Page 1 of Swift and Saddled

Chapter 1

Ada

I’ve come in contact with a lot of liars, but none quite so big as Google. I’m not trying to discredit the search engine, but I am trying to bring attention to its most annoying inaccuracies. In this case, telling me that the dive bar I was sitting in—because it was the only establishment in the small town of Meadowlark, Wyoming, that was open past ten o’clock on a Sunday night—served food.

It did not.

Google’s stupid bar-graph busy-meter also said that the Devil’s Boot—not sure if that’s actually the name of the bar, considering that there’s not a sign anywhere that indicates that—wasn’t busy.

It was.

Not insanely busy, but busy enough to at least get the “moderately busy” designation on Google.

There was also a very boisterous cabal of old men at the bar—Google couldn’t have told me that. But if there’d been any pictures of this place on its business page, I probably could’ve deduced that for myself.

And avoided the Devil’s Boot altogether.

Stupid Google.

This place was exactly what I thought of whenever I pictured a small-town dive bar. There was old-school country playing on a jukebox and an excessive number of neon signs; it smelled like stale cigarettes, and there were spots on the floor that my Doc Martens stuck to when I walked.

I’m not a snob. I’ve got nothing against a good dive bar. I just didn’t think I’d end up sitting in one. Not today.

When I left San Francisco yesterday and started making my way to Wyoming, a dive bar would’ve been the last place I wanted to be the night before I started the biggest job of my career.

But I was hungry, and the small but weirdly quaint motel I was staying in tonight didn’t have the best Wi-Fi, so I left in search of sustenance and internet access, but I only found one of those two things. What kind of dive bar has no food but good Wi-Fi?

The kind with a very tall and very hot bartender who took pity on me when I asked about food and fished out a snack-size bag of Doritos from behind the bar and gave them to me with my whiskey and Diet Coke. I didn’t ask how old they were—I didn’t want to know—but I had a pretty good idea, considering they were almost soft. They tasted like the bag had been open for a while, though it was still sealed when I got it.

After that, I settled for a high-top table in the corner. On the wall behind it, there was a neon sign of a cowboy riding a beer bottle like a bull. The ridiculousness of it tugged at the corners of my mouth, and I liked that feeling.

Honestly, I didn’t know if eating the Doritos that could probably qualify for a senior citizen discount was better than eating nothing, but here I was, eating them.

I wiped the nacho cheese dust off my fingers so it wouldn’t dirty my iPad screen. I had pulled up the email threads between Weston Ryder and me, double-checking the time I was supposed to be at Rebel Blue Ranch tomorrow morning and making sure I had the map downloaded to my phone, just in case.

That was me, Ada Hart, nothing if not prepared.

I didn’t know much about Rebel Blue—just what Teddy had told me over the past few months. I knew Teddy from my first year of college. We went to the same school in Colorado—at least for my first year. After that, I ended up transferring to be closer to home.

Going home was now a decision that I deeply regretted, because it had led to what would forever be known as “the incident” to me, but also known as my wedding to others.

I shook any thought ofthatandhimout of my head.

After I left Denver, I stayed in touch with Teddy—mostly on socials—and I was grateful for that now. She was the one who’d referred me to Weston, who I thought was the owner of Rebel Blue, but I didn’t know for sure. When you google it—again, stupid Google—you only get the information that it’s a cattle ranch and that it’s nearly eight thousand acres.

I guess I could’ve asked Teddy, but I didn’t want to bug her. She’d done enough for me.

I didn’t know how to conceptualize eight thousand acres.Fucking massiveis what I was thinking, when I heard one of the old men at the bar giving the bartender a hard time.

“What kind of bar runs out of ice?” he growled incredulously.

“The kind that has a bunch of sad old men who drink whiskey like water,” the bartender fired back. I looked up at them. The bartender had a small smile on his face, so he couldn’t be too upset with the jabs. “Gus is bringing some, so make that drink last for the next ten minutes.” He pointed at the glass in front of the man, and the man scoffed at him.

I felt my phone vibrate on the table and picked it up.

Teddy: Hey! Did you make it okay?

Me: Yeah—just doing some prep before tomorrow.

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