeting, no resistance, like even the animal understands who it’s dealing with.
We ride out in silence.
The grounds are extraordinary.
Wide open fields giving way to dense treeline. A stone bridge over a narrow river that cuts through the eastern property. Paths that wind uphill toward an overlook I can already see would give a clear view of the entire estate layout.
I catalog everything quietly. Every gate. Every outbuilding. Every point where the treeline breaks and the boundary wall becomes visible.
Kade rides slightly ahead. Not dominantly — just naturally, like he knows this land the way he knows his own breathing. He points things out occasionally. The old gamekeeper’s cottage to the north. The boundary wall running along the ridge. The path that leads down to the river if I ever want it.
He is surprisingly easy to ride with. No unnecessary conversation. No performance. Just a man on a horse on his own land at six in the morning, making space for someone he doesn’t know yet.
It unnerves me more than hostility would.
We reach the overlook and stop without discussing it — both of us pulling up at the same moment like we made the same decision simultaneously. The estate spreads below us. Vast. Quiet. Beautiful in a way that feels almost unfair given why I’m here.
“How long has your family owned this land?” I ask.
“Four generations,” he says. He looks out over the valley with an expression I haven’t seen on him before. Something quieter than his usual stillness. Something that might be called peace if peace were something Kade Remington allowed himself. “My great grandfather built the main house. My grandfather added the east wing.”
“The wing they gave me.”
“Yes.”
I look at him. “Why that wing specifically?”
He’s quiet for a moment. Long enough that I think he won’t answer.
“It has the best light in the morning,” he says finally. “And the garden view.” He pauses. “My mother used to say that the quality of your mornings determines the quality of everything that follows.”
I go very still.
Something moves through my chest. Sharp and unwelcome.
Because my mother used to say the exact same thing.
Word for word. The exact same thing. I heard it a hundred times growing up, in our small kitchen over bad coffee and burnt toast, her hands wrapped around her mug, her eyes soft with something I was too young to understand.
The quality of your mornings determines the quality of everything that follows.
My throat tightens.
I look away from him. Back down at the estate. At the west wing where his study sits locked and waiting.
“She sounds like she was a wise woman,” I say carefully.
“She was.” A beat. “She died when I was nineteen.”
“I’m sorry.”
He looks at me then. Really looks at me. And for just a moment the wall is down — not gone, not broken, just briefly lowered — and underneath it is something so human and so heavy that it steals the air from my lungs.
“Loss changes the shape of everything,” he says quietly. “You learn to build around it.”
I know, I think.
I know exactly.
But I say nothing because my voice isn’t steady enough and I cannot afford to let this man see me unsteady. I cannot afford to feel the thing currently pressing against the inside of my ribs trying to get out.
He lost his mother too.
He knows what it is to carry that specific weight.
I came here believing he took mine from me.
And sitting beside him on a hill above his estate in the grey morning light I feel the first hairline fracture appear in the certainty I’ve carried for five years.
Just a c***k.
Barely anything.
I seal it shut immediately.
I turn Mara back toward the path.
“We should head back,” I say. “Before breakfast.”
He follows without argument.
But as we ride down the hill I feel his eyes on my back the whole way. Patient. Steady.
Waiting.
- Writer
