Ranch Refuge

by Virginia Vaughan

  Colton started looking around as Laura called Misty’s name. Terrible thoughts raced through her mind about what could have happened to her cat. She checked in all of her usual hiding places but couldn’t find her. If they’d hurt her... She shuddered to think of it.

  Colton pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll phone Blake and have him find out if any of the police officers saw a cat wandering around the crime scene.”

  Laura nodded, hoping wherever Misty had wandered, someone was taking care of her. She finished gathering her things while Colton placed the call.

  “Well?” she asked when he hung up.

  “Sorry...nothing about a cat. But he did say they’re ready for us.”

  She finished gathering her things and Colton carried them downstairs to the truck. Knowing she’d done all she could here, she turned her attention to the upcoming meeting. She still wasn’t sure about meeting this detective. She’d heard Randall had the police in his pocket. “Did Blake say anything about this detective?”

  “He still thinks he’s okay.” He rubbed her arms reassuringly and she was glad he was with her. “Are you ready for this?”

  Laura took a deep breath, then let it out. She was determined to push through this and trusted Colton’s judgment about this man. All they could do was step out in faith and deal with the fallout. “I am. If I can do anything to help bring Randall down for Mrs. Duncan’s death, I want to do it.”

  He nodded and opened the truck’s passenger door for her. She slipped inside, and as he closed it, she hoped this unknown detective wasn’t luring them into a trap.

  * * *

  Laura shuddered as Detective Merle gave her a cold, hard stare. He looked intimidating and distrustful as he listened to her recount how her father owed Chuck Randall and how Randall had demanded she marry him to repay his debt. He didn’t flinch when she told him about his obsession with her and the attempted abduction in the hospital parking lot. She glanced at Colton standing against the wall with Blake, both men looking as if they were silently summing up the detective.

  “What happened to Mrs. Duncan?” Laura asked Detective Merle once she was done telling her tale.

  He opened a file and skimmed through it. “According to the autopsy, her throat was slashed. We believe she saw her attackers leaving your apartment and confronted them. The report suggests she was bound for quite a while before she died.”

  Laura put her elbows on the table and placed her hands over her face as the detective explained the horrible encounter Mrs. Duncan suffered. “It’s not fair,” she wept. “She didn’t know where I was. She had no involvement in any of this.”

  “Do you have any evidence that could place Randall or any of his men in her apartment?” Colton asked him.

  “Not yet,” the detective replied. “We’re still running fingerprints. Whoever committed this crime was a professional. Can you think of any reason someone might want to hurt your landlady?”

  Laura nodded, but her voice was quivering as she answered. “To hurt me.”

  Colton came over and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “They could have also been trying to determine if she knew where you were hiding,” he stated.

  Detective Merle nodded. “That would seem to fit the evidence better.”

  “Th-they tortured her,” Laura said brokenly. “Th-they tortured her to get to me.”

  “Laura, none of this is your fault,” Colton told her.

  “Yes, it is. If I hadn’t run... If I hadn’t refused Randall...”

  “Stop talking that way,” Colton demanded. “You didn’t do anything.”

  “I was selfish. I was only thinking of myself, just like my father. I can fix this. I have friends, Colton. Their lives might be in danger, too, and I won’t let that happen.”

  She was determined to make this right. She wouldn’t see anyone else suffer the way Mrs. Duncan had because of her. Her father had placed her in this mess, but it didn’t mean she had to continue to be a victim. She could stand up and take responsibility. She could give in to Randall’s advances and maybe stop his tirade.

  “Stop trying to hog all the blame, Laura,” Colton chided. “There’s plenty to go around. First and foremost, this is Randall’s responsibility as well as the men that follow his orders. They’re the ones culpable, if you’re looking to assign blame.”

  “I don’t want anyone else harmed because of me, Colton. Can’t you understand that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if that happened? It doesn’t matter what happens to me. I don’t have any more family besides my dad. No one will care what happens to me.”

  He grabbed her arms, his fingers digging into her skin. “I care, Laura. I care about you.”

  She saw the pain on his face, but at least she wasn’t putting his life in jeopardy any longer. “I’ll pay you whatever I can. You can have my things and sell them for whatever you can get as payment.”

  “Stop it, Laura,” he growled. “I don’t care about the money. I care about you. I won’t let anything happen to you and I won’t let you give up.”

  “How are you going to keep me safe, Colton? How are you going to keep my friends and family safe? Randall is everywhere. He owns everyone and everything for miles.”

  “He doesn’t own me.”

  “Or me,” Blake stated.

  Even Detective Merle stood. “He doesn’t own me, either, Laura. You can trust me. I promise I will do whatever I can to connect Randall to this murder. The sooner he’s in prison, the sooner you’ll be safe.” He turned to Colton. “Take her home. Watch over her. I’ll do my best to find evidence linking Randall to this murder. I’ll be in touch when I know something.”

  FIVE

  Colton loaded the truck and drove to the north pasture. He needed to repair a fence out there and Laura had asked to come and help however she could. He obliged her request, glad to keep her close by even while he had to work. After the incident when the McGowen cousins had broken into the house, he didn’t like leaving her alone even for a little while.

  Somehow, and he hadn’t figure out how yet, rocks seemed to grow up out of the ground, which made mowing and keeping grass in the pastures difficult. If Laura really wanted to be helpful, he supposed he could have her clear away the stones while he tended to the fence.

  “You really don’t have to do this,” Colton told her. “It’s tedious work.”

  “But it’s necessary, right?”

  “Yes. We had high winds a couple of weeks ago, so the field will be littered with limbs and branches. We can’t run the tractor through it until all that’s picked up, which means we can’t cultivate the field for pasturing.”

  She pulled on a pair of gloves. “Then let’s get to it.”

  He admired her tenacity and work ethic. She understood the need for hard work.

  Colton worked as fast as he could to mend the fence while keeping an eye and an ear alert for movement around them. The last time they’d been out in the open this way, someone had shot at them, and he wanted to finish and get back inside as soon as possible. When he was done, he pulled two bottles of water from the cooler and walked over to her. As she tossed a heavy rock into the already loaded cart, he handed her a bottle.

  “Let’s take a break.”

  “But I’m not done.”

  “Ranch work is never done, darlin’, but we have to take care of ourselves, too, to keep working. Besides, I think we’ve been out in the open too long.”

  She pulled off her gloves, took the bottle of water and drank from it, then followed him to the truck and got inside.

  “There’s no question that it’s lovely here,” she said softly. “But you must have traveled all over the world with the Rangers. Could have settled anywhere really. Why here?”

  He waved his hand over the horizon outside the glass. “Because of this. Look how incredible this place is. I spent years of my life in places torn up by decades, sometimes even centuries, of war. Then I saw this place and all of God’s majestic beauty. It’s peac
eful here and that’s what I was looking for. That’s what I needed. That’s what I still need...”

  His voice trailed off, and he found himself lost in thought for several long moments. But he snapped out of his reverie when she reached out and gently squeezed his shoulder, prompting him to continue.

  “Sometimes my brain gets so scrambled with all I’ve seen and all I’ve done. When I left the Rangers, I couldn’t shut it off, all the battles and the fighting. Then Blake invited me here to his hometown and there was something about these hills and these landscapes. It drew me in. It reminded me that there is more to life than the struggle and war. So I decided this was where I wanted to settle down, raise a family, spend my life.”

  She smiled. “That’s actually beautiful. I understand how you feel with life so chaotic. I feel like I’m always running, always putting out fires...even before all this with Randall began. How long were you a ranger?”

  “Ten years. I enlisted in the army right out of high school. It’s all I had ever known and I honestly never thought I would see a day when I wouldn’t be a ranger.”

  “Miranda told me about the ambush,” she said instead, causing him to tense and wonder what else Miranda had told Laura.

  “She did?”

  “She said you lost men. Most of your squad. I saw the picture of them. I can’t imagine how terrible that loss was for you.”

  “It was awful.” His voice cracked as he spoke and it amazed him that that event still had such a pull over him.

  “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” she said quietly, obviously hearing the raw emotion in his voice.

  He quickly reassured her. “It’s okay, Laura. It feels good to talk about it with someone.” And it did. He’d held back that wall of pain for too long.

  “What happened?”

  He thought back to that terrible night on the mountain. He still saw the faces of every one of his brothers who didn’t make it off that mountain. “Our interpreter turned out to be a spy for the other side. He led us right into a trap. We had twenty men go into camp that night. Only six of us made it out alive.”

  He wanted to open up to her, to share how bad he’d gotten, how he’d turned to gambling to drown out any feeling and deal with his grief, but he didn’t. He knew it would frighten her away from him and compromise his ability to keep her safe. But he wanted—longed—to share this major event in his life with her. “I went to a really dark place afterward. The army shrinks called it survivor’s guilt and I guess they were right, but it didn’t stop my free fall into darkness.”

  “How did you get out of that?” Laura asked curiously. “You’re obviously not still in that dark place.”

  “It was all God’s doing. He pulled me up, healed me and delivered me from it.

  “I was never what you would call a religious man. I believed in God and had walked the aisle as a teenager. But somehow that had all faded away over the years. I could talk the talk with the best of my ranger friends who were devout believers, but I know now it was all talk.” He sighed. “When it came right down to it, I didn’t trust God. How can you trust someone who lets you down like that? Who allows men with families to die while allowing me to live? Not one of us came home unscathed. We were all changed that night.”

  “You questioned how you could trust a God that let you down, but now it seems like you believe in Him again. I see you reading your Bible. What changed?”

  “It wasn’t something that happened quickly. At first, I was so angry at the situation and at God. I tried to pretend I wasn’t, but I stopped reading my Bible. I even left my Bible in a camp in Afghanistan. I abandoned it there, I guess, because I felt abandoned myself there. But I couldn’t escape the giant hole of grief and pain and emptiness that lived inside me.” He took a long, deep breath, still amazed by how far he’d fallen. “I spent a long time trying to fill it with other things. I even started doing these rescue missions with Garrett because of the thrill of danger it gave me. It helped to fill it, but only for a short while.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “I hit rock bottom. I thought I had lost everything that ever mattered to me. Then Blake and the other rangers pulled me up. They probably saved my life. I was on a path of self-destruction, taking anyone in my path with me.”

  “I envy you,” Laura said. “You have someone in your life that you can truly count on.”

  “I have more than one,” Colton told her. “I have five former ranger brothers that I could call on at any time and they would be there to help me in a heartbeat. And I would be there for them. I trust them all completely.”

  He would be there for her, too, he wanted to tell her. She could trust in him 100 percent. But he didn’t speak the words. Instead he watched as the afternoon sunlight glistened off her auburn hair. She was so beautiful and he wished he could offer her all this place and all this beauty. But she deserved so much more than a washed-up cowboy like him could ever give her.

  * * *

  Laura’s heart broke upon hearing such a tragic story. Colton had fought to keep his composure the whole time, and although she realized he always tried to appear stoic and strong, he still held so much of his pain inside. He didn’t allow it to spill out, but she knew one day it would. It had to. And if he didn’t allow it to, that pain would manifest itself in destructive ways.

  She understood that path of destruction he’d fallen into. It reminded her all too well of a similar road her father had descended. She was glad Colton had made it through, and it sparked a tiny flicker of hope in her. If he could turn his life around, was it possible that her father could change, too?

  However, Colton still had not explained how he’d overcome one hurdle. “But how did you get past being angry at God? He allowed this terrible thing to happen to you. How could you ever forgive Him?”

  Colton turned to look at her and she thought he could probably see right through her question. How could she ever forgive God for allowing all this to happen to her?

  “It wasn’t easy, but I realized I was being held captive by my anger and bitterness. I was barreling down that path of self-destruction on the sled of anger and despair.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “The Bible speaks of God’s goodness and love for His children over and over. I chose to believe in it. That’s it. It was a conscious choice on my part. And I’m still fighting it, but every time a negative or destructive thought enters my mind, I remind myself that I believe in God’s goodness.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I still don’t understand how God could have allowed this to happen to me.”

  “God didn’t put you in this situation, Laura. There is evil in this world. No one knows that better than I do. I’ve seen it. I’ve watched it in action. And bad things happen because of that evil. That’s not the fault of God, but of man and his evil nature. What I’ve learned is that God is there like a father to pick us up, dust off the dirt and pull us into His arms to comfort us.”

  She shook her head, still not convinced. “I still don’t know. I’m in this situation because of someone else’s actions.”

  “I know it’s difficult, but not being able to forgive is a chain that keeps you bound.”

  “He doesn’t deserve my forgiveness.”

  “No one ever does. But that didn’t stop Jesus from dying for us and offering us forgiveness before God.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said in a low, guttural tone. “It’s never easy. It’s a constant struggle. Every day I wake up and have to remind myself that I’ve chosen to forgive. It’s not easy, Laura, but it is worth it.”

  She remained quiet, thinking about all he’d said as they drove back to the shop to unload. Colton lifted the roll of fence wire to his shoulder and carried it inside. She picked up the bags of tools and followed him. Tony was inside the shop working on the tractor when they entered. Colton waved to him and Tony waved back.

  “I got that fen
ce in the north pasture repaired,” Colton told him. “Hopefully it’ll stay intact for a while. And Laura was a big help picking up rocks.”

  Tony nodded appreciatively. “That’ll make our job easier when it’s time to ready that pasture.”

  “We’re going to unload this stuff, then go to the house and fix some supper. Care to join us?”

  Tony shook his head. “I appreciate that, but I’m heading home, too. See you both tomorrow.”

  “’Bye, Tony,” Laura called. She watched him walk out, then followed Colton to a doorway near where Tony had been working on the tractor. She stepped over the threshold and saw that it was a small storage room where he kept tools and small equipment.

  “Just set those on the workbench,” Colton instructed her. “I’ll put them away.”

  Colton hauled the roll of fencing from his shoulder into a bin in a corner. He pulled off his work gloves, then turned to her and smiled. “How about we put those away, then call it a night?”

  She started to agree, but before she could, the storage room door slammed shut, trapping them inside.

  * * *

  Colton looked at the door in shock, then turned to Laura. “Must have been the wind,” he told her. He walked to it and tried the knob, but it didn’t turn. He tried again. “It’s locked.”

  “From the outside?”

  “We lock it because we keep tools in here. There was a rash of thefts several months ago.” He heard the tractor fire up and knew someone was there. Tony must have returned. He pounded on the door and called for Tony, but there was no response from the outside.

  “Can you call someone to let us out?”

  He patted his pockets. “I must have left my phone in the truck.”

  She rubbed at her eyes that were suddenly burning and stinging and her throat was dry.

  Colton pulled on the doorknob again, then pounded on the door. He suddenly realized fumes were coming in under the door. The tractor was parked beside the storage room and the fumes were venting right inside.