Bad Boy Rancher

by Karen Rock

  “Where?” James shouted.

  “Can I come?” His sister, Jewel, hustled after him. Her freckles burned dark on her white face, and the moonlight trickled down the length of her side ponytail.

  He shook his head, donned his helmet, revved the engine and mouthed “sorry” before letting out the throttle and ripping into the black night.

  His family meant well. They just didn’t understand him or his unending grief. Jack, a bounty hunter turned Denver deputy sheriff, had moved on after he’d caught Jesse’s killers. James had healed once he’d opened his heart to Sofia and Javi. Jared kept busy managing his fiancée’s barrel-racing career. Even his mother has gotten on with life since the grandbabies came along and she began dating Boyd Loveland, of all people—their neighbor and patriarch of the family they’ve been feuding with for generations.

  But him? He’d never let Jesse go. Who was he without his other half?

  Not anyone.

  Not anyone good.

  Jesse made up the best parts of them.

  Justin gazed at the full moon as he wailed around a hairpin turn. Heat waved up from the engine, and he breathed in the sharp smell of exhaust mingling with the pines lining this remote stretch of road. Sharp precipices dropped on either side of the two-lane rural route. At this hour, it should be deserted. He opened the throttle, and the speedometer ticked up until the needle vibrated on the hundred-mile-an-hour mark.

  His body hummed, electric, alive, for the first time today. He gazed back at the road and glimpsed a moving van edging into the intersection. His pulse slammed in his veins. Too late to stop. He could either topple sideways onto the narrow shoulder and down the embankment or race to cross in front of the van.

  He might make it, he thought, eyeing the lumbering vehicle.

  Or he might not.

  When it came down to it, what was the difference?

  He’d joined the world today; this might be the right time to leave it, too... He pried his fingers from the handlebars and tipped back his head as the motorcycle rocketed downhill.

  He’d roll the dice.

  Let the chips fall where they may.

  Thirty minutes earlier

  “IN ONE-THIRD OF a mile, turn left on Willow Brook Drive,” Brielle Thompson’s GPS droned.

  “What? Where?” The moving van lurched as she shifted on the steep incline. The gears ground, then caught.

  She peered at the lit screen then out at the dark, rugged terrain. Overhead, a full moon shone in a starry sky, illuminating Colorado’s mountaintops. Her headlights picked up fir trees, thick brush, a narrow, pebble-filled shoulder. No willow trees. And no brook.

  No turnoff ahead, either.

  She groaned and wished herself back on any of the army bases where she’d spent her childhood, places where streets were ordered and her structured life made sense.

  The two sets of dog tags dangling from her rearview mirror caught her eye. Her heartbeat stumbled. There was one base she never wanted to return to. Kandahar. It haunted her still. Somewhere amid the dust, heat and blood of Afghanistan, the pillar of strength she’d always relied on to hold her up had crumbled.

  Would she finally regain it here in Carbondale?

  “We’re part of a long history of suffering,” she’d heard her commanding officer say sympathetically before handing over her honorable discharge papers six months ago. He’d severed her from the only life she’d known—the military—and abruptly ended her tour of duty as an army chaplain, her bout with depression forcing her to abandon her comrades when they needed her most. “Thank you for your service.”

  The silent dismissed still rang in her ear.

  Her fingers dug in a bag of soft sour candies and tossed them in her mouth. She sucked in her stinging cheeks and chewed through the pain. Lime. Lemon. Watermelon. Apple. Cherry. Orange. She ticked off each explosive flavor until they overrode her memories, shoving them down deep where they wouldn’t get her into trouble again.

  “Coming up on Willow Brook Drive,” intoned the GPS.

  She rolled down her window and the crisp, pine-scented air tore a strand from her bun and fluttered it across her mouth. A thicket of brush, scrub trees and conifers rose on one side. Opposite, the pines thinned and flashes of the starlit sky appeared through the spaces, revealing a drop-off. Not a stream or a willow.

  This GPS made less sense than her civilian life. Her military world hadn’t prepared her for life without a uniform. She was struggling to fit in. The bombardment of choices in fancy coffee shops left her bewildered and stammering. Workdays at her first regular job, as a psychologist at a mental health clinic in Chicago, ended when the clock struck five, objectives unmet. And it had filled her with restless anxiety.

  As for her former coworkers, they’d kept to themselves, working independently. It was a different mind-set than the military, where you worked as a unit, brothers in arms, and had each other’s backs.

  She’d discovered that the real world was a lonely place.

  Not that she’d let herself get close to anyone again. Not after... Her eyes swung off the road and landed on the dog tags. Not in a professional capacity. Not ever again. It could trigger a PTSD episode, one she might not survive this time.

  Her new position as the head of Fresh Start, a mental health and drug rehabilitation facility in the remote Colorado Rocky Mountains, was her second chance at regaining her footing.

  And she’d better not mess it up.

  If she ever found the place.

  “Recalculating,” the GPS droned, sounding put out.

  Brielle’s head whipped left. What? She’d missed the turn? She groaned. Even a cheap gadget could navigate the real world better than she could.

  The rural route stretched beyond her headlights, not showing a decent place for her big van to turn around. A sigh hissed through her clenched teeth. The facility’s owner had texted her a half hour ago when she’d missed their meeting time.

  Her. A no-show?

  She lived by a schedule and was never late. As her army colonel father had bragged (when he used to be proud of her), Brielle was born on her due date, during the Army-Navy game’s halftime, the timing so precise he hadn’t missed a minute of the action.

  So much for dependability.

  She needed to message her new boss back, but she didn’t trust the road’s flimsy shoulders enough to pull over. Should she take a chance and text while driving? Was that legal in Colorado?

  Given she barely knew how to drive a stick shift, or her whereabouts, exactly, she didn’t need to add to her distractions. But if she didn’t hurry, she’d lose another job, her fresh start over before it began. And then where would she go?

  Not to her parents. After her breakdown, while she’d sorted out next steps, her mother had hovered and recited PTSD jargon she’d learned in online support groups. While her father ordered her to pull herself up by her bootstraps and loomed in her bedroom’s doorway each night, shaking his head when she’d spent another day under the covers.

  “Turn left on Laurel Moon Road,” snapped the GPS.

  Was it her or did the GPS lady sound snippy?

  If so, she wasn’t the only one losing her patience.

  Brielle’s beams picked up an unpaved road just ahead, no laurels or a street sign in sight.

  Take it?

  At the last moment, she veered left, the van protesting as she downshifted on the narrow road. Here, the dark pressed closer still, dredging up old, remembered horrors of what lurked just out of sight. Her breaths shortened. Quickened. She flicked on her high beams and wiped her damp palms on her dress slacks. A split-rail fence ran along either side of the road—if you could call it that, though path seemed more fitting. Hopefully no one approached from the other direction.

  “Turn right,” the GPS directed.

  “Where?” Cattle with long,
deadly-looking horns lifted their heads as she neared. She couldn’t turn into a pasture. In fact, she couldn’t turn at all. Abruptly the road ended at a locked gate.

  “Awesome. Now what?”

  “Recalculating,” the GPS bit out savagely.

  “Enough.” Brielle flipped off her navigator, applied the brakes then popped the truck into Park. Her burning forehead dropped to the steering wheel.

  It’d been a dark night like this when a soldier stopped by to see her before heading out on patrol.

  “I don’t believe in this war anymore,” Jefferson had told her. “Everybody’s angry. Crazy. Trying to kill you. Blowing each other up.” He’d paused, and his eyes burned into hers. “It makes no sense—who gets killed and who stays alive. Sometimes you mess up, and it’s okay. Sometimes you do what you’re supposed to and people get hurt.”

  “You can’t control everything that happens,” she’d said. “You’re only in charge of your own actions.”

  “No.” He’d dropped his eyes and shook his head. “I can’t even do that all the time.” His face turned hard. “Once I thought you could help me. But you’re a chaplain. Your hands are clean. You don’t know what it’s like to do what we do.”

  She’d tensed up as if he’d struck her. True. She didn’t know what it felt like to take someone’s life, or any of the horrors these courageous soldiers endured, but she’d been trained to understand. To empathize. To listen. To minister. Still, no books, classes or seminars prepared you for the harsh reality she’d discovered during her first deployment.

  “No one’s hands are clean except God’s,” she’d said slowly, as if convincing herself of her faith, her purpose, her mission. How did you spiritually minister to men who were still being assaulted? she’d wondered. “All we can do is pray He gives us the strength to do what we have to.”

  A fleeting smile twisted Jefferson’s lips. She wasn’t sure she believed her own words, or any words at all. What did words matter in Kandahar, where death struck indiscriminately? Its nonstop toll was a drip, drip, drip on the heart of every service member, boring a hole straight through for some, hardening it for others.

  “Look at my hands.” He’d shoved them at her, callused palms facing the ceiling, then he flipped them over and stretched out his fingers. “I look calm, right?”

  “Are you?” Should she call his superior? File a report to request he skip today’s patrol? Not that her requests were honored except in the most extreme cases...

  “I never sleep anymore,” he’d said. “But check out my hands—look at me. Look at my hands. It’s like I’m calm.”

  But she hadn’t really looked, not closely, not like she’d had to do later the next morning, when he and the rest of his platoon returned to the base in pieces. She’d been asked to help identify some of the questionable remains. Her skin shook over her bones as each blood-soaked horror cascaded in her mind’s eye. She’d seen too many brave troops lose their lives in defense of their country. And what’d she do? She’d succumbed to dark emotions and turned her back on her comrades when they’d needed her most, the deadly result one she’d never forgive herself for causing.

  Never again.

  She screwed her lids shut, snatched up another handful of sour candies and chewed so hard she bit her tongue. Warm, metallic-tasting fluid mingled with the synthetic fruit flavors.

  “Don’t think about it,” she whispered to herself, knowing the dangers of reliving her experiences, the drowning depression that’d occur if she let herself sink back into them.

  “Complete your mission,” she ordered herself, then shifted into Reverse and headed backward from the dead end, her eyes trained on the rearview mirror, her mind compartmentalizing the way she’d been trained.

  It only took one slipup.

  The dog tags swung like a meat cleaver, ready to saw her in half.

  Pain didn’t exist unless she let it, her father always told her.

  If a tree falls in the woods and no one witnesses it, does it make a sound?

  If soldiers die in the field and no one survives to tell about it, did they make a sound?

  She flipped on the radio as she jolted back onto the main road, drowning out her friends’ screams. She heard them, often, when she wasn’t careful to keep her mind empty or forgot to take her Prazosin before bed.

  Those mornings she woke exhausted, restless and anxious, haunted by nightmares. Hopefully out here in Carbondale, in the middle of nowhere, she’d lose her past, her old self, and become someone new. Someone who no longer carried the gut-wrenching responsibilities of her former job—the memorial services for soldiers, friends killed in action, the therapy sessions after contact with the enemy, the perilous excursions outside the wire to minister to remote posts while under enemy fire.

  Carbondale seemed peaceful.

  Would it silence her demons and let her lead a normal civilian life at last? Or was she doomed to never fit in—to haunt the edges of the real world, straddling the line between it and war, unable to leave her past to fully join the present? She’d arrived at her Kandahar assignment starry-eyed with a head full of jargon and a heart certain of its ability to save everyone. Twelve months later, she’d left with nothing, not even herself.

  Her cell phone buzzed on the seat beside her. She risked a glance down at the number, recognized it as her new employer’s, then reached for it, slowing as she approached an intersection.

  Her fingers closed on the metallic rectangle just as the dark shape of a biker raced into view, barreling straight at her.

  Her pulse slammed in her veins.

  Was he crazy?

  She entered the intersection and had the right of way. Her heart jumped to the back of her throat, clogging it, stopping her breath.

  Had he just lifted his hands from the bars?

  Did he want to die?

  No!

  She slammed on the brakes. Too late!

  An explosion of metal colliding with metal boomed and then she heard the sickening thump of something softer, human, hitting her truck with maximum impact. She recognized the sound easily.

  For a moment, she smelled Kandahar’s burned refuse, tasted the salty grit of its air, the blood, heard the screams, the groans, and she froze, hands over her ears, her curved body rocking.

  Was she alive or dead?

  There’d been times when she hadn’t known.

  She felt her legs, her arms, her face. No injuries. But how? An IED should have torn the Humvee and her apart.

  Only...

  She struggled to remember.

  This was a van, not a Humvee.

  And it wasn’t a bomb, but a biker.

  She straightened, scrambled out of the truck and raced to the passenger side. Her heart beat overtime, and her eyes stung.

  A body lay crumpled on the ground, a man. Tall and lanky with a bruised, scraped face and a mop of dark hair. Beside him lay the twisted mass of his bike. His cracked helmet rolled a few feet away. She dropped to her knees and felt for a pulse just below his bearded jaw. A couple heartbeats later, it pressed back against her fingertips. Steady. She ripped off her jacket and covered him to stave off shock.

  The stranger’s thick lashes fluttered. Yellow-green eyes gleamed at her.

  “Am I dead?”

  A relieved breath whooshed out of her. “No.”

  He closed his eyes again.

  “Crap.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  BRIELLE’S LOW HEELS clacked on the courthouse’s marble-tiled floor as she strode down the hall ahead of the motorcycle driver’s DUI hearing. In her pressed navy suit, her hair scraped into a tight, painful bun, she hoped her respectable, steady image belied her jittering nerves.

  Where was room 8A? The hearing started in fifteen minutes and she wanted to arrive early. When the district attorney had contacted her with the
date and time, she’d promised to attend. It was her civic duty after all...but deep down she sensed her eagerness stemmed from the rugged man whose tormented face had haunted her these past two weeks. His expression had reminded her of soldiers returning from battle—bleak and raw.

  He could have been killed, yet he’d appeared calm and strangely disappointed when he realized he’d lived. He’d only managed to break a rib, tear a two-inch gash in his face and suffer a concussion, but that’d been nothing to him.

  Did he have a death wish?

  Why had he taken his hands off his handlebars?

  Often, soldiers about to leave on patrol had stopped by her office on the pretext of asking for candy. They’d really sought reassurance, hope and faith that they’d return the way they left: alive. Whole. Physically and, with any luck, mentally. They valued their lives and saw each day they breathed as a reprieve until their next tour, and the one after that, the countdown to their deployment’s end feeling like borrowed time. Yet the biker seemed cavalier about this precious gift.

  Safety. Many didn’t appreciate it until they’d lost it. Once gone, that faith never fully returned. You couldn’t unknow things...couldn’t unsee them...couldn’t unlive them.

  Brielle sidestepped a chattering attorney and client and strolled closer to the window. Outside, fall seemed to be gradually overtaking summer. Yellow now mixed with green aspen leaves. One cluster of red covered the side of an ancient maple. A child and parent stopped beside a spruce, snipped off some needles and dropped them into a baggie.

  A student project, she surmised, recalling a happy memory from her elementary school days for a change.

  Was her own darkness causing her to read too much into the biker? A traumatic past twisted the present, distorting the new to match the old. She needed a fresh start, something she’d never get if she kept picking the scab over her wound.

  Sleep had eluded her since the crash, and she thought of the accident often. When she’d followed the ambulance to the hospital, she’d learned his name was Justin Cade, the youngest son of a ranching family and the town hellion, per an oversharing nurse who staffed an empty waiting room. The bored woman went on to divulge Justin had had a drug-addict twin brother, Jesse, who’d been shot dead by drug dealers on a back road right here in Carbondale. The community’s only murder in over two decades.