Guarded By the Lumberjack (Moonshine Ridge Lumberjacks #5)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Penny

T he security system was my breaking point.

Living on a rural road outside the city limits, the biggest threat I ever expected to face was maybe a raccoon in the garbage bin when I took trash out at night.

I never expected to install a high-tech security system in the home I'd spent the last three years slowly making mine. Only mine.

If my husband had come home from his last deployment, maybe I wouldn't have needed to.

But when the twenty-four hour surveillance team failed to notice the intruder that had clearly been inside, I finally admitted that I was in bigger trouble than I wanted to believe.

I'm nobody.

Just another military wife, widowed too young, trying to find my way back from the path I thought my life was going to take and onto whatever new one I'm supposed to follow now.

The rain starts while I'm pumping gas.

I have to run back inside to get my change, and by the time I'm back in the car, I'm soaked.

Rain is different in the mountains. I'm not just wet, I'm cold. And I still have nearly three hours of driving ahead of me. If I even have the right man.

The foothill town of Keller's Ferry moves past my windows slowly.

There was a four-way stop where I turned off one state highway to another.

The long, flat valley with the ranches and alfalfa fields where I'd followed a wide, slow-moving river on one side of the road and a set of lonely rail road tracks on the other had begun to climb into low hills and rocky outcroppings, then the road forked.

The winding US highway continued north to the town of Slow River Valley with a few roadside bill boards promising lodging, and food.

Keller's Ferry looks like it only exists through the sheer tenacity of the people who live here.

Orchards roll over the hills, homes dotting the landscape in various states of age and repair.

Fruit stands seem to adorn every driveway.

Some are closed. Some are on-your-honor set ups with fruit in bags or crates beside boxes where you can leave your money.

There was a gas station at the four way flasher, one that was relatively new, well-lit, with a small market attached. That's where I stopped for gas.

Everything else along this stretch of road looks closed-- either because it's after six p.m. or permanently. It's hard to tell.

I cross a bridge that spans a creek and suddenly the town, is behind me as I start climbing a narrow, two lane highway that takes me high into the mountains.

If Calvin Murdock ever called me back, I didn't get his message. My phone is at the bottom of a canyon somewhere outside of Winnemucca, Nevada.

I haven't used my bank card since I took cash out at an ATM in the same area.

The messages had started up again. Innocent-sounding questions about my travels, suggestions of what to do in the next town coming up.

But they were coming from the same unknown accounts that had been contacting me every time I blocked a previous one for the last few months. Even worse, they were messages to my phone. Not comments on my content or DMs on my social accounts.

Whoever I was dealing with had gotten my private number.

Or, who knows? Maybe they'd always had it and just picked now to let me know.

Law enforcement back home said there was nothing they could do. I contact the FBI and, while the person who'd been tasked with listening to my story was professionally polite, I'm pretty sure I heard her roll her eyes as she told me my case didn't warrant an investigation. I didn't have a case.

Everywhere I turned, I got told I was over-reacting.

Just block and delete. Ignore it, it'll go away.

I didn't fit the profile for the kind of women who get targeted for this sort of harassment; too old, too curvy, not nearly famous enough.

It wasn't an ex. It wasn't an obsessed fan. No threats had been made.

I was just being overly cautious. Paranoid. Silly.

My heart kicks into panic mode as I take a hair pin curve too fast, correcting just in time to avoid the guardrail.

This road is nothing like the mountain passes I navigated to get here. I don't understand how it can even be called a "highway." It's just two narrow lanes of curves and cliffs clinging to the side of the mountain it winds around.

The sun sets somewhere behind me, with the mountains rising to stand between me its waning light.

Two deer stand in the forest to the side of the road, watching me drive by, reminding me to pay more attention to my driving than to the thoughts crowding my head.

If Calvin Murdock is half the man my late husband made him out to be-- he's the one person left who might be able to help.

Calvin

R ain pelts the office windows just like it's been doing most of the day. Hell, most of the last few weeks.

It's late September and it's been raining since Labor Day.

Normally, I welcome the weather. I like the soothing noise that eases my thoughts, I like the smell of the mountains when they're freshly bathed. I like good long, wet seasons that keep fire seasons short.

Today's got me feeling jumpy for some reason, though. As if thunder were rolling in along with the rain clouds. My nerves are on alert, despite not a flash or a rumble punctuating the steady white noise of the falling rain.

We had to pull the crews off the work sites last week. Too much rain and more in the forecast brought the cutting season to an early end this year. Best we can do now is pull the timber we've got down off the mountain and haul it down to the McAllister mill before the snow starts falling.

Pulling my glasses off my face, I stretch my neck and rub my eyes.

I thought retirement was going to look like summer days on the porch drinking lemonade, winter nights reading by the fire, and week-long fishing trips. Maybe a chance to see parts of the world where people aren't shooting at me.

Closing out of the maps I'm constructing from my brother's field research, I push my chair back and head for the breakroom where I start a fresh pot of strong coffee even though it's well past five in the afternoon.

I was lucky in a lot of ways; I always had a knack for tech, and the U.S. Navy didn't let that go to waste. It meant I spent a lot of my time in front of screens, making sure my men were the ones doing the killing instead of the ones getting killed.

Of course, that didn't always work out the way we hoped.

Pulling the pot off the plate before it's finished brewing, I fill a mug with the dark, steaming liquid, then put the pot back on the plate so it can continue brewing.

For all the blood and terror two decades of service showed me, it's the kids under my command that stay with me. Especially the ones that didn't make it home-- or didn't make it home in one piece.

I got lucky. Damn lucky. That's something I try not to take for granted.

Back at the computer in my office, I take another look at the maps I'm constructing for our logging crews. We'll be able to thin a quarter mile into the woods before logistic makes it impossible to go deeper.

Now there's talk about opening up the old road between us and Paradise Point too. People over that way feel like abandoning the trails that used to run through those cursed woods might be making it easier to use them for criminal activity.

They want to open up the old road and make it possible for rangers to patrol in there.

That's not my call. It's just my job to map out the new trail and get a crew in there to mark and clear the timber.

Opening up a new set of files, I set my coffee aside and look over the figures in front of me. I promised I'd help my new sister-in-law, Honey, set up her money in an investment plan.

Still can't believe Carver got hitched; two years older than myself and twice the asshole I am on any given day. He goes into the woods to collect data for us, and comes out with a woman.

A woman who'd been in a plane crash and didn't remember her own name, sure, but by the time they got that ordeal sorted, she'd gotten it in her head that my grumpy brother was something she planned on keeping.

Now Carver's married to that pretty little thing and he's talking about starting a family in his fifties.

I don't know if I'm jealous, or if I think the man has lost his damn mind.

Heaven knows I never met a girl that struck me that way; someone that had me so I couldn't see a future without her in it.

Can't say as I see that happening for me now. I'll just have to enjoy the uncle title when it comes along.

At the point when I've had about all I can take of the office for the night, I shut things down and lock up.

Everyone else left hours ago. Aside from Carver, most of our permanent staff settled down over the last year or two. Adam's a new dad and Levi's right behind him. We expect the same news from Jake any day.

Everyone's got reasons to clock out at five now. It's just me and Clinton left burning the midnight oil, and Clint prefers to do it from his home office.

The rain is coming down even harder by the time I hit the remote to have the garage door open for me before I've even crested the top of the hill to my property.

The wipers are going full tilt and still not doing much good at giving me much visibility, which is why I don't notice the blurred shape of the unfamiliar car parked in front of my house, or the out of focus figure of a woman moving through the pouring rain as I roll into the garage.