by Roxie Noir
“Like I was saying,” Austin went on, turning to Sloane, “We’ll have lunch up there and be back by mid-afternoon. Plenty of time to read about sexy pirates and their wenches.”
“I suppose I could make time,” Sloane said, running her finger around the rim of her mug. “As long as I get to the bosoms eventually.”
The kitchen door opened, and a few other men walked in and said good morning. Sloane nodded at the three of them, and Austin moved out of the way of the coffee pot.
“Perfect,” said Austin, sidling closer to her. “We’ll leave after breakfast.”
“Sounds good,” said Sloane.
“Everyone grab a plate and put it on the table, it’s breakfast time!” called Barb.
For the next fifteen minutes, everyone was too busy eating to talk or flirt.
After breakfast, Sloane put on her light hiking gear, then waited for Austin in the living room, munching on a plate of cookies.
I could really get used to this, she thought. Even breakfast has dessert, hot men flirt with me, and I don’t have anything to do.
Briefly, she wondered again about the unconscious guy, back in the hospital. She hoped he was okay, but was also starting to think that she’d just never know what had happened. By the time everything got sorted out, she’d probably be somewhere in the high Sierra, and the mystery would be the last thing on her mind.
If Sloane was being really, really honest with herself, she was a little tempted to just end the trip there. If she did, she could afford to spend a few more days at the ranch, eating cookies and flirting with Austin, and then she could probably get a ride into Redding and fly home to Seattle from there.
When she’d started, the high Sierra had seemed like a wonderful challenge, spending days and days hiking at elevations above nine thousand feet, through places where few humans went. But then, about a week earlier, a through-hiker heading from south to north had casually mentioned that there was still snow on a few trails, and it had drained a little of her enthusiasm. Maybe she’d done enough.
No, she told herself. You finish it. If you can do this, you can do anything.
Just as she was reaching for another cookie, Austin came into the living room, carrying a backpack on his back.
“Ready?” he asked.
Sloane nodded and stood, picking up her water bottle.
“You got sunscreen in there?” she asked. Sun protection had quickly become second nature to her. She didn’t burn easily, but she was particularly susceptible to weird tans.
“Yup,” Austin said. “And water, granola bars, trail mix, some apples, leftover bacon, biscuits, and sandwiches.”
“Damn,” Sloane said. “You’re prepared.”
“Barb believes in doing something right if you do it at all,” he said. “That includes picnic lunches.”
He grabbed a cookie off the plate and shoved it into his mouth.
“Shall we?” he asked, his mouth full.
7
Trevor
“It’s just so boring,” Lizzy said. She stabbed at her blueberry pancakes, dramatically leaning her face against her hand, staring down at her plate like it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
Was I this dramatic when I was thirteen? Trevor wondered, cutting a piece of his own pancakes, dipping it in syrup, and eating it.
“Well, why is it boring?” he said, trying to maintain a reasonable tone. “Maybe you can write your report about that.”
Lizzy rolled her eyes.
“Two people had a baby. Who cares? People have babies all the time,” she said.
Trevor struggled to remember his own ninth grade education. Had he even had to read The Scarlet Letter? Somehow, he was vaguely aware that it was an A for adultery, pinned to a woman’s dress, but beyond that, he couldn’t recall a lot.
“But they weren’t supposed to have a baby together,” he said to his niece, putting more pancake in his mouth, hoping that he was right. “Maybe you could write about how morality has changed since the book was written.”
He was really struggling for ideas. Frankly, school hadn’t been his forte, and he’d mostly chugged along as a B and C student, really only getting A’s in the things he enjoyed, like woodshop and math.
It had driven his teachers crazy, and they’d sent endless letters home about his wasted potential. Not that his parents paid much attention to him. After all, they already had their golden boy in his older brother, David, and Trevor was more or less a backup.
Besides, Papa had already been dead for a few years by then, leaving only Mom and Dad, and they were both starting to spin off into their own orbits by the time Trevor was a teenager.
Lizzy looked at Trevor like he was the world’s biggest idiot. He pretended not to notice.
Somewhere else in the house, a door opened, and Trevor’s mom came in, wearing a bathrobe and slippers even though it was ten in the morning already. By ranch standards, she’d practically slept until early afternoon.
She was also obviously hungover.
“Morning,” she said. Her hair was mussed, and she had bags underneath her eyes.
“Want some blueberry pancakes?” Trevor asked, standing from his own breakfast.
“Sit down, I got it,” she said. The pancakes were being kept warm in the oven, and she slipped two onto her plate, standing behind Lizzy’s head.
Then, as if she thought she was being sneaky, she took a small bottle of tequila from a cabinet next to the stove and poured a shot into her orange juice. When she turned around, she held Trevor’s gaze as if to challenge him to say something.
He dropped his eyes back to his own plate, knowing that nothing he could say was going to work.
“You hear about that boy found unconscious?” she asked, swallowing half the glass of orange juice in a single gulp. “He was off the trail to the Double Moon.”
“I was at the hospital for three hours yesterday, mom,” he said. “He was on our land.”
“But he was headed to the Double Moon,” his mom said. “I never did trust Barb and Bill. Who hires a grizzly to do a wolf’s job?”
Being the manager of a ranch was a big, important job, and Trevor’s parents were traditionalists: they thought it was a job that could only be done properly by a wolf. Any non-wolf working in management on a ranch was taking a job from a good, solid, hard-working wolf, and that was that.
Trevor didn’t respond. His mom’s orange juice was half-gone already, and he knew from years of experience that it was useless to argue.
“He had an empty syringe in his neck,” she went on. Lizzy made a face, but didn’t say anything. “Who does a thing like that?”
His mom took a bite of pancake, then spoke with her mouth full.
“It’ll be a nightmare for us if he dies, I tell you what,” she said.
Trevor stood from the table, snatching his plate up.
“It’ll be worse for him and his family,” he said.
Lizzy looked at him with wide eyes, then snapped her attention back to her plate. Trevor felt the rage flicker through him, just watching his niece. Sure, with him, she could be a bratty know-it-all sometimes, but she was a teenager. He hated the way she was around his mom, the quiet, meek girl who seemed to shrink into herself.
There were days that he wished she’d died instead of Papa, as awful as it made him feel to wish that. Sometimes he thought about what it might be like if Papa hadn’t died, even though that was a useless thing to wonder about. If Papa hadn’t died, would Trevor’s other two parents still have kicked him out the moment he turned eighteen? Would David and his mates still have died in that car crash, leaving their two kids to Trevor and David’s parents?
If Papa hadn’t died, could he finally tell his family the truth about his mate? That that bear they hated so much was his lover, the person he desperately wanted to spend his life with?
“What are you two doing today?” his mom asked, blithely changing the subject.
“Lizzy has a book repo
rt she needs to finish,” he said, giving the teenager a stern look. She made a face, but didn’t argue. “Tim’s out in the workshop with Dad and Scarlet and a few of the guys.”
He didn’t like Lizzy’s little brother being out in the workshop, which was really more of an armory, with his father, sister, and the men of the Ponderosa Pack, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Most days, Trevor’s job was to keep everyone’s head above water. He was pretty sure that without him, they’d all slide under.
“You?” his mom said, her eyes narrowing a little.
“I’ve got some stuff to do,” he said. “I need wolf time. I’m getting twitchy.”
“I could have sworn I saw you come in late last night,” his mom said. She sounded oddly sober for a moment, and Trevor felt his stomach twist inside him. “Or was that some other wolf?”
“Must have been one of the new ranch workers,” Trevor said. He had the horrible feeling that, no matter how drunk she was, he could never quite lie to his mom.
“Ah,” she said. “That must be it.”
In the silence that followed, Lizzy got out of her chair, put her dishes in the sink, and went up to her room.
Trevor said nothing, just washed the breakfast dishes. When he finished, his mom was pouring herself more orange juice. With Lizzy gone, she didn’t even bother to hide the tequila she poured into her glass.
“Be careful out there,” she said. “Someone’s tranquilizing people.”
Trevor couldn’t tell if it was concern or a warning.
Then she walked back out of the kitchen, drink in hand.
After the barely-hidden chaos of his house, the woods were welcome solace to Trevor. Lately, he’d been going out there more and more, especially since about half the Ponderosa wolf pack had practically started living on their ranch. They were mostly good guys — they pitched in around the ranch, were nice to Lizzy and Tim, and even brought groceries home without being asked — but Trevor knew why they were really there.
They were there because his father, Buck, needed someone watching him. Six months ago, he’d gotten two of his own pack members killed when he’d attacked a feral bear and then run away, leaving them for dead. Then he’d trapped the feral bear — Austin’s cousin, no less — and kept her for days.
Trevor still felt awful when he thought about it, though he hadn’t known who she was at the time. At the time, he’d been too afraid of his father to let her go, so he’d had to settle for sneaking her food and finally slipping someone else the key to her cage. But now, he wished he’d just done it himself, that the poor girl hadn’t had to go through being locked in a cage for days.
It was too late for all that, though. The best he could do now was to hope that his father didn’t bring everything crashing down around them, and do right by Lizzy and Tim, his brother’s kids.
He found the trail to the overlook without even having to search for it. That was the nice thing about spending a lot of time as an animal: his sense of direction was incredible.
He didn’t know how he was going to work this out with the human girl, though. While Austin had already spent a lot of time with her, Trevor had only learned her name from his mate after seeing her for all of thirty seconds. Even though he trusted Austin utterly, and felt inescapably drawn to her himself, he just wasn’t sure that he could fit her into his life.
After all, he had more going on than Austin did, and he couldn’t even introduce Austin to his family. He wouldn’t let Austin introduce Trevor to his family, even though they were much less likely to react badly. Sure, they wouldn’t be thrilled, but to hear Austin tell it, they’d be so happy he’d found a mate that they would someday overlook the fact that his mate happened to be a wolf instead of a bear.
It was just too much, at least for now.
Let her go, he thought. Let her finish hiking, and maybe we’ll find her again when things calm down a little.
Every molecule in his body protested the idea, but he couldn’t think of a better way. Every path either ended with his parents kicking him out again, leaving Lizzy and Tim alone in their house with no one to watch over them, or things carrying on just like they were now.
His thoughts spun around and around until, finally, he reached the overlook. Trevor sat on a rock to wait, looking out over the valley. From there, the ranches and houses looked so peaceful and perfect, like a painting of idyllic American life.
Trevor sighed and closed his eyes, taking a moment to clear his mind and calm himself down.
It will work out somehow, he thought. It has to.
He didn’t know how much later it was when he heard footsteps coming up the trail to the overlook. He hadn’t fallen asleep, but he’d let himself be lulled into a state of near-meditation sitting there. He watched hawks fly by, he watched cars twist and wind around the roads, far below. He imagined that he and Austin had their own ranch, and Sloane agreed to come live with them. Lizzy and Tim were there, but no one else from his family, and their lives were perfect and wonderful and no one paid them any attention at all.
Then he heard Austin’s voice.
“Almost there,” it said, and Trevor’s heat clenched inside his ribcage.
When was the last time he’d seen Austin alone during the daytime? They ran into each other sometimes — Long Prairie was a very small town — but there were always people around. They always had to act like they were just acquaintances, two men who had the same job at two different ranches.
“I think this is longer than two miles,” Sloane said. They were both still just out of sight, and Trevor felt every muscle and hair stand to attention.
Calm down, he thought. She doesn’t know anything. You just happened to run into each other here.
“You’re just out of shape,” Austin teased her, as he came through the last row of trees.
“Ha,” said Sloane, her voice totally unamused. She stepped out behind Austin, then saw Trevor and stopped.
“Hey,” Austin said.
“Hi there,” Trevor said.
“Nice day for a hike,” Austin said, his tone affectedly casual.
Trevor swallowed.
I just want to kiss him hello, like normal mates, he thought. Is that so much to ask?
“It’s gorgeous out,” Trevor agreed.
He let his eyes slide over to Sloane, taking in the girl’s perfect, mouth-watering form, from the dark pools of her eyes to her curves, obvious despite her hiking gear.
“Sloane, this is Trevor,” Austin said. “He works at the Red Sky ranch, next door. Trevor, this is Sloane.”
“Hi,” Trevor said. He stood from the rock he’d been sitting on and offered a hand to Sloane, who shook it.
“You were at the hospital yesterday, right?” she asked.
She remembers me! Trevor thought to himself, his heart soaring for a split second.
“That’s right,” he said. “Technically, the kid was found on Red Sky land. My family owns the ranch, so they sent me over to make sure everything was okay.”
That wasn’t strictly true. Trevor had answered a call from the police about a man being found unconscious on their ranch, and Trevor had thought it best to be proactive, bringing one of the ranch hands along with him.
“Have you heard anything about him?” Sloane asked. A slight crease formed between her eyebrows.
She’s beautiful even when she’s worried, Trevor thought.
“Nothing,” he said. “You?”
She just shook her head.
“I’m starting to worry he won’t wake up,” she admitted. “I mean, I’m trying not to think about it, but still.”
Sloane walked to the edge of the precipice, her hands on her hips, and looked over the edge, to the same view Trevor had been admiring earlier.
“This is pretty spectacular,” she admitted. “Probably better than bosoms and pirates.”
Trevor raised his eyebrows.
“Sorry,” she said to him. She blushed a little, which Trevor though
t was odd, but not unwelcome. “It’s dumb running joke we’ve had all morning.”
“About lady pirates?” he asked.
Sloane looked thoughtful.
“Well, they could be lady pirates,” she said. “Maybe this particular romance book was very progressive.”
“Not if it was part of Barb’s stash,” said Austin.
Then he looked slightly embarrassed.
“Oops,” he said.
Trevor laughed out loud. He was already starting to feel looser, more like himself. Just like he always felt when Austin was around.
“Barb, you minx,” murmured Sloane, still looking at a view. “Hey, there’s a hawk.”
“For a while, earlier, there was one in this tree right here,” Trevor said, pointing to a scrubby little pine tree clinging to the edge. “I got to watch it eat a mouse.”
“Gross!” said Sloane, staring up into the tree, sounding more excited than grossed out. “Did you see it catch the mouse?”
“No,” said Trevor. “Just eat it.”
“That’s so cool,” she said. “About a week ago, I was sitting on a rock pretty far off the trail, eating lunch, and I saw a fox get a rabbit,” she said. “I felt really bad for the rabbit, but it can be amazing to see nature in action. I had no idea foxes were so sneaky or fast.”
Trevor just nodded, his eyes still scanning the view.
Behind them, Austin sat on the rock and started pulling food out of his backpack.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ve got two giant sandwiches, a bunch of apples, potato chips, some cheese and crackers, a baggie full of cookies, and, uh...” he trailed off for a minute, still pawing through the bag. “A container of chicken salad, some cold bacon, biscuits, jam, butter, and a bottle of chocolate milk.”
Trevor’s eyebrows went up, and he couldn’t help but smile.
“So Barb packed you a lunch?” he asked.
Sloane looked at Trevor and then at Austin, her face inscrutable.