5. Four Familiar Strangers? #2
He’s younger than the first, but not by much.
Maybe thirty? His skin is the pale, luminous kind that freckles but never tans, and there’s a smoothness to his jawline that gives him the appearance of perpetual aftershave, even though he clearly hasn’t bothered with a razor today.
The contrast between his fair skin and his hair—black as the inside of a well, parted just off-center and falling in a perfect, ink-dark crescent over his brow—gives him an improbable, almost cinematic beauty.
If the first man is a slab of unyielding granite, this one is all angles and patience, a stone honed to a blade.
His eyes startle me. Lush, saturated green—the precise hue of grass after a thunderstorm or those ancient glass bottles you find half-buried behind the barn.
They’re bright, patient, and unflinching, and I can tell even from this distance that they’re scanning, noting, matching my face to some internal database.
His gaze is so searching, so appraising, that for a second I wonder if I’m bleeding or limping or otherwise in distress.
I check my hands, my knees: no visible wounds.
Still, the effect is the same as stepping onto an exam table and having the doctor’s fingers on your pulse before you’ve explained why you’re there.
When he gets close enough that I catch a breath of his scent, it nearly floors me.
Not the brute-force pine of the first man, but something subtler and more intoxicating—sage, rain on stone, and the faintest thread of sugar maple.
It’s the smell of a storm rolling in over a hayfield, of possibility and shelter and something else, too, something stitched through with longing.
For a lightning-flash second I see myself through his eyes, a stranger with one good shoe and a pair of suitcases held together by bungee cords.
I look like I belong anywhere but here, and yet his face doesn’t register even a flicker of judgment.
Just curiosity, and that unwavering calm.
He stops a full pace behind the first man—close, but careful not to crowd—and after a beat, his lips curve into what I’m surprised to realize is a real smile.
Not the cold, professional sort that clerks and functionaries use to keep you moving, but something softer, with a trace of mischief.
It’s as if he’s set himself the challenge of figuring me out without asking a single question.
He doesn’t say anything, just stands with his hands in his pockets, shoulders relaxed, eyes never leaving my face.
In the span of six seconds, he has already built a file on me, and I can sense him updating it, live. His expression is so open it borders on clinical, but the warmth is unmistakable: something about it makes me want to spill my entire life story right there in the driveway.
I feel the urge to speak first, to offer some explanation for my existence, before I even register the absurdity of that.
The compulsion to fill the silence is nearly overwhelming, but the words won’t come.
His quiet patience amplifies every insecurity I carry: the battered exterior, the way my clothes still smell faintly of engine oil and sweet scent of cinnamon and coffee, the quaver in my jaw as I try not to cry or hyperventilate.
He sees it all, and in his eyes, I swear, there’s not pity but a kind of fierce, impossible understanding.
A movement by the barn interrupts the silent standoff—a third figure, taller even than the first, but lean where the others are solid.
His hair is a mess of dirty blond, and from across the yard, I can make out a posture that doesn’t so much walk as stalk.
He’s pacing the barn’s perimeter with restless, prowling energy, every so often glancing over at the gathering by the house but never quite meeting anyone’s gaze.
There’s something about him—maybe the way he rolls his weight from heel to toe or the set of his jaw—that tells me he’s the kind of man who doesn’t do well with waiting.
Or new people in his space?
Trailing the barn-walker, or maybe keeping tabs on him, is a fourth presence.
This one is slighter, not just in build but in affect: his blond hair almost white in the sun, freckled arms folded in a loose, off-guard way.
He’s stationed himself on the bottom step of the porch, half-seated, half-leaning against the post, and his smile is so wide and guileless it takes me a minute to process it.
It’s the smile of a fourth-grade class clown—unhardened, a little too eager, but somehow endearing.
The kid brother in every family sitcom, except here he’s at least twenty-two and dressed in worn denim and boots that look like hand-me-downs.
The effect is so wholesome it almost sets my teeth on edge.
All four of them are watching me, all in their different ways.
The first—the Alpha, that old, mythic capital-A kind—stands his ground, arms crossed, face unreadable.
The second, the man with the rain-green eyes and gentle hands, does nothing but keep watching, as if willing me to find my own words.
The third circles at a distance, feigning distraction but always aware of the group’s center of gravity.
And the fourth, the porch-sitter with the impossible grin, seems to vibrate with a restless, sunny energy, like he’s seconds away from leaping up and tackling me with a hug.
I realize, with a cold flush, that this is all some kind of test. Not a threat—not exactly—but an evaluation.
The way a hospital team might take in a new patient, quickly but thoroughly, each expert bringing their own lens to the assessment.
My heart is pounding so hard I’m sure they can hear it, even across the gravel.
My Omega senses, dulled by years of city living and good old-fashioned repression, start to buzz at the edges, warning me of something I can’t name.
It occurs to me, belatedly, that I have never in my life stood in front of four men who looked like this—all different, yet bound together by some invisible thread of familiarity.
For half a breath I wonder if I’m in a movie, or dreaming, or hallucinating from stress and too many gas station energy shots.
But no, this is real: the Montana sun, the scrape of gravel under my boots, the impossibly alive ranch that’s supposed to be mine.
My hands tremble as I fumble for my bag, the motion drawing their eyes to me again.
The first man—Alpha, I remind myself—finally speaks, and his voice matches everything else about him: low, steady, edged with granite.
“Ma’am.” His voice rumbles deep, careful. A polite but unmistakable warning in every syllable. “Can we help you?”
I should speak…explain…but his scent keeps wrapping around me, and there's something familiar about the way he stands—protective without crowding, alert without aggression.
My mouth opens, closes, no words coming.
Where the first man makes me want to stand straighter, the second one makes me want to soften.
"Easy there, Cole," the second man says, and his voice carries the kind of calm that probably soothes spooked horses. "Can't you see she's overwhelmed? Not nice to do that to an Omega, especially when she clearly means no harm."
Cole. The name slots into place, though I don't know why it feels significant.
"I'm River," the calmer one continues, keeping his distance like he knows exactly how much space I need. "That's Cole, our foreman. And that's?—"
"Mavi, checking the perimeter." A third voice comes from my left, and I turn to find sharp green eyes studying me from about twenty feet away.
Dirty blond hair, compact build, every line of his body ready for trouble.
His scent carries on the breeze—smoke and cinnamon with an edge of danger that makes my pulse skip.
Where Cole offers protection and River offers peace, this one promises vigilance.
"Paranoid is what he is," a fourth voice chimes in, warm and amused. "Don't mind him. He thinks everyone's casing the joint."
This one— the youngest-looking of the group —approaches with an easy smile and a baby on his hip.
The man is young—midtwenties, maybe, though the easy confidence in his stride says oldest sibling energy to me.
He wears his warmth the way some men wear a badge: shiny and obvious, impossible to ignore.
His jaw is soft, not squared off like the first two, and his face is all open lines and sun-touched freckles, lending him the approachable air of a small-town nurse who actually remembers your birthday.
He wears cologne, but it’s subtle, layered over a scent so clean it almost hurts—like cotton sheets after a dry snap, or the deep inhale you take after a long rain when every dust mote in the world has been washed away.
It’s a scent engineered for comfort, which should be impossible in a place that already smells this much like home.
The effect is so thorough it almost overrides my anxiety response, and for one dizzying moment I want nothing more than to bury my face in his shirt and let him tell me everything’s going to be all right.
But it’s not the man himself who unmoors me.
It’s the baby in his arms—a not-quite-infant, maybe eight months old, with a riot of wispy hair and a marshmallow face still etched with that newborn look of perpetual surprise.
She’s got a sunbeam smile, softened at the edges by teething, and her eyes—one bright blue, one greenish-gray, unmistakably heterochromatic—lock onto mine the instant we’re in the same orbit.
And then she shrieks, not in terror or protest but in the pure, nuclear delight that only babies muster when they’ve just had an emotion explained to them by the universe.
She flails both arms wildly, then jams a fist into her mouth as if to contain her joy. Her legs paddle against the deputy’s hip, almost knocking him off-balance, and she makes this high, ululating sound that I can’t help but mirror with a startled laugh.
It’s a ridiculous sound— like a dinosaur crossed with a car alarm —but it brings every grown man in the vicinity to attention, as if she were the ranch’s actual foreman.
The youngest man handles this with practiced ease, bouncing her gently, murmuring, “See, kid? Told you she’d show up,” in a voice so calm and sure I feel my throat close up with unexpected emotion.
He glances down at the baby, then back at me, as if to confirm some in-joke he’s been waiting weeks to deploy.
“Sorry about that,” he says, narrowing his eyes just a little, like he’s taking my measure and not sure if I’ll bolt or if I’ll actually pet the baby’s head as instinct demands. “She’s a bit of a greeter. Gets it from her dads.”
Dads. Plural. I file it away for later, but the word clangs in my chest with a resonance I don’t have time to process right now, because the baby’s outstretched hands are now full-on groping toward me, and the man—still smiling, but warily now—makes a small show of tightening his grip.
And even though every nerve in my body is screaming for me to maintain a safe, city-bred distance from this small army of wholesome rural men, I feel myself inching forward, powerless to resist the gravitational pull of an unfiltered infant.
“That’s Austin,” River offers helpfully, nodding in the deputy’s direction. “And the little one is Luna. She’s new.”
“She’s not new,” the man—Austin—corrects, “she’s just…
very enthusiastic.” The way he says it tells me everything I need to know: that this baby is adored, that she is the axis around which this odd collection of men now rotates.
Even Mavi, the barn-circle guy, stops mid-pace to shoot a glance at the commotion, his restless skepticism replaced by something softer and more curious.
I have no idea what you’re supposed to do in a moment like this, when an entire porch full of strangers is half-expecting you to meet a baby like it’s some sort of handshake ritual.
My arms twitch with the impulse to wave, or coo, or perform some appropriate gesture of biological solidarity, but all I manage is a sheepish half-smile and a quiet, “Hey, little one. You always make an entrance like this?”
Luna makes another delighted squawk, this one so loud and urgent she very nearly squirms out of Austin’s arms. For a split second, her baby-blue eye fixes on me with the laser precision of a guided missile, and I feel a weird, headlong shiver—like she’s looking straight through the battered shell of me and into the part that might have once known what home felt like.
"Luna, no—" the man starts, but she's already reaching with chubby hands, babbling excitedly like I'm her favorite person in the world.
"I think she likes you," River observes with a gentle smile.
"Austin, get control of your daughter," Cole says, but there's fondness in his exasperation.
"Our daughter," Austin corrects, bouncing Luna as she continues reaching for me. "And she clearly has excellent taste."
"Our?" I finally find my voice, looking between them.
The baby has heterochromatic eyes—one blue, one green-gray—and watches me with unusual focus for an infant.
"Long story," Mavi calls from his careful distance. "Who are you, and what's your business here?"
The direct question snaps me back to reality.
Right. I'm not here to catalog attractive men and their confusing baby situation. I'm here because ? —
"I'm Willa James." The words come out steadier than I feel. "William James was my grandfather. He... he left me this place."
The silence that follows is deafening.
All four men exchange looks I can't read, something passing between them in the space of heartbeats.
Luna breaks the moment by babbling louder, her reaching becoming more insistent.
"Well," Cole says slowly, and there's something in his voice I can't identify. "We should probably go inside to discuss this. Austin's right—Luna's overdue for her nap."