Rule Breaker

by Joanne Rock

  Her vision hazy with exhaustion from the flight delays, she almost ran into a picture-perfect blonde dressed in an on-trend trench coat and leather boots. The kind of woman Elena would have once tried to photograph for her “Woman on the Street” posts about beauty. But these days, Elena didn’t have the resources to keep up her work as an influencer. She’d been forced to take a temporary gig as an “entertainment journalist” just to make ends meet. The only bright spot in that was getting to write a piece about Gage.

  “Excuse me,” the blonde blurted, even though it had almost assuredly been Elena’s fault for listing sideways with her broken suitcase.

  Elena paused to watch the woman hurry toward the row of all-terrain vehicles parked near the lodge. Sliding into the closest one, which looked sort of like a golf cart with tricked-out wheels, the blonde revved the engine and flipped on the headlight, roaring away into the snow.

  Talk about badass.

  Putting her feet in gear again as she pushed through the double doors of the lodge, Elena promised herself to check one of the vehicles out after she’d had time to catch up on some sleep. Her story would have to wait another day while she got her bearings in Montana and, hopefully, found some clothes suitable for the snow. Her social media following was still large, but she couldn’t afford to lose followers with sloppy clothes and poorly thought-out posts. Her following and connections had helped her land this job in the first place, and one day she hoped to return to her old job.

  Besides, she needed to publicly chronicle her story as she pursued it. She wanted the Mesa Falls Ranch owners to know she was coming for them. Or, more accurately, she wanted Gage Striker to know she was coming for him, since his betrayal had sent her life on the trajectory that landed her in her unhappy marriage.

  Her fault, yes. But Gage bore some blame too. Breaking this story and revealing the secrets of Mesa Falls would not only help her pay the bills, it would give her a bit of sweet revenge.

  * * *

  Weston scaled a fifty-five-degree bouldering wall in his home gym, trying to work off the frustration brewing inside him ever since April had refused his dinner invitation.

  Scratch that.

  The frustration had been building before that, when she’d evaded his calls earlier in the day, texting him that she was swamped with work. Swiping sweat away from his eyebrow, he focused on reaching a hold high over his head. Granted, it was hypocritical of him to be upset with her for keeping him at arm’s length when he’d known things were temporary between them. Hadn’t he already thought about how to keep things amiable when they said goodbye?

  Turns out, he sucked at this no-strings kind of relationship. The women in his past tended to be hookups. And April was about as far from a hookup as he could imagine. He liked her—respected her—too much. No matter what his brain told him about keeping things light, he wanted to be with her while she was still in Montana. As far as he was concerned, their time together wasn’t over yet.

  But it seemed like she believed otherwise.

  “Excuse me? Mr. Rivera?” A man’s voice from below surprised him.

  He peered down from his precarious foothold to see Cedric, his recently hired personal assistant, looking decidedly uneasy. The guy was whip smart, just out of college and dressed like a million bucks. Weston hadn’t figured out why he had no self-confidence to go with it, but Cedric hadn’t batted an eye at the idea of helping Weston manage a financial empire from a Montana ranch, so Weston liked him well enough.

  Except when he interrupted a challenging climb.

  “I’m sort of in the middle of something here.” The muscles in his right arm shook from the strain of too long a reach.

  He turned his attention back to the wall, needing to maintain his focus. A decisive tapping of shoes on tile almost made him look back down, but he fought the urge to solve Cedric’s problems for him. The guy needed to learn how to navigate Weston’s world on his own.

  “Weston?” April’s unmistakable soft voice held a steely note as she called up to him. “We need to talk.”

  A quick glance over his shoulder let him see her hands-on-hips, no-nonsense posture. The fire in her eyes was clearly visible from his semi-inverted position two stories over her head.

  No wonder Cedric had been uneasy. She looked like she meant business. Which couldn’t be good for Weston.

  “Of course,” he told her mildly, feeling his way downward. His climb would have to wait. “Cedric, can you see if our guest needs anything before you go?”

  He heard the two exchange a few words before his assistant disappeared as silently as he’d arrived, leaving Weston alone in the gym with April. The subterranean room was built into the mountainside along with the rest of Weston’s modern home that overlooked the Bitterroot River Valley. He’d spent a lot of time in Mesa Falls during the last two years, but not much in the house itself. If he wasn’t working on the ranch, he was joining search-and-rescue efforts on the mountain. Sitting still had never been his thing.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” April asked as he picked his way around an obstacle.

  “No,” he assured her. “I prefer not to jump until I’m closer to ground level. Easier on the knees.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to jump,” she retorted. “It just didn’t occur to me that you’d have to climb back down. At a training facility near me we have ropes to slide down afterward, but then I realized you don’t even have a safety harness.”

  “This is a home gym, and I don’t climb for a thrill.” Finding the last foothold on the lower side of the rock obstacle, he readjusted his finger hold and then let go.

  Falling.

  He landed on both feet a few yards from where she hovered near the punching bag he kept in one corner of the gym.

  “I do it to stay in shape for rescues on the mountain. And it’s a great workout.” He grabbed a towel from the weight bench and mopped his forehead, his muscles still thrumming from the climb and the weight lifting before that.

  In fact, he’d been working out for well over an hour in an effort to forget that this very woman hadn’t wanted to see him tonight. She looked beautiful in her long trench coat and high leather boots, her hair in smooth curls again. Not like when they’d spent the night together and he’d combed his fingers through it over and over.

  Damn, but he’d wanted to end this day with her in his bed again.

  She pursed her lips in a look he’d come to know well in the short time they’d been acquainted. She wasn’t a woman to blurt out anything, picking over her words before she spoke.

  He waited, even though he had the feeling he wasn’t going to like whatever she’d come here to say. He would have far preferred to kiss her than listen, but he knew that would only delay the inevitable.

  “I didn’t realize it was quite this late when I decided to come over here.”

  “I’m surprised you knew where to find me.” His house was far from the main lodge on the guest ranch portion of the property. Tucked into the mountainside, he wasn’t close to the working ranch portion of Mesa Falls, either, since the land here was too rocky and precarious for cattle.

  “I stopped by the ranch manager’s office to ask Cooper Adler for directions,” she admitted. Cooper had been the ranch manager at Mesa Falls even before Weston and his friends had purchased the property. “I needed to speak to you in person. Gauge your reaction for myself.”

  “About what?” Wary, he braced himself for whatever new information she’d unearthed in her investigation.

  “I heard from Nicole earlier this evening.” She watched him closely, her gaze narrowing slightly. “She was in LA for three days at the cattle-raising expo.”

  “I remember.” April had told him about that. She’d been anxious to speak to the woman when she returned. “Did you find out her real name? Or her sister’s?”

  “Not yet.” Her blue
eyes never wavered from his. “I learned Nicole was fired from her job here. Her employment was terminated while she was still on the tarmac in Los Angeles. It was made clear to her that she won’t be allowed on the premises again.”

  “Fired?” He could tell that April was upset about this, but he wasn’t quite sure why she’d want to see his reaction to the news. “You think she was dismissed unfairly? I can look into her performance if—”

  Even as he spoke, the pieces fell into place. Something about the skeptical tilt of April’s head finally clued him in to what she was thinking.

  “You think I had something to do with her being let go?” He gripped the ends of the towel he’d draped around his neck, pulling taut.

  “Did you?” she asked him point blank.

  “Of course not. I didn’t know a damned thing about it.” He hated that these were the circumstances that had brought her to his place, and not a desire to see him. “I’m trying to help you find the answers you need, April. I don’t care if you talk to Nicole.”

  Some of the tension left her shoulders, making him realize that she really had believed he might have orchestrated an underhanded move like that. On the flip side, her obvious relief at having been wrong told him that he might not be the only one who was starting to care too much.

  “Thank you for telling me that.” She gave a firm, brief nod, as if her world had been reorganized to her satisfaction. “But my investigator instincts suggest that someone else in a powerful position at Mesa Falls cares very much if I talk to Nicole. Now, more than ever, I think it’s important I meet the owners.”

  He ached with regret that she’d only come here to confront him. And to ensure she still had a chance to meet with his business partners.

  “I just got word that we’re doing a dinner party at Gage’s house Saturday night. Low-key. Just a few environmentally minded celebrities who weren’t able to attend the gala before Christmas.” The bigger mission of Mesa Falls was spreading awareness of sustainable ranching practices, so the more opportunities they had to showcase that, the better.

  “In that case, thank you.” She backed up a step as if she was ready to sprint for the door now that she had everything she’d come here for. “I look forward to it.”

  He clenched the towel tighter in an effort not to haul her against him. He wanted to touch her. Taste her.

  But the walls she was putting between them were starting to feel like the kind he couldn’t climb.

  “Will I see you before the party?” he pressed. If she was backing away from him, he wanted her to at least be clear about it.

  “Not unless I wrap up my investigation before then.” She hesitated in the archway leading out of the gym, as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether to stay or go. “My boss is under a lot of pressure from our client. He expected answers long before now.”

  Weston suspected that was the truth. But he also felt certain she was more than content to hide behind work so she didn’t have to confront what was happening between them. He tried his question another way.

  “Tell me this then, April. Would I see you before the party if you didn’t have to work?” He forced himself not to chase after her. He wouldn’t sway her with touches, no matter how much he wanted to do just that.

  She swallowed. Took a deep breath.

  “I don’t think it would be wise to keep—” she seemed to search for the right words “—seeing each other when we both know the end is imminent.”

  He wanted to ask her why. Because she cared for him and feared walking away would be difficult? Because her work was bound up with his life? There might be a hundred other reasons, but he didn’t want to hear them. He only wanted a chance to be with her one last time.

  He wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

  “Then I’ll count myself fortunate you agreed to be my date this weekend,” he told her simply, already thinking about ways to make the night special. “Just keep in mind if Saturday is the last chance I’ll have to spend time with you, I’m pulling out all the stops to make you change your mind.”

  Eleven

  Late Saturday morning, April tipped her face into the wind off the Bitterroot Mountains, wishing she had better weather to climb one last time before she left Montana for good.

  Before dawn, she’d stowed her gear in a backpack and requested a ranch utility vehicle to take her to one of the trailheads for Trapper Peak. But one of the ranch hands had spooked her with the weather report while she was loading up the vehicle, insisting a storm was predicted for noontime. April hadn’t wanted to risk getting caught up there again and needing Weston to save her.

  Again.

  So she’d left her bag at the lodge and settled for a long walk along the Bitterroot River, where she could at least admire the views. There were wide-open spaces interspersed with gentle slopes and the occasional patch of woods, while the craggy gray peaks jutted in the west. Despite the weather prediction, those high mountaintops looked clear enough to her. Maybe tomorrow she could fit in a final climb. Boots crunching through the snow, she just needed this last moment in the outdoors with space and air around her, so different from the crammed suffocation of her mother’s house. She feared it would feel all the more claustrophobic after spending this time with Weston.

  He’d shown her a different side to herself. Given her a brief glimpse of the life she might have had if she’d made different choices—of who she might have been if she hadn’t hatched the adolescent scheme that initiated her mother’s downward spiral. Weston had access to a wealthy world that felt foreign to a woman who had to worry about how long she had before her mother’s yard broke the local fire code.

  Still, Weston’s words had replayed in April’s head all week long, a refrain she couldn’t stop hearing while she toed a rock into a portion of river that wasn’t iced over.

  I’m pulling out all the stops to make you change your mind.

  She wasn’t sure why he’d want to change her mind about ending a relationship they’d both known wouldn’t last. But she couldn’t afford for her heart to be swayed by whatever he had planned for tonight. It was for his own good. He wouldn’t be happy with her in the long run.

  A huge bird soared past her, casting enough of a shadow to startle her. Peering up, she saw its white underbelly and dark gray body, the mottled feathers and broad wings helping her identify it as a gyrfalcon, a rare winter resident in this part of the country. Weston had told her Mesa Falls’ environmentally friendly ranching was boosting the ecosystem all around, and here was beautiful living proof.

  She would miss Montana. And Weston.

  Her office had already booked her a ticket to Denver tomorrow in the late afternoon. From her boss’s perspective, her case was closed now that she’d tracked the majority of Alonzo Salazar’s expenses thanks to Nicole Smith’s bank deposit statement. The woman’s name was actually Nicole Cruz, a piece of information easy enough to find once April had the other details. Matthew Cruz, her nephew, was in a boarding school on the East Coast, the expensive tuition financed entirely by ClearSkies.

  April’s investigator instincts weren’t satisfied since she’d barely scratched the surface of whatever had happened fourteen years ago to spur Alonzo Salazar to write a book that would finance the child’s upbringing. But her job had only been to find out where the money had gone.

  Between the travel log she’d pieced together thanks to Fallon Reed, and the tip from Nicole Cruz, she’d accounted for ninety percent of it. The rest, in the eyes of her firm, was incidental.

  She headed back toward the lodge, giving herself time to get her game face on for the dinner party tonight. In theory, she could back out now that she didn’t need to meet Weston’s business partners to solve her case. But she’d been enough of a coward with him already. Besides, truth be told, she needed this last evening with him if only to give her closure on their time together.

 
And perhaps she was indulging herself a little by attending an event that promised to be posh and glittery. She’d even booked an appointment with a local boutique consultant through guest services who’d agreed to bring some sample dresses to her suite this afternoon. She walked faster on the way back, looking forward to choosing the kind of cocktail gown she’d only have the chance to wear once.

  Her own Cinderella moment.

  When she arrived at the lodge, she saw a delivery van with the name Hailey’s Closet painted in elegant font on the side. The vehicle was parked with the side door slid open, and April spotted a silver rolling rack full of hanging garment bags just inside. A trio of women seemed to be having a tense exchange on the curb.

  Could they be here for her dress consultation? Checking her watch, she saw it was now just past noon, and her appointment wasn’t until one thirty. But just in case, she approached the trio, recognizing one of them as Lorelle, the guest services liaison who’d helped April book her only financial indulgence this trip.

  “Excuse me?” She called over to the group as she strode toward them, thinking maybe there was a mix-up with her appointment, or some other issue she could smooth over. “Hi, Lorelle.” She greeted the only person she knew, an apple-cheeked matron who frowned down at her clipboard, pen poised over the notes. “Is there a problem with my fitting this afternoon? I’m here now if we need to change the time.”

  “You’re April Stephens?” A younger lady paused her gum smacking to speak to April. She had one lace-up boot on the van’s running board while her long, lime-green fingernails gripped the rolling rack. “Could you? There was a mix-up with the times and I can’t stay—”

  Lorelle scoffed. “Your mix-up, not ours. I distinctly told your store manager that I needed two appointments—”

  The third woman—a petite bombshell with miles of glossy black waves—interjected. “I’m not sacrificing my time slot. My party is tonight.”

  April glanced at the beauty with heavy dark eyebrows and sultry voice. April recalled passing her on the way out of the guest lodge the night before when the woman had been swearing colorfully at her suitcase with a broken wheel.