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Twilight was coming down on the far mountains, splashing pink and gold across the endless sky. It was getting warmer up here in the foothills of the Sierras; a thaw was in the air.
Green grass clawed its way up out of ice and snow. Leaves battled it out on the trees. Spring was fighting the good fight against the last of winter.
After calving started, they’d move the cows up here, where they’d summer with the cooler temperatures, the greener grass. But in order to do that, they needed the well working.
And right now it was definitely not working.
Anxiety and anger tugged at her stomach. So much to do at the Rocky M and for the first time since she’d been foreman, she hadn’t been able to hire extra seasonal guys. There just wasn’t enough money. So it was her and her skeleton winter crew. She was tough and they were good, but everything was stretched thin.
She’d come back from Santa Barbara six weeks ago to a phone call from the bookkeeper. Walter hadn’t filed taxes last year, their accounts were frozen and the current taxes were due. Things had been tight before, but now it was downright dire.
The Rocky M wasn’t going to make anyone rich, Mia knew that. But she hadn’t expected to sink into bankruptcy. And it felt as though, unless she was able to put the brakes on this downward slide, bankruptcy was where everyone was headed.
She knew it was just a matter of getting the new calves to market, but Walter didn’t seem to fully grasp all he’d done or hadn’t done. Lost in the haze of his sickness, drinking too much and saying nothing at all— Walter was half the man he used to be.
And none of the rancher.
The wind howled over the high land, the ends of her ponytail whipped into her eyes, stinging her face. She wrestled the hair into the collar of her coat, and climbed over to the round corrugated metal fence that protected the well and pump mechanism from snow and wind.
She pumped the handle, and while the gears screeched as they had screeched for years, no water came out.
She really hoped it was a gasket issue—because that was the extent of her well knowledge. She pulled the wrench from the pocket of her canvas barn coat and crouched, her feet sinking in the mud, and wiped the grit and mud from the pump with her numb fingers.
Her neighbor, Jeremiah Stone, who shared this well, knew even less than she did about pumps. Walter usually fixed these problems but…she shook her head, resentment flooding her. Walter was his own problem now.
Her head pounded and her stomach growled. Two more hours of work before she could head back to the ranch. At least.
Sure would be handy to have Jack around.
Before she could stop herself she glanced up at the ghostly sliver of moon in the eastern sky and wondered where he was.
If he was safe.
Mia shoved her mind away from the thought—from all thoughts of Jack. Those wedding-night memories she thought she’d mull over through the cold, lonely nights, were sharp—too painful to hold. The tenderness and heat, the touch of his hands, the shocking intimacy of his body inside hers—it hurt to think about it.
It hurt and it made her angry.
Angry at him. Herself. The situation. Everything.
And the anger simmered, boiled right under the surface of her skin. In her head. Her stomach. She lived with it. Ate with it. Stared at the ceiling in bed every night and burned with it.
There had been a barrage of emails from him in the weeks after she left. She opened one and deleted the rest—because that first one, full of concern and worry—had been too much.
Now he was concerned. Now he was worried. She’d been his wife for five years and the night they had sex, he finally got involved.
Not that she expected anything different. That night wasn’t something Jack would take lightly. Jack was about as honorable as they come. Sure, he was absentminded and thoughtless at times, but the guy hadn’t taken their vows lightly. That he’d been celibate for five years, while shocking in theory, didn’t really surprise her.
That he’d finally slept with her was surprising.
Of course, she’d all but ripped off her clothes.
And as his email subject lines got more and more worried and finally started to get angry, it was easier to delete them without reading them. But then the emails slowed and finally, nine days ago, they stopped.
Mia forced herself to stay away from the news. She’d been too busy to see a divorce lawyer since coming back to the Rocky M, but in her heart it was over between them. And now she had no idea where Jack was. If he was okay. If his last trip had been successful.
She had nothing.
As she had for the past six weeks since grabbing her clothes and running away from Jack and the rooftop patio, she buried all those memories, her anger and every one of her fears in the endless work that came with the Rocky M.
“YOU OKAY, Jack?”
Jack barely heard Devon Cormick, who’d driven him from Los Angeles to the Rocky M, a mile outside of Wassau. He stared at the sprawling brown ranch house, the thin trail of smoke that rose from the chimney into the darkening sky. The building sat in the shadows of a granite cliff.
The house he’d grown up in always looked in imminent danger of being crushed.
Home, he thought, the word foreign in his head.
The painkillers he’d taken once he got off the airplane in Los Angeles were still kicking around his system. The world felt thick and fuzzy, and he knew being here was dangerous. Dangerous in a way that Darfur couldn’t even dream of being.
“I’m fine,” Jack said. Though he wasn’t. Wouldn’t ever be again.
“Are you sure you won’t reconsider?” Devon asked. “You could stay with us. Claire would—”
Jack shook his head. His throat was on fire.
“It will die down,” Devon said. The young man leaned forward over the steering wheel. The bruises at his temple and across his face were yellowing. One of the explosions had tossed him into the air like a rag doll, throwing him headfirst against one of the fences. It was a miracle his neck hadn’t been snapped. “The papers, the university. It can’t go on like this.”
But his hundred-yard stare out the front window said he wasn’t so sure.
Their return from Sudan and their survival of the military’s brutal attack had put Devon and Jack in the papers from coast to coast. And it wasn’t just the media; the university was all over him, too.
The dean had been inside Jack’s house when he got home. As if he had the right, much less a key. And the way he demanded answers—Jack wouldn’t argue, the university had a right to those. But they didn’t have a right to him. He wasn’t his pump. He wasn’t the damn drill.
The university didn’t own him.
The attention was relentless. But for Devon, the attention would die down—innocence, after all, had its advantages.
For Jack, the questions would come at him for the rest of his life.
Do you remember the attack?
Why were you beyond the perimeter of the compound?
What happened to Oliver Jenkins?
Jack flinched and shut his eyes. The morphine burned in his pocket, a promise, a sweet whisper of how good forgetting could be.
“I can’t leave you here. I’ll take you back to the university,” Devon said. He put the car in gear and turned in the front seat ready to reverse down the long driveway.
“I’m staying,” Jack said, his voice a thin wheeze. The doctors had told him not to talk to keep from irritating his damaged throat. But Devon liked conversation. Another reason not to go home with him.
“But you’re pretty far away from a hospital, and with—”
Jack opened the door, and Devon shut up, putting the car in Park and hurtling out the driver-side door to help Jack out of the car.
It was hard with his knee and the broken hand.
“What about physical therapy?” Devon asked. “For your hand?”
Jack ignored him, swinging his duffel bag up over his good shoulder with his good hand.
“Jack! You need to talk to someone about Oliver, about what happened. You can’t just—”
“Thanks for the ride, Devon.”
Devon sighed, wiped a hand over his eyes. “Christ, you’re stubborn.”
Jack would have laughed if it hadn’t felt like swallowing glass.
“Fine. Is there anyone here who will take care of you?” Devon asked.
Jack looked at the brown house with the dark windows. It blended into the forest, the granite outcrop—a shadow in twilight.
No one had ever taken care of him here before.
Except Mia.
Anger burned through him like a gasoline fire, hot and quick and greasy. She’d left him on that hotel rooftop, run away like a child, didn’t return a single email or phone call for four damn weeks and then, after the bombings, after…Oliver, still nothing.
Where the hell were you, Mia? he thought.
The only things he could count on were the pills in his pocket, the nightmares and that no one would find him here.
“You better go,” he told Devon. “The pass gets dangerous in the dark.”
Devon looked sufficiently nervous at the idea and Jack bit back a smile. He’d watched the man’s fingers get whiter and whiter on the steering wheel on the way over the mountains.
“If you’re sure?”
Jack nodded. He wanted a get this over with—walk through those doors, face down the demons and then sleep. For two months, until he was forced back to San Luis Obispo to answer the dean’s questions.
He barely heard Devon drive away as he took the gravel pathway up to the house. Why were the lights off but the fireplace going? It was getting close to seven o’clock and at least the lights in the kitchen should be glowing, with some traffic coming from the bunkhouse to the dining room.
The barn to his left was silent. One brown gelding was in the nearby corral.
It was spring and the place looked like a ghost town.
The front door creaked open under his fist and he helped his left knee up the front stoop and entered the house.
He found a weak fire, mostly glowing embers, in the living room fireplace, but the house was cool. The furnace was off. It was eerie.
A vicious snapshot, a horrific memory of the pump site, the compound, blackened to cinder. Nothing but craters and smoke where people and equipment used to be.
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