Chapter 2 #2
But Bax still tanked every hand we’d played at his brother’s house that night.
It wasn’t in me to give up the goods. And then Brand had taken a very drunk Bax to pass out in his guest room, and I hadn’t seen Bax Lee again till a week ago on my computer screen, when Brand begged me to make the trek to Wisper to finish all the projects he’d committed Lee Construction to.
Bax had looked different somehow on that laptop screen.
Granted, I didn’t know him well, apart from what his brother had told me, but he seemed…
tamer—quieter—than he had the night I’d beat him at poker.
The same night I’d had a hard time keeping my cards straight because the color of Bax’s eyes had mesmerized me and the shine on his lip left there by his tongue had me sawing my legs together beneath Brand’s kitchen table.
Whatever had changed for Bax Lee or the wetness level of his full lip, it didn’t really matter.
For the next couple weeks, he was nothing more to me than a landlord and my boss’s older brother.
Brand had appointed me project lead for all the builds on his family’s property; he expected excellence and efficiency, and I intended to do the job justice.
Bax couldn’t help because the idiot had gotten his leg broken by a cow.
Or a bull? Whatever. If it went “moo” and shit where it ate, it was a cow.
My phone rang. Speak of the devil.
“What’s up, boss? You make it home yet?”
“Yeah, been home for an hour or so,” Brand said. He sounded exhausted.
Tapping the speaker button, I set the phone on my dash.
“Are you close to Wisper yet?”
“An hour out, I think,” I said. “I’m glad you called. I just wanna reiterate that I’m not goin’ to your brother’s place to be his nursemaid. You know that, right? It’s not my job.”
“And I wouldn’t ask it of you,” Brand assured me.
“All I need you to do is supervise the crew finishin’ the houses.
They shouldn’t need too much of your energy.
All three houses are almost done. What I really need you to do is use your motivational services to whip the cabin crew into shape.
If those don’t get finished before the snow hits, Bax and Rye’s whole business plan might go up in smoke. ”
I snorted. Right. Me, motivational?
“You know what I mean.”
“I do,” I said, “and it’ll be done.”
“Thanks. I better go. I need to unpack and grab a shower. The lawyers estimate that the case will take two or three weeks. We’re meetin’ tomorrow to go over everything.
They want me to settle with this guy, but I’m not sure I can do that.
To me, a settlement means admittin’ fault, but it wasn’t our damn fault. ”
“Okay,” I said, “but Brand, listen to the lawyers. At least hear them out, and then you do what’s best for you and your company. To hell with everyone else.”
“I will. Thanks, Sweetie, and listen, go easy on Bax. I know the two of you didn’t exactly hit it off when you met, but he’s been through a lot.
You’re gonna be seein’ a lot of him. Might as well make the best of it.
And Athena will be there. She’s a great kid.
She’ll have you bustin’ a gut in no time, but be careful where you step.
She has a habit of adoptin’ abandoned animals and they crap everywhere. ”
“Sounds like… fun?”
Brand laughed. “Thanks again. You’re savin’ my ass.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re welcome.”
“Text when you get to my brother’s.”
“Will do. Bye.”
Brand had downplayed the job he’d asked me to do, just a smidge.
There was still a ton of work left. The three houses Brand had agreed to build for his mom, his sister, Abey, whom I met last year and loved, and her fiancée, and a third house for his friend and business partner, Ryder, and Ryder’s girlfriend were almost done.
All they needed were roofs, drywall, and exterior siding.
Plus, then there was all the interior stuff and electrical.
But a lot could still go wrong. And if the houses weren’t enough, the nine rental cabins left to finish were all in varying stages of completion.
The two biggest structures had only recently had their foundations poured.
Cabins were a hell of a lot less involved than houses, but they still needed sturdy floors, working toilets, and kitchens.
And these were fancy cabins, so each build was like a mini house.
The two crews on payroll, not including the specialty guys who’d pop on and off the property until the jobs were done, had been split between the houses and the cabins all summer.
But in my opinion, separating them further would be more efficient.
The crews would be smaller, yes, but more specific to the tasks still needing to be finished.
Brand had given me the go-ahead to make changes because the work had to be paused for him to prepare for court, and any time I could buy back for us would help.
I’d spent the last several days working out the new crew configurations and schedule.
The delay was a problem, but time would tell if I had put my money where my mouth was.
If I could get all the projects on track to be finished before the end of October, I’d consider that a win and a job well done.
Brand had personally overseen all the preliminary work on the cabins while I stayed in Sheridan to run the projects we had going up there.
He’d done a good deal of the groundwork himself, but the enormity of the overall project was a little intimidating.
And then there was the fact that I was a woman.
A five-foot-two woman who had been nicknamed Sweetie.
At least in Sheridan, I’d worked with the crew for a long time.
They knew me, knew I had the skills to lead them and that I didn’t take any shit.
The mostly male crew in Wisper didn’t know me from Eve, and I couldn’t even put into words how excited I was to deal with their whistles and catcalls and all the blowback they’d give me once they got a good look at me.
Right.
Brand had handpicked the cabin crew, and those were the guys I worried most about.
If they fancied themselves special or irreplaceable, that usually came with attitude.
Not always, but enough to make me bite my nails and stress about hitting our deadlines.
As a woman, trying to lead those guys could sometimes be a little like wrangling self-important cats.
A lot of the guys had grown up with Brand, though, so I hoped they were down to earth like he was.
He would’ve managed the whole thing himself, but he’d tagged me in when he knew he’d need to be away for the stupid legal crap he was dealing with. Who the fuck injured themselves—on purpose—on a construction site hoping to get a payout?
Brand was a good boss. Everybody in and around Sheridan knew it to be true.
If they worked for him and they needed something, all they had to do was ask.
So why this douchebag, Jim Culver, felt the need to “fall” from the second floor of an unfinished house onto a pile of lumber and risk breaking his neck was a mystery to me.
If the idiot needed money, Brand would’ve gladly helped out.
The dude would have quite literally given Jim the shirt off his back and all the cash in his wallet, so the fact that the whole thing had ended up in a formal court hearing was just plain?—
“Shit!”
Slamming on my brakes, my tires screeched to a stop when a gargantuan bison stepped out from the row of trees lining the highway and stood in the middle of the road thirty feet in front of my truck.
It was definitely a male, with huge, thick horns, a long beard, and a boulder-like shoulder hump on his back.
As my heart rate increased to dangerous levels, I whispered to myself, “Like you’d know a male from a female bison. Have you ever even seen one in real life?”
But I felt sure the animal was male. There was just something about his kingly stature and the way his deep brown eyes saw into my soul. He had to be old. Maybe wise too.
Glancing in my side and rearview mirrors, I checked for cars behind me on westbound Highway 26. The road was empty as far as I could tell, and there were no cars coming from the opposite direction either, but I flicked on my hazards to be safe.
It was just me and my new best friend, a bison. Was he part of someone’s herd, or was he one of the free-range ones that wandered out of Yellowstone?
Damn. “If he attacks, you’re screwed.”
How much did a full-grown male bison weigh?
Two-thousand pounds? I imagined his horns tackling my truck’s front end and winced.
His head was huge! I doubted I had a cell signal out here.
I’d just passed over the Continental Divide and hadn’t yet made it to Moran, and from what my maps app told me, that was where civilization would start to make a comeback in this part of the state, but I was too afraid to move to grab my phone and check the distance.
My new friend’s legs seemed breakably skinny, but the rest of him was truck-sized, and all I could do was watch him turn and square off with my rusted-out Chevy. I could’ve tried to back up, but I had a feeling his reflexes would be quicker than mine right now. My hands on my steering wheel shook.
The bison stared past the windshield, right at me. I didn’t get the feeling he was mad or he wanted to ram my ride, but he just kept staring.
Like he was… trying to tell me something?
“Are you mental, Bea?” I whispered into the deafening silence. “What’s wrong with you? This is a very wild animal. He could crush you quite literally. He didn’t stop to shoot the shit.”
In my defense, a bison stopping traffic wasn’t a super common occurrence up in Sheridan.
I’d never been down to the Jackson Hole area before, and I hadn’t yet taken the time to wander Yellowstone, but humungous mammals didn’t usually hang out on the side of the highways up in the northeast part of the state.
Actually, we did get moose and elk occasionally, and sometimes wild turkeys, but definitely not bison.
“What do you want?” I asked the wooly brute, but my voice sounded insignificant in the magnitude of the moment, and he couldn’t hear me anyway.
He turned his head, like he wanted to direct my attention to the mountains behind him I could barely see peeking through the fog to the northwest. Was there something I needed to know about my destination?
Something a humungous bison felt the need to stop traffic to tell me…
or, like, impart through nonverbal communication?
Wooly Wally swung his head back in my direction.
He kept his eyes locked on mine and moved slowly—and pretty gracefully for an animal his size—and stepped to the graveled side of the road, and then he lowered his shoulders and dipped his horns, as if in the last minute he had judged my character and was saying, “Go ahead. I give you my blessing to continue forth on my land.”
Quickly grabbing my phone from the dash, hoping he didn’t get spooked by the movement, I snapped a picture of the mountain protector, this once nearly extinct behemoth and guardian of the West.
He grunted a breath, and it turned to steam in the cool, fall air, and then he lumbered back into the trees and was gone.
With him went the fog I’d been battling through the last two hours.
It rolled in waves off the hilly, winding highway, leaving Togwotee Pass and lifting back into the sky like steam rising from hot coffee in the cold.
As the sawtooths of the Teton Mountain Range revealed themselves to me, I sat in awe, holding my breath, still barely daring to move as the deep blue-green roadside fence of evergreens with their wood-post trunks led my eyes to the orange sunset deepening in the distance.
The impending twilight lit up those impressively tall peaks and darkened their sharp valleys, washing them in a powerful peach and dusky lavender glow.
And now I got it. I finally understood why Brand had been so homesick, and how, when he talked about the mountains surrounding his home, he got this cheesy, faraway look in his eyes.
It was silly, but I felt Wooly Wally’s approval of my reaction to his land, and somehow, it felt like I’d been called home too.