“Damn it all to fucking shit,” I muttered.
On top of my mechanical skills, cursing like a sailor was something I’d learned from my father.
I turned my head to wipe sweat away onto my sleeve and tried the next thing that popped into my head. I was fully in the zone, barely aware of everything else around me, when someone tapping me on the shoulder made me let out a startled yelp and jump away from the truck. I spun around to see who it was and found my best friend grinning at me. Glaring at her, I caught my breath.
“Sara!” I snapped. “Don’t do that! You scared the hell out of me.”
That didn’t intimidate her. She just let out a giggle that fit perfectly with her tiny body and delicate, beautiful face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be so deeply engrossed in your conversation with your truck not to notice me coming up behind you.”
I glanced at the truck in disgust, then back at her.
“It’s definitely not my truck,” I corrected her. “If this thing was mine, I would have taken it out behind the barn with a shotgun a long time ago. What this thing is, is the bane of my existence.”
She laughed again and grabbed my hand to steer me out of the garage and into the sunshine beating down on the driveway. It felt good and I reached behind me to pull the rag out of my back pocket so I could wipe the grease off my hands.
I looked down at them and examined my fingernails. There was a distinct possibility I had permanently tinted parts of them black from digging around under the hoods of so many cars. Right at that moment, the rumble of a car coming down the street brought our attention to the end of the drive.
A truck several generations older than the one sitting in intensive care in the garage slowed down as it drove by, and the guy in the passenger seat hung slightly out of the open window to stare at Sara. Beside him, another local guy I recognized leaned over from behind the wheel to check her out, too. They stared for as long as they figured they could get away with it, and when Sara didn’t pay them any mind, they sped up and drove away.
I tried hard not to feel the pang of guilt that hit me right in the middle of the chest. Sara didn’t even notice when guys acted like that toward her. Either that or she was so completely accustomed to it, she didn’t feel the need to acknowledge it. Whichever one it was, she was never affected by it and I always was.
It was never lost on me that every time we were together, every man she walked past stopped for a second to look at her. Sometimes, it was just a quick glance, a double take because they were struck by her. But sometimes, it was a long lingering stare of appreciation. And I just stood there, not even registering on their radar and wishing for it to be over.
The reality was, Sara and I were just about as different as we could be. She looked like the beautiful fairy flitting around in the wildflowers, while I was the sturdy hand working the fields. Possibly not that extreme, but that was how it felt when she was being admired and I was overlooked.
Tall and strong, I was more thick and athletic than I was soft and curvy. Pair that with a generous sprinkling of freckles and a minimalist approach to grooming—beyond brushing my hair back into a ponytail—and it was clear I wasn’t going to be leading anybody to Neverland any time soon.
Sometimes, I wished I could be a bit more feminine. Maybe just softened around the edges, a little more girlish in my shape, a little prettier in my style. But with my job, it was difficult. Manicured nails and car engines didn’t go well together, and all the makeup Sara wore would melt right off up near an engine.
Besides, I came by it naturally. I’d always been more of a tomboy, even with my mother’s efforts to make me a bit softer. Any time I put on a dress, I felt like an imposter. I didn’t know what to do with my body or how I was supposed to act. Nothing seemed right and I couldn’t just be normal. It was like I was trying to be someone I wasn’t.
But still, it would be nice to have a man look at me like that once in a while. It had been a long time.
Not forever. There were times in my life when I felt beautiful. When a man’s eyes on me made me feel special and desirable. But that was a long time ago, and no amount of burying myself in tools and motor oil completely took away that occasional twinge of wishing I could feel that way again.
Just like I expected, Sara didn’t even seem to realize the guys were there, much less that they paid her any attention. She was focused on me, and the bouncy look in her eyes said she had stories she wanted to tell. She came by them naturally. Working in a small-town hair salon meant knowing everybody’s business, sometimes even before they did.
“Guess who was the first client in my chair this morning?” she asked.
I hated when she did that. Sara thought the guessing game was fun and added mystery to her telling me what was happening, but it was really just a futile waste of time. Green Valley was a small town, but there were still hundreds of women who went to Sara’s salon to get their hair cut and styled. Any one of them could have been her first client of the day, and the vast majority had an equal shot of having some sort of salacious story happening behind closed doors.
On some days, I would go along with it just to amuse her and start rattling off as many names as I could come up with on the spot. But that day, my battle with the pickup had dried up the whimsical part of me and I just wanted to get to the point.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Who?”
She flashed me another smile. “Mrs. Shirley.”
I rolled my eyes. Everybody knew Mrs. Shirley, and Mrs. Shirley knew everybody. Sara might be a gatherer of stories and details, but the older woman was the unquestioned queen of gossip around town. What Sara didn’t get directly from the mouths of the women themselves, she—and everyone else—learned from Mrs. Shirley.
“Oh, lord, here we go,” I said. “What beans did she spill this time? Actually,” I held up a hand to stop her before she even started, “don’t tell me. I don’t want to be part of the cycle.”
“How afterschool special of you,” she commented.
“Whatever it is, it’s none of my business,” I said.
“Oh, but it is,” Sara said.
I shook my head. “Sara, you know no good can come out of spreading gossip around. If there was something I was involved in that was juicy enough to get cycled around by Mrs. Shirley, I’d know. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Believe me,” Sara insisted. “You’re going to want to hear this.”
There was no getting out of this. My best friend had come all the way out here and almost made me bash the back of my head into the hood of a pickup truck just so she could tell me this and she was going to make sure I heard it.
I planted my hands on my hips and let out a breath. “Fine. What is it?”
Sara glanced around like there was going to be anybody around to overhear her, then leaned in conspiratorially.
“Jesse Montgomery is on a flight back to Green Valley this very minute. No more military service for him. He’s coming home. For good.”
My heart immediately began to race. She was both right and wrong. Her bit of town gossip for the day definitely had to do with me, but I didn’t know if I really wanted to hear it.
Chapter 3
Jesse
Mandy had just been teasing when she asked me if I could see the ranch from the plane. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the exact expansive stretch of land that belonged to my family, but I sure as hell could see Montana.
No matter what else I left behind when I joined the military and what had kept me from coming back, this place truly was home. And I truly believed that it would always be the most breathtakingly beautiful place I’d ever seen.
As soon as the plane started making its way down from the sky, I could see the stunning features of the landscape. It was nothing compared to what it looked like up close, but even from that distance, I could see the wide swaths of green grass and dense forest nestled up against the foot of towering snow-to
pped mountains. Rivers rushing down to glacier-fed lakes looked like blue veins through the lush landscape. Other spaces were golden. Those were the pockets of wheat rather than grass.
I knew the wild landscape well. When I was younger, I’d spent a considerable amount of time exploring as far out as I could get. I hiked through the woods and climbed into the mountains. I swam in that cold water and camped under a sky that was still the biggest and the most densely scattered with stars I’d ever seen.
One of the problems I always had with my buddies telling all those stories and getting into all the details of their lives back home was that the more they talked about it, the more they romanticized it. Nothing could ever live up to the way they described everything in their life, right down to where they lived.
That wasn’t the case with Montana.
I wouldn’t be able to describe it in any way that wouldn’t fall short of how stunning it really was. If anything, it looked even more beautiful than I remembered. I didn’t really know how to feel about being back home. But if nothing else, I could appreciate the incredible beauty of these surroundings compared to the nightmarish places I’d been over the last ten years.
I probably would have appreciated it even more if it wasn’t for the long brutal day of travel I had just gone through. By that evening, I was in the back of a beat-up old taxicab that sounded like it was going to collapse into a dozen pieces at any moment.
The flight from DC landed in Missoula, which was a good distance away from Green Valley. Of course, everything was a good distance away from Green Valley. That was why I ended up flying into an airport that would require me switching cars several times over just to get back to the ranch.
Every time I had to switch, each car seemed to get less and less pleasant. This last one was particularly rough. Somebody could have told me it was kept together with bubble gum and super glue and I would have believed them.
But that was Green Valley for you. Too far out in the middle of fucking nowhere to account for much. People out here didn’t have much use for cabs, so it seemed the ones that did exist were far from cutting edge.
At least this wasn’t a pet-and-owner situation and the driver didn’t have a personality that mirrored the condition of the car. He was warm and friendly from the time he picked me up, and even went through a drive-thru for me so I could get something to eat that hadn’t been warmed several thousand feet up in the air.
But the smile on his face started to wane when I directed him to a long dirt drive and the car passed under a wooden sign that read, “Montgomery Ranch –est. 1947”.
“How long has it been since you were back home, son?” he asked.
I watched a more familiar space unfold on either side of the cab as we continued down the dirt road. There was something wary about the way he asked the question, like he could somehow tell I wasn’t chomping at the bit with excitement to get back there. Either that or I just didn’t strike him as someone who belonged on a cattle ranch.
That was fair enough. Depending on how long he’d been in the area and what had brought him through, he might not be familiar with my family’s ranch. And I knew in the ten years that had passed since I left, I had gotten the ranch trained out of me. Now when people looked at me, they were much more likely to see the military than they were the fields of cattle.
“Three years,” I answered the driver, almost surprised to hear it even though it was coming out in my own voice.
Somehow, saying it out loud made it even more real. Without acknowledging it, I could keep going along feeling like it really hadn’t been that long that I’d been away. But now that it was out there in the open, I had to think about it.
It was hard to believe I hadn’t been back to my family’s ranch in three years. That seemed like such a long time, especially considering it wasn’t just the ranch itself I hadn’t seen in those years. I also hadn’t seen any of my brothers.
The last time I was here hadn’t been for very long either. I didn’t even get the chance to stay for the night. I spent a little time with my brothers, had dinner, and stood on the porch staring across the rolling hills and mountains with a sense of detached familiarity. I knew I couldn’t let myself sink back too deeply into it. That would have only made it harder when I got on another plane and headed back to the base for more training. After that, it was off for another tour in the desert.
But never again. Now there would be no more going back to the base. There would be no more training and no more getting called up for combat tours. My time in the military was done.
Not everybody realized that. I hadn’t gone into details when I let my family know I was coming back. I didn’t want them looking at me any differently when I arrived.
The cab driver slowed down and looked around as we rolled down the drive. He whistled, obviously impressed by the expansive ranch around him.
“How big?” he asked.
“Sixty square miles,” I told him.
“Damn,” he answered.
That was a pretty familiar response to the size of the ranch. Being able to instantly recite the size of the land came from having the significance of that drilled into me when I was younger. Every time there was a rage, every time there was disappointment, or I wasn’t enough, the size of the ranch and the implications of that came up. It was one of the reasons I had to make the decision I did and get away.
After a few minutes of driving down the long dirt road, the main house and bunkhouses came into view. It was harder to see it from inside the cab, but behind the residences were rows of brown barns. They were built exactly the same, but weathering and age distinguished the different eras of the ranch.
The barns were arranged starting near the residences and stretching out farther into the land, with the newest being the farthest away. The oldest barns were from the era when my grandfather owned the ranch and then the one my father added on when he took over. After those were the two my brothers had constructed to accommodate the increase in the herd of cattle.
Off the side was a fifth smaller barn that housed the horses and other farm animals. All the structures were closed up and quiet now. It was late enough in the evening that the animals had been brought back in to shelter for the night and the ranch hands were all done with their work.
Days started extremely early on the ranch. Morning came well before the sun rose when the workers got on horseback and rode out to gather the herd that had roamed during the night. Putting them into the barns was not only difficult, but it was stressful for the animals, so we didn’t do it unless it was going to be extremely severe weather that could threaten their safety. Other nights, they were allowed to spread out across the ranch and graze.
They didn’t have full access to the entire sixty square miles at all times, of course. There were fences and barriers in place to control their movement to a degree. But they were still able to explore a fairly vast area, making gathering them all up again a daunting task.
“This whole place isn’t just you, is it?” the cab driver asked. “You haven’t just been paying people to look after it while you’ve been gone?”
I shook my head. “No. My brothers are here too. We inherited it from our father.”
“That’s nice, keeping it in the family,” he said. “You hang on to that. It means something and a lot of people have forgotten that these days.”
I tucked that away with all the other fairly useless unsolicited advice I’d gotten over my lifetime and just gave him a tight smile and nod when he looked at me through the rearview mirror.
We pulled up in front of the house and I paid him. He got out and opened the trunk so I could get my luggage. I gave him a tip, thanked him again, and stepped out of the way so he could drive away. I waited until he was gone to draw in a deep breath.
It filled my lungs with the familiar smells of the ranch. These were the smells I grew up with, the ones I always thought of when I did let myself sink into thoughts of this place. Earth and grass. Dirt and clea
n mountain air. The faint undercurrent of the animals. I closed my eyes and listened as the cab pulled away. It left me in the evening quiet of the ranch.
The sounds of the ranch were as deeply ingrained in me as the smells. Even after so long, they were still right there with me like I could recite them. A breeze rustling through. Insects somewhere in the distance singing and chirping. Animals occasionally vocalizing. If I listened hard enough, I would probably be able to hear one of the ranch hands singing to fill up the loneliness.
Another sound joined the others, a creaking I’d heard thousands of times before. That was the sound of the porch door swinging open. I opened my eyes and turned toward the house. My oldest brother, Cassidy, stood at the top of the steps, wiping his hands on a dishrag. We looked at each other for a few long seconds, trying to negotiate what we were feeling and how we were supposed to react to each other.
Finally, he grinned. “Hey, little brother. You’re just in time for dinner.”
Chapter 4
Shannon
It was the end of an extremely long week and I didn’t want to do much of anything besides sit around at home relaxing, which was what I’d already been doing all afternoon. But as the sun setting outside made the inside of my house dimmer, the man in my life decided he couldn’t tolerate me wasting a perfectly good Sunday evening eating peanut butter crackers and waiting to fall asleep.
He displayed his disagreement with my plan by walking up to the couch where I sat and stuffing his nose in my lap. A few snuffles and a nudge later, I knew there was no arguing with him.
His Reckless Heart (The Montgomery Boys Book 1) Page 2
