Chapter 5
Jenna
One night in the guest room, one day of ranch life, and Stoneridge Ranch already feels like the safest place I’ve ever been. And I’ve already learned the routine.
But the thing about the ranch routines is that nobody enforces them.
No laminated charts. Just people who show up and get things done.
In my fourth placement, chores were posted on a whiteboard.
It was a system I understood because systems are how I survive.
Here, things simply happen. The ranchers check fences because fences need checking.
Maggie cooks because people are hungry. Ethan feeds the cats because they’re his, and he doesn’t neglect what belongs to him.
I watch from the guest room window, sleeves pulled over my hands, my skin burning underneath.
I called in sick earlier, my voice hoarse and slightly apologetic, like a woman who’s come down with something unremarkable.
My manager said, “Feel better” and didn’t ask follow-up questions.
The white lie buys me a few days. Maybe a week, if no one checks too closely.
Pressing my forehead against the cool glass, I watch Ethan cross the yard.
He’s in a faded work shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows.
A bucket hangs from one hand, and a gray kitten is tucked against his chest with the other.
Halfway across, he shifts the kitten to his shoulder without breaking stride.
He carries things and makes it look like rest.
Like it’s easy.
Like taking care of something is simply part of him.
My forearms itch. I tug my sleeves down farther and head to the bathroom.
In the mirror over the sink, I see the evidence of the last twenty-four hours: a smudge of a bruise on my temple, already yellowing, and a scrape next to my eye that’s already scabbing over. Whatever Maggie put on it yesterday helped.
I push my glasses up and run the tap.
The soap is different.
I stare at it, my hands already wet. Yesterday’s harsh, green bar—the one that made my skin sting every time—is gone.
In its place is a plain white bar. No smell. No color. Just… soap.
I pick it up and work it between my hands.
No sting.
No burn spreading across my wrists.
Just clean.
The relief hits fast and hard. I grip the edge of the sink so my knees don’t give out.
I run through the foster kid’s inventory, of every time an adult noticed something about my body: the mother who pointed out my flare in front of her friends like I was a rescue dog with mange; the father who left off-brand cortisone on my pillow, and I mistook it for kindness until I realized he just didn’t want the other kids to catch it. I was eleven.
This is the opposite.
Someone noticed.
They saw what it was doing to me, figured it out, and fixed it without fuss.
My chest tightens because it’s not just anyone.
It’s him.
I can picture Ethan in here—quiet and careful—switching it out like it didn’t matter, like I didn’t need to know it was him.
Like he wasn’t doing something that feels a little too much like care.
I rinse my hands slowly, staring down at them.
I don’t know what to do with this information because something small—like a bar of soap—feels more significant than it should.
A man who notices my skin and solves the problem is either the safest person alive or the most dangerous. If I let myself believe someone cares so much, I’ll unpack my bags. And I haven’t done that since the Reeves’ when I was eleven years old.
Later that afternoon, Ethan invites me for a walk around the property. I stroll beside him as he points out areas of interest.
The housing for the veterans, which started at Havenridge and is now expanding to Stoneridge under Daniel and Delaney’s guidance.
Ethan points out Crowley, the massive orange cat who lost an eye to a raccoon. He balances on the fence post, looking as though he’s holding the grudge with his entire body.
He tells me that the south pasture floods in spring, and the old well behind the equipment shed hasn't worked for years, but nobody fills it in because Gabriel used to hide there as a kid.
The closest barn needs a new roof, which they can't afford yet, and the water testing station by the creek is one of three that Daniel installed after the first cattle got sick.
“Cattle,” I repeat.
“Cattle were the first alarm. Last year, Kitty, Tom’s wife, almost died. Turned out to be heavy metals. Lead and cadmium in the Havenridge well.” He pauses. “We share the aquifer with them. Their water and our water come from the same place.”
My heart stutters. Knowing that the company I work for is targeting this land is one thing. Knowing it’s already poisoned a person—Tom’s wife, a woman whose name I now know—turns my stomach.
Ethan takes the narrow path that cuts along the side of the pasture, the one without fences or uneven rails to climb over. I’m still a little sore from the crash, and he adjusts without saying anything—guiding me around rocks and low dips in the ground before I even register them.
I’m not used to someone paying that much attention. It should bother me more than it does.
As we round the line of trees, the land opens up—and I stop short.
“Is that a barn?”
The structure rises out of the field, massive and industrial. Corrugated steel walls stretch high into the sky, the curved roof arching like an aircraft hangar. It dwarfs the house, the sheds, everything else on the property.
“Aircraft hangar,” he says. “Dad’s helicopter.”
I glance at him. “I thought your dad was a SEAL.”
“Was.” He keeps his eyes on the building. “Transferred into naval aviation later. Learned to fly.” A beat. “Still keeps one in there. Tinkers with it sometimes.”
There’s more to that story. It’s in the space between tinkers and sometimes. My data analyst brain flags it: incomplete dataset. Revisit.
But I don’t push. Just file it away.
“Everything really is bigger out here,” I say, taking in the open stretch of land, the sky, the sweet-scented mountain air.
The corner of his mouth lifts. “Dorito thinks so.”
The barn cats eat at 4 p.m. I know this because my brain finds patterns whether I want it to or not.
Ethan leads me into the smaller barn with two bowls and a bag of kibble.
The moment the door creaks open, shapes materialize, slipping out from behind bales and beams as if they’ve been waiting just out of sight.
He hands me a bowl. “Pixel’s on the left. She won’t eat if Crowley can see her.”
Our fingers brush over the rim as I take the bowl. It’s nothing, but I turn before that thought can spiral and head left. A tiny tuxedo cat is perched on a hay bale, watching me with the fixed stare of a creature deciding whether I’m worth the risk.
“She’ll come to you,” Ethan calls from across the barn. “Give her a minute.”
I ease myself down onto the edge of the bale. Pixel watches me. I watch her back.
Two cautious creatures engaged in the same standoff.
Across the barn, Ethan crouches with the gray twins, Bug and Glitch, he calls them, though they look more like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum to me. The light coming through the slats catches his jaw, the line of his throat, the tendons in his forearms as he pours the kibble.
Pixel drops from the bale and eats. A small surrender.
“You know,” I say, watching her, “she reminds me of that stray you told me about. The one that lived under the porch for a week before she took food from your hand.” I’m quoting an email from March that I read at my desk at two in the morning, my fingers pressed against the screen.
“You said she sat close enough to smell the food but not close enough to be caught. And you said—”
“That sometimes the bravest thing a scared animal does is stay.” He finishes the sentence without looking up.
I stare at him across ten feet of hay-scattered concrete.
The recognition is a physical thing, like a lock turning as the key I’ve been carrying all this time finally finds the door it was cut for.
I know this man. Not his face, but his mind.
The way he says things in six words or fewer, as if the words cost him something, so he chooses the exact right ones.
Pixel winds between my feet and settles on my left shoe. The vibration of her purr echoes through the leather into the arch of my foot.
“She picked you,” Ethan murmurs.
I’ve read a hundred romance novels. I know what this is. The barn, the cat, the man who finishes my sentences. I’m inside the story. I know the shape of it. I’ve traced it on paperback covers with my finger and thought, not for me. Stories like this are for women who know how to stay.
The last rays of the afternoon sun filter through at an angle, turning the dust motes to gold. I stand to brush hay from my jeans, and Pixel protests with a small, offended sound.
My laugh is real and unguarded, and when I look up, Ethan is right beside me. Not across the barn. Here. He looks at me the same way he did in the kitchen, except this time there’s no question in his gaze.
“Jenna.”
My name. The pause before the important thing. I know this cadence, but it’s never sounded like this.
My brain short-circuits as I study him hungrily. The scruff on his jaw, his full mouth, the way his chest rises and falls. His scent—coffee and leather and warm skin and him.
He cups my jaw, and his thumb traces the line of my cheekbone. I stop breathing. The rough drag of his calluses on my skin is more than I imagined at my desk at midnight. Better. So much better because his hand is real, warm, and slightly unsteady.
That unsteadiness undoes me.
I don’t choose to close the distance. My body decides. It’s been deciding things my brain hasn’t authorized since I walked onto this ranch. I rise onto my toes, and my hand finds the front of his shirt, pulling. Then his mouth is on mine, and I can’t think.
My brain, my best tool and safest place, has abandoned me completely, and I don’t care.
He tastes like coffee, late-afternoon air, and six months of a voice in my ear.
His hand slides from my jaw into my hair, while his other hand finds my waist and pulls me closer.
My fingers find the collar of his shirt, the warm skin at the back of his neck, and I hold on because I’m drowning and he’s the surface.
He makes a low, almost pained sound against my mouth. It hits me somewhere below my ribs and detonates.
The kiss is not gentle. It’s the dam breaking, months of building a language we’re speaking with our lips and tongues.
His grip on my waist tightens. I press closer, but closer isn’t close enough.
My glasses bump against his nose, yet neither of us adjusts.
My back hits the barn post, and he presses me against it.
His heartbeat throbs through both our shirts and into my chest, or maybe it’s mine.
I can’t tell where I end and he begins. For a woman who’s spent twenty-six years knowing exactly where her edges are, that should be terrifying.
It’s not.
Ethan’s breath catches as I slide my hand up the back of his neck into his hair. He wraps his arm around my waist and lifts me enough that my feet leave the ground for half a second. I make a sound I’ll be embarrassed about later, but right now—
We pull apart. Not because we want to. Because if we don’t stop now, we’re not going to stop.
His mouth is damp and swollen from mine.
His breathing is ragged, and his eyes have darkened in a way that has nothing to do with the fading light.
My fingers are still in his collar, and his hand is still on my waist.
“That was—” I clear my throat. The woman with the careful vocabulary has been reduced to rubble with one kiss.
He presses his forehead against mine as his thumb moves along my jaw in a slow sweep. I close my eyes because if I look at his mouth again, we’re going to end up on the barn floor in a pile of straw.
“Ethan.” My voice cracks around his name. “What are we? I mean… what is this now? We’ve been through the phone calls, the emails, and now I’m here and I’m—”
The precise, formal language I’ve built like armor around my feelings cracks under the intensity of his gaze. His bright blue eyes throw me off balance. I need rules. Knowing the rules is how I survive. If I know the rules, I can follow them, and maybe... I get to stay.
I try again. “What’s the protocol?” Protocol? As if what’s happening between us can be categorized and assigned a reference number. “For this. For us. Is there a—are we—”
Ethan strokes his thumb over my cheek. “There’s no protocol, Jenna.” His deep tone made my pulse spike over the phone, but in person, it halts my breath entirely. “There are no rules. Nothing is supposed to be. There’s just us. We’ll figure it out as we go.”
No rules. No system. No chart on the refrigerator dictating when I’m allowed to want things. Just us, with his body close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him.
“Ethan!” Daniel’s voice cuts through the dusk from across the property. Clipped and commanding, the tone of a man who expects to be heard the first time. “Need you at the north gate. Sensor’s tripped again.”
Ethan’s jaw tightens. His eyes close briefly, and in that second, I see the thing he’ll never say: that the man who always goes when someone calls has, for the first time, a reason to stay exactly where he is.
But he’ll go anyway.
“I’ll be back.” His hand slides from my waist, and the absence is a physical event. He steps back, holding my gaze for a beat too long. “Go inside. Maggie’s got dinner.”
I nod because my voice is stuck somewhere in my throat.
I watch him go as he turns toward the north pasture, the lean silhouette, the stride that’s putting distance between us.
If he doesn’t go now, he won’t leave. I know this the way I know the sky is blue and the oceans are deep.
Because I know him. I look up and meet his gaze, thrown back over his shoulder, and realize that I feel the same.
I’ve read a hundred love stories, and none of them told me it would feel like this. Like walking into a room you’ve been dreaming about and discovering it’s real and the door doesn’t lock behind you.
Ethan’s taste is still on my tongue, his voice still in my chest, as I force my shaky legs to move toward the house.