by Laney Powell
His Heart
Broken Falls Ranch Book One
Laney Powell
Copyright © 2019 by Laney Powell
His Heart: Broken Falls Ranch Book One
Cover: Covers by Combs
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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For all my Flirt Club, Bite Club, and Underground authors and readers. You all are the best!
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
The Spar Island Girls
About the Author
Also by Laney Powell
Prologue
The Broken Falls Ranch series is one that I’ve been planning for some time. I wanted a place where people who needed it could go and find a new lease on life in all the ways.
And while this has been planned, the Big Sky collaboration that I did with my fellow Flirt Club authors really got this going. My book, Cowboy’s Heart, introduced Broken Falls Ranch and Axel, Pris, and Freeze, who you will see in every single book in this series. It’s not necessary to read - but you’ll get the whole shebang on how this series began.
Cowboy’s Heart
Happiness is Broken Falls Ranch
in my rear view mirror.
At least, that’s what I thought when I drove out of town in a blaze of angry words and hurt feelings. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see my grandfather again. But with unexpected retirement from my special forces unit staring me in the eye, I head home to mend fences and eat some crow.
Priscilla Monroe is Granddad’s nurse. She’s the first thing I see when I step through the door, and the only thing filling my dreams. Unfortunately, she’s made it clear she’s here to work and nothing more.
I had no idea that going back to the ranch would give me back my future. Not the future I planned, but a future I discovered I wanted. I also had no idea it would give me back my heart.
How can I prove to Priscilla that her future belongs with me?
Giddy up! Flirt Club is headed west to Big Sky country! Join eleven of your favorite romance authors as we head to Paulson, Montana, and wrangle up some of the steamiest stories yet! So hold onto your hats and join us for one wild ride!
Chapter One
Jensen
Jesus fucking Christ. My back is killing me today. It’s ridiculous. I’m not that old, but it’s killing me.
However, the job waits for no one, and I can’t call in sick. I’m the Chief Petty Officer on my SEAL team, and that means I have to get the lead out and get moving. I rolled out of bed and stretched, trying to work the kinks out of my back.
Not to mention, I made Chief in just under nine years. That’s fast by Navy standards, and when you rise in the ranks quickly, people have expectations. I’m always aware of that. After stretching, I got right into the shower. I made it to the chow hall in twenty minutes and sat with the rest of the guys on my team.
“Training today, Chief?” Wil Jessop, one of the guys, asked.
“Always,” I answered with a grin, back temporarily forgotten. We’re steaming along with an aircraft carrier group, heading for a spot in a desolate part of the world. Our team needs to go pick up something the U.S. government thinks it might have lost. Well, it actually fell out of the sky. They don’t want to lose it, and we have to get there and retrieve this thing before anyone else finds it. Of course it’s in a place where the U.S has enemies.
So, we’ve caught a ride on the big boat, an aircraft carrier, which is nice. Usually, we’re on a sub, and that makes it tougher to work out, to have room to do more than scratch your ass. We’re scheduled, given the ship’s travel time, to go in tomorrow night. That means we have just under a day to kill. With that in mind, I kept the guys moving with checking gear, cleaning weapons—although they are generally clean enough to eat off of—and working out. A bored SEAL can be a dangerous thing.
By the time we’re ready to go, everyone’s feeling good, feeling loose, and I’ve got that amped up sensation that comes before a job. I called my wife earlier today, and she was glad to hear from me. Pammy—short for Pamela—has always been supportive of my career. She knows that she’ll have lots of time alone when I’m gone, and she’ll be on her own. She knew that when we married—and she keeps things going at home.
We made it to where the item landed, loaded it up, and got out. Thankfully, the job went without a hitch. This team is great, and I didn’t expect anything less. We’re back on the boat before daylight and getting ready to get a ride out of there. There was only one minor hiccup. While we were collecting the government’s lost and found item, one of my guys stumbled with his end of the carry cloth that’s holding up the item we’ve retrieved, and tugged me down by my arm, hard. My arm went numb, and even after got back, it still didn’t have much feeling.
Which is why when I wake up the following morning and can’t move, I responded by swearing up a blue storm. I do not need this shit today. Or any day. Tyler, another one of the guys on the team, poked his head through the door to see what’s going on. I must have been louder than I thought.
“Chief, what’s up? You’re pretty salty today.” He eyed me laid out in my bunk like a fish out of water, helpless to do anything except flap around a little. “Jesus, Chief, you need a medic?”
“Yes,” I ground out the words, hating to have to say them. “Sucks, but I think I do.”
Three hours later, I’m parked in front of the ship’s doctor. I’ve had an MRI, too many x-rays to count, and grudgingly accepted some drugs, because I would like to be able to walk and not burst into tears like a baby.
“Well?” I ask Dr. Fossey, the ship’s chief medical officer.
Creed, the team’s CO, is there as well.
“It’s not good, Chief Briggs,” the doctor said as he looked down at his notes.
“What does ‘not good’ mean?” I demand.
“It means that after this, I can’t clear you for any more field work. You can’t be on missions any longer.”
I glared at the wall behind the doctor’s head, trying to comprehend what I’d heard. “What do you mean, I can’t be in the field anymore?” I stared between the doctor and Creed.
Creed’s face shifted only slightly as he kept his eyes on the doctor. He crossed his arms but didn’t say anything.
“It’s just a pulled muscle in the back, or something like that! How the hell does that take me out of the field?” I glared at both of them.
Dr. Fossey began to speak. “It’s not your back. That’s just a pulled muscle, and that will heal with no problem. When we did an MRI, I found something else. Your left shoulder been bothering you?”
“What?” I asked. “Yeah, it got cranked around on the mission. What does that have to do with it?”
“You have a tear in your brachial plexus nerve bundle on your left side, to put it generally. What is means is that your arm isn’t getting all the messages it needs to function.” He touched a spot between my left shoulder and my neck. “Right here,
that’s where the nerve bundle is.”
“I’m not even thirty.” I protested. “This will heal, like everything else, right Doc?.” There is no SEAL who hasn’t pulled, strained, or broken something on some job. We heal. That’s what we do.
“Which is why you have to make a change now,” Fossey said firmly. “You know, if you want to keep on moving in any way like you are now, you need physical therapy, like yesterday. You’ll have to keep it up for some time. I don’t know how long; that’s not my specialty. But you’re going to need it. And with PT, it means no active missions.”
“Nice bedside manner, Doc,” I said.
Fossey shrugged. “Would you rather I blow smoke at you?”
Well, yes. Right now, blowing smoke would be a shit ton better.
“You have a choice,” Creed said, interrupting.
“Yeah? Doesn’t sound like any choice that I want,” I snarled, glaring at both of them some more. Together, they were ruining my life.
Creed shrugged. “But it is a choice. I have a job in command HQ, it’s yours if you want it. I’m allowing you to give me your preference.”
“Or?”
“Or we will let you go.” He crossed his arms, staring at me. “You have enough time in that you can leave with no problem.
I stared back.
“I’m out,” I said. “Fuck it. I’m out.” I slid off the examining table, grabbing my cover and yanking the door open. Despite the fact that my arm was the reason I found myself in this shitty ass position, and my back had gotten me here initially, it was ramrod straight as I walked away from the only life I’d ever known.
Well, I was stuck on the ship until we got into a port. But I knew how these things went. I’d seen it before. One of the guys would have health problems, and he’d be out quicker than shit through a goose.
I just never thought it would be me.
I knew I had to stop no matter how I’d just bitched to the doc and Creed. If I couldn’t count on my arm, I wasn’t a good bet to make sure missions were complete. And daily workouts—that would potentially make the problem worse.
I was out.
What the hell was I going to do with myself? Before this, I figured I had ten more years, and then maybe five in a stateside leadership team. Fifteen more years before I was supposed to be having this conversation.
Jesus fucking Christ.
By the next morning, the rest of the team knew. And by that night, I was on a plane home. I flew into Washington D.C. and then got a flight to the base at Norfolk. I hadn’t called Pammy because I didn’t know what to say. ‘Surprise, honey! I’m home for the next fifteen years?’
Yeah, that option sucked.
I pulled into the driveway. The lights were on, which meant she was up. I took a breath. I’d been thinking about how to tell her that our entire lives were about to change, and after both flights, I still didn’t have a clue.
Nothing was going to get solved with me sitting on my can in the driveway, so I went inside, calling for her. “Pammy?”
Footsteps, and then Pammy came around the corner from the living room. “Jensen! You scared me to death. I wasn’t expecting you home for another week or so.” She put her hands on her hips, looking me over. “What’s wrong?”
She knew me well. “Pammy, we have to talk. There is all kinds of shit wrong.”
She came close, putting her arms around me. “Jesus, Jensen, you look terrible.”
“Thanks, babe.” I dropped my bags at the door.
“Come and sit down with me and let’s talk.” She led me into the living room and onto the couch.
I told her everything, everything that the doctor had said, and how my CO had offered me a job at HQ.
“Why wouldn’t you take that?” Pammy asked.
“Because it wouldn’t be working with my team,” I said. “I’m out. No more SEALs.”
Her face was thoughtful. “Aren’t there other things you can do and still be a SEAL?”
“There’s nothing else I want to do. I love what I do.” I almost shouted.
“I know that, baby. Why don’t you go to bed, and we’ll talk in the morning?”
She walked with me to the bedroom, and when I turned to reach for her, she kissed my cheek, patted my shoulder, and walked back to the living room, closing the door behind her.
I stared at the door in the dark room. This wasn’t how I’d pictured my homecoming, even with the less than positive news.
Three weeks later, I was sitting on the couch, looking through my laptop for any new emails. I’d put out the word with my SEAL buddies, but this damn arm thing was a concern for them, too. Not to mention, I spent hours at the VA, working with various physical therapists who had some sort of secondary degree in torture. As I looked at my account, I thought about how many ‘Sorry, buddy,’ emails I’d already gotten. I didn’t blame them. You can’t pull a job out of your ass, even for a buddy.
Pammy came in. “How’s it going?” Her voice was tight.
I’d noticed that she’d been talking to me in this tight manner that suggested suppressed anger.
Shaking my head, I leaned back on the couch, feeling ancient. “Not great. Lots of ‘Maybe in a couple of months’ responses.”
“You need a job, Jensen.”
“I know that, Pamela,” I said, using her full name. “I’m aware of it every day.”
“Listen, this isn’t what I signed up for.”
“What are you talking about?” I set the laptop aside. “Sit down. Talk to me.”
She shook her head, shaking her hand at me as well. “No, I don’t want to sit down. I’ve always been supportive of you, but you were married before we met, and her name was SEAL Team whichever number you were working on. Now you’re home, and you’re not pulling your weight, and you’re just pathetic!” She gestured at me on the couch.
“Babe, what in the hell are you talking about?”
“I don’t want to be married to an ex-SEAL! That’s not part of the deal!” Pammy wasn’t holding back her anger now.
“I don’t understand.”
“What good are you now? You’re a mess. You don’t work out. You don’t even try to get up and go out except to the hospital. You’ve given up, and you’re just letting yourself go. Well, you’re not taking me with you.” She walked to our room, away from me.
“Did I miss something?” I got up, following her. “Because it sounds like you’re willing to break up our marriage over a job change? And what sounds like a pretty fucked way of looking at from your end, I have to say.”
“It’s not just that,” she pulled a suitcase out of the closet. “This is a life, a way of life. I like this way of life. You’re not doing a damn thing to keep that going, and I’m not going to let you take advantage of me anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” She wasn’t making sense.
“I’m leaving, Jensen. Don’t call me. I’ll go see a lawyer. We’ll split everything evenly.”
Now my guard was up. How many of my guys had heard the very same shit? “If you think you need to leave, well I guess that’s best,” I said, letting my head drop. I didn’t want her to see how angry I was, how much I wanted to fight this out with her.
She didn’t want to be married anymore because she couldn’t be the wife of a SEAL.
What in the actual fuck? I’d heard about this, but again, just like I’d seen guys get bounced for health, I never thought I’d be the one to have to deal with it.
I walked out of the bedroom and went to the kitchen. I was so mad; I didn’t want to see her. I wanted her to go so I could process this. How had I missed it? Not only missed it, didn’t even see it in the distance.
She walked by, slowing, but when I didn’t turn around, she kept moving toward the front door.
“I’ll have my lawyer call you,” she called out, and then the door slammed shut.
“Don’t bother.” I didn’t turn around.
Then I went to hit the email again. I was going to
need a good lawyer.
How the hell had my life come to this? In just under thirty days, too. It was like some kind of record.
Well, fuck it all. I wasn’t going to let any of this shit beat me down—not Pammy, not the Navy—none of it.
I pulled out my phone and started making calls.
Chapter Two
Carissa
I came in the door, dropping my purse and my bag on the floor, and slipping out of my heels. It had been a long day at the office, and I was ready to come home, have a glass of wine, maybe a bath, and see Stephen, complain a little, and then get into bed and watch a movie. Thankfully, it was Friday night, and I had Monday off, so the only thing looking at me for the next three days was the weekend.
“Hey, I’m home!” I called out, padding into the kitchen to grab something to nibble on, and the glass of wine.
The house was quiet. The only light on was the light over the stove. “Stephen?” I said. There was no answer.
There was an envelope on the counter with my name on it, in Stephen’s handwriting. I felt a pit of fear race through me, making me feel cold. There was no reason for me to feel this way, but I did.
Slowly, as if I were walking through water, I opened the envelope, and pulled out a single sheet of yellow legal pad paper.
C,
I have to get out of here for a while. Talk to Mel. He’ll explain.
S
What the hell? I stared at the letter, turning it over to see if there was anything else. There wasn’t.
