Liam crossed his arms over his chest and stared back at me. “Blair,” he said succinctly.
I should have guessed. Liam’s thirteen-year-old niece had decided her future career at age seven and never once wavered from it. She had done all our faces at one time or another, but her Uncle Liam was her favorite. Maybe because she didn’t know what a broody grump he really was. He liked to keep his grunts and growls just for us. With Blair, he had the patience of a saint.
Mateo studied him through his round glasses. “She’s getting really good. Your cheekbones, dude. Damn.”
Liam grunted in acknowledgment, but his lips tilted in the closest thing to a smile he got.
My stomach growled. I had been up since four, and the protein bar I had washed down with my thermos of coffee had burned off hours ago. The welcome desk where we held our Monday meetings was close enough to the dining hall that I could smell the biscuits and bacon waiting for us.
“It’s 9:02.” I flicked my clipboard. “Some of us have work to do.”
“Ha.” Mateo’s dimples flashed in a grin. “You’re a poet and you don’t even know it.”
Seb and Liam groaned in unison. Holly’s dark eyes bulged out comically.
“Mateo,” she hissed. “You were aTier 1 operator. You blew the entire electrical grid of the East Coast when you were nine years old just to test a theory. Russians call you T’ma.”
“What’s your point?”
“You can’t say shit like that. It’s embarrassing.”
He shrugged, bumping his shoulder against her calf. “Someone had to say it. We were all thinking it.”
“No,” Liam said. “We weren’t.”
“Well, you should have been.” Mateo shook his head like we had all let him down. “Have some fucking whimsy once in a while. Especially you, Jay. You’ve been an old man since the day you were born.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. Worse than a whole herd of stampeding cows, every last one of them.
“We have two new guests checking in today,” I said before anyone else could run their mouths about something that had nothing to do with work. “We’ll put Tyler Wood in Hydra. Lennon Graves will be in Orion.”
It was more of a reminder than new information. Tyler had made the reservation a month earlier, but Lennon’s had come through only two days ago.
Seb nodded. “Cabins are ready for them. Saw to it yesterday.”
I checked it off my list and moved on. “How about the trails, Holly? You were out there this weekend. Are they safe for us to take guests on horseback yet?”
“The lower ones are clear.” Holly ran the back of her index finger down Mother Clucker’s wing. “The higher ones still have snow, but it’s not too deep. Should be clear in a week, unless we get another storm.”
I nodded. This close to the Wind River Range, we couldn’t rule out a freak snowstorm even in June. It was rare, but it happened. I tapped my pen on my clipboard. “All right?—”
The door chimed as someone entered the lodge lobby, and we all turned to look.
And I forgot how to breathe.
The woman’s steps faltered as she took us all in, but then she tilted her chin and strode forward. Her gaze darted from face to face, pausing to assess before moving to the next one. And then her eyes found mine.
“Hi. I’m Lennon Graves. I’m checking in.”
Nine yearsago I had walked into a café in Fallujah and found myself thrown right back out again by a blast thattook down half the building. In between entering on my feet and leaving on my ass, there had been a split second where my gaze had landed on a shaking, scrawny kid barely out of his teen years and known without a shadow of a doubt that I was about to get blown up.
Lennon Graves felt like that split second—an epiphany that came a moment too late for self-preservation. I was as certain now as I was then: I was about to get blown up.
She was pretty—jaw-droppingly, chest-achingly pretty—but that wasn’t it. It wasn’t that she was a woman, either, when I had been expecting a man, as most of our guests tended to be. Mercy River was a working ranch, but in addition to our cattle operations, we provided a respite for veterans, active military, and first responders who needed a moment to catch their breath. Some stayed three days and others stayed three months.
This woman didn’t look like she should be here three minutes. Something was off about her. Maybe it was the way she’d braced as her gaze darted around the room at each of us, like she expected to be recognized. I’d never seen her before in my life—she didn’t have the sort of face you’d forget—but what did it mean that she thought I might? I didn’t know.
And that meant I didn’t trust her.
