Hooper (Black Butte Ranch #5)

Chapter One

Hooper

AJA FOXX

~ Hooper ~

The moon was gone, had been gone for hours, and the only light left was the kind that wasn’t. The farmhouse didn’t so much glow as float, a pale suggestion in the void.

I was halfway through a cup of morning coffee when the stillness broke open: a baby crying.

I stopped. Listened hard. I could separate the sound of a calf in distress from a coyote yelping at the edge of the tree line from two hundred yards, easy. This was neither. This was an infant, lungs at full sail, not twenty feet from where I stood.

My brain played the obvious cards: Brandon. Maybe Jasper had run him outside to reset his circadian rhythm or, hell, maybe the kid was sleepwalking already—some babies did that, right?

It was just past three in the morning, so anything was possible. But the crying wasn’t coming from upstairs. It was coming from the porch, loud enough that it had probably woken up every mammal in a square mile, including the ones still hibernating.

I let myself listen for a second longer, picking out the cadence—on, off, on, like a malfunctioning siren. No adult voice tried to shush it. No shuffle of slippered feet. I counted the seconds it took for my adrenaline to roll over from curiosity to cold, sudden dread.

Three, two, one. Go.

The front door popped loud in the dead air as I opened it. The baby—definitely a baby, not a toddler, not even the old man’s yapping terrier—was right there in the center of the porch in one of those plastic and fabric travel bassinets, like someone had set it down and then vanished.

The crying wasn’t even the worst part. It was the rest of the scene, the negative space around it. No blanket on the boards, no footprints in the frosted-over porch, nobody bolting for the tree line.

I did a quick scan of the shadows under the porch, then up toward the windows. The only eyes watching were mine.

I crouched, heart rattling hard in my chest, and pulled the edge of the bassinet toward me.

It moved easy, lighter than I expected—like maybe the baby was a doll, like maybe this was a prank, except then the crying split off into a new octave, sharper, and my hands knew before my head that this was the real deal.

“Hey,” I said, because I had no other script, and the baby—tiny, pink, and real—kept going. Not blue, not gasping, just pissed. I wasn’t about to judge. I had questions myself.

Nobody but nobody abandons a baby in the middle of a Montana December. Not unless they’re desperate, or worse.

The rules were clear: get the kid inside, then sound the alarm.

I scooped him up, doing my best impression of the neonatal nurses from the last time I’d visited Danny and Burke at the hospital. The kid fit in the crook of my arm like a football, but wiggly, angry, alive.

I zipped my own coat open and tucked him against my chest, then snatched up the bassinet with my other hand and slammed the door behind us with the heel of my boot.

Inside, the old house was mostly dark—one bulb left on over the front hall, a deliberate choice so we wouldn’t stomp in and step on a dog, a goat, or a sleepwalking intern.

I set the bassinet down on the bench, unzipped my coat the rest of the way, and pulled the baby free. The crying snapped off as if I’d hit a switch. I wasn’t ready for the silence.

For a second, the baby just stared up at me, face screwed up, arms folded tight against his chest like he was bracing for the next bad thing.

He was small. Smaller than Brandon had been at six weeks, which is what my gut told me this kid was.

Maybe two months, max. His head was covered in down so pale it looked silver in the hallway light.

The shape of his nose, the curve of his cheek—my brain started cataloging, even as I told it to cut the shit.

There was something. An edge, a familiarity. I squinted.

Could have been nothing.

I looked down at my hands, which had already started the old army routine of checking for injuries—pulse, breathing, bleeding.

Kid was cold, but not frozen. The clothes he wore were new, soft, expensive enough that I could tell at a glance.

Nothing about this said abandoned. It said delivered. Dropped off.

The baby’s eyes were open now, tracking the movement of my hand as I brought it up to shade his face from the bulb. Blue, deep blue, the kind you saw only at high altitude or after a summer hailstorm.

He stopped shivering.

I didn’t. Not really.

The sound in the house was nothing—just the click of the baseboard heater and, from way down the hall, maybe the distant rumble of someone snoring. Nobody else awake. Nobody else seeing this, at least for the first minute.

I said, quietly, “You are not supposed to be here.”

The baby didn’t answer. Just kept staring.

I set him down, gentle as I could, on the bench by the door, then stepped back and took one slow, measured breath. The questions started to pop like bubbles: whose kid, how did they get here, what the hell was supposed to happen next.

My mind went to Burke’s recent habit of leaving the baby with “uncles” whenever he could sneak it by Danny.

But I’d watched both of them head to their house hours earlier.

There was no reason for their kid to be out here, and even less reason for anyone to bring another baby onto the ranch without warning.

I thought about old enemies, about past mistakes, about the lines of resentment that still zigzagged through this part of the country like forgotten barbed wire.

Then I thought about what it would take for a parent to put a kid on a porch at three in the morning, knowing the temperature would dip below ten before sunrise.

I reached out, brushed a fingertip against the baby’s wrist. Warm enough.

I stood over him, my shadow looming big on the opposite wall, and pulled out my cell phone. I forced my voice low. “Jasper,” I called, half to the house and half to whatever was awake in the universe that night. “We’ve got a situation at the main house. I need you here. Bring your first aid kit.”

“How bad?” Jasper asked. I could hear him moving in the background.

“I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you.”

“Try anyway,” he insisted. “Are we looking at blood, broken bones, bullet wounds? What?”

“Baby.”

There was a moment of silence and then, “Come again?”

“I found a baby.”

“A human baby?”

I glanced at the kid’s tiny features. “Could be a fairy.”

“Hooper!”

“Found him in a basket thingy on the front porch. I think someone dropped him off. I just wanted you to come over and make sure he was okay.”

“I’m on my way.”

I hung up and then picked the kid up again. “All right, hombre,” I whispered. “We’ll get you sorted.”

He blinked. Didn’t cry. His eyes did this thing, almost like they were searching my face for a joke, which would have made him the only one on the ranch who actually got my humor.

Under the bulb, he looked less like a lost cause and more like a challenge. Not even that. A dare.

I heard a floorboard creak overhead—someone finally moving—and I waited, letting the cold on my skin and the quiet in the house sharpen everything down to this moment.

The baby, me, the frost melting in a ring where I’d set down the bassinet. I could smell the memory of smoke in the walls, the faint iron tang of snow when the wind pressed against the old windows, and now, the tiniest, most insistent scent of powder and milk.

Everything else—every question, every protocol, every scenario—could wait a minute. I let him look at me. I looked right back.

He was small, but he had a set to his jaw that said he’d made his own choices, at least so far. Good for him.

Jasper reached the house in record time, shirt half-buttoned, hair stuck up on the right from however he slept these days. He didn’t ask what was going on; his eyes cut straight to the baby and then to me, taking in the entire situation in less than two seconds.

Whatever emotion had lived behind his face in the first moment vanished, replaced by the same steady, untouchable focus I’d seen in him the time he’d stopped Burke’s truck from rolling off a ravine with a toddler inside.

“Bench,” he said, not even winded, and I laid the baby down again, not gently, but not rough either—like he was a detonator that required exact pressure.

The instant my hands left, the baby let out a shriek. Not a fussy whimper, but a full-throated blast that made my ears ring. Jasper didn’t flinch. He pressed two fingers to the baby’s sternum, palmed his head, tilted his chin, checked pupils, skin color, pulse.

I’d seen doctors do this in war zones, usually with the other person already halfway dead, but Jasper’s routine was so smooth it didn’t leave room for disaster. His hands moved quick, but soft, and the baby calmed, eyes going wide and blank again.

“Healthy,” Jasper said, voice low so it wouldn’t trigger another outburst. “No trauma. Cold, but not hypothermic. Male. Six weeks, maybe seven. Well cared for.” He looked up at me then, and I saw something flicker—wonder, maybe, or anger.

I wasn’t great at reading Jasper when he went into work mode.

He stepped aside, one hand trailing over the baby’s shoulder. “You can pick him up.”

I did, and the crying cut off like a blown fuse.

Jasper watched this. Then he said, “He’s imprinted on you.” It was an observation, not an accusation, but I felt the heat crawl up my neck anyway.

“He was left on the porch,” I said. “Bassinet and all.”

“Any sign of who did it?”

I shook my head. “Nobody, nothing. If there were tracks, they’re gone now.”

He grunted. The kind of grunt that said he was filing it away for later.

I looked down at the baby, who was now totally still against my chest, like a small, warm grenade. He blinked once, twice, then decided I was not going to explode and let his fingers rest, curled soft as new leaves against my collarbone.

“Hooper,” Jasper said, voice shifting up, and I knew he was about to ask for more details. Except the next sound wasn’t his voice at all.