Chapter 6 #2
The simple question caught her off guard.
In that moment, looking at his outstretched hand, Sadie felt something go soft inside her.
After her father’s death, her mother had clung to faith like a lifeline, but Sadie’s relationship with God had been more complicated.
Yet here was Nash, offering this moment of connection—not just with him, but with something larger than both of them.
She placed her hand in his; it was warm and strong around her fingers. “I would like that.”
His thumb brushed lightly over her knuckles as he bowed his head.
“Dear Lord,” Nash began, his voice low and sincere, “we thank You for this food and for Your provision. We ask for Your guidance as we navigate these uncertain days. Protect us, lead us, and help us discern truth from deception. Thank You for bringing old friends back together, even in strange circumstances. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”
“Amen,” Sadie echoed, her voice barely above a whisper.
When she opened her eyes, Nash was watching her, his gaze soft. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze before releasing it, the brief moment of contact lingering on her skin.
“That was nice,” she said, meaning it. “I like praying with others.”
“My family always prays before meals,” Nash said, serving himself salad.
“Even when my dad was at his most distant, that was one tradition he insisted on. I guess it stuck.” He shrugged.
“Even though I don’t do it all the time and I will say that I was grateful you asked us to pray together earlier because I should be praying more for help with everyday things. ”
She smiled. “I don’t know if a hunt for gold is an everyday thing.”
He grinned. “You know what I mean.”
She nodded. “My mother used to tell me we should ask to see God’s miracles every day, so I try to do that.”
“I like that. I need to ask for that.”
Sadie took a bite of the chicken, closing her eyes briefly at how good it tasted. “This is amazing.”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” Nash laughed. “I’m a man of many talents.”
“Clearly.” She took another bite. “So law school, huh? How did that happen? I would have thought you’d stay at the ranch, like your brothers.”
“Porter left, but came back when dad passed away. There was … extenuating circumstances.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, anyways, and Colt and Chance and Blaze were always going to stay in Cross Creek,” Nash said, his expression thoughtful.
“Colt loved the ranch, Chance always wanted to be a sheriff.
Blaze was determined to be a vet from the time he was six.
He shrugged. “I was good at debate in high school, remember? Mrs. Henderson always said I could argue the spots off a leopard.”
Sadie smiled at the memory. “You were terrifying in debate. Poor Ryan Willis never knew what hit him when you demolished his argument about school uniforms.”
“You remember that?” Nash looked pleased.
“I remember a lot about those days,” Sadie admitted. More than she’d allowed herself to think about in years. “So your debate skills led to law?”
Nash nodded. “That, and I wanted to do something different. Forge my own path. Don’t get me wrong—I love the ranch, and I go back as often as I can. But I needed to prove I could make it on my own terms.”
“I understand that.” In her case, she’d had no choice but to forge a new path. Her old one had been obliterated the night her father was killed.
They ate in companionable silence for a moment, the country music from the other room providing a gentle backdrop.
He grinned. “Now Cheyenne’s becoming an attorney as well.”
“Really?” Sadie let out a low laugh. “I saw that she married Micah Stone last year?”
He cocked an eyebrow.
She knew she was blushing. “Hey, I was researching your family last night and I found a bunch of stuff online.”
Nash nodded. “That was definitely reported in the Cross Creek paper. Probably in the national paper too, because so much of the Stone family has received attention with the gold hunt.”
She nodded. “Yes. But it appears all of your siblings are married.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t remind me. I never hear the end of it. ‘Nash, when is it your turn?’”
For some reason, the way he looked at her made her blush. “That must be hard.”
“You have no idea.” He cocked an eyebrow. “What about you? Is marriage in the cards?”
“Well, until my mother passed, she pressured me nonstop. But after she passed, my studies felt … safe. Concrete. A subject where the facts don’t change, even when everything else does.” She pushed a strawberry around her plate. “Unlike dating.”
“That makes sense.” He cocked an eyebrow. “It feels strange to me that your mother wanted you to have someone, even though there was all of the witness protection stuff.”
She nodded. “Especially because of that. She truly wanted me to find someone I could be close to and share everything with.” She shrugged. “But it was hard for me. I dated a bit, but it was just easier to get lost in school and then my research.”
“I get it,” Nash said. “I always joke that I have enough people bugging me in my family. The law is safe; it doesn’t talk back.”
She laughed. “Exactly.”
Nash set down his fork. “So how did Sadie Blair, witness protection edition, end up specializing in the Rockwell gold?”
Sadie considered how much to reveal. She took a sip of water, choosing her words carefully.
“I started taking classes at the U, just to have something to do. There was this professor—Elaine Matthews—who taught Utah History. She was brilliant, passionate. She made these long-dead figures seem alive. I got hooked. Porter Rockwell was easy to get hooked on. He’s fascinating. ”
“How so?”
“He’s this complex, controversial figure who was fiercely loyal to his people but had a reputation for violence. A man surrounded by myths and secrets.” She smiled faintly. “I wrote my undergraduate thesis on him. That’s when I first started hearing whispers about the gold.”
“From Bill Harris?”
Sadie shook her head. “Not then. Bill came later, after I’d already been researching Rockwell for years. I met him at a historical society event about four months ago. He approached me after my presentation on Rockwell’s connections to early mining operations.”
She remembered that night clearly—Bill’s enthusiastic questions, his barely contained excitement when she’d mentioned the broken arrow symbol.
“He said he had discovered something that would change our understanding of Rockwell’s activities,” Sadie continued.
“He was particularly interested in the broken arrow symbol and its connection to hidden caches throughout Utah Territory.”
“The same symbol that’s in the cave where we met,” Nash noted.
“And on the missile silos on your ranch,” Sadie added.
Nash raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment on her slip. “Right. What exactly was Bill’s theory about the gold?”
Sadie hesitated. “Like I mentioned, he believed Rockwell was part of a network. People who were tasked with hiding valuable items—not just gold, but documents, weapons, artifacts that the early Mormon church wanted to protect from the federal government. The broken arrow was their marker system.”
“And the caves on Mount Olympus?”
“One of several sites Bill identified based on historical records and Rockwell’s own journals.
He was convinced there was a major cache there—not just a small stash, but something significant.
” She sighed. “Bill would say he thought he was being followed. But I never imagined how much danger he was in.” She paused and then sniffed, tears filling her eyes. “I never wanted him to die. I didn’t.”
Nash reached across the table and took her hand, his touch grounding her. “We’re going to figure this out, Sadie. I promise you that.”
The earnestness in his eyes made her want to believe him. But she’d learned the hard way that promises, no matter how well-intended, couldn’t always be kept.
She blew out a breath. “Your turn again,” she said, deflecting. “What’s the Cross family’s connection to all this? The conquistador gold, the broken arrow, all of it.”
Nash studied her for a long moment, as if deciding how much to share.
“It actually started with a different letter. Not the one with Bill Harris in it. No. It was a letter that Porter found when he took over the ranch after my father passed. Porter reached out to Trey Stone and asked him about the conquistador gold.” He let out a light laugh.
“We honestly had no idea what they’d been through and what we were stepping into. ”
“Really?”
He nodded. “I won’t say everything, but we ended up finding the missile silos on our property that weren’t on any official maps. They had the broken arrow symbol on them.”
“Right. Okay. You said your father was decommissioning missile silos,” Sadie said, making the connection. “And using them to hide the gold?”
“Well, we knew he’d been in charge of decommissioning them. We thought there might be gold, but we never found it in the silos.”
“Wow.”
Nash waved a hand through the air. “Yeah.” He spent the next couple of minutes going over the Stones and Cross’s stories of trying to find the gold—including several uncomfortably close calls.
“Holy cow.”
“It’s crazy. Basically, all we know is that some of the conquistador gold was there—Ms. Connie on the reservation was melting down pieces of it, and it was being sold through Kentucky and South Carolina.
But we’re convinced there’s more.” Nash leaned forward.
“What if the main cache, the bulk of the gold, is somewhere else? What if the broken arrow symbols are pointing to multiple locations?”
“Like Mount Olympus,” Sadie whispered.
Nash nodded. “Like Mount Olympus.”
The implications were staggering. If the Cross family had been looking in the wrong place all this time … if the gold was actually here in Salt Lake …
“We need to get up that mountain,” Sadie said, glancing down at her ankle with frustration.
“We will,” Nash assured her. “But first, you need to heal. And …” He hesitated.
“What?”
“I think we need to tell each other everything. No more secrets, no more holding back. If we’re going to do this together, we need to trust each other completely.”
Sadie felt her heart rate pick up. Complete honesty would mean revealing things she hadn’t talked about in years—the details of her father’s case, her real identity, why they’d been in witness protection to begin with. “I’m not sure I can do that,” she admitted.
Nash’s gaze was steady. “Try. For both our sakes.”
Maybe it was the earnestness in his eyes, or the lingering warmth of their joined hands during prayer, or simply the exhaustion of carrying her secrets alone for so long. Whatever the reason, Sadie found herself nodding. “Okay,” she said softly. “But not everything I know is mine to tell.”
“I understand.” Nash began clearing their plates. “Rest your ankle. I’ll get some water, and then we talk. For real this time.”
As Nash moved around the kitchen, Sadie closed her eyes briefly, gathering her courage. She’d been Amanda Levitt once, a girl with a crush on Nash Cross and dreams of college and a normal life.
Then she’d been Sadie Blair, a young woman living in constant fear, always looking over her shoulder.
Who was she now? And who would she be after she told Nash everything? She didn’t know. But for the first time in eight years, she was willing to find out.
Nash returned with two glasses of water and set them on the low table in front of the couch. He sat beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from him but not so close as to crowd her.
Before reaching for his water, he unexpectedly took her hand. “Would you mind if we prayed again? Before we get into everything?”
The request touched her. “I’d like that.”
Nash bowed his head, still holding her hand. “Lord, we ask for Your wisdom and guidance. Help us see the truth and protect us from those who wish us harm. Give us clarity and strength for whatever lies ahead. In Jesus Christ’s name, amen.”
“Amen,” Sadie whispered, finding comfort in the simple ritual.
When she opened her eyes, Nash was watching her with an intensity that made her breath catch. His gaze lingered on her face.
“What?” she asked, suddenly self-conscious.
“Nothing,” he said softly. “It’s just … you know, Sadie, you’re beautiful too.”
“What?” she repeated, caught off guard by the unexpected compliment.
Nash flashed a grin. “Hey, you can say I’m handsome, but I can’t say you’re beautiful?”
Her heart fluttered in her chest, and she knew she was in trouble. This wasn’t part of the plan. Getting attached to Nash—or anyone—was dangerous. But the warmth in his eyes made her forget, just for a moment, all the reasons she should keep her distance.
She looked down at their still-joined hands. “I think we’d better start talking before I chicken out.”
Nash squeezed her hand once before releasing it. “Alright, Sadie Blair. I’m all ears.”