Mend a Heart (Blue Creek Ranch #3)

Chapter 1

Ville

Ifrowned at my phone. Then swiped to make the call.

“Ville, you know I’m perfectly safe here,” Wren stated in lieu of a greeting.

I harrumphed like someone thirty years older than my thirty-nine.

He laughed.

“I just….” I sighed and rubbed the middle of my forehead with my fingertips.

My best friend sighed too. “Look. You did the security checks yourself. Sonny has made it as safe as possible, nobody knows the studio even is here. We’re deep into the Ozarks, you know that.

” Then he reminded me of the fact I wanted to forget because I was self-important like that. “Besides, you left Abi here.”

Abigail was my second in command when it came to guarding Wren.

She was no-nonsense and an Army veteran.

Normally she handled the security of the rest of the people around the production that was Wren Paxton.

She had jumped at the opportunity to take a few weeks off in the Ozarks in the name of keeping Wren safe.

A paid vacation when otherwise she would’ve been put to some shit job by the label until we needed her again.

She’d come to Colorado with Wren. I still wanted to go get him myself, but I had a feeling she would skin me in my sleep if she felt as though I thought she couldn’t handle getting Wren to me safely.

Knowing all of that didn’t help much, though. I’d been by Wren’s side, keeping him safe, for a decade and some change. We didn’t even vacation separately. I went where he went and sometimes, vice versa. Not that I had many places to go by my lonesome.

“Get on that plane and go make sure my family is safe, okay?” he said in a quiet, vulnerable tone.

That shook me out of my angst. Right. I was heading to do a job, after all. For Wren, but mostly for the people he called family more often than his actual blood relatives.

“Yeah. Okay.”

The agent at the gate raised a brow at me. The final few people were about to step through into the tube that would take us into the plane.

“Go. I’ll be fine,” Wren promised.

“Okay. Just….”

“No risks. I won’t leave this cabin, and Abi is fully capable of getting me to Colorado for the wedding.” His voice held warmth, and I clung to that as I said goodbye and headed onto the plane.

The wedding that was the catalyst for my trip was in less than a month.

The bride-to-be, Demi, was one of the older Harrington siblings, and someone Wren was very fond of.

When the invite had landed in his email—since, to quote Demi, “how does one send personal mail to a touring musician, huh?”—we’d been planning on me going to the ranch beforehand to check things out.

Then Fern had been added to the WhatsApp group Demi had made for Wren and me, and she’d expressed concerns and so here I was to figure shit out.

As I settled into my seat in first class—because Wren had insisted—I was glad I’d picked the flight with no layovers. The sooner I got to Blue Creek Ranch, the better. Not because anything was actively wrong, but because even after all these years of near constant traveling, I hated it.

Don’t get me wrong, it got easier over time.

I’d gotten over my fear of flying real fast early on.

You’d think you got used to the monotony of travel, but no.

To me, two hours felt the same as ten hours.

I was stuck with very little to occupy my mind, and that got to me the most. I could watch movies or listen to music or read or, normally, chat with Wren, but it rarely helped or kept my attention for more than twenty minutes at a time.

Since I didn’t drink, I asked the flight attendant for a coffee and settled in with the information I had thus far.

The ranch was large, with several businesses scattered around the Harringtons’ property. The wedding that was at the center of the need for security would be held mostly at the event barn.

Everything needed to be double-checked, and not just because Wren, a famous country artist at the top of his career, was attending, either. There would be other family and friends staying on the ranch property, too.

I looked at the tentative plans I’d gotten from Fern. She was one of ten siblings and an event coordinator for her business, The Event Barn at Blue Creek. Wren had grown up next door to them.

Fern had been doing a lot of social media marketing, as one did these days, not just for her own business, but the whole ranch.

It had driven plenty of paying customers everyone’s way.

The issue at hand were the idiots who came onto the private property without permission.

The family now had many visible signs stating that the whole ranch was, in fact, private property and that trespassing wasn’t allowed and whatnot, but did people listen?

I sighed as I opened Instagram. My own account had nothing on it, because I had very little I wanted to share with the world at large, but also because the whole thing was a security risk.

I used it to stay on top of exuberant and even a bit stalkery fans of Wren’s and, at the moment, people’s opinions on Blue Creek Ranch.

Wren’s account was handled by his record label’s social media team. He just sent them photos when he wanted, and if he didn’t, they posted something for him. He got mostly regular fan comments with some crazies sprinkled in, but that went with the territory.

Meanwhile, a lot of the people oohing and aahing about BCR were city folks who didn’t understand how much work went into keeping an operation like that running.

They also didn’t realize that the balance was easily shaken if something went wrong, and that balance was the key thing about keeping things running smoothly.

More than any of that, what bothered me the most and where most of the inherent risk came from was entitlement. People who didn’t understand that places, things, and people you saw online weren’t for you to go to, take, or touch. Parasocial shit was the worst.

As I scrolled through the Event Barn’s Instagram, I could see Fern’s vision.

It was a gorgeous spot and the packages she offered for all manner of parties were kind of high end, without having the disgustingly expensive additions nobody actually needed.

She did down-to-earth weddings and birthdays as much as the over the top anniversaries and such.

It was all very tasteful and not out of reach for most people who would want to use her services.

In one of the photos, she was carrying a table with her brother, Crew. He was the second oldest of them, just three years younger than Bodhi, who was Wren’s best friend. Or had been, growing up, at least.

With a cowboy hat on Crew’s head, he laughed at something she was saying. Add to that a flannel, Wranglers, and boots… yeah, I could see why people gravitated toward her photos.

She made sure to post on all accounts regularly. The Blue Creek Ranch one had some really lovely professional shots of the area, like the creek and the blue spruces the place got its name from, the mismatched herd of rescue cows, various horses, even a barn cat sprawled on a hay bale.

It looked idyllic and inviting, and while that wasn’t a bad thing, it sent the wrong message. Sadly, it needed to remain as it was for business’ sake.

I flicked back the ranch’s photos until I got to the ones that had caused the most hubbub last fall.

The ranch hosted an annual Halloween event. Last year had been different with one particular new thing they’d added: “the ghost horses.”

I rewatched the professionally shot video of Mike Harrington, the patriarch of the family, speaking into the mic in his hand. He was explaining the myth of the ghost horses and how if the gathered people were lucky, they might just see them tonight.

There were some eerie sounds and galloping hooves approaching from the distance—or the sound system, rather—and then the camera angle changed and two glowing horse skeletons galloped through the darkness maybe twenty-five yards away from the gathered crowd.

It looked cool as hell, and even with the added sound effects, I could hear the gasps and exclaims from little kids to even some adults.

That video had gone viral over the Halloween weekend. We were at the end of May now, and while things had slowed down, it still popped up at least once a month.

I had three weeks to figure out what to do to make the ranch as secure as possible without making it too obvious or too taxing for the people living and working there.

I tapped on a photo with the title “Dr. Emery to the rescue.”

Emery Harrington was twenty-nine, and he’d joined the staff at the town’s clinic last year. In the photo, Emery was tending to a little boy in a… whatever the costume was. Chewbacca? Yeti? I wasn’t sure. Either way, there was a scrape on his knee and Em was cleaning it.

The next photo on the carousel was the boy picking out a Band-Aid from a few options Emery was holding out. The final photo, one that I had saved on my phone as a reference picture of Emery, was the two of them, smiling widely at the camera.

I was nothing if not thorough, so there was a file of every person in the family and everyone on the staff.

Basically every human who set foot on the property on the regular.

There was a reference photo for each of them, just so I could familiarize their faces beforehand.

Most of the pictures were candid shots from various social media accounts.

I had met all the Harringtons before, some on the ranch when I’d visited a couple of times over the past decade, and some while they’d come to see Wren on tour.

Yeah, the Harringtons were definitely better people and loved Wren more than his blood family ever had.

I liked all the Harringtons. I had some… thoughts about some of them for different reasons, but mostly they were just good, solid people..