Bad Boy Rancher

“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.

When the nurse said “drug addict,” she’d dropped her voice and whispered it, as if she’d uttered a filthy word. She’d pursed her mouth then said characters like that had no place in a sweet, sleepy town like Carbondale.

When she’d asked what brought Brielle to Carbondale and learned she would be running the new rehab and mental health treatment facility, the chatty nurse clammed up and busied herself sharpening pencils. Looked like Brielle might be one of those undesirables the nurse mistrusted.

Brielle paused at a water fountain and bent over to press the tab. She drank the icy stream, recalling the nurse’s dismissal. While she hadn’t expected the town to roll out the red carpet, it surprised her how few had dropped by the new facility. She’d written a letter to the local newspaper’s editor inviting Carbondale residents to tour the facility and ask questions about the provided services before the first patients arrived next week.

She straightened, wiped her mouth, then continued down the hall. Other than a couple rubberneckers who’d looked plenty and said little, the townsfolk steered clear of Fresh Start. Worse, a couple of nasty letters to the newspaper’s editor blasted the facility, calling it a threat to the community because it would attract the “wrong elements” and drop real estate values.

She blew out a frustrated breath. She needed Carbondale’s support to succeed. While she’d stayed busy, reading through case files for incoming patients, hiring staff and inventorying supplies, her mind kept drifting back to how she could improve community relations...and to a rough-and-tumble cowboy who’d looked like he’d walked right out of a biker fantasy...

Speaking of which.

She pulled up short at the sight of the tall, lean, bearded man tightening his tie knot. His light hazel eyes bored into hers then narrowed in recognition.

“You,” he said, the single word sounding like an accusation. His hands fell to his sides, and he stalked toward her, smooth and graceful, a predatory animal. There was no other way to describe how he zeroed in on her. Like a wolf with hackles raised, Justin Cade seemed to flex every muscle in his possession.

Brielle swallowed hard and stuck her hand out. “Brielle Thompson.” After a moment of hesitation, he clasped it with his callused palm. Warmth exploded up her arm at the brief contact. “I’m sorry about the accident.”

He crossed his arms and his biceps bulged beneath the tailored suit material, curving it. “Wasn’t your fault.”

“I braked, but it all happened so fast.”

“There wasn’t anything you could have done.”

She tilted her head so her eyes caught his. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged and his gaze flitted outdoors, landing on the parent and child she’d spotted earlier.

“Are you doing okay?”

“Suppose,” he said without looking at her, which gave her plenty of license to indulge her curiosity and study him.

Beneath his bearded scruff, he had a perfectly proportioned face: a strong jaw, high cheekbones and a straight, narrow nose. Normally she didn’t like the mountain man look, especially after a lifetime spent around clean-shaven, tightly shorn military men. Yet something about his wild, untamed looks appealed to her. Challenged and drew her in.

“I tried visiting you in the hospital, but they wouldn’t let me back.”

“You’re not family.” He inserted a toothpick in his mouth. “Or a friend.” His eyes slashed across her face then back to the outdoor scene.

Heat crept up her neck and into her cheeks. “True.”

It wasn’t like she wanted to be his friend. Getting close to Justin Cade, she sensed, would be as futile as trying to throw a hug on a cactus.

“I heard you broke your ribs. A concussion, too,” she persisted.

His piercing eyes swung back to her, and the impact of his ferocious gaze was like a hand on her chest, shoving her.

“It’s a fracture.” He yanked at a green tie that brought out the yellow flecks in his eyes. In fact, looking closer, she realized his eyes were lighter than she thought.

“That’s a relief.”

A line appeared between his thick brows. “You think I’m relieved about this?” he mumbled around the toothpick.

“How about grateful?” she snapped, losing her patience with the mulish man.

“Nope. Not that, either.” His broad shoulders rose then dropped in a careless shrug.

Didn’t anything matter to this guy? His face was a slipping mask, and beneath it Brielle saw pain. “I’ve seen a lot of good men and women who cherished life lose it too soon. You’re lucky.”

He scrutinized her for a moment then laughed, a bitter, hollow sound. “Lucky? Good one.” He tipped his hat, pulled open a door labeled 8A, and disappeared inside.

Her eyes wandered over the entrance’s fake wood grain.

Justin Cade might have deliberately taken his hands from the handlebars after all. Maybe he’d wanted to die two weeks ago, and she’d prevented it. Or it’d been some twisted version of Russian roulette with his life.

Did he court death?

She smoothed her hand over her hair, yanked down her suit jacket and wrenched open the door. After the trial, she’d steer clear of Justin Cade.

He didn’t want to be saved, and those cases haunted her most.

* * *

“WOULD THE DEFENDANT please rise?”

Justin shoved back his chair and rose from the courtroom table slowly, ignoring the pain lancing through his side from his fractured rib. His heart drummed, and beads of perspiration broke out across his forehead. An overhead fan whirred in the expectant hush, and the room’s wood-paneled walls seemed to close around him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the woman who’d driven the van he’d hit two weeks ago. Brielle Thompson, a former army chaplain from Chicago, he’d learned. She’d been hired to run Carbondale’s new rehabilitation and mental health center, Fresh Start, and had been headed there when they’d collided.

Now she sat beside the county DA, ramrod straight, her strong jaw lifted, her face impassive. Varying shades of blond hair, from platinum to honey to a dark gold, smoothed over her head and twisted in a knot at the base of her neck. Although she hadn’t glanced his way since the hearing began, he recalled her light green eyes in the hall and the way they’d seemed to look not just at him, but through him.

He didn’t remember much about that night, except the image of her stricken face peering down at him. He’d even dreamed of it, a reprieve from his usual loop of Jesse calling for him, insisting this time he’d changed, and Justin angrily refusing to believe until it was too late...

“How does the defendant plead?” asked County Judge Charlotte James.

Her daughter, Amberley, who dated his brother Jared, had warned Justin not to expect leniency on his DUI charge. Judge James had lost her sister in a drunk driving accident and imposed the maximum sentence when hearing these cases. She leaned forward, her forearms extended atop the tall bench, a gavel beside her right hand. Her black robe billowed around her tall, thin frame and the narrow oval of her face creased in disapproval. Gray threaded through her shoulder-length brown hair.

Justin cast a quick glance back at his family. James glowered while Jared mouthed “good luck.” Jewel chewed on a nail while his mother’s eyes glistened. Her lips pushed together so hard the color leached out of them. Regret settled sour in Justin’s gut. He’d caused his family pain.

Again.

Jail would get him out of their hair for a while. Behind bars, he’d also escape their pitying, anxious looks...their useless attempts to pull him from his grief. He squared his shoulders beneath Jared’s borrowed suit jacket. “Guilty, Your Honor.”

An annoyed huff escaped his family’s attorney, Chuck Sloan. A portly man with a thick mane of white hair and a perfect set of teeth, he resembled a well-fed cat used to pampering, not scrapping. He’d insisted they plead not guilty to provide better leverage in a plea bargain, but Justin refused. He’d chugged the beer before hopping on the bike. No one had put a gun to his head—a preferable choice, in hindsight, to driving under the influence.

His mind drifted as Judge James called for the accident report, witness statements and the toxicology reports.

He could have hurt someone, an unforgivable, selfish act. Granted, he’d believed the remote road would be empty and his motorcycle little threat to a moving van, but he couldn’t excuse his reckless disregard for another’s life. Brielle Thompson, by all accounts, was an exemplary person, a woman of the church, practically a saint compared to a sinner like him.

Yet despite her brisk bearing and guarded expression today, he recalled the dark anguish in her eyes after the accident and her sudden fury just moments ago in the hall. She’d looked haunted, desperate, desolate—an expression he recognized. It often peered back at him in the mirror.

Was this godly woman possessed by demons, too?

After listening to the officer on scene’s testimony, as well as a brief statement from Brielle, Judge James steepled her fingers, her elbows planted atop her desk, deep in thought. The room descended into a tomb-like silence. A mother, failing to soothe her fussing baby, hustled up the central row of seats and out through the door.

“With a blood alcohol level of point oh nine—” Judge James waved the toxicology report a few minutes later “—your license is suspended for nine months.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Justin laced his fingers in front of him and rocked back on the heels of his boots, nodding. More than fair. Besides, he didn’t need a license to race dirt bikes or go mudding off-road. As for driving, he’d catch a ride with one of his siblings if he needed to go somewhere. Other than the pool hall and a weekly poker night, he rarely left the ranch anyway.

Since Jesse’s death, he found it hard to leave the place. Everywhere he looked, he saw Jesse. Walking away felt like he was abandoning his twin all over again. Besides, the wanderlust that’d once seized him had died alongside his twin. It’d be disloyal to explore the world without him. If Jesse couldn’t leave Carbondale, neither would Justin, no matter how many sunsets he watched...wondering what lay beyond the horizon.