Somewhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 1)

by Susan Fanetti

  “Tell me what happened.” Catherine’s voice was gentler than Gabe had ever heard it.

  “He grabbed me and dragged me behind the truck. He told me he got whatever he wanted, and I couldn’t stop him.”

  Her boss chuckled quietly. “Guess he was wrong about that.”

  Maybe someday Gabe would find humor in the situation. Doubtful, but maybe, in the future. Definitely not now. “Please don’t fire me. I didn’t do anything. I promise.”

  “I believe you. You’ve already landed your whale.”

  Gabe didn’t know what that meant.

  “Here’s the problem, Gabe. Do you know who Richard Cross is?”

  She shook her head; just another wealthy guest, she’d supposed.

  “He is the CEO of Cross Aeronautics. A major military contractor. He books his executive retreat here every winter, and he brings his family every other year and books us solid for two full weeks. More than that, he tells his friends how much he loves the Moondancer. He is my most important guest. Every visit, he finds himself a little cookie to play with. He considers it one of the perks. To my knowledge, no one has ever told him no.”

  Gabe wondered how many of his ‘cookies’ would have liked the chance to say no. “I thought fraternizing with guests was against the rules.”

  The look Catherine gave her just about screamed Shut up, smarty-pants. Gabe shut up.

  “If Melodie had been discreet, all would have been well, but she got the talk going, and Mrs. Cross caught wind. She knows, of course, but she wants to pretend she doesn’t. If anyone is more important to keep happy than Richard Cross, it’s his wife. She is now extremely unhappy.”

  Seeing the destination of this talk, Gabe felt tears welling up again. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Who do you think I can most afford to lose here?”

  “Please. I need this job.”

  “What if he presses charges, Gabe? What if he sues?”

  “He was trying to rape me!” Tears spilled over and became sobs.

  “Right there at the chuck wagon? In front of everybody? And who can back up your story? Any bruises? I imagine he has some marks to prove his version.”

  “It’s not a story. It’s the truth.” Even as she said the words, she understood their emptiness. Truth was what people wanted it to be. She knew that better than most.

  “I’m sorry, Gabe. Pack your things. I’ll have Luke take you into town.”

  “No. I’ll get my own ride.”

  “Fine. I want you off the ranch within the hour.”

  *****

  On her way back to the bunkhouse, Gabe stopped and sat down on a bench. She pulled her new phone out and scrolled to Heath’s name, but stopped before she pressed ‘call.’ For a few minutes, she sat there with her phone in her hand and cried.

  When she’d been attacked outside the truck stop near Salt Lake City, and fought back in a similar fashion, she’d felt a vibrant surge of potency, of power and self-confidence. For a brief flash of time, she’d felt invulnerable. Now, though she’d fought back and won, she felt like she’d lost. She felt small and unsubstantial.

  But she’d had control of that truth. She’d fought the Salt Lake guy off and left him behind, and there had been no one to challenge her story, no one to tell her that she had acted wrongly or that her truth was immaterial. She’d been alone in the world, and there was a kind of strength in that, a strength she’d lost when she’d come to Jasper Ridge and tried to make room for herself here.

  Everything was changing again. She had no home again, no place to be, nowhere to go. Could she even call Heath? They’d only been together a few weeks. She wasn’t his responsibility.

  But what else could she do? Let Luke take her down into Jasper Ridge and get a room at the Gemstone again? To what purpose? She had nothing. Again.

  No. She had Heath. And that strength—the kind that came with leaning on a friend—was as good if not better than the kind that came when there was no one to lean on.

  Forcing control over her tears, she pressed ‘call.’

  He answered right away. “Hey, little one. You done early?”

  The sound of his voice shattered that little bit of control, and tears overwhelmed her again. “Can you please pick me up?”

  “Gabe, what’s wrong?”

  “Can you please pick me up?”

  “I’m leaving right now. Are you safe?”

  She didn’t feel safe at all. “Yes. Please come.”

  “I’m worried. Stay on the phone with me while I’m on my way.”

  She took a breath and made her voice level out. “No, I’m okay. I’ll see you when you get here. I’m at the bunkhouse.”

  *****

  Heath didn’t bother to knock. He stormed in and, finding her in the living room, her sad little duffel packed with all she owned—at least she had enough to fill it full now—sitting next to her on the sofa, he came right to her, deep worry etched into his forehead.

  Gabe had been crying most of the twenty minutes since she’d ended their call, and she knew he could tell. But she was fairly certain her tears had finally dried up.

  He crouched in front of her and took her hands. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I got fired.”

  “What? Why?” After a beat, he added, “Because of me?”

  “No.” Could she tell him? The image of Brandon Black lying on the floor of the Jack rose up. If he did something like that to Richard Cross, he would end up in real trouble.

  But she had to tell him. She needed him to know. She needed him to make her feel better.

  “A guest came at me, and I hurt him.”

  A dangerous glint came into his eyes. “What do you mean, came at you?”

  Her voice would fail if she tried to say more while she was confronted with the icy fury building in his eyes, so she looked down at her lap instead, where his hands held hers. “He pushed me up against the food truck and—”

  She got no farther, because he leapt to his feet, startling her and cutting her off. “Jesus fucking Christ. Stay here.” He stalked toward the front door.

  Gabe jumped up. “Heath, no! Don’t—just don’t. I just want to go. I don’t know where to go. I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t know what to do.” As her thoughts unspooled into panic, a new font of tears erupted. She began to cry again, and Heath came back and gathered her close.

  “Hush. It’s okay. You have somewhere. Come home with me. Stay with me.”

  She shook her head against his chest. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too soon! We just started!”

  “Who cares about that?” He lifted her chin and stared down into her eyes. The light in his had changed, grown warm. “Why put a clock on what’s happening? Gabe, I love you. I want to be with you. If you feel the same, come live with me.”

  It was the first time he’d said those words. It didn’t begin to solve all the problems or answer all the questions, but it was a start; she felt instantly better. And she did love him. She’d been fighting the urge to say it for weeks, almost since their first night together.

  “Do you feel the same, Gabe?” He brushed his thumbs over her cheekbones, wiping her tears away.

  She nodded. “Yes. I love you.”

  His smile was gentle. “Then let’s get the fuck out of here. I’ll deal with this shit later.”

  Gabe was afraid to ask what he meant.

  Chapter Twelve

  Heath came out onto the porch and handed Gabe a beer. He’d started keeping Corona in his fridge for her, and he’d even bought limes once or twice, though Gabe could take or leave the lime. That was more fuss than she herself normally bothered with, but it was sweet that he’d thought of it.

  This time, though, the bottle was lime-free. Sitting on his porch glider, she took a long drink, swallowing a couple of times before she set the half-empty bottle on her knee.

  He sat next to her and stretched his arm across the back of the gl
ider. His other hand held a glass of bourbon. “I want you to tell me again. You’re leaving shit out, Gabe. I want to know it all.”

  All the way from the Moondancer, he’d grilled her about the night: what had happened with Richard Cross—whose name she’d kept to herself, though he’d probably hear it from somebody else in town soon enough—what Catherine had said, whether she’d had trouble with him or anybody else before, why she hadn’t told him.

  In truth, she hadn’t left much out at all, but he was convinced that she was hurt and not saying. That was kind of ironic—if she’d gotten hurt, maybe she could have proved her ‘story.’ “There’s nothing else to tell. The way people talk around here, you have to know how things work up there, right?”

  He drank from his glass and looked out at the dark ranch before him. There wasn’t much moon, but he’d kept the porch light off so they wouldn’t be so interesting to bugs, and the scene before them rolled out like a blue painting on black velvet.

  “I know some girls work up there to find men. I didn’t know the men thought they could take whoever they wanted. And I didn’t fucking know Catherine fires women who get attacked. Christ, Gabe! That is every kind of wrong. I’m going up there tomorrow. You’re going to get your fucking job back, and that son of a bitch who put hands on you is going to learn some manners.” He finished his drink and set the empty glass on the porch floor.

  “No.”

  “Yes. This shit doesn’t stand. You can’t think I’m going to sit here and do nothing.”

  The real truth was that Gabe wanted him to go back up to the Moondancer and tear the place apart. She wanted him to do to Richard Cross what he’d done to Brandon Black. She even wanted him to do the same thing to Catherine. She was angry and hurt and disgusted. She felt helpless and vulnerable, and she wanted Heath—her man—to make it all better.

  And he would. But that would make everything worse.

  Not only would he get himself in serious trouble, but it would change things between them. It would be so easy to just give over and let him do what he wanted, to let him take care of her. But she knew she would lose herself as soon as she did—and maybe in a way she couldn’t get back.

  “Yeah, I do think that. It’s not your fight, Heath. And it’s not worth fighting. You can’t just go up and beat up a guest. He’s some kind of important guy, and you’ll just get in trouble. I don’t want that—and it doesn’t fix anything, anyway. I don’t want that job back. I hate that I lost it, and I don’t know what I’m going to do now, but I can’t go back after all this.” She sighed. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Calming, he put his arm around her and pulled her tight to his side. “You don’t have to do anything.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t need to work. You know I can take care of you.”

  “Heath, no.” She put her hand on his chest, pushing back so she could look into his eyes.

  She could just barely make out his expression in the dark; he was frowning. “Why not? And don’t say it’s too soon.”

  “Because I can’t just sit around and do nothing. I want to have a life, not just get swallowed up in yours.”

  He tensed, and Gabe thought she might have hurt his feelings, but he said, “Okay. But why just get any old job? Why not do something you want to do?”

  “I don’t know what that is. In Santa Fe, I was taking community college classes to try to figure that out when everything happened.”

  “So do that again. Boise’s a couple hours away. You could take some classes, work your schedule so you drive into the city a couple days a week. Figure out what you want.”

  “I can’t afford college. And I can’t get there.” They were circling toward a familiar argument now.

  “Gabe. Enough. Money is not your problem, and I’m getting offended that you won’t see that. Let me help.”

  “It’s only been a month, Heath.” Maybe he didn’t want to hear that they were too early in their relationship to make big plans, but his denial didn’t make it less true. Gabe thought it was important to at least try to keep it in mind.

  “I was alone for four years. By choice. It was my choice to stay that way for the rest of my days. Now it’s not. Now I want to be with you. You think I take that lightly? Do you take it lightly?”

  Gabe looked out over the dark ranch and thought for a moment. Why was she fighting him? She loved him, and she believed him when he said that he loved her. She wanted him to take care of her. She didn’t want to have nothing in her life except him—but he was offering to help her make sure that wouldn’t be the case.

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t take it lightly.”

  He tucked her against his chest again. “Good, then. It’s settled. We’ll go into Boise and find you a car, and we’ll go by the community college while we’re there. You can do anything you want. I’ll do whatever I can to help you make it happen. I’ll take care of you. I will.”

  It was—he was—exactly what she needed to erase the awfulness of her day. Of her life.

  *****

  “Okay, good. Bring the cue back—easy, stay lined up—”

  Gabe could feel Heath’s erection on her hip. “I don’t think this is a good way to learn pool.”

  He was curled over her back, his face just above hers. She felt his chuckle like a warm, light caress over her ear and cheek. “You don’t? Seems great to me.” He tucked his face in the crook of her shoulder and nipped at her neck.

  “It’s great, but I’m not learning pool.” She shimmied her hips.

  “Christ on crutches, you two. Are we gonna play this game, or are we gonna have to watch you dry hump all night?”

  Laughing at Emmett’s complaint, Gabe let go of the cue and turned around. Heath barely made room for her to do so, and she rubbed solidly against him until she was facing him, still wedged between his body and the pool table. She liked the light in his eyes—the one that said he was half a second from dragging her to a dark corner.

  “You play. I’ll sit and watch your ass.” She reached around and smacked the ass in question.

  He sent her off to the table with a kiss, then shot an exaggerated scowl at Emmett. “We’re playing, asshole.”

  As Gabe came to the table, Victor and Paul both half-stood in that gentlemanly way most of the men had in Jasper Ridge, and Paul pulled back one of the empty chairs for her to sit. Heath’s friends were a strange combination of chivalrous and nasty about women. They stood when a woman stood, they pulled out chairs and held doors, tipped their hats, all that stuff. But she’d been around them enough in the past weeks to have also learned how they talked about the same women they were so polite to.

  Thrilled that she had brought Heath back to the living, as they said, his buddies had folded Gabe into their group fairly readily, to the point that they’d already stopped watching what they said around her. In the nearly two weeks that she’d been living with Heath, she’d accumulated vivid naked pictures in her mind of nearly all the attractive women in Jasper Ridge, just from listening to these buttheads describe what they knew and what they thought they knew about what the women looked like.

  She wasn’t surprised all of his closest friends were single.

  Victor refilled Gabe’s glass from one of the pitchers of beer on their table. His attention wandered, and he overfilled, then knocked the glass over when he noticed his mistake. Beer went everywhere. As she jumped clear of the splash zone, she turned to see what had caught his eye.

  Pearl and Ellen, from the Moondancer, had come in. Gabe smiled and held up her hand in a wave, and they sent stunted waves back. The palpable awkwardness kept anything more from happening.

  Gabe liked them both, and they’d been building a friendship. Pearl and Ellen were full-timers at the dude ranch; they’d both been born and raised in Jasper Ridge, and they both lived in town rather than one of the bunkhouses. They’d been enthusiastic about her connection with Heath and had shared a lot more gossip about him than she’d ever wante
d to hear. Both had sharp senses of humor. They were fun.

  But the situation with Richard Cross had gotten a lot more complicated, and a ‘Moondancer versus Cahill’ feud had bubbled up in town.

  Despite Gabe’s pleas against it, Heath had gone up to see Catherine the very next day after the incident at the Chuck Wagon Dinner. Gabe had been out with Emma and the kids, and she’d first heard about it after the fact. She’d heard in detail, from many sources, including Heath.

  He’d asked around and quickly figured out which guest had attacked her. He hadn’t beaten Cross, but he’d made some intense threats—which had been effective, because the whole reunion group had packed up and left that day, three days early. Catherine had most likely lost Cross’s business, and that of all his associates, for good.

  Then Heath had gone for Catherine. People said they could hear the shouting in her office all the way down at the stables.

  By the time he’d stormed back to his truck, he’d canceled his contract with her. He was the only farrier for many miles, so that also made some significant complications for the ranch.

  Catherine had taken the whole thing very badly. Now everybody working at the Moondancer was on orders not to associate with the Cahill family or Gabe, under threat of firing.

  Since then, there had been strange tension throughout the town—nothing but an atmosphere yet, but Gabe got the sense that people were beginning to align on opposing sides of a divide: Catherine and the people she employed, and some of the other ranchers, against Heath and the Cahill family and their friends.

  And Gabe was back to having no friends—except those Heath had brought to her.

  That was her one source of real worry right now, but it touched every part of her life. Since she and Heath had become a couple, and especially since they’d begun to live together, every part of her life came through him. She lived in his house. All of her friends were his family and friends. Jasper Ridge was his town.