Chapter Three
Jo
I t took me 24 years to get my first job, and now I feel like my real life is beginning.
This is exactly what I needed, a place isolated from my family where I can be myself.
None of their judgment or critiques can follow me here, not behind these gates.
As soon as I step out of my car, Lochlan is waiting on his front porch.
I tiptoe excitedly to the front steps, avoiding letting my heels sink into the dirt.
His eyes travel the length of me from head to toe before taking a deep breath and shaking his head.
Okay…
Maybe I’ll still face some critiques here, but I love wearing heels, and not even Lochlan Dane can stop me.
“This is where you can report every day, or every other day. I’ll only need you for about twenty hours a week. You can pick what works best for your schedule, but you have to tell me ahead of time and stick to it.” He holds the front door ajar with an outstretched arm, waiting for me to walk in before him.
“Thanks,” I mutter softly as I squeeze past him.
There’s plenty of room, but he’s so large in this normal sized house that it feels like he’s looming over me.
In my heels, I’m about six feet tall, but I’m still only to his chin.
There’s a straight wooden staircase directly in front of the door, leading upstairs.
To the right is a modest but outdated living room, and to the left is the kitchen, which is where he leads me.
His head nearly brushes the top of the door frame, but he doesn’t duck as if years of the same routine tells him he won’t hit it.
The brown oak cabinets match the oak table sitting off to the side.
The refrigerator and stove look straight out of a sitcom from the 70’s.
It looks like someone’s grandparents’ house, in every stereotypical way.
“The computer is in here, and I keep all the paperwork in these drawers.” He pulls out a stack of mail from the built-in above the kitchen table.
“I’d like you to go through the mail and my emails regularly, throw away the junk, and prioritize the rest. The bills are always the number one priority,” he sighs.
“Bills, emails, mail. What else?” I ask with too much gusto, and he notices, looking at me peculiarly.
I don’t care, it’s my first day and I’m so excited.
“Well, I’m not asking you to be an accountant, but if there is any way you can crunch some numbers, find areas that we can decrease spending, or a way to make a profit. I’ve been racking my brain for months now and can’t find a way out of the hole we’re in.”
“How much of a hole?”
“We’re operating at the base level, enough to function. There isn’t any extra. My grandfather started this place when things were simple and cheaper. Now, food for the bears, materials, and the equipment we need cost almost triple what they used to.”
“How much are your workers making?”
“They only make minimum wage, but they live here for free, get two meals a day provided.”
“Like prison?” The words leave my mouth before I have a chance to think about it, and his face darkens.
“No, not like prison. They’re free men here. They choose to be here to get a leg up with employment experience and some savings before getting thrown into the real world. They can come and go as long as they do their jobs. They get a bonus once their parole is up. Most of them use it to buy a car or put a down payment on a place to live once they leave. They follow my rules because they want to stay, not because they have to.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it.”
He doesn’t respond right away, turning in a half circle and swiping a hand over the back of his neck.
“Follow me, I’ll show you around the property so you know the basics.”
I trace his steps back out of the house when he stops suddenly.
“Upstairs is off limits. You can go anywhere on the main level and the porch. Not upstairs,” he says over his shoulder, not waiting for me to confirm.
I follow him across the dirt lot toward the outbuildings, wobbling slightly when I hit the gravelly spots.
The only indication he notices is how his strides shorten, slowing his pace.
“The main barn is the bunkhouse. The guys live here, dorm style. Shared kitchen and living space, but their beds are quartered off and private.” He doesn’t open a door to show me inside, he continues walking down the alleyway between all the buildings.
“This is where we keep the vehicles.” He opens the door, showing me a few mismatched work trucks not likely from this decade and a couple more small all-terrain vehicles.
Aside from a shiny red motorcycle in the corner and a green Ford Bronco, they’re all dirty and well-used.
“We keep all the bear supplies in here.” He shows me inside a smaller building, leading me into the depths this time.
“Food and medical supplies. GPS collars, if we need them.”
“They don’t wear collars all the time?”
“No, only if they need regular medical intervention or supervision. They have over 100 acres here to roam freely. Our goal is to keep it as close to their natural habitat as possible.”
“How do you keep them contained?”
“A fence runs around the entire property. My grandfather spent most of his time here making sure every inch was fenced in. Mostly to keep people out and away from his animals.”
“But it’s not working now?”
“It’s an old fence,” he says wearily.
“We don’t have eyes everywhere. If we could see the breach right away, they wouldn’t have time to mess with anything.”
“And, that much surveillance over that distance and up in these mountains is expensive. Got it.” All the pieces are coming together, and where his problem lies.
This is a not-for-profit company that needs big profits, and fast.
He nods, leading me out of the building and back up toward the house.
“What about that far building?” I point down past the others, the one he didn’t show me.
“It’s where we keep all the strays.” I raise my eyebrow at him, so he continues.
“People see the word sanctuary and use it as a dumping ground. We find all sorts of animals abandoned at our gate. Dogs, chickens, goats, and worse. They stay over there, away from the bear enclosures until we find them a new, permanent home.”
“How do you get to the bears?”
“Trails cut through the woods and lead to the bear fences at each corner. North, South, East, and West are how we navigate them. It’s a grid that’ll always lead you back here eventually. Not you , specifically. You shouldn’t go near the enclosures for any reason.”
My mood deflates, but I try to hide it.
The glimpse of the fence that I can see is just past the main yard and barns through the tree line.
“This barn is completely off limits. It’s an original, been on the property for as long as my family has owned it, but it’s a death trap. Don’t even stand near it if the wind is blowing.”
I chuckle until he glares at me seriously.
Oh, not a joke.
“There she is, Second Chance Sanctuary’s newest employee,” a man says, rounding the corner of the bunkhouse to cut us off.
“Frank, I told you to stay scarce.” Lochlan levels him with a sinister look, but the guy doesn’t budge.
“We were just curious, is all. The guys wanted to say hi.” He smiles innocently but with too many teeth.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“They’re all right inside, aren’t they?”
“Yep.”
Lochlan lets out a sharp whistle and then stands silently, and reluctantly, while six more guys stumble out through the doorway.
“Alright, get it out of your system. Go ahead. ”
A chorus of hellos and introductions come my way all at once, indistinguishable from one another.
A few cheeky smiles and one or two bored expressions.
“Nice to meet all of you, I look forward to working here,” I respond sincerely.
“These are the Second Chance parolees. They will leave you alone at all times. They’ve been informed of the consequences if they choose to disobey.” He looks pointedly at them before turning back to me.
“All communication goes through me. Do not engage with them. Are we clear?”
“Yes.” The longer he looks at me, the more my heart thunders in my chest.
He’s so intense all the time, but standing here in front of all these guys is the first time I feel the weight of what I’m doing.
I’m the only woman among eight grown men.
“Curtis, go grab Hayes and Seiver. Might as well get all the introductions out of the way. The rest of you, get back to work.”
Correction: 10 grown men.
“Come back up to the house, they’ll find us.” He ushers me forward, making sure he stays between me and the rest of the men at all times.
“Those the shoes you’re going to wear every day?” He asks suddenly.
“No, that would be ridiculous. They only match certain outfits.”
He huffs but doesn’t say anything else.
It takes the entire walk back to the front porch for me to realize that he probably wasn’t referring to the specific shoes I was wearing, but rather the heels themselves.
I don’t bring it up again, though.
I don’t feel like explaining my love of shoes to him, or how my mother always insisted that leaving the house in anything but a perfect outfit was doing our family a disservice.
All of our outfits were to be hand-picked by her or a trusted stylist, tailored to precision, and never replicated.
I’ve ignored that last rule as an adult, mixing and matching pieces to eliminate the wastefulness of it all.
My mother turns her nose up at me anytime she notices.
She’s been doing that since I was a child, making it abundantly obvious anytime she disapproved.
There was no such thing as kids’ clothing to her, no characters or sequins, I looked like a politician’s daughter since birth.
Her disappointment was palpable the moment I hit puberty and went from adolescence straight into womanhood.
My hips widened and my chest grew too quickly for her liking, and she made sure to point out every imperfection on my skin.
Every dress fitting included a healthy dose of ridicule and degrading remarks.
She was 5’2 and 100 pounds on her wedding day, and she’s never let me forget it.
My father and brother both tower over her, each of them a few inches over 6 feet.
She could never wrap her head around having a daughter who was nearly as tall as the boys and not as light as a feather.
My shoes are the one size that has never faltered.
No matter how old I am, or how bloated I get, or the amount of sweets I eat will not change my shoe size.
However, the one item of clothing that doesn’t give me anxiety to try on makes me a mockery for other reasons.
A man like Lochlan would never understand something like that.
I could wear a pair of my tallest stilettos and still not rival his height.
He would never worry about people making fun of him for being too tall, not like I have.
“Having second thoughts?” His deep voice startles me, as I’m staring unfocused across the property.
When I turn towards him, he’s closer than I realize.
I have to crane my neck upward to look him in the face.
“No, I appreciate the opportunity to work here, Lochlan. Thank you again.”
He doesn’t respond, he’s looking at me like he’s trying to figure me out.
Most people don’t ever accomplish that, nor have they tried.
The older man from my failed interview comes around the house and climbs the porch steps slowly.
“Miss Jo, I’m glad to meet you properly this time. I’m sorry about all that trouble from before.”
“Oh, it’s no problem at all. Seiver, right?” He smiles at my correct guess of his name, and I swear there is a faint flush on his weathered skin.
“He’s been here a long time. He was friends with my grandfather before I was ever born,” Lochlan informs me.
“If you have questions or need anything and I’m not around, then Seiver is a good person to ask. He knows the ins and outs of this place as well as I do.”
“Boss man has tried to get me to retire, but I’ll wait and do that when I’m dead. I like this place too much.” Seiver bumps his fist against Lochlan’s shoulder, earning a glare, but I can see there isn’t much heat behind it.
“Seiver and Hayes are the only two that work here without a commitment to the state. They aren’t on parole and have freedoms the other guys don’t. I just can’t get rid of them.”
“You’d be even more miserable if we weren’t around, boss,” a man says from behind us at the bottom of the porch steps.
Hayes, I assume.
He is younger than Lochlan but looks just as intense.
I guess that’s normal for someone who has been to prison.
The tattoos scattered down his arm are all in black ink with snip-its of more visible under the collar of his white T-shirt.
He’s lean with muscle, stealthy even, and even though he’s as foreboding as Lochlan, he’s not nearly as wild or rugged looking.
Hayes’s dark blonde hair is buzzed short and tapered on the sides, and his smile is charming.
Lochlan is a brute force of nature.
“Hayes started here as one of the first parolees that we worked with. Once he was free and clear, he decided to stay on to help out. He keeps an eye on the guys when I’m not around. He knows what I expect, and they respect him. If any of them give you any trouble and I’m not around, go to Hayes. He’ll take care of it.” Lochlan looks at me seriously, letting me digest that information.
I glance at Hayes, and he winks at me, but it’s not flirtatious.
It’s a confirmation.
That rock in my gut settles heavier.
I wanted to dip my toe into the real world, but I think I accidentally stepped into the deep end here.