I hung up before she could respond. Cell phone reception here sucked, so maybe she would think we had been disconnected. It was fine. Everyone knew the bend in Hideaway Road was dangerous. That would be the first place they would check. They’d find him and get him to a hospital. He was going to be fine.
Altruistic. That’s what I was. Because honestly. Why would hedothat? I mean, seriously.There’s no road there, dipshit!If he had turned toward the fields like he was supposed to, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Shaking my head, I pulled back onto the road. Hopefully a patrol car or an ambulance would be cruising along here soon, and I needed to be far away when that happened. They wouldn’t understand.
But Lennon would. She would totally get why I had to do it, but I couldn’t tell her yet. It might scare her. She didn’t know me like I knew her. That was the wholepoint, why I’dhadto do it. She needed time to get to know me. And she’d need a job if she was going to make her move to Mercy River permanent.
I’d figured she’d want a job with animals—she’d always lamented that her landlord wouldn’t let her have a pet—but I’d overheard her telling Mateo that she really liked working in the kitchen. So of course I made that happen for her. That’s what guardian angels do.
And now that he was out of the way, she could stay at Mercy River as long as she wanted to.
One day, we would laugh about this.
My favorite song came on—another sign that I was on the right path. I turned it up over the roar of the rain and sang along.
10
LENNON
Mornings could befrigid and I was grateful I’d never know a winter here because I doubted I was cut out for that kind of suffering, but damn.Damn. A June afternoon in Wyoming might be my idea of heaven.
The air here was lighter somehow. Maybe it was the lack of humidity. I’d already used up the entire bottle of moisturizer I’d brought with me, but that was a small price to pay for being able to take a breath this deep. And that breath being full of wildflowers and ponderosa pine made it even better. I loved the city, and damn, how I missed it, but I liked this, too. It surprised me how much. The mountains, the trees, the vastness of the land and the sky… This place made my blood sing in a way I couldn’t explain.
But right now it wasn’t the mountains making my blood sing. It was the cowboys.
Shirtless, sweaty cowboys.
Even Holly had stripped down to a sports bra, but I was a lot less interested in that than the bear of a man passing out wooden mallets—the only one of the five of them who was wearing a shirt because god hated me, apparently. But at least his T-shirt was tight and light gray, which was the next best thing. He looked like a Viking with all that burnished gold hair and his thick muscles. I wanted to feel that mustache between my thighs.
I bit into the chocolate chip cookie I had snagged from the lobby and watched as they set up flags, poles, and wire wickets. It looked like croquet, but the space they were using was about half the size of a football field. The couple of times I’d played as a kid, the setup had taken maybe a quarter acre. Of course, there wasn’t a lot of space to be had at the trailer park. Maybe this was normal.
I brushed the cookie crumbs from my hands and sauntered forward. “Can I play?”
“Fuck no,” Jeremiah said at the same time Holly said, “Sure.”
I split a glance between them. “So…yes?”
“No.” Jeremiah’s jaw tightened. “Guests don’t play Blood Ball.”
I watched Mateo push a wicket into the dirt. “I thought this was croquet.”
“It’s Blood Ball. You want to play croquet, you can use the equipment when we’re done.”
“Oh, let her play,” Holly protested. “She’ll be fine.”
Something about the way she said that made me wonder if I would, in fact, be fine.
“I vote yes,” Seb tossed in. I felt better about that.
Jeremiah pinched the bridge of his nose. “This isn’t a democracy.”
“The fuck it isn’t.” Seb turned to me. “The rules of the game are simple. Get from Pole A to Pole Z—that’s the home pole—with more points than anyone else. We don’t take turns. You just get your ball through the wickets and try to keep other players from doing the same. Each wicket is five points. Hitting another player’s ball is ten points. Reaching Pole Z is worth twenty points. Making someone bleed is fifty points.”
Ah. “So that’s why it’s called Blood Ball?”
“Nah. The name came first, the rules after.” Seb grinned. “We call it Blood Ball because Holly said the five of us playing any game involving wooden balls and mallets, someone was going to bleed. She was right. It started as croquet, but none of us knew the rules and…” He smirked. “Things happened, as things do. So we figured we might as well award points for something that was going to happen anyway.”
Well, that was foreboding.
