Chapter 3 #2
If there was a single person I trusted at Red Hart above Eve, it was Jude.
The foreman was more of a brother to her than anything else, and he had even less a propensity for bullshit than Eve did.
The Ranger in me appreciated that. If it had been Travis who had pulled up, I might have had different reservations.
Her twin, despite his age, was as flighty as a flight attendant on her first job.
Jude ignored my question, gesturing to someone in the cab I hadn’t spotted, engrossed in the mirage of the man who had tortured Eve.
A small, chocolate haired woman climbed down from the truck.
I blinked at the mirror image and shook my head.
Not Eve. A bright smile lit her face as she approached me, dark eyes surrounded by heavy lashes sparkling in the afternoon light.
Dressed in blue jeans that fit just right and a striped, red and white button down shirt, she did a better job of resembling the woman I’d driven fifteen hundred miles to find than her brother did.
“Hi. I’m Natalie.” She stretched out a small hand, shaking mine firmly. Her hair was a little straighter than Eve’s, curling only at the bottom, not the full head of glossy chestnut waves that made my hands itch to run through it.
My gaze slid to Jude. I’d long wondered at the foreman’s attachment to Eve. Looking at the woman he had chosen for himself solidified that concept.
“Nice to meet you.”
Jude slid an arm around Natalie’s waist, tugging her into his side.
His attachment to her was obvious in the glow between them.
“Nat and I met when Travis sent me down to the auctions a while back. She’s been helping us stock the ranch.
Had a bit of a rocky start but,” —he grinned down at Natalie who tipped her head back, her smile softening— “it’s alright now. ”
I swallowed hard and looked away. “This place looks pretty bare.”
Understatement.
Jude’s gaze returned to me, forcing my attention back to the conversation we needed to have. “It is. Travis—well. He hasn’t been the same since the accident.”
I nodded, remembering the day he fell off the barn, who set all that in motion. “Simon Haldon changed lives.”
Jude’s face set into harder lines. “He did. But Trav’s got Rachel now. He comes down sometimes, works with her at the vet surgery. Here, it’s mostly just Eve, and me when I’m not at Nat’s.”
“You’re still around?” I asked with a measure of surprise. From the looks of Jude, he had moved on.
“He’s still here, and he still sleeps in the bunkhouse,” Natalie piped in grumpily, though the corners of her mouth curved up. “Though I’m just on the other side of the ridge.” She pointed to the white capped peak that loomed behind Red Hart’s ranch house, pensive and stoic.
I stared up at the solitary mountain. The range spread out behind it, but that one mountain watched over the house buried at its foothills.
“That’s a pretty long drive around, though. Not like there’s a road straight through the middle between here and Canada.” Jude grinned, rolling his eyes for my benefit. “Customs gets used to us.”
“They do.” Natalie snuggled into him.
“There used to be something through the range,” I murmured. “Eve mentioned it once. Long time ago.”
Jude frowned. “If you feel like going for a hike, ask Walker Roan. He’s out on the other side of the ridge, about a day and a bit of a hike that way.
” He waved a hand toward the northeastern boundary corner.
“He bought land from Len a decade ago. Long way back. He’s not too friendly, doesn’t like to talk.
Trav and I went up there, helped him build the house he’s got.
If you want to trek in a few days further, Bode Hunter’s out there too, but he’ll shoot you before he talks to you.
Carves the sapphires we pull out of the river.
Trader Kyle talks to him.” Jude scratched his chin.
“Well. Kyle talks. Dunno if Bode actually talks back at all. Anyway they might know about a pass through, but no one else is out there.”
“That you know about.” Natalie poked him.
Jude maintained a straight face and looked at me. “That you know about,” he conceded.
I watched them, my lips twitching. “That’s good to know.”
“What do you do?” I asked Natalie, struggling to follow the conversation.
“Elk.” They both answered me together. Natalie spurred off into a fit of giggles as Jude tucked her into his chest and ruffled her hair. A stupid grin decorated his face.
The kind of stupid I kinda still wanted on my face when I finally got to see Eve.
I cleared my throat, needing to find my girl. Too much standing around after driving so far left me aching.
“Eve mentioned that she might go looking for a deer she thought hadn’t been around for a while.” Jude took off his hat, revealing premature grays that speckled his hair as he answered my previous question.
We all grew a little older year by year here.
“It’s been gone for days,” Natalie added in as she wound her arms around his waist, squeezing tight.
I withheld a groan, tapping my hat on my leg. That did sound like Eve, all too well.
“Any ideas where she’d look?” I directed my question at Jude, speaking over the tiny, brown haired woman wrapped around him, and tried to ignore the pang of my heart in an empty cavity.
Jude jerked his head backward. “Western boundary land. Up near—”
“Black Hill.” This time I did release a groan. “If I’m not back by tomorrow, send the sheriff for the body. It won’t be mine.” I settled my hat on my head under their combined curious gaze, and headed for my truck.
Hell, I was proud of me for managing not to run.
Eve’s shade drove with me as I headed for the western boundary, a reflection of the last trip we had done along this section together.
Hell, that felt like an eon ago. Maybe it had been.
Here, Red Hart Ranch shared a good dozen miles of fence line on the border of Black Hill land, both adjoining the Canadian border to the far north.
Beyond were rugged mountains Eve had shown me, all virtually inaccessible, though she had mentioned the land used to house an original customs outpost, long forgotten, when her family first built the ranch.
That was where Jude mentioned the two mountain men lived on a few days’ hike out.
I doubted anyone could drive into their places, which I suspected, was exactly the way they like it.
My truck ate up the miles of winding unmaintained property tracks as I lost myself in memories of looking for livestock along the boundary with Eve on a previous trip.
A string of four black pickups drove parallel to my path on the other side of the boundary line jerking me out of memory lane and back to reality.
An arm raised out of the driver’s side cab to hail me.
I waved back, unable to make out the driver before the trucks disappeared into the tree line.
I paused for a moment, letting my truck idle, but the neighbor’s land wasn’t my business.
The sounds of the other trucks faded, and I resumed my path that followed the fence line for a short distance before I turned slightly north and headed deeper into the forest, returning to my reminiscence.
Peirce had been involved then, too, which didn’t make this trip sit any easier with me.
This time, though, I was looking for a girl, which was no easy feat when she was likely, knowing Eve, nowhere near the road.
That trip had been a fast one, both of us belting out the wrong lyrics to a song together.
This one was slower, with the window wound all the way down, though I could barely hear anything over the drone of the engine.
I parked at a familiar bend in the dirt track. The road continued on to a round trip of the property, but to access the back corner after driving for long enough that one ass cheek turned numb, I had to walk.
Which was fine. I had no idea if I had passed Eve’s destination, but I had more of a chance of finding her on foot where I could hear a whole lot better. The path before me seemed a better choice than getting lost in the foothills of the mountains that I barely remembered for no good reason.
Eve was my pine needle in the snowy haystack that was Red Hart, and she could be anywhere within a twenty square mile radius, quite literally.
I paced myself, taking longer strides but kept my breaths slow and steady as I walked.
My mind refused to stop ticking over, the same way it had at the house.
Why the hell wasn’t Jude or Travis out looking for her if they knew she was out helping her animals?
Red Hart’s spotted red deer herd was infamous and Eve’s pride and joy.
She’d do anything for her herd, and the boys knew that.
Maybe Natalie had become Jude’s distraction, though he seemed to be on the property to help run it often enough.
I gave her twin no excuse. As part owner of the ranch and Eve’s brother, he didn’t get off half as lightly in my book.
I halted beside a thick pine, my palm resting on its roughened bark. Icy water dripped on the back of my hand as I listened for the faint sound I thought I’d heard a moment before, but it didn't repeat. No, it wasn’t like any of the Red Hart crew to abandon their own.
Not unless Eve had a habit of taking off for days on a regular basis.
My boots crunched over snow and slush, the insides slowly soaking. I seethed silently, my footfalls careful but heavy as I strode deeper into the cold depths of the forest. What the hell had happened to my girl that she was hiking into the snow and no one knew where she was?
Or that anyone seemed to care.
My Eve, who had always brought light and warmth to the ranch hands and people who filled Red Hart, usually because of her. Every one of them adored her—some more than others, it seemed—but I couldn’t see anyone hurting her intentionally.
But then, after everything that had happened to her in the last year, I hadn’t been here to help prop her up, or let her cry.
God, please, let her still be able to cry.
My guts knotted as I strode through the underbrush that thinned into pine litter and mush, pausing to listen every few steps.
Something warned me against calling out for the moment.
The ground was soft underfoot, the snow less melted here as it had been in the yard.
Small clumps of frost still clung to the trees, glazing them in a glistening array of sparkles both beautiful and blinding in reflected light.
It might have been the small change in altitude that cleared my head, but I wondered if the yard at the front of the ranch house was getting more traffic than I had assumed.
Surely Eve had someone helping out around the place. She’d always been as tough as hell and blessed with determination that rolled easily into the realm of stubbornness. That was what both drove me crazy and what I loved about her most, but even Eve had to admit when she needed help.
I rounded a slab of granite that always reminded me of stone boulders thrown by mountain giants, and stumbled over the first hint that I might actually have found my needle.
A ponderosa pine was split straight down the middle of its heavy trunk, the tips of the bark blackened at its shattered ends.
New growth had begun to assimilate the damage done, its survival pushing through the season, but what caught my interest was the fresh turned dirt at its base.
Scuffle marks spread across the pebbly soil in a wide pattern across the bowl where the tree used to stand.
I walked around it, tracing the path of destruction to a worse-for-wear oversized holly bush.
Beyond that, the trail tipped down a small incline into a small dell, in a copse of elderberry and mountain laurel and right at the very bottom, Eve was planted on her perfect behind, uncoiling a ridiculous amount of wire from around a small deer that the property was named for.
She looked up as I peered down at her, my hands clenched at my sides. Dark circles hung beneath her eyes, her curls as wild a mess as the tangled deer she cradled.
But when she saw me, some part of that exhaustion was pushed away. Color rose in her cheeks, and she managed the kind of smile that sent me scrambling down the incline to help her.
“Rhys,” she whispered, her head tipping back.
And suddenly I didn’t give a single fuck if she wanted me there or not. Because I'd found her, and right now, that was all that mattered.