Chapter 8
Ethan
This pattern doesn’t constitute proof. Three calls routed through a relay could indicate a scam, a wrong number, or simply a bored intern at a marketing firm.
But the timing, with the calls stacked within minutes, each lasting long enough to confirm the line was active, is not random.
It’s a confirmation protocol. Someone is checking if the number is live before dispatching a real person.
I’ve accessed the perimeter cameras, reset all passwords, and switched the ranch network to the encrypted VPN Beckett set up months ago. My hands remain steady, as they always do in this mode, with the brain of an ordnance specialist clicking into gear. I assess, fortify, and contain.
A few minutes ago, I texted Beckett Lawson to explain the situation.
His reply arrived in eight seconds: En route.
A movement catches my eye, and I look up to see Jenna in the study doorway. I’m not sure how long she’s been there, but it seems long enough to watch me work.
She shouldn’t be beautiful standing there.
She’s in Maggie’s old shirt, hair loose, no armor of makeup or careful posture, just Jenna watching me with those careful eyes she keeps trained on everyone.
I’ve spent twenty years reading threat assessments; I read her the same way, cataloging, filing.
I already know her tells. The way she holds the mug in both hands when she’s processing something she doesn’t have words for yet.
The way she goes still when she’s trying to look unbothered.
I’ve learned many things about her over months of phone calls, but experiencing them in person feels like a privilege.
She’s held herself apart from everything soft. Then, this morning, she let me in. We let each other in.
Her expression falters for a second. Her eyes widen and soften as she takes everything in.
I know what she’s seeing. Not the ranch Ethan, contacts in, hat on, jaw set against the sun.
The other one. The one I don’t show people.
Glasses on, hair uncombed, three screens deep in data with a cat on my lap and code scrolling in the reflection of my lenses.
The version I’ve kept hidden for years because it doesn’t match the frame, because cowboys don’t look like this, don’t work like this, don’t sit in the blue-white glow of a monitor tracing VoIP relays like a man who belongs behind a desk instead of on a horse.
She’s looking at me the same way she did earlier in her bedroom.
It’s as if this version of me is not less but rather the one she’s been connecting with all along.
Not the hat and the horse, but the mind beneath, the man who builds quiet systems of protection and tracks soil data at 2 a.m. and rescues feral cats.
An hour ago, she was pressed against a door with my hands in her hair and her breath in my mouth and the word stay lodged in my throat.
In that moment, she reached for me—not cautiously, as she typically does with everything else in her life, always ready to retreat.
No, she reached for me as someone who had calculated the risks and found them worthwhile.
I’m still carrying the weight of that. The sound she made when I kissed her throat.
The way her fingers shook against my chest, not from fear but from the effort of letting herself want something without a safety net.
The relief and recognition in her eyes when I told her I chose all of her.
The look of a woman who’d been waiting her whole life for someone to see the full inventory and not walk away.
I haven’t processed it yet. I’m not sure I can. My hands are steady on the keyboard because the threat gives them something to do, but underneath the calm, every nerve in my body is still tuned to the frequency of Jenna Calloway choosing me back.
She gazes at me like a woman who has never had anyone defend her and is now witnessing a man do just that because her phone rang at five in the morning.
I adjust my glasses and meet her eyes. “Beckett's coming. Former SEAL. He runs security for Havenridge and Stoneridge. He’ll establish a proper watch rotation.”
“You called someone.” Her voice is cautious, as if she’s holding something delicate. “For me.”
“For us,” I correct. “Come here.”
She hesitates. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because she’s spent twenty-six years learning that “come here” is usually followed by a condition.
“Come here and explain yourself.”
“Come here and pack your bag.”
“Come here, but don’t get comfortable.”
I wait. I’ll always wait for her.
As she crosses the room, I push back from the desk and pull her onto my lap in one smooth motion, settling her sideways against my chest. Pixel protests the disruption with a sharp meow before relocating to the armrest of the desk chair with the wounded dignity of a cat who’s been demoted.
Jenna tenses for half a second, the reflex of a body that doesn’t know how to be held without bracing for the catch. Then she exhales, and the tension leaves her like air from a punctured tire.
Her head finds its place between my shoulder and jaw, fitting perfectly as I knew it would.
“The calls were routed through a VoIP relay,” I say into her hair. “Could be nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” Her voice is muffled against my shirt. “You wouldn’t have called Beckett for nothing.”
She’s right. I’m not going to lie to her. She survived the foster system and a corrupt corporation by reading the room better than anyone in it. Feeding her false comfort would insult both of us.
“No,” I say. “It’s probably not nothing.”
Her fingers curl into the front of my flannel, finding the same spot she held in the hallway. I’m starting to understand her grip. It’s not clinging. It’s anchoring. Because she’s been untethered her whole life and holds on when she finds something stable.
“Are we safe?” she asks.
“This ranch has cameras on every access road, motion sensors on the perimeter, and in about thirty minutes, a man who could kill someone with a zip tie but cries at foaling season.” I press my mouth to the top of her head. “You’re safe.”
“That’s not what I asked.” She lifts her face to look at me. Brown eyes, steady and clear, her glasses slightly crooked from being pressed against my chest. “I said we.”
My throat tightens. She’s not asking me to protect her. She’s asking if I’m protected too. If the man building the fortress remembered to put himself inside it.
No one has ever asked me that. Not once. I’m the one who holds things, who monitors and fortifies and stays awake so others don’t have to. Nobody checks whether the man on watch is okay because the man on watch isn’t supposed to need checking.
“Yeah, Jen,” I say roughly. “We’re safe.”
She studies me for a long moment, running her diagnostics the way she does, the data analyst who reads people the way she reads spreadsheets. Whatever she finds must satisfy her because she nods and puts her head back against my shoulder.
I hold her in the glow of three monitors, Crowley snoring on the router, Pixel guarding the armrest, and the encrypted feed cycling through camera views of a ranch I’d burn to the ground before I let anyone touch this woman.
I reach around her to type one-handed, pulling up the perimeter grid. She watches the screen with half-closed eyes, her analyst brain quietly cataloging even when the rest of her is soft.
“Your system is elegant,” she murmurs.
“My system is held together with duct tape and stubbornness.”
“Elegant stubbornness.” Her mouth curves against my collarbone. “My favorite kind.”
Beckett arrives while Jenna is in the shower; his phone is pressed to his ear as he bursts into the study. Beckett doesn’t just arrive; he deploys.
He fills the doorway like Daniel, but in a distinct way. Daniel occupies space effortlessly, as if he were made for it.
Beckett, on the other hand, has carefully assessed every angle of the room and positioned himself strategically to see both the door and the window at once. It's an old habit—one that's hard to unlearn.
He ends the call without saying goodbye—Beckett doesn’t waste words on pleasantries, even with people he likes—and pockets the phone.
“Perimeter’s soft on the east side,” he says by way of greeting. “Blind spot between the second cattle gate and the creek crossing. I clocked it on the drive in.”
“I know. Camera three has a fifteen-degree gap. I’ve been meaning to—”
“I brought a spare unit. It’s in the truck.” He pulls a chair to the desk, the same way he’d pull a seat in a briefing room, and scans my screens with the practiced eye of a man who’s spent more time in surveillance operations than most people spend sleeping. “Talk me through it.”
I do.
Beckett’s expression doesn't change at any point during the briefing, including the part about the goat eating the drive. “The drive is recoverable?”
“Casing’s durable. Should survive transit.”
He nods and files it away the way he files everything, without judgment or wasted reaction. Beckett doesn’t have opinions about how intelligence is acquired. He has opinions about what you do with it once you have it.
“Did some digging before I left.”
The look on his face sends a frisson of unease down my spine. I recognize that look. I’ve worn it myself. It’s the expression of a man holding bad news, waiting for the right moment to deliver it.
Knowing him, he’s already run three scenarios, checked satellite imagery of the county road, and mentally mapped every vulnerable access point between here and the highway.
“Let me have it,” I say.
“Someone’s been in town.” His tone is clipped. “Asking around at the diner, hardware store, gas station on Route 9. About a woman. Brown hair, glasses, slight build. Drove in from out of state.”
“Who?”
“Smooth operator. Expensive boots. Bought coffee for everyone in the diner and tipped a hundred on a twelve-dollar tab.” Beckett’s jaw is tight. “Name’s Julian Vance. Jenna’s boss. And he’s in Clover Canyon.”
My blood runs cold. Then hot. Then very, very still.
“How long has he been here?”
“Since yesterday. Maybe the day before. He’s not rushing. He’s building rapport. Making friends.” Beckett says making friends the way another man might say laying mines. “He hasn’t asked about the ranch yet. He’s circling.”
“He’ll get here.”
“He’ll get here,” Beckett confirms. “But not unopposed. I’ve already spoken to Sadie at the diner.
She’ll feed us anything he says. And Roy Watkins clocked him as wrong before the man finished his first cup.
This town knows its own, Ethan. A hundred-dollar tip on a twelve-dollar tab doesn’t buy trust in Clover Canyon. It buys suspicion.”
Something loosens in my chest, not much, but enough. LandCorp can buy land, they can poison water, but they can’t buy a town that’s watched us grow up, that shows up for brandings and funerals and everything in between. A town that’s been closing ranks around its own for a hundred years.
“I want eyes on Vance,” I say. “Where he goes, who he talks to, where he’s staying.”
“Already on it. I’ve got three of my guys in town. Saint, Tank, and Tex. Passive surveillance only. He won’t know we’re watching.”
Upstairs, the woman I just kissed is showering in a house I promised would be safe. Outside, a man who poisoned water supplies and buried evidence is buying coffee, smiling at waitresses, and asking if anyone has seen a woman with brown hair and glasses.
He’s here.
And he’s looking for her.