2. Jeremiah
JEREMIAH
“Where is Seb?” I groused.
Liam Cole grunted, which could have meant he didn’t know, or it could have meant he knew but didn’t want to narc. In all fairness, Liam should have been the one wrangling cowboys, not me. It was his ranch, after all. But Liam preferred cattle to people, so here we were.
Mercy River Ranch had been in the Cole family for four generations.
The ranch had nearly gone under with Liam’s parents, until Liam’s younger brother, Daniel, had the bright idea to turn the ranch into a nonprofit retreat for veterans, military, and first responders suffering from the mental scars that came from doing the kind of work we did.
Daniel and Liam Cole, Sebastian Ashcroft, Mateo Alvarez, Holly Delaney, and me—we had all served on a SEAL team together years ago. Now we were cowboys together. I was the general manager. Liam and Mateo oversaw the cattle operation. Holly and Seb handled the nonprofit.
Liam filled his mug then raised the silver urn to me, brows arched above big dark eyes that somehow looked bigger and darker than ever. I held out my own mug, squinting at him as he topped it off. Why did he look so…pretty?
I peeled my gaze away. “Mateo? You see Seb this morning?”
“We’ve got two minutes,” Mateo said, always the optimist. “He’ll be here.”
“Unless he’s dead,” Holly chirped as she breezed through the doorway.
She headed to her usual perch on the front desk, but with her arms full of sleeping chicken, she couldn’t pop herself onto it.
Mateo patted his lap and, without missing a beat she placed one boot on his thigh, using him as a stepping stone.
His hand circled her ankle and his biceps flexed as he gave her a boost. His other palm ghosted her calf to steady her, but she didn’t need it.
Graceful as a ballerina, she twirled onto the counter and settled above him, her legs hanging next to his shoulder. Mother Clucker didn’t even blink.
I shook my head. “He’s not dead.”
Holly shrugged like it didn’t matter to her either way, even though I knew it did. “He might be dead.”
“I’m not dead.” Sebastian finally made his appearance. “I’m not even late.”
There was a fresh bandage on his arm, which meant he had been out in the mountains this morning.
Rock climbing or mountain biking, probably.
That was what I told myself, anyway, because the alternative was he’d jumped off a cliff wearing nothing but a nylon wingsuit like some kind of deranged Batman.
I tugged at my hair, frowning at his bandage.
You’d think the only survivor of a rescue gone really fucking wrong would handle his own life with a little more care.
I bit back the safety lecture that wouldn’t do any good and muttered, “Call next time.”
“Sure, Dad,” Seb lied with a smirk, because he thought it was hilarious that I was a mere six months older than him and still demanded check-in calls. Maybe if he stopped scaling mountains in the stupidest way possible, I’d be less nervous about it.
“Coffee?” Liam offered, and I found myself once again puzzling over what was different about him.
“Sure, I’ll take a cup. Thanks,” Seb said.
Liam set his own mug down to fill Seb’s, leaving a smudge of pink on the rim where his mouth had been. There was a beat of silence as we all realized what it meant.
“Are you wearing makeup?” I asked, baffled.
Liam crossed his arms over his chest and stared back at me. “Blair,” he said succinctly.
I should have guessed. Liam’s thirteen-year-old niece had decided her future career at age seven and never once wavered from it.
She had done all our faces at one time or another, but her Uncle Liam was her favorite.
Maybe because she didn’t know what a broody grump he really was.
He liked to keep his grunts and growls just for us.
With Blair, he had the patience of a saint.
Mateo studied him through his round glasses. “She’s getting really good. Your cheekbones, dude. Damn.”
Liam grunted in acknowledgment, but his lips tilted in the closest thing to a smile he got.
My stomach growled. I had been up since four, and the protein bar I had washed down with my thermos of coffee had burned off hours ago. The welcome desk where we held our Monday meetings was close enough to the dining hall that I could smell the biscuits and bacon waiting for us.
“It’s 9:02.” I flicked my clipboard. “Some of us have work to do.”
“Ha.” Mateo’s dimples flashed in a grin. “You’re a poet and you don’t even know it.”
Seb and Liam groaned in unison. Holly’s dark eyes bulged out comically.
“Mateo,” she hissed. “You were a Tier 1 operator. You blew the entire electrical grid of the East Coast when you were nine years old just to test a theory. Russians call you T’ma.”
“What’s your point?”
“You can’t say shit like that. It’s embarrassing.”
He shrugged, bumping his shoulder against her calf. “Someone had to say it. We were all thinking it.”
“No,” Liam said. “We weren’t.”
“Well, you should have been.” Mateo shook his head like we had all let him down. “Have some fucking whimsy once in a while. Especially you, Jay. You’ve been an old man since the day you were born.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. Worse than a whole herd of stampeding cows, every last one of them.
“We have two new guests checking in today,” I said before anyone else could run their mouths about something that had nothing to do with work. “We’ll put Tyler Wood in Hydra. Lennon Graves will be in Orion.”
It was more of a reminder than new information. Tyler had made the reservation a month earlier, but Lennon’s had come through only two days ago.
Seb nodded. “Cabins are ready for them. Saw to it yesterday.”
I checked it off my list and moved on. “How about the trails, Holly? You were out there this weekend. Are they safe for us to take guests on horseback yet?”
“The lower ones are clear.” Holly ran the back of her index finger down Mother Clucker’s wing. “The higher ones still have snow, but it’s not too deep. Should be clear in a week, unless we get another storm.”
I nodded. This close to the Wind River Range, we couldn’t rule out a freak snowstorm even in June. It was rare, but it happened. I tapped my pen on my clipboard. “All right—”
The door chimed as someone entered the lodge lobby, and we all turned to look.
And I forgot how to breathe.
The woman’s steps faltered as she took us all in, but then she tilted her chin and strode forward. Her gaze darted from face to face, pausing to assess before moving to the next one. And then her eyes found mine.
“Hi. I’m Lennon Graves. I’m checking in.”
Nine years ago I had walked into a café in Fallujah and found myself thrown right back out again by a blast that took down half the building.
In between entering on my feet and leaving on my ass, there had been a split second where my gaze had landed on a shaking, scrawny kid barely out of his teen years and known without a shadow of a doubt that I was about to get blown up.
Lennon Graves felt like that split second—an epiphany that came a moment too late for self-preservation. I was as certain now as I was then: I was about to get blown up.
She was pretty—jaw-droppingly, chest-achingly pretty—but that wasn’t it.
It wasn’t that she was a woman, either, when I had been expecting a man, as most of our guests tended to be.
Mercy River was a working ranch, but in addition to our cattle operations, we provided a respite for veterans, active military, and first responders who needed a moment to catch their breath.
Some stayed three days and others stayed three months.
This woman didn’t look like she should be here three minutes.
Something was off about her. Maybe it was the way she’d braced as her gaze darted around the room at each of us, like she expected to be recognized.
I’d never seen her before in my life—she didn’t have the sort of face you’d forget—but what did it mean that she thought I might? I didn’t know.
And that meant I didn’t trust her.
“It doesn’t take five cowboys to check in one guest,” I said pointedly. Seb, Liam, and Mateo took the hint, greeting Lennon quickly before they headed out. Holly apparently decided the term cowboy didn’t apply to her, and she leaned a shoulder against the wall.
Lennon stared at her. “Is that a chicken?”
“No,” Holly deadpanned.
I gave her a narrow-eyed look over my shoulder before turning back to Lennon. “I’m Jeremiah Bell. This is Holly Delaney. Welcome to Mercy River Ranch. Check-in is at two,” I informed her.
Her face fell. “I could have sworn it was eight.”
“The lodge opens at eight. Check-in is at two. It was in your confirmation email.”
She pushed her hand into her enormous bag and rummaged around.
The bag was a simple design with no logos or fancy hardware, but I knew leather and that bag right there likely cost more than a ranch hand made in a week.
The sunglasses she tossed on the counter did have a big ass logo glinting on the side, and even I recognized the name Prada.
It made me wonder if those big rocks studding her ears were real diamonds.
Mercy River was mostly funded by donations and the cattle operation.
Guests rarely paid their own way, although insurance usually kicked in about fifty percent.
Lennon hadn’t provided insurance information on her forms, but it was common enough for insurance to reimburse the person directly that I hadn’t thought much of it.
Lennon had money. Another reason not to trust her. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. I had a healthy suspicion of any mortal mouthpiece that presumed to speak for the divine, but that lesson at least had held true.
With a triumphant huff, she whipped out her phone, presumably to verify the email. Her brow didn’t exactly furrow, but the squint of her eyes made it seem like it had. I tapped the sign next to the computer to get her attention. She blinked at it.
“Wi-Fi password will be provided at check in?” she read out loud, making it sound like a question instead of a certainty.
“That’s right,” Holly said firmly. “At two p.m.”
Lennon studied her for a moment, immediately determined I was the weaker link, which was accurate because anyone standing next to Holly was the weaker link, and turned her big doe eyes on me pleadingly.
I caved before she even asked. “Your cabin is ready. No harm in getting you settled now.”
“Thank you,” she said over Holly’s soft snort. Holly knew as well as I did that getting Lennon settled at the ranch was an hour-long process, and doing it now instead of at two meant other things were not getting done.
Breakfast being one of them.
I took her I.D., matched it against what we had in our system, and added in the license plate from her vehicle. Swiping the cabin keys from the locked wall cabinet, I glanced over at her. “You want the Wi-Fi password now?”
She rolled her lips together, then shoved her phone back in her bag with a firm shake of her head. “No. No, I do not.”
Not the reaction I was expecting. The way Holly’s eyebrows went up, I knew she was thinking the same thing. “Where did you park?” I asked.
“Just out front.”
I nodded. “I’ll meet you there.”
She headed out the front door, and I grabbed our welcome packet: a map of the grounds and other handy information, such as meal times, activities, rules, places to go in town, and the Wi-Fi password.
Holly put a hand on my forearm, waylaying me. “Something is off with her.”
I nodded. We were on the same page there.
Outside, Lennon leaned against a black mid-size SUV. Brian, one of our ranch hands, tipped his hat to her as he passed on his way to the dining hall and then did a double take. His expression turned quizzical, but at her blank stare, he shook his head and kept moving.
“Morning, Jay,” he greeted, reaching for the door behind me.
“Morning, Brian,” I returned, but my attention was focused on the woman standing still as stone.
Everything about her was all wrong, and if I were a betting man, I’d put good odds that she had never seen a day of military life.
First responders cared about duty and service.
I’d never known a person with money to show a lick of interest in either.
But maybe I was letting her pretty face cloud my judgment.
Maybe she did belong here at Mercy River Ranch. Because her eyes…
Her eyes had that hunted look.