Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
CAL
H ome. When people asked me “Where’s home?” I would cycle through all the places I’d spent time growing up. I once asked Jace what he called home, and he said he’d always thought of his childhood bedroom on his family ranch, but now that he was married, he thought of the kitchen of that same ranch because that was where he pictured his wife and kids.
Those images weren’t anything I had. Home, during the school season, was the all-boys boarding school I went to, with its dorms and narrow bed in a room with five other boys. For breaks, I went to the big house my parents had outside Denver. I didn’t have a kid’s bedroom like most of my friends. Sure, it was decorated like a boy’s room, but it was never filled with stuff I liked or played with. Just things I couldn’t touch.
When I thought of the one place I was the happiest growing up, it was my maternal grandparents’ place, the Rolling Thunder Ranch. I hadn’t been there in a decade. When I’d walked away from my dad and Sabrina, I left behind everyone and everything. The ranch had been in our family for generations, and the sprawling two-story eight-bedroom home had been my place of refuge. A place to escape my dad. When my mom had left my dad ten years ago, she moved to the ranch for good.
Currently, home was an apartment in Seattle with a view of the sound, when the day wasn’t cloudy and rainy. But I was rarely there. I preferred to be in the office, at the gym, or on an assignment. I’d traveled so much that hotels felt the same as my apartment, only my apartment had more clothes and hotels had more food. And a TV.
I could thank my dad for all that. He’d taught me how to be a minimalist.
Although Sabrina claimed she was willing to be a part of this battle, she hadn’t spoken to me on the plane. She’d kept her laptop open for the entire trip. She’d even sat next to Paul.
And I was fine with that, dammit. I’d only looked in her direction for a large portion of the flight because the side of the plane she was on had the most scenic views. That was what I’d said when she asked.
“Not mid-flight,” had been her response.
I’d had to turn my back to her then. I was in a weird place with Sabrina. I didn’t want to say I liked it because, well… I just didn’t want to say that.
But I didn’t not like it.
A few years after I’d left her in Vegas I set up Google alerts to ping me if she was ever in the news. Those little unexpected notifications that would slide across my screen had the power to cause a brief arrhythmia. Each time, I half expected the notification to be her engagement or wedding announcement. Each time, I was relieved when it wasn’t.
I pushed a hand through my hair and tried to wrap my mind around how quickly my life had done a one eighty. My dad had to be choking on his spite. There was a bit of satisfaction in knowing that. And it was fitting that Sabrina got to play a part in it as well.
“Hello, dipshit. You just gonna sit there all day?” Sabrina asked.
I turned to find her standing by my seat. “Dipshit?”
“I tried all the names. Dipshit was the one that worked. Weird that.” She gestured to the front of the plane. “We’re here and ready to disembark. Where were you? Were you planning an escape? That you’d stay on and have your pilot fly you back to Seattle and bail on us?”
We’d taken my company jet, which seated sixteen and had sleeping quarters. Both the pilot and flight attendant were staring at me with smiles that asked questions more than projected kindness. They were stuck on board until I got off. I was holding everyone up.
How long was I in a fugue?
I quickly stood and immediately towered over Sabrina. “I doubt you used any other name to get my attention.”
“It’s your word against mine.” She turned on her heel and strode out of the plane. Dressed in figure-fitting dark jeans, a gauzy white blouse, and turquoise cowboy boots, she looked like a rich girl who’d grown up out West. Her long black hair was in a thick braid down her back, and I wanted to tug on it like a dumb middle schooler who didn’t know how to talk to girls so antagonized them instead.
I had single-handedly built a multimillion-dollar business in under ten years, and this leggy woman with a pink birthmark where her spine ended and her ass began had turned me into a dimwit. As I watched her ass sway seductively, I couldn’t burn away the memories of all the times I’d kissed said birthmark. I hoped this fake dating would kill me and put me out of my misery. I was in a paradoxical hell. I wanted to be around her and dreaded it at the same time.
I grunted in self-derision. “Dammit all,” I mumbled.
“What’s that?” she asked as she took the stairs down to the tarmac, glancing over her shoulder with a bewitching smile.
I caught a waft of her spicy perfume. My dick twitched. “I think I left something back at the office.”
I was so attracted to her it was stupid. I always had been, from the minute I’d seen her thirteen years ago at a party at some dumb frat house. And here she was, better than ever. God help me.
“You’re not at work, Cal. Forget about it.”
I wished I could. I really wished I could.
Paul was already across the tarmac of the private airport, where a large, black SUV was waiting for us. My mother had thought ahead. I opened the back cargo space and started throwing bags in. I needed to get to the ranch and away from everyone.
I was about to close the hatch when Sabrina grabbed my arm. “Wait. Let’s get a picture.” She spun me around so the airplane was behind us. And behind that were the mountains. She stood slightly in front of me but to my side and held out an arm to take a selfie.
She looked over her shoulder at me. “Get in the frame, Cal. All I can see is your big, dumb chest.”
“You think my chest is big?” I leaned over her shoulder.
“And dumb.” She smiled and took the shot. She studied it before giving a one-shoulder shrug. “It’ll have to do. I’ll hashtag it ‘getting my getaway on.’ Oh, look,” she said, opening up my app, ProtectedLove. We’d put the beta on our phones before making the trip. “Over a hundred people have signed up to test the app.” She tapped her screen. “And just like we asked, a bunch are from this area. That’s encouraging.”
She was thinking about the job, and here I was thinking about her body.
“Get in the car.” I gave her a nudge in the back to get her moving. But instead of going around to the right, she took the back seat directly behind the driver’s seat, where I was sitting.
“I can’t wait to see where you became you, Calvin,” she said.
Hard money on her kicking the back of my seat the entire hour drive to the ranch.
“I didn’t always live out here. I spent a lot of time in a boarding school, but this is where I came back to when I wasn’t in school and didn’t have to be with my parents.” Essentially, when I was allowed. I always had to downplay my love for the ranch because to like it meant my father would take it away.
In the three years we’d dated, I’d never once even thought to bring Sabrina here. I hadn’t wanted the ugliness of my homelife to touch her, and though the ranch was, for all intents and purposes, a happy place, it also served as a reminder of all the things I didn’t have and the thing every kid wanted—a happy, safe home. So in college, when we’d had a chance to go home, I’d always picked Sabrina’s Texas ranch, my other refuge.
I caught her eye in the rearview mirror. “My mom and sister live full time on the ranch.”
She nodded and didn’t ask any other questions, which surprised me. She’d never met my family except for the one time she met my dad. I’d explained about being estranged from my dad, and she’d accepted that with blind faith. I sometimes wondered how my life would have turned out had I married Sabrina in Vegas and my dad met her afterward. Would Dalton still have gone on the attack? Would he have come between us and broken down all we had?
“I contacted a very good friend of mine, a reporter out here.” She put a hand up to stop Paul. “I was off the record. I trust her immensely. I told her about the app, and she signed up. She said she’ll help with some press with whatever we need. Do a story if we want. She knows what’s up, and she suggested that she take pictures of the first date we select from the app. I don’t know if you’ve played around with the app, Cal, since we put in our info, but one suggestion was that we take out horses and go sightseeing, and I really liked that. It’s a great first date.”
“That’s a terrible first-date suggestion. That stranger could murder you,” I grumbled. Sure, there was truth to it being somewhat unsafe, but my reaction was more related to how quickly I wanted to do this.
“You’re not a stranger. That’s why the app suggested it. Whoever added the section to explain why the activity was being suggested was a genius.”
“That would be Citra,” Paul said.
Sabrina leaned between the seats. “You have horses, Cal?”
I nodded. “It’s a ranch, so…”
She rolled her eyes. “Maybe not everyone uses horses. I saw a show once where a guy used a drone to survey his land and corral sheep.”
“A drone?” Paul asked.
“Yeah. It even barked to help move the sheep.”
I smirked. “I saw the same show. No one uses drones. That was just for TV.”
“Some people use ATVs. I have one on my ranch.” She sat back and crossed her arms. “It was a fair question.”
She was annoyed with me. Good, I could live with that. Annoyed I could handle. Nice made me a weak-kneed jackass.
“You are so prickly,” she mumbled.
Sabrina
We fell into silence. Exhausted, I closed my eyes, rested my head against the window, and took a catnap. Only hours earlier, I’d been in my bed in Texas when Cal had barged in.
I woke when the SUV slowed and made a left turn. I blinked several times to clear the fuzz from my head. He’d turned onto a private road and crossed under a large ranch arch made from insanely large timbers. A sign declaring The Rolling Thunder Ranch swung softly in the breeze from the cross timber. I sat up and looked out the window. Miles and miles of deep-green land spread out around us. To the right was the backdrop of blue-and-brown mountains shaded by white, puffy cotton-ball clouds in a baby-blue sky.
I’d been to Wyoming several times because my friends Jace, Meredith, Cricket, Cori, and Fort lived out here. I never got tired of the view. And this one looked strikingly familiar.
“How far away do you live from Jace?” I asked.
I knew they’d been friends before college and were both from Wyoming. I knew he’d been to boarding school, though I’d thought it was only his high school years so he could get into an Ivy League college. Which he did. And then turned down to go to a state school in Texas.
But ranches were vast and isolating. When I was at Jace’s, I’d never thought about who was out there beyond the fences because I knew they rarely ran into people unless they went into town.
“He’s the next town over, a little over an hour.”
“How far away from Wolf’s Creek are you?” Wolf’s Creek was where Cori and Fort lived. And Shane and Ellie. Wolf’s Creek was my favorite.
“This is Wolf’s Creek,” he said as we crept along the road.
I sat upright. “Shut up—it is not!” How many times had I been out here and never once run into him or heard his name or any hint of him? Millions, that was how many. Millions.
“It is.”
“You know Fort Besingame?”
Cal shook his head. “I haven’t been back here in years.”
“How could you not come home to this? It’s stunning. Already, I feel a thousand times lighter, like I can handle anything. Looking at this view is like doing deep meditation. It’s good for the soul.” One more opportunity our paths had run close together but never crossed.
The ranch itself was two stories and sprawling with a wraparound porch. There were three barns and lots of corrals. Cattle grazed in a field far off. The house had dark timber trim and accents, contrasting with a whitewashed house that was all big windows and sunshine.
He pulled up to the side of the house near a garage and sighed heavily, not moving. “It is spectacular, isn’t it?” He seemed to be soaking it in.
“And I thought I had something special in Texas.” I got out, stretching like a cat after a nap in the sun.
He got out beside me, and I bumped into him as I lifted my hands high over my head. I froze and gave him a side-eye as I felt the rush of heat I always got when I touched Cal. Then I did a quick few sidesteps to move away, arms still in the air to finish my stretch. Cal chuckled.
Footsteps on the porch drew my attention. I was fixing my shirt, which was only partially tucked in, when I looked up and saw Morgan, the coworker who had started this whole nonsense.
I pointed at her. “I know you.” To Cal, I said, “This is the person who asked to hire me.”
“So I was told.” He gestured to the older woman. “Sabrina, this woman, full of trickery and hidden agendas, is my mother, Morgan Beckett.”
“But I go by my maiden name now, Barker.”
“Your mother?” I remembered how the woman had stared at me so curiously when we’d met. What were her full intentions? Morgan had to have known of our past when she tried to hire me. I turned to Paul, who was unloading the bags. “I owe you a twenty. You were right—he is human.” To Cal, I said, “I thought you’d been hatched from an egg like all cold-blooded snakes.”
Morgan slapped her hands together in pleasure. “You are such a delight, Sabrina. I cannot wait to get to know you better.”
Cal groaned. “She’s not going to be here for long, Mom.”
Morgan put her hands on her hips, her smile large. “Well, don’t just stand there, Calvin. Bring your friend in, and let’s make her comfortable.”
Cal moved up the stairs next to me and gave me the side-eye. “We’re not friends. Just two people who once knew each other.”
I gave him a wicked smile. So my line about us not having a friendship had hit a nerve. “Mere acquaintances.”
The space between his brows made a divot as his gaze roved all over my face, probably trying to figure me out. Good. I liked my Cal Beckett unnerved, with a side of confusion.