5. Four Familiar Strangers?
Four Familiar Strangers?
~WILLA~
T he Honda wheezes like an asthmatic horse as I coax it up the rutted dirt road, my hands steady on the wheel despite the way my heart hammers against my ribs.
Thank God for all those nights watching Damon work on cars, his Alpha pride making him eager to show off while I held the flashlight and memorized every movement.
The makeshift patch job I managed at Wendolyn's should hold— duct tape, borrowed coolant, and pure desperation working their magic one more time.
The road curves around a stand of pines, and I brace myself for disappointment.
Grandpa's letters stopped coming fifteen years ago. Fifteen years of neglect could reduce any property to ruins.
I've rehearsed it a thousand ways: the haunting tableau of abandonment, with warped fence posts leaning like old men and brittle cattle guards shrieking their own eulogy beneath my tires.
I'd conjured the image in my brain, over and over again—the paint stripped from the porch and the picture windows condemned by a spiderweb of cracks, the roofline slumping in grim resignation.
The mailbox a rusted jawbone, gaping for letters that would never come.
Each time, I imagined the land gone feral, reclaiming its boundaries; thistles shouldering through the cracked walk, cheatgrass swallowing the outbuildings whole.
Even the barn would not be spared. Grandpa himself had described it as “old as Montana and twice as stubborn,” but neglect is a patient predator.
It’d start with a few missing shingles, then a peeled patch of siding, then a hungry wind blowing straight through to pick the bones of the hayloft clean.
I half expected the whole place to be gone.
Maybe a blackened scar left by a late-summer grass fire, maybe just the foundations and the family headstones out behind the windbreak to prove any of it existed at all.
It would be fitting—the past smoothed down to nothing, all the hard edges eroded so I could squint and almost convince myself that nothing was ever lost.
But history isn't that merciful, and so I braced myself for the kind of little heartbreaks that make up a lifetime.
I figured I'd open my car door to the dust-choked silence of utter emptiness, the only sound my own footsteps creaking on waterlogged boards or the lonely moan of wind through fractured glass. If anyone was left to greet me, it would be the ghosts.
Grandpa’s voice echoing from the back pasture, Grandma’s laughter in the clatter of an unsteady screen door. Just me and the shadows, keeping inventory of what we’d failed to keep alive.
Instead, I have to slam on the brakes.
Cactus Rose Ranch is alive—no, thriving.
It unspools before me in layers, every detail brighter and more deliberate than the next, like someone dialed up the contrast on my childhood memories and color-corrected them until they glowed with impossible clarity.
The fence lines are white as wedding cake and unbroken, not a slat missing or paint flaked.
Curved in neat grids, they corral pastures that ripple in the gold slant of afternoon sun.
Cattle— actual cattle, a dozen at least —graze without hurry, flicking their tails at nothing in particular.
Their coats don’t just shine; they shimmer, as if even the livestock refuse to be dull here.
I coast the Honda forward on instinct, tires whispering over gravel so clean it could have been raked that morning.
The main house sits at the end of the drive, equally impossible.
The porch, freshly painted, wears a shade of periwinkle so intentional it makes my teeth hurt.
Someone has lined the railings with mason jars, each overflowing with wildflowers in full, defiant bloom.
Petunias, marigolds, purple asters—a rainbow with delusions of grandeur, considering it’s October and this far north.
Every window is scrubbed, panes reflecting the sky so perfectly I could probably spot flaws in my posture from here.
There’s a swing under the eaves, the kind that creaks on purpose, and a rocking chair with a thick wool blanket draped over the back.
Draped, not abandoned. As if someone just stepped inside to check the kettle and would be back any second.
This can't be right.
Dead men don't maintain ranches…
I ease the Honda forward, gravel crunching under balding tires.
The late afternoon sun turns everything golden, like the whole place has been dipped in honey.
My throat tightens with something I refuse to name.
This is what Grandpa wanted me to have. This piece of paradise he somehow kept perfect, waiting.
Movement catches my eye as I pull up near the main house.
Four men emerge from different corners of the property like they've been summoned, and my body goes on immediate alert. Not fear exactly, but something older, more primal. The Omega in me cataloging threats and possibilities before my conscious mind can catch up.
The first one reaches me as I'm climbing out of the car, and his scent hits me like a physical force—pine and leather, woodsy and grounding, with something underneath that makes my knees want to buckle.
Safety.
The word whispers through my mind uninvited as I take in his appearance.
He’s tall—maybe six-three, maybe more, impossible to tell with the way he carries himself, like the ground is contractually obligated to hold his weight.
Everything about him radiates the kind of presence that makes you forget whatever you were just doing.
I don’t mean the florid, line-dancing kind of masculinity that football coaches and whiskey ads try to sell you, but something older, bred into him by generations of weather and necessity.
Shoulders as broad as the barn’s crossbeam, but not in the careless way of college linebackers who can slouch their way through life.
No, his were the shoulders of someone who’d hoisted hay bales and patched barbed wire in blizzards; someone who understood that survival was a group project and took it damn seriously.
His hair is dark, thick as fence rope, and sun-bleached in a way that feels earned—touched with streaks of gold that I silently, irrationally resent for being more artful than anything I could pull off with a salon visit.
He’s let it get just long enough to brush his collar, and the wind—this persistent, battering Montana wind—keeps trying to push it out of his eyes.
If there’s a trace of vanity in the way he ducks his head or smooths it back, I can’t find it.
His jaw is shadowed by an impeccable five o’clock scruff, more salt than pepper at his chin, and the effect is less “grizzled movie sheriff” and more “the man you call when your house is on fire and you want your pets saved first.”
But it’s his eyes that pin me, and I mean really pin me, like a bug on a collector’s card.
They’re slate-gray, shot through with hints of blue, and behind them lives a steel-trap intelligence that I instantly, irrationally, want to impress.
He takes me in, head to toe, in a single sweep that is neither lecherous nor dismissive—just coldly, precisely efficient.
It’s obvious he’s the leader here, not because anyone told me, but because the air around him rearranges itself to make room for the fact.
The shock of his scent hits me second and hard: sharp pine resin, old leather, and something softer beneath—maybe the ghost of aftershave or the memory of a campfire.
It’s a scent that wraps around my ribs and makes my heart clench in a way I can’t afford.
The Omega part of me, the part I’ve spent years duct-taping behind my ribs, catalogues the chemistry faster than I can blink: dominant Alpha, unmated, unhurried, but vigilant.
The instinct in me responds before my brain can draw the brakes.
A spiral of recognition, desire, and what I dare acknowledge is dangerously close to hope skids through my nervous system.
I make myself breathe.
He stands a deliberate three feet from my bumper, feet planted in mud-caked boots, arms crossed with a mechanic’s indifference.
His posture says “don’t fuck around,” but his face—fine-boned, wide-browed, almost handsome if you stripped away the day’s exhaustion—softens just enough to suggest he’s not here to run me off the land. Still, I keep my hands visible, gripping my keys like a talisman.
My whole body remembers the lesson: never underestimate a man who can hurt you.
He waits, and in the silence I notice how my boots are sinking into the gravel, how the air carries the promise of snow, how my hands are trembling just enough to betray me if he looks closely.
He doesn’t. Instead, his gaze flickers past my shoulder to the battered Honda and back again, an assessment so practiced it might as well be a handshake.
Behind him, I catch movement—a second man, slightly shorter and more slender, with hair as black as the midnight sky.
He approaches with the unhurried, unflinching gait of a veterinarian—someone who’s spent years bringing his hands up to shattered bones and twitching muscle, who’s learned to move nearer not with force but gravity.
Each step broadcasts intent, but not threat.
I recognize it instantly: the way he keeps his palms open, slightly flexed, so even a wounded thing knows he means to help.
There’s a gentleness in his carriage so pronounced it almost hurts to look at; the living proof of what rescue looks like when rescue is done right.