Rescued By the Cowboy (Havenstone #5)

Chapter 1

Jenna

“So let me get this straight,” I say, pressing the phone tighter against my ear. “You’re telling me a full-grown cow walked through a screen door.”

“She didn’t walk through it.” A pause. The kind that means he’s smiling. “She leaned. Real committed-like. The door just happened to lose the argument.”

I bite back a laugh, but my mouth curves up without permission whenever Ethan Sutton talks.

The regional LandCorp office is empty. I’m sitting cross-legged in my desk chair, shoes kicked off, a cold cup of coffee growing a skin beside my keyboard, and I am so absurdly happy that I could cry.

My whole spine softens. Six months of this.

This thing where I reorganize my entire evening around the sound of his voice while pretending I don’t.

It started with emails from January through March, then daily phone calls starting in April, and my body still registers his voice like a physical touch.

Which is stupid. We’ve never met. Never exchanged photos.

Never even asked for them. Just words and voice and the slow, terrifying magic of letting someone know you before they see you.

An unspoken agreement that started with my shyness and somehow became sacred.

Because I’m in love with a voice, his voice, and I’m starting to wonder if that makes me the protagonist of something beautiful or a cautionary tale.

How is it even possible? While I don't know the answer, I also don't have another word to describe the emotions that bloom inside me whenever I speak with Ethan Sutton.

I found Marlie’s Angels six months ago during a flare so bad that my forearms looked scalded.

I was sitting in the dark, scratching my wrists raw, scrolling because sleep wasn’t coming and loneliness was swallowing me like thick cotton wool.

A matchmaking service for ranchers. I almost laughed.

But I filled out the profile honestly because who lies at two in the morning?

And I checked the box for correspondence only, no photos.

I wasn’t looking for love. I was looking for a way out—proof that the world was bigger than my apartment, my flares, and a job that was eating me alive.

I had no expectations. Maybe a few awkward emails that would fizzle into silence.

I never expected to meet a man who asked about my day and actually listened, who signed his emails with just his initial—E.

—like he was rationing himself but still couldn’t stop reaching out.

“Was the cow okay?” I ask.

“Cow’s fine. Screen door’s in the afterlife. Daniel, my older brother, is pretending he’s not mad about it, which means he’s real mad about it.”

“And you’re pretending you didn’t find the whole thing hilarious.”

“I would never.” Another pause. Then, lower: “She looked real surprised, though. The cow. Just standing in the living room like she’d been invited for dinner.”

A robust laugh escapes, filling the empty office. I clamp a hand over my mouth because laughing like this in the LandCorp building feels like a violation of an unwritten rule. Everything in this building is beige and measured. Nothing about the way Ethan makes me feel is beige.

“You’re still at the office,” he says. Not a question.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I can hear the fluorescent buzz. Also, you always sound tired when you’re there. Different tired than when you’re home.”

I turn my chair toward the darkened windows, the city lights spreading below like scattered coins. “That’s creepy, Ethan.”

“It’s not creepy. It’s paying attention.”

God. When he says things like that, in that low register he uses when he’s being serious, I feel it in my chest. In my thighs.

I bite my nail and taste copper—a habit I can’t break, especially here.

“You eaten?”

I glance at the granola bar wrapper on my desk. “Define ‘eaten.’”

“It’s almost ten. How many people are still in the building?”

I look down the corridor of cubicles with their gray fabric walls, a dead Ficus by the water cooler. “The cleaning crew finished an hour ago.”

“Go home,” he says.

“Can’t.” I press the phone closer, as if I can pull him through the handset and into my heart. “I need to finish these reports.”

Late nights don’t bother me. I don’t have much to go home to. For now, it’s a serviced apartment during this job at the regional office.

“Jenna.” Ethan’s tone shifts, and something deeper resonates beneath his calm. Not quite worry, but more like a man who’s listened carefully for six months and heard what I’m not saying. “I want you to—” He stops. Exhales. Starts again. “Come to me.”

My breath catches. The words land differently this time.

Usually when he says it—come visit, come see Montana, come meet me—it’s easy to deflect with jokes about work, projects, money, the vague architecture of a life that suddenly feels very fragile.

But tonight something has shifted in his voice.

He says it as if the only question is why I haven’t done it yet.

Come to me. As if there’s a door I could walk through, and someone would be waiting on the other side.

But God…

“I want to.” I clear my throat. “Things at the office are—there’s a lot happening. But the files I’m processing show discrepancies. Numbers that don’t add up. I can’t lose this job.”

“Come to the ranch,” he says. “I’ve got a guest room. Maggie makes enough food for twelve people every night and gets offended when it’s not eaten. Trust me, you’d be doing us a favor.”

I press the speaker closer to my ear, relishing the endorphin high from his baritone. “You’re selling the guest room pretty hard, cowboy.”

“The window faces east. You get the sunrise.”

I’ve imagined meeting him countless times.

But what I know isn’t a face—it’s a low, steady voice with a drawl that drops consonants like they’re optional.

Thinkin’. Wantin’. Words that feel like they’re being peeled open and offered with a mug of warm honey-spiced tea.

He says “yeah” instead of “yes.” He goes quiet before saying anything important, and the silence is so intentional that my skin prickles every time.

“Ethan. We haven’t even seen each other’s faces.”

“I know what your laugh sounds like when you’re tired,” he says.

“You grab peanut butter cups from the vending machine at four p.m. every day because that’s when your blood sugar crashes.

You read three books a week and always start with the last page because you need to know it ends okay before you’ll invest.” He pauses.

“I don’t need to see your face to know you, Jenna. ”

My throat tightens. I push my glasses up my nose, processing and trying to fit his words into a framework that makes sense. He makes it sound so simple, knowing someone, being known, as if it’s not the most terrifying thing in the world.

“I want to.” My voice comes out smaller than I intended. “I can come next week. I’m planning to come next week.”

Next week is the safe answer. It buys time, keeping a comfortable distance between his voice in my ear and his body in the same room. But I’ve been saying “next week” for a month.

And now the thing I built in the safety of distance, this slow, impossible intimacy, is demanding that I show up, revealing every reason I checked that no photos box.

My heart beats rapidly. I should say no.

I should say I’m a disaster, I’m flaking out on basic self-care, and I haven’t slept properly in weeks.

My skin is the worst it’s been in years.

Stress has my forearms burning under my sleeves and angry red patches climbing from my wrists to my elbows.

The dark circles under my eyes defy even the best concealer.

My nails are bitten down to nothing. I’m not the version of myself I want him to meet.

And then there’s the other thing I can’t say: every person I’ve let close has eventually found a reason to let go. I’ve been pre-packing my bags since I was eleven.

“Let me give you the address,” he says. “You got something to write with?”

“You don’t want to text it?” I tease.

His laugh rumbles down the phone, warming parts of me that have been cold for a long time. “Call me old-fashioned.”

I smile, grabbing a pen as he reads off the ranch name, the road, the county.

I write it on a bright yellow Post-it and stick it to the edge of my monitor.

Something about it tugs at me. The town name: Clover Canyon.

My brain files it away, but a flicker of something remains underneath. A connection I can’t quite make.

“Get some sleep, Jenna.”

“You first.”

His laugh is low and warm, a sound I want to press between the pages of a book so I can listen to it later. “Night.”

“Night.”

The call ends, and the absence of his voice is so physical that it’s as if someone turned off the heat.

I frown as I stare at the address on the sticky note in my hand. The address is familiar.

My fingers are already on the keyboard. I pull up the internal project database—the one managed by VP Julian Vance’s division that I’m technically not supposed to access. But I built the filing architecture for the whole system last year, and nobody thought to revoke my permissions.

I type the road name. The results load in three seconds. I click before I can stop myself. My data analyst’s brain takes over, connecting nodes, following the trail, pulling one thread and watching the whole web shiver.

Cold crawls up my spine.

Water testing reports with dates that don’t match the inspection schedule.

Correspondence between Vance’s team and a contractor I’ve never heard of, going back eighteen months.

Payments to a geological survey company that doesn’t appear in any public registry.

And buried in a sub-folder labeled HR-Archive—who hides things in HR?

—a memo referencing “contamination protocols” and a ranch called Havenridge.

I’ve heard that name before. Ethan’s mentioned it. It’s his uncle’s ranch, the other branch of the family. His cousins.