Jayden’s Hope: MacKenzies of Montana

by Hart, Liliana

  “I do appreciate the offer, but I can’t stay. I really need to get settled.”

  Alice nodded sympathetically. “You’re plum worn out, aren’t ya? I can see it in your face.”

  Another rumble of thunder, this one closer than the last, had her looking out the front windows. The sky was getting darker and had a greenish tinge so it looked like an ugly bruise.

  “There’s only one way to get there,” Mac said, taking a pen and drawing a map on the paper. “Just keep going down Main Street, and don’t turn off on any of the side streets. The buildings and everything will eventually end and the road will turn from two lanes into one. That’s where MacKenzie land starts and there’s a big sign that says private property. You’ll see the cameras.”

  “Cameras?” Holly asked.

  “Uncle Dec is a stickler about privacy. That’s just the outer realm. Security gets a lot more intense the longer you drive.”

  Holly remembered the security she’d had to go through when she met with Declan in New York. Security was Dec’s business, and though she didn’t know exactly what his job entailed, she knew that it was high-risk, high-profile, and the protection was probably more than warranted.

  “You’ll pass some fenced in pastures for a couple of miles, and then you’ll come to a fork in the road with an enormous tree that splits the fork. You can’t miss it. Now,” Mac said, with a dramatic pause. “Make sure you take the right side of the split.”

  Holly was going to ask what was so bad about the left side of the split, but knew the quickest way to get going was to keep her mouth shut. Mac didn’t need any prompting to keep the conversation going.

  “The house Uncle Dec has you in is on Territorial Drive,” Mac continued. “That’s over by the compound where I live, but it’s outside the gates. You’re in one of the lake houses. The numbers are on the doors, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  “I appreciate your help,” Holly said, reaching in her bag to pay for the coffee.

  “It’s on me, honey,” Alice said. “Welcome to Surrender. And make sure you come back and see us. I want to hear all about what brings you to Surrender.”

  Holly fought the panic that rose inside of her, and told herself to relax. She and Declan had talked over what she’d say when people asked her that question. His advice had been to stick as close to the truth as possible without giving too much away. It was easier to remember the truth than too many lies.

  “I’ll be back once I get settled,” Holly said.

  She took her coffee and map and hurried back to the car, putting it in reverse before she got her seatbelt fastened. The coffee went forgotten as she put the car in drive and headed down Main Street.

  “Just stay on Main Street,” Holly muttered. “You’d think that’d be easy enough to do.”

  But she soon saw it was more complicated than it should have been. The street opened up into what should have been chaos and there was a large roundabout that somehow tied it all together. Thank goodness there was no traffic. She and roundabouts didn’t have the best track record. She’d had a close call in Chicago, but she’d somehow passed through unscathed. Only terrified.

  There was a Greek revival building on the right with large white columns that said Surrender Public Library, and then next door to that was what looked like a very new police station. There were several police cars parked out front and a sign that said Surrender Sheriff’s Office—Sheriff Cooper MacKenzie.

  Alice had been right. There were MacKenzies everywhere.

  There were several restaurants and a place called Duffey’s Tavern that didn’t fit in with any of the newer buildings, but it looked like it had been recently remodeled. Another boom of thunder shook the sky and this time it was followed by a crack of lightning so bright it had her seeing stars and her hair frizzing around her face.

  “And that’s close enough for me,” she said, pressing the button to shut the top of the car.

  She saw the sign where Main Street continued, and she veered hard the right so she didn’t get stuck in the endless round and round cycle. There were more businesses on each side of the road, but the farther she drove, the sparser they became.

  The first drop of rain fell as soon as the road changed from two lanes to one, and she barely had time to see the sign proclaiming private property and the cameras situated high on poles before the sky opened up and she couldn’t see anything at all.

  She’d never experienced rain like this—the big heavy drops that exploded as they hit the windshield. The electricity in the air that made the hair on her arms stand on end. It was violent and full of rage.

  Her wipers were doing double time, but she was barely inching along since she couldn’t see two feet in front of her face. She could only pray she was the only person foolish enough to be on the road right now.

  Her front bumper hit the tree before she could see it, and she jerked forward against the seatbelt with a tiny oomph. The windshield wipers swished loudly, but they were fighting a losing battle. But she couldn’t stop now. If she’d found the tree then she wasn’t too far from the house.

  The palms of her hands were damp, and her heart thudded in her chest. She turned on the radio and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique filled the tiny car.

  “That’s the perfect music for impending death. How about something else?” She flipped the station again until she found the classic rock station, and then she wiped her hands on her jeans and took the wheel again.

  “Just a little farther,” she said, trying to reassure herself.

  She put the car in reverse and then inched her way forward and back onto the road. She didn’t know how long she crept along, but it felt like hours. Tall grass brushed her window, and she realized she was totally disoriented. And then the car stopped moving all together.

  She pressed down on the accelerator, but the tires just spun in place.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Don’t panic.” She checked her phone once more, but there was no signal.

  She had two options. She could wait it out or she could start walking and try to find help. She looked at the map Mac had drawn on her paper. She was in the home stretch. It couldn’t be much farther. At least, she was praying it wasn’t too much farther.

  With that decided, she dug into one of the boxes in the backseat and grabbed a windbreaker with a hood, not that it would do much good, and she grabbed her workout sneakers instead of the designer ones she currently had on.

  “No time like the present,” she said after she’d zipped up the jacket and tightened the hood.

  She grabbed the keys, said a little prayer, and stepped into chaos. The wind pushed her back against the car, and rain lashed at her face. She held her arm in front of her eyes long enough to lock the car, and then she stuffed the keys in her pocket and started walking.

  Chapter 3

  Summer was officially over. The chill in the air hadn’t been there a week before, and the wind had shifted direction so waves rippled gently across the lake. Rain was coming. But for now…life was perfect.

  Sunlight hadn’t yet broken between the peaks of the mountains, but the promise of it was there, casting a pearly gray light over the land—his land. The quiet and his own thoughts were all he needed. He leaned against the cedar porch railing, his hands wrapped around a steaming mug of coffee, wearing only a pair of navy flannel pajama pants.

  Winston laid at his feet, never as excited about a new morning as his owner, and snored lightly. He was a seven-year-old English Bulldog who tolerated having a human living in his house.

  Jayden MacKenzie was a man of routine. He liked the mornings best and was up before most. He liked the way the sun rose like clockwork, but how it was always different—the colors, the light, the shadows. He liked how the light touched his land like radiant fingertips and spread until it reached the land of his ancestors. And he liked knowing that despite everything his family had been through, this piece of heaven on earth would always belong to a MacKenzie.

/>   And he was a MacKenzie.

  Though he hadn’t known how special it was to belong to such a unique family the first ten years of his life, he’d more than made up for lost time over the last twenty. He was a MacKenzie by blood, but more importantly, he was a MacKenzie by heart.

  He’d never had the urge to travel the world or escape Surrender like some of his uncles and cousins. They’d eventually all come back after the wanderlust had faded, and they’d settled down with their wives and families. But to Jayden, there was no more beautiful place on earth than Surrender, Montana.

  The problem was, everyone else thought so too. Over the past decade or so, Surrender had turned into a vacationer’s best kept secret. Between the skiing and snowboarding in the winter, and the fishing and kayaking in the summer, their sleepy, quiet town turned into a circus a few months out of every year.

  But when tourist season was over, things slowed back down to a normal pace and the faces he passed on the street once again became familiar. His cousin, Declan, had done a good job of regulating the population and the kinds of businesses that could come into town. The people of Surrender hadn’t wanted big developers building condos and hotels. They wanted jobs and stability for the locals, and they wanted the off-season population to stay small.

  Jayden understood what the tourism meant for the town. It didn’t mean he had to like it. He’d always considered the beauty of Surrender to be his, and he made it a point to spend as little time in town as possible during tourist season.

  In his experience, people were generally a nuisance.

  His mother said he had an artist’s temperament. He’d hole up for days or weeks at a time while he was working, be surly, or downright rude if someone interrupted him, and then he’d surface like a drowning man gasping for air and rejoin his family or friends in whatever they were doing, as if he hadn’t missed out on large gaps of time.

  He wouldn’t apologize—couldn’t if he tried—because he knew he couldn’t change how he was. When a person was surrounded by so much beauty, it was impossible not to get lost in its grandeur. It was impossible not to get caught up in his art.

  Speaking of work, he needed to get a couple of hours in the studio before the storm rolled in. He turned to head inside just as his phone rang. He looked at the number and scowled.

  Kana.

  She knew he’d be up this early. She knew him as well as anyone ever had. That was part of the problem. The calls came less frequently than they had after they’d initially broken up. But for whatever reason, she wanted to know how he was doing and to tell him she missed him. It was a vicious cycle, and he wasn’t ashamed to say he’d used the emotion the breakup with her had caused in his work. He’d done some of his best painting over the last year. The only saving grace was she’d left before he’d embarrassed himself by asking her to marry him.

  His parents and the rest of his family had taught him the value of marriage. It was a commitment that wasn’t to be taken lightly, and when he did find the right woman, he’d be with her until he took his last breath. MacKenzies mated for life, and that kind of contentment was a tall order to fill for the younger generation.

  He knew he needed to block Kana and move on. There was no need to hold onto those last dregs of a relationship that had fizzled so quickly. It didn’t matter that he’d loved her. She hadn’t loved him. At least not enough to stay.

  But these occasional calls kept him tethered to her, and he’d stopped answering months ago and let it go to voicemail. And then he’d listen to her messages—the voice that was so familiar, yet so far away—and feel the faint tug to go after her. But Surrender was his heart. And if she didn’t love him enough to stay, Jayden could admit that he didn’t love her enough to go.

  The scowl on his face didn’t detract from his looks. He shared the strong bones and angular face that all the MacKenzie men had. His hair was dark blond and badly in need of a cut. He tended to forget such things when he was working, and he’d been working a lot lately. His eyes were hazel with flecks of brilliant green and gold, and the scruff on his face was getting long enough to irritate him.

  He was tall and lean with the body and shoulders of a swimmer, which made sense considering he’d swam across the lake more times than he could count to get to one relative or another’s house. He’d spent his life outdoors, and had the rugged looks and calloused hands of someone who knew how to work and play hard. But he had the soul of a poet, the heart of a romantic, and the temperament of a crotchety old man when his art and space were interrupted. He was a contradiction, but to Jayden MacKenzie’s mind, life, just like art, should be contradictions. That’s what made it interesting.

  “Come on, Winston, it’s time to go to work.”

  Winston cracked an eye open and immediately closed it again. Winston wasn’t a big fan of work.

  “Rain’s coming,” Jayden said. “If you stay out here you’re going to get wet. And I’m not going to stop what I’m doing to come rescue you.”

  Winston gave an aggravated sigh and got up slowly, making sure Jayden knew how displeased he was, and then he lumbered inside to sit on the mat in front of the kitchen sink.

  “Yes, you’re right,” Jayden said. “You deserve a treat for trekking the entire fifteen feet from outside to inside. You’re a dog Olympian.”

  Jayden grabbed a treat from the canister on the counter and Winston grabbed it delicately from his fingers before trotting off to the built-in dog house in the wall under the stairs.

  The two-bedroom cabin had been built with the views in mind. He and his Uncle Grant had designed it together, and he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. The MacKenzie land was vast—thousands of acres—and a good portion of that had been closed in with concrete walls and an electronic gate to protect the MacKenzie Security headquarters and the homes of the agents who worked there. But the last thing Jayden had wanted was to be fenced in.

  He’d chosen his plot of land across the lake and a mile or so down the road from Grant and Annabeth, and he’d designed the cabin to look like it was part of the surrounding landscape. It was A-frame in structure, and had floor to ceiling windows on all sides. He didn’t worry about privacy. There was no one remotely close to him, and no chance of stray hikers on the private property.

  His studio was in the loft upstairs, and the view was incomparable. The floor-plan was open—living room, kitchen, and dining room—and the furnishings were modern, minimal and sleek.

  He touched the control panel on the wall and John Coltrane wailed through the surround-sound speakers as he detoured through the kitchen to refill his cup, this time adding a generous amount of sugar and cream. And then he padded into the master bedroom and stripped out of his pajama pants, tossing them across the foot of the king-size bed as he headed into the bathroom.

  The bathroom was one of his favorite rooms in the house. It was large, and the entire back wall was glass and looked out over the lake, and there was a large walk-through shower with ceiling and wall jets. At the touch of a button he could slide the glass panel into the wall and he could walk out over the lake on the attached dock. There was an outdoor shower so he could rinse off before coming back inside when he spent a day on the water, and in the winter the tile floors and walls stayed heated.

  Jayden turned on the water and walked into the shower with his coffee. He drank too much of it, but not drinking it in the mornings never turned out well for anyone. The water was hot, and he washed quickly, his mind occupied with the painting he’d left unfinished upstairs. There was something missing…

  The morning light that had been streaming through the windows vanished and everything fell into shadow. Jayden had been so wrapped in his thoughts on the painting that he hadn’t noticed the change in the sky.

  Gray clouds roiled overhead and the wind made tiny whitecaps across the lake. But there was still a single stream of sunlight that split between the mountains, and the sight of it made his breath catch.

  He turned off the water wit
h a jerk of his wrist and grabbed a towel from the bar, halfheartedly drying off as he ran across the tile and into the bedroom, leaving puddles of water behind him. There was a pair of cutoff sweats on top of his dresser, and he grabbed them and then ran naked through the house and upstairs to the loft.

  The view from the second floor was even better, and he knew he’d only have moments to capture the power and emotion of mother nature before it was gone. He haphazardly pulled on the sweats and then moved the canvas he’d been working on off the easel and propped it against the wall.

  He grabbed a new canvas, his movements methodical and practiced, and he mixed paint with the fanatic intensity of a mad scientist. The first stroke slashed across the canvas like the lightning that danced in the sky. His heart pounded and the exhilaration was like nothing he could explain. There were days art was work—where he had to tear it from his soul and he thought he might not survive—but there were times like this where he was no longer in control of his body or his mind. It’s as if he were standing outside his body and watching from the outside.

  Drops of paint littered the hardwood floors and sweat dripped down his back, despite the cool breeze of the air conditioner blowing through the vent overhead. He was in a battle, a warrior wielding a sword with every stroke of the brush, and he would be victorious. There was no other option.

  The clouds changed color and rolled toward him, as if they were coming to swallow him whole, and he felt the power and electricity in the air. His gaze was focused, his smile triumphant, and his body thrummed with a pleasure that was only second to sex.

  Time no longer mattered. He could have stood there for hours or days. But he felt the aches in his body as he put the final strokes on canvas. His concentration broke and he stopped to stare at the painting, breath heaving. There was a thudding, a pounding, that kept intruding even as he tried to push it away. He used his palette knife to thicken the clouds and add layers of color, and then he made a final stroke as another explosion of thunder shook the house.