Chapter Fourteen
Jory woke up, warm, relaxed and with a sense of floaty well-being that felt delish but utterly unfamiliar.
Don’t spoil it by analyzing and worrying.
“Good morning,” Calhoun’s deep voice rumbled against her sternum.
“Good morning.” It was Saturday, the fourth morning she’d woken up next to Calhoun, and she still felt like she’d won the princess lottery.
That would make him laugh and reveal too many insecurities. Even though she reminded herself how far she’d come, she still felt like the same anxious, lonely girl.
But the way he was smiling at her, unguarded and with rising desire, banished her worries.
“For a man who was badly injured this week, you don’t seem to require a lot of rest and healing,” she commented, thrilled with how hard he was against her thigh.
She traced his sleeve of tats. She especially loved the coyote howling at the moon. It was large and vivid, and she felt like the eyes were watching her. Calhoun had told her the tattoo artist had modeled the eyes on Kai’s eyes, only he’d been called Duke then.
She kissed his rock-hard pectorals, making sure she didn’t put any weight on his ribs. “Alien DNA?”
“My secret’s revealed. I’ll have to hold you captive.”
He rolled over her, intent stamped on his hewn features, and as they kissed, Jory accepted that Calhoun already held her heart prisoner, and she’d handed it to him.
*
Later that morning,Calhoun and Jory rode ATVs to the farthest area of the Telford property.
He powered down the vehicle, frowning a little at the sudden silence. It seemed a crime against nature to make such a racket on a beautiful Saturday morning, and if he did help the Telford family, he’d do so on a horse. There was plenty of room in the barn for horses. Rohan had said having horses on site had always been part of the plan.
Jory worried he was pushing himself too hard, but he’d been nowhere near full throttle, and his body was itching to power up. He was tough, but he wasn’t stupid. And while he could afford to sit around and do nothing the rest of his life, he had no intention of taking that route.
But did he want to do this—be a ranch hand on another family’s ranch—build up their legacy instead of his own? He frowned. Legacy sounded like his father. His family. Something he’d run fast and far from.
And if he did stay, could he protect his friends and their fledging business from his father’s meddling?
Could he fly under the radar? He’d avoided all social media. Perhaps his father had forgotten he existed.
“What’s wrong? It’s beautiful up here,” Jory noted. “I’ve never been out this far from town, and we were considered to be out in the boonies then.”
She paused, and he tried to tame his troubled, racing thoughts.
“But why are we here?” she asked tentatively after a silence. “You don’t think my dad and brother were out here do you? We didn’t have any livestock. We leased the land for grazing. It wasn’t a lot, but it was consistent.”
He heard the shame, the hurt of a girl who’d worked so hard to pull herself out of poverty, and his admiration swelled. She’d suffered, but she was kind and strong.
“The summer pastures are up here, and I’ve been asked to keep an eye out on the fencing, predatory animals, humans too. Montana ranches are getting hit by cattle rustlers who’ve gone more high tech.”
“Have you decided to take the job?” Jory’s eyes rounded. “Is it dangerous?”
He smiled. No one had worried about his safety. His father and family had expected him to suck it up, his teammates to get the job done. Jace as team leader had always made sure he and the others understood the parameters of a mission and were prepared.
“Baby, I am the danger.” He lowered his voice, playing with her a little.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Okay, tough guy. This is not a cowboy movie role audition. This is rural Montana. I grew up here. It can be very dangerous. And high-tech cattle rustlers…” She broke off, and he remembered that she said her father and other men in her family had been in and out of prison for crimes such as cattle rustling.
She was really worried. Something in his chest twisted and broke free, leaving him warm and breathless.
“I’ll be prepared,” he said, deliberately not mentioning the weapons he normally carried, and the AR-15 Taryn Telford had told him to carry. “There are cameras that monitor much of the ranch, and I’ll be sending up a drone to monitor the more remote back areas during the summer, but they’ll also need me for other ranch work at certain times.”
“So you’re going to take the job?” she pressed, leaning forward on the seat of her ATV.
And there it was. The question he’d been avoiding.
“I haven’t said yes, long term,” he admitted. “But I’m willing to help the Telfords out while I’m here.”
Looking a little broody, Jory removed the thermos of coffee that she’d brewed before they’d headed out on their drive along with an insulated package of still-warm biscuits she’d baked in a skillet this morning.
Calhoun had been jonesing for a biscuit, and he’d also been oddly touched by Jory’s casual domestic gesture. Jory poured him a steaming thermos cup of coffee and handed him a biscuit that had been buttered and spread with homemade raspberry jam Jory had found in a cupboard.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, curious, and then took a bite. “Damn. Delicious.”
Jory sipped her coffee, looking southeast over the valley.
“There’s something about Paradise Valley. Marietta. I thought I knew it, but after being here a week, I’m not sure what to think. Everyone has been so kind. Interested in what I’m doing—how my mom and oma are. Your friends’ wives have included me.”
She took another sip of coffee. She’d yet to take a bite of her biscuit. “I thought I was running toward something—a new life—and when I took the job here, I realized I’d been running away.”
“And you want to stop running.”
“It sounds so easy.” Her voice was thoughtful as she stared at the view. “When most things worthy of being achieved are difficult. Are you running from something, Calhoun?”
The question shouldn’t surprise him. Jory didn’t sound accusatory. This woman got him in a way that both peeled off his skin, and yet comforted him.
“Yes.” He didn’t want to lie to her or himself anymore. He finished his biscuit and reached for another. The sun was up now, warming his shoulders. He felt so alive—a woman he was beginning to trust as well as like by his side, Kai on his six, coffee, a biscuit, a beautiful morning. He was savoring it all, but Jace was six feet under, and Jory’s father and brother might be somewhere he might never find them.
No. He would find them. He owed Jace. And now Jory. Closure.
He took another biscuit and held it out first to her to take a bite.
“Yes. I ran away from my father, the family expectations even as I told myself I was running toward something. Not very manly for a cowboy turned soldier turned back to cowboy.”
“Accepting yourself, flaws and strength, being honest so that you can change if you want is very manly.” Jory took a bite of the biscuit and smiled as she chewed. “And womanly, but don’t worry, Big O. Your secret is safe with me.”
He laughed, and a little more tension eased out. He finished the biscuit and sipped his coffee.
“It’s beautiful here,” he said, looking at Jory instead of the view.
Jory handed Kai a sweet-potato-based treat that she’d baked this morning. Calhoun tried to hide his rising smile. Jory might claim that she felt alienated, but she was making an effort to belong.
Did he have the courage to do the same?
“You never answered my question about the job,” she said, breaking pieces off her biscuit and nibbling them. “You didn’t say yes, but you didn’t say no.”
Seeing her plush lips so near her fingers made him remember what they felt like on his skin and on his dick.
He leaned forward. Kissed her.
“You’re right. I didn’t.” He took another long swallow of coffee.
“Calhoun, you don’t need to protect me from whatever you’re thinking you might find.”
Yes, he did. She mattered. He couldn’t pretend to himself that she didn’t.
“Stop stalling.”
“You really up for this?”
“Up for what exactly?” she challenged, one dark brow arched. “Trying to find clues to my father’s disappearance? I didn’t see any shovels in your truck. I’m not up for that, and neither are you for another few weeks.” She gave him her doctor look. “But yes, Calhoun. I’m in.”
*
“Does any ofthis look familiar?” Calhoun asked after they’d been walking for over an hour in two different areas spanning different ranch access roads. They’d started—with permission—near the McBrides’ former land on a potholed, sort of still-gravel narrow lane that paralleled the highway and led to several different properties. It had all once been McBride, but it had been broken up years before she’d been born.
“Yes, all of it does,” she called back to him. They’d driven by it a few mornings ago. “This road parallels the highway at a few points. It was the bus stop Josiah and I would run-walk the mile and a half from the back end of our property. If it was really snowing, my mom would drive us down or my dad would in the tractor.” She shivered even though the morning sun was warm.
“This wasn’t the main road to our ranch, but it was a convenient shortcut to get to town. Hard on the axel of the truck though, and we didn’t have the money or equipment to regrade it. But when the weather wasn’t bad, it was faster, and a much easier walk.”
Calhoun didn’t look at her as she explained. Instead, he’d pulled a pair of binoculars out of a pocket and was looking in several directions.
Why that was hot was the biological mystery.
Did her ovaries think Calhoun and his binoculars could hunt her and any potential offspring some dinner? She cringed guiltily. The hunter versus gatherer myth had exploded. He didn’t want kids, and she hadn’t taken the pill. She’d insinuated that she would, but then she and Calhoun had been savagely ripping each other’s clothes off—they hadn’t even made it into the house the first time. And then Calhoun had turned her into sexually quivering jelly. He’d blown her body, her mind and her intention.
And she wasn’t sorry.
But she also wasn’t unrealistic. They were having fun, but he wasn’t hers. He hadn’t committed to staying.
But neither have you.
And if she did have an unplanned pregnancy—unlikely, the statistics weren’t in her favor—she’d deal with it them. Calhoun would likely be long gone.
There wasn’t a future for them.
Did she want there to be?
Yes.
And even though it didn’t make sense, she had a secret hope that she would have a baby.
Someone to love.
Nervous about the course her busy brain had taken, she glanced guiltily toward Calhoun. He stood still, about fifty yards on the opposite side of the narrow track. His back was to her, and his head was down.
He’d been working while she’d been dreaming.
Kai had been running a search pattern, between them through the weed-choked fields along the road, but now he sat where Calhoun stood.
“Find anything?”
*
Calhoun stared atthe two small, rotted homemade crosses, close to the ground. They’d once been painted white, maybe, but now they were weathered to a silvery brown. One cross’s nail was loose so the cross part hung drunkenly down like a person trying to push themselves off the ground back up to standing.
Two.
Damn.
He’d wanted Jace to be wrong.
But the location made sense. Isolated road, only traveled by a few locals. He could see a house from here, tucked back from the road and partially obscured by a grove of aspens. Mrs. McBride had said that they’d partitioned and sold four five-to-ten-acre plots to several families on the backside of their property thirty years ago in an effort to stay solvent.
The grove of trees would have been smaller twenty-plus years ago. It wasn’t a county road. It had been a ranch road.
Kai had alerted, which shocked Calhoun. Kai hadn’t trained as a cadaver-dog, but he had found victims in rubble from bombings or blasts so maybe it wasn’t as big of a stretch as he’d imagined.
What did he do next?
Call the cops? Tell Rohan? Dig to see if there were bodies here? Even his hardened stomach lurched. Was this a crime scene? And how was Jory going to react?
He looked over at her. She’d been taking pictures of the carpet of wildflowers that grew out of the weeds. She’d told him their names, her face shining with happiness—glacier lily. And few-flowered shooting stars. She’d yipped with wonder to find a few arrowleaf balsamroot. They looked like small, slightly pale daisies to him.
Jory had strung some flowers through Kai’s service harness.
‘Very handsome,’ she’d intoned before heading back to her side of the road to walk around, her gaze focused more on the mountains and hawks riding thermals rather than looking at the ground.
Because it’s not real to her.
Heart in his throat, he looked down at the toes of his new cowboy boots—he was surprised at how easily he’d made the shift from tactical boots—rested against one of the crosses. Was he standing on a grave? A secret one? And what had happened? What could thirteen-year-old Jace have witnessed? A hit-and-run? A hunting accident?
But why say nothing and then vow to find the bodies decades later?
‘War changes a man.’
Something his history professor his first semester at West Point had said.
He sure as hell wasn’t the same seething-with-resentment-and-fury hothead he’d been at eighteen.
“Did you find anything?”
Calhoun heard the question, and he quickly looked up. Jory smiled at him. She now had a few purple flowers tucked in her curls, secured by what he thought was a jeweled bobby pin.
She looked happy.
Free.
Persephone ascending.
“No.”
*
Jory sang aTaylor Swift song as she grilled the paninis. Calhoun had been working on his computer, and also looking at the hunting app on his phone that showed him the different property lines. She quickly tossed a salad, cutting up a few raw vegetables—carrots, cauliflower, tomatoes. She added a crumble of goat cheese that Willow’s mom had gifted her.
Willow’s mom had told her about the farmer’s market on Saturdays. It was a wonderful addition to Marietta, but was it worth it to drive that far for fresh veggies when she could grow so many here if she repaired the raised beds and mulched the soil?
She stopped singing.
This was no longer her house.
No longer her property.
She wasn’t staying in Marietta.
But I could.
She wouldn’t have the money for a down payment on anything until she paid off her student loan and started the long haul of building her savings back up again.
“Well, are we?” Calhoun asked standing up from the farmhouse table where he’d been working on something.
“Huh?”
Gosh, he was handsome. He’d been quiet on the drive back to the house, but before they’d made it through the door of the house, he’d started kissing her, and they’d made love on the couch.
Life was just about perfect.
“Are we out of the woods?”
She flushed. She always loved to sing on her own—in the shower, in her car, out for a trail run with her headphones in. She must be getting comfortable with Calhoun to do it while cooking.
“Don’t distract me.” She still held the chopping knife and quickly put it down as he continued his stalking advance. “I’ll burn the sandwiches.”
“Think you’re about to do that without my help.” He grinned and opened the panini maker. “Perfect.” He looked at her, an expression fleeting across his handsome features that she couldn’t quite place, but it made her tummy feel gooey, and her hunger for food turned to her hunger for him.
“Lunch first,” he said, his voice graveling, and the heat in his dark-honey eyes, matched the flame kindling in her. “I need to keep my strength up.”
She could barely swallow much less speak so she nodded and unplugged the appliance.
“It’s weird that the house is so tricked out,” she said as Calhoun plated the sandwiches, and added the rosemary and thyme potato wedges she’d baked. She brought the sandwiches to the large farmhouse table. “It’s way nicer than when we lived here except for the veggie beds. My mom had a green thumb when I was a kid. She canned salsa, marinara sauce, corn salsa and beans and baked a lot until my dad and brother left.”
She shot a quick look at him. He felt different somehow. The sex with him before making lunch had been even more intense than last night, but she felt like part of him was distant, working on something.
Don’t invent trouble.
It would find her soon enough.
“The house was functional but showing a lot of its age and wear-and-tear. It’s stylish now,” she said looking around, and breaking off a piece of her sandwich. “Do you really think your friends are going to run an outdoor adventure company from here?”
He bit off a big bite of his sandwich and chewed, his expression thoughtful. “They are in the brainstorming stage,” he said. “We’re going to meet here Sunday night when you’re at work to talk about it. Sorry, I should have asked first before I invited them here, but…”
“It’s not my house,” she said. “It’s the Telfords’ now. They own the property. They remodeled and upgraded the house and the barn and the outbuildings. I’m not even paying rent although I pushed the point.” She tore off another small piece of her sandwich and nibbled. “Besides you live here too. They are your friends. You can have whoever you want over. What?”
“You are so adorable. You eat like a…a pixie, although I don’t know what that is, but it’s cute how you break up your food.”
“Drove my dad nuts.” She swallowed and wiped her damp palms on her jeans. She’d always broken up sandwiches or bread or bakery items in pieces. She’d been teased about it—called chipmunk.
“It’s sweet. And never in a million years would I have thought…” He broke off, and she held her breath waiting for him to say more. But instead, he took another huge, manly bite, and she thought the moment was lost, but for a second, she thought he might feel more for her than sexual desire.
Jory, you are in trouble.
“I was thinking, after lunch we could head over to the Telfords’ ranch and take a couple of horses out. Rohan invited us. You ride, right?”
“Yeah,” she said softly, sadness settling over her. She’d always had to borrow horses. She’d wanted to compete in a mustang rescue project. It was the only way she could have ever had a horse to care for, but their barn had been deemed too rough, and they didn’t have enough money for the feed and veterinary care.
That was the thing about coming home. She was reminded of all the small and big hurts that had piled on her, and yet also the moments of beauty, like the flowers in the fields this morning.
“I never had my own horse. I desperately wanted one but…” she gestured toward the window “…our property didn’t look like this then. There wasn’t any extra money for luxuries and a lot of times no money for basics.”
“So a ride will be welcome.”
“It’s been a while, but…are you sure you’re up for it?” She tried to keep the excitement out of her voice.
“We’ll find out.” He finished his sandwich and reached for another half. “It’s been a while for me too, but if I’m going to help at the ranch, I need to see how well I’m healing, and if I’m ready to ride. The ranch has ATVs but a lot of work is done on horseback, and if I’m going to be patrolling, I’d like not to announce my presence with noise you can hear a mile off. Plus Kai will prefer working with horses.”
“Then let’s ride.”