20. eighteen
eighteen
. . .
ASPEN
Crew had been gone for hours, and I was beginning to understand his worry and anxiety when I’d lost myself at the library the week before, because I was a bundle of stress by the time I heard the garage door open later that afternoon.
I was about to get up from the desk in his office to greet him when my laptop pinged with an incoming email.
FROM: [email protected]
SUBJECT: Can you help her?
The first is the key
Crowned the prom queen
Face forever locked in a scream
But who could the killer be?
A shiver sluiced down my spine as I stared at the four lines on my screen, the words blurring together as my mind tumbled over possible explanations.
What did they mean?
Who were they from?
Were they…a clue?
Was someone trying to help me? Or was it merely a taunt?
“Aspen?”
Crew’s voice came closer as he continued to call for me, though it sounded like a distant echo as the world spun out around me.
And then he appeared in the doorway, and everything snapped back into focus in time with me slamming my laptop shut.
“Hey you,” he said, though the wariness in his eyes belied his warm greeting.
“Hey,” I said quickly, practically leaping from the chair.
“You okay?” he asked, that shrewd blue gaze not missing a thing.
“Fine!” I said, both too quickly and too cheerfully.
I was so far from fine we weren’t even in the same country, but I wasn’t about to dump my shit on him. This man had already done more than enough for me; he didn’t have to take this creepy emailer on too. Not to mention the way I was trying—and failing—to deal with my trauma. Somehow, though, being near Crew settled everything for me, made it easier to think and to move forward. Already, the tension in my body eased.
“Are you sure? You’re acting kind of weird…”
“I’m sure, Crew. You don’t know me well enough to know if I’m acting weird or not,” I gritted out, immediately regretting the tone when he blinked in surprise and yielded a step, as though I’d slapped him.
I couldn’t take the words back though, especially because they weren’t even a lie. Letting me sleep under a roof didn’t give him the right to…hover. I had my very own helicopter parents for that.
Parents I wasn’t currently speaking to for that exact reason.
“Sorry,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “Just checking.”
I sighed roughly through my nose and squeezed my eyes shut for a beat, willing myself to calm down.
“Where have you been?” I asked, scanning his face. His expression was tight, lips flattened into a thin line, the normally clear blue of his eyes hardened. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I was with Lane. I went to go ask him about those case files and ended up riding along to a suspect interview.”
Instantly, I perked up. “For this case?”
He nodded. “Drug dealer named Chris Taal. He’s a janitor at the school and has been long enough that he would’ve been around the night Vicky and Roger were murdered.”
“And?” I prompted, practically vibrating now, my mood doing an impressive one-eighty, cryptic email momentarily forgotten.
“Decades of cops seem to think he’s good for it, but they’ve never been able to pin him down. The interview was kind of a bust, but he ended up holding a knife to my brother’s neck, so at least Lane can hold him on that for a while.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “Is Lane okay?”
That was the first time I’d called his brother by his given name instead of “Sheriff,” and it felt funny on my tongue. Like I was doing something I shouldn’t be—like I was claiming an intimacy between me, this man, and the members of his family. I wasn’t sure I deserved it, or that there’d ever be anything between us beyond working this case together, but I couldn’t deny how much I liked it. Like Crew and I were discussing the daily happenings in our lives instead of talking through the first interview in a murder investigation .
Crew snorted, oblivious to my mental gymnastics. “He’s fine. My big brother is invincible.”
“I want to talk to this guy.”
“No,” Crew said quickly, and I met his eyes quick enough to see what looked like fear pass across his face, there and gone so fast I wasn’t entirely sure it’d been real.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean, no, you can’t. He’s in police custody, where he’ll likely stay for a while. Maybe when he’s out, but…he’s a bad guy, Aspen. A long-time drug dealer who associates with the bottom dwellers of this town. I don’t want you anywhere near him if I can help it.”
My blood pressure rose instantly.
“That’s not your decision to make. I need to interview him for my own investigation, and I’ll do so with or without your permission.”
“Aspen…”
“No,” I said, backing away from him, down the hall and toward the guest room. I could feel the walls closing in around me, suffocating me. I thought Crew had been doing me a favor by giving me a place to stay, and that he understood the kind of woman I was—the kind who could stand on her own two feet. But maybe I’d been wrong.
Him standing in my way now combined with the email had my hackles raised, and the urge to run flooded every one of my senses until I could barely think or breathe around the desire. “You don’t get to make those kinds of decisions for me. You don’t get to make any decisions for me. Maybe this was a bad idea.”
Crew frowned, the corners of his mouth turned down, bottom lip jutting out slightly.
The expression shouldn’t have been sexy, but I’d be damned if I didn’t want to pull that lip between my teeth, or feel that mouth glide across my skin.
What a conundrum I’d found myself in. Unwilling and, honestly, unable to let this man care for me how he wanted, yet wanting to rip his clothes off and ride him into the sunset every time I looked at him.
The duality of women, ladies and gents.
I really needed to find a fucking therapist.
“What was a bad idea, Aspen?”
“Me moving in here. Maybe I should go.”
Without another word, I retreated into my room, though I didn’t bother to shut the door, knowing he’d follow me. This was his house, after all.
Before I could get too deep inside, he caught my wrist and jerked me back, spinning me to face him and pinning me against the nearest wall.
Like two puzzle pieces slotting together, our bodies aligned perfectly, his thigh parting my legs, the tips of my breasts brushing his upper abdomen, right below those juicy pecs. His hands came up to rest on either side of me, completely caging me in.
Fuck, I liked it.
Loved it, in fact.
Loved the heat flaring in his eyes, turning them the ice blue of a white hot flame. Loved the way his jaw muscles fluttered as he ground his teeth together, his entire body vibrating with the final shreds of his self-control.
I knew because I felt it. Not because of his rapid breathing or pulse jumping at the base of his strong, sexy neck, but because I felt the same.
There was a bed right there.
I wanted to give in to this push and pull, and I was confident he did as well. But that was a terrible idea for so many reasons. We both knew that.
Still, he seemed content to play with fire, because he leaned closer, the tip of his nose brushing against my hair as he brought his mouth to my ear .
“You’re not leaving.”
“You can’t stop me,” I said on a breathy exhale.
“Fucking watch me, Aspen.”
“What’re you going to do, tie me up? Been there, done that, got the scars to prove it.”
Crew wasn’t cowed by the reminder of what I’d endured. And god, I appreciated that so much, was deeply pleased by the fact that he didn’t treat me like I was a victim. That he didn’t act like I was made of glass and could easily break at any moment.
The dichotomy between him wanting to take care of me and knowing I could take care of myself made my head spin—much like his proximity.
He bent closer, his lips brushing the shell of my ear, as he said, “Only if you ask nicely.”
An entirely different kind of shiver raced down my spine, and I sucked in a breath that had him chuckling darkly.
“Pass.”
I barely managed to choke out the word, and it tasted thirty different types of wrong . We both knew under the right circumstances, I’d climb this man like a fucking tree. If I molded our bodies tighter together, Crew would take that as the invitation it would be. I’d find myself naked and on my back in seconds.
He shifted away, only far enough to bring his face in front of mine, our lips nearly pressing together, more the suggestion of touch than actual contact, his breath fanning over my mouth when he spoke.
“One day,” he said, his words a sensual promise that skittered across my skin. “One day you’ll give in.”
And then he pushed off the wall and disappeared, leaving me with a swirling mind and wet panties.
Only to return a moment later.
“Before you distracted me,” he said, leaning in the door frame with those beefy arms folded over his chest and legs crossed at the ankle, “I was coming to invite you to dinner at my mom’s house.”
My heart rate kicked up for an entirely different reason.
Poorly, I attempted to play it off, to act like a hoard of butterflies hadn’t taken up residence in my stomach.
“You want me to meet the family? Moving awfully fast, hotshot.”
Crew smirked, those blue eyes flaring, the tension from before bleeding away, only to be replaced with a different sort of charged energy between us.
Vague talk of sex was one thing. Introducing me to his family in any sort of capacity was entirely different.
“My mom was in school with Vicky and Roger,” he explained. “Lane and I thought it might be a good idea to pick her brain about them and their friends and everything else going on around town when they died.”
“That’s…genius.”
“I do have good ideas on occasion,” he said. “We do family dinner once a week, and this week’s is tomorrow night. We’ll leave about five thirty, so make sure you’re ready by then.”
I gave him a mock salute, and he left me to my own devices.
“So what exactly should I expect?” I asked from the passenger seat of Crew’s truck the next day.
The thing was so large, I had to use the running boards and leverage myself with the oh shit handle to get inside. I hissed through my teeth as the strain pulled on my burn marks. They bothered me a lot less lately, but the skin wasn’t anywhere near fully healed.
My face heated as my mind flashed back to the last time I’d been in it, when Crew made me drive it home. I could still feel the ghosts of his hands on my hips, the way adrenaline had spiked my bloodstream at his touch. Everything about the man elicited a reaction from me on some chemical level I couldn’t control if I tried. Simply sitting beside him now, with only the center console separating us, had my internal temperature rising. His scent filled the cab, masculine and fire smoke, until I couldn’t take a breath of Crew-free air.
God, I was in a bad way. Maybe the attraction wouldn’t be so strong if I had been laid sometime in the last five years.
Having forgotten I’d asked a question, lost in a thousand-yard stare locked on his gorgeous, broad hands, his voice startled me.
“Well, my whole family will be there. Mom always makes an impressive spread, despite the fact that she cooks breakfast for the ranch hands every day. We always tell her she doesn’t have to go through the trouble, but she says she likes doing it because it gives us an excuse to all be together, and because then she knows we’re at least getting one home-cooked meal a week.”
“That’s sweet,” I said absently, mind turning to my own family as endless fields passed by the window. We sped down a gravel road, rolling right up to the foothills of the mountain range that bracketed the town.
I hadn’t heard either of my parents’ voices since the call the day I got out of the hospital. Surprisingly, my mother had respected my wishes for space. Dad, on the other hand, had taken to texting me periodically, something he’d never done before. Telling me he loved me, he missed me, and he hoped I was doing okay. I assured him I was but didn’t go any deeper than that. I wasn’t about to put him in the middle of my shit with Mom.
Now that I’d had a little time to cool off, I could—grudgingly—see where she’d been coming from, and I could understand their desire to want to take some of the burden off my shoulders after everything I’d been through. But maybe this reckoning was the best thing to happen for us. Maybe now, she’d give up her quest to dictate my life and bring me back to Chicago .
I hadn’t been back for years, with good reason. There were too many memories there for me, and not only the ones that featured my big sister.
Even growing up, though, with only the four of us, and seven years between me and Lola, we rarely had consistent, sit-down family meals. We were at very different stages of our lives, Lola with her school extracurriculars and me devoting myself entirely to making a career out of dancing.
That all changed the day she died, and I hadn’t danced since. After her loss, I couldn’t bring myself to do the things that had once brought me joy any longer, not when she’d never get that chance for herself again.
Maybe, in a way, I’d been punishing myself.
Maybe I still was. Leading this quiet, solitary existence was my way of atoning for living when she hadn’t.
Thoughts of the past floated away on the breeze when Crew rolled the windows down as we approached a gate leading down a long gravel drive. Two logs as big around as telephone poles stood sentinel on either side while another rested across them, a dangling, shiny metal sign that read “Lawless Rescue & Dude Ranch” swaying in the wind.
“A rescue and dude ranch?” I asked. “How is that even possible?”
Crew chuckled. “We’ve got a lot of land, for starters.”
“How much is ‘a lot’?”
“About a hundred thousand acres.”
I whistled low. “Damn. And how long has it been in the family?”
“Since the mid-1800s.”
I gaped at the vast expanse surrounding us as we rolled down the drive. I couldn’t imagine this kind of legacy. Sure, both of my parents had grown up in Chicago, but that wasn’t the same as a single family working this exact land for nearly two hundred years .
“How come you didn’t join the family business?”
He shrugged. “Never wanted to. And that’s the great thing about my parents. They encouraged us to do whatever we wanted instead of making us feel obligated to work this land like our ancestors.”
“Did any of you stick around the ranch then?”
“Finn and West. The twins,” he added when my forehead pinched in confusion. Honestly, there were so many of them and I had no frame of reference for anyone outside of him and Lane at this point, seeing as they were the only two I’d met.
Although, I supposed that was about to change.
“So do they handle all of it together, or…”
“Nah,” Crew said, guiding us around a bend. “Finn handles the rescue side of things, and West manages the dude ranch. But they both work with the animals we use for byproducts.”
“Byproducts as in…meat?”
“We stopped slaughtering animals a long time ago, about the time my dad took over. After growing up here when it had been a working cattle ranch, he couldn’t stomach it anymore. Thankfully, that happened before any of us came along, so this is all we’ve ever known. We have dairy cows, chickens for eggs, and goats for cheese.”
“Quite the operation.”
“Dad did an incredible job building a solid foundation for us, and when he died, it ran relatively smoothly for years until Finn and West settled down and started the rescue and dude ranches.”
I found myself hanging on every word as he described growing up here, running amok through the fields with his five older brothers, learning to ride horses and milk cows, rock climbing on the sheer cliff faces and jumping from the top into the random lakes that dotted the property.
Before long, we pulled up to the most gorgeous house I’d ever seen. Standing two stories tall, it featured white clapboard siding, the bottom three or so feet accented with smooth, medium-sized river rocks ranging in color from dark grey to light beige. The entire front facade consisted of windows, and I could imagine they let in a ton of natural light—especially with nothing to obstruct the view, though towering maple trees dotted the surrounding yard, providing some shade.
On the opposite side of the driveway, the land gently sloped away to barns and corrals in the distance. Horses and ranch hands moved around outside. There was a white, low slung barn and a taller red one. In the fields beyond, cows grazed.
Crew took a deep breath as he turned the engine off and looked at me.
“You ready?”
I quirked a brow. “You worried?”
“I love them,” he said, flicking his gaze toward the house. I followed to see a woman emerge, her grey-blonde hair piled into a messy yet stylish bun atop her head. She wore a bright red apron overtop jeans and a simple tee, a matching dish towel slung over her shoulder, and a wide grin. Crew groaned and finished, “But they’re a lot.”
“I’m sure they’re amazing,” I said, reaching over and squeezing his hand. We lingered in that touch for a moment before I gave his fingers a final pulse, let go to unbuckle, and hopped out of the truck.