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The moment he had hung up the phone with the case manager at the hospital, he had texted his CO explaining the situation and putting in for six weeks of leave. He wasn’t sure if that was enough to assess the situation, but it was a start. Leave was granted with well wishes and off he went. He was lucky this didn’t happen when he was in Kuwait or Iraq. Once he was deployed, it would have been much more difficult to get home.
He arrived at two in the afternoon, riding through the familiar scenes of town buffered by rolling farmland that in a few months would be filled with crops. He turned onto the main drag through the old downtown area and passed his high school hangout, Joe’s Diner, which looked just like it had twelve years ago. It was like he was driving through a memory instead of going home.
He tried not to think of his mom and Adam, but with each red-brick facade of the tea shop here and the grocery there, the memories echoed louder and louder in his mind. They only increased as he headed out of town toward the ranch.
God, what if he couldn’t bear looking at the rubble? Everything his dad had worked so hard to build. Hell, the house his grandfather had built. All of his mom’s memories and Adam’s belongings in the closet—
No. He had to get a grip. They were things. Not people. Things could be rebuilt and replaced.
Not exactly, his annoyingly accurate subconscious pointed out.
For someone in the army who had moved around, seen different countries, met different people, he hated change. It wasn’t that he was inflexible, but this was the one thing that was never supposed to change. He relied on Goldvein to be the exact same as he left it. He counted on his dad to always be there, doing the same things in the same house.
The sight of the black fence brought him back to center, while his pulse kicked up another notch.
This was it. Their property. The ranch.
There were no animals, and the fence needed a good coat of paint, which made him frown. He knew Dad had semiretired, but it was unlike him to let things like this slip.
Troy popped the blinker on and turned into Mountain View Ranch. He was home.
The gravel driveway sounded the same with the crunch of his tires. Even though this car had never been here before, the ranch whispered its familiar greeting as he drove deeper into the nearly three-thousand-acre ranch. There were a few gates in the four square mile area, but this one was the closest to the main house, one of the smaller ranch houses, and the old original wooden barn his grandfather had built.
There were two more houses on other parts of the ranch for employees to stay in while they monitored their area, but those houses hadn’t been occupied in years. It made sense to guess that his dad would stay closest to home.
His dad had picked out the property from his grandfather’s tract of land, which had been sold off to support the estate. This was the last original piece, and though he hadn’t always appreciated it, his sense of tradition meant he had to keep the legacy going when the time came.
The rolling hills swept up into mountains that mingled with clouds at the horizon. He could track the ridgeline from memory, including the notch that seemed to be cut out about half a mile in. The mountains weren’t on their property anymore but were a landmark dividing them from others. Right now everything was still bleak and gray, but in the summer, the blue sky would stretch on for miles over a golden prairie speckled with wildflowers. He had grown up here, and back then couldn’t wait to leave.
He crested the hill and… “Oh, thank God.”
He loosened his death grip on the wheel and let out a gush of air in relief when he saw the outline of the main house standing strong. Not a total loss. He could work with that. He could deal. Whatever it would take, they could salvage and rebuild. Then get a damn dry hydrant because, as God is his witness, this was never going to happen again.
Rather than dwell on what was lost, he turned past the barn, which had more peeling paint, and headed for the closest house.
He parked and hopped down from the truck, hitting the hard ground with a thud. The frost-covered ground was no good to dig in for a needed hydrant, but if he could, he would at least get the site approval for once things thawed. He needed it now, but Montana’s weather didn’t change because you wanted it to.
A slice of wind cut right through his army field jacket and nearly knocked him flat. He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned against the spring wind that still had a bite in it to go into the house, reaching out to open the knob when the door swung open without him.
His brain scrambled trying to reconcile what was in front of him with why he was seeing it.
Standing in his path was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.
CHAPTER8
“Uh…excuse me,” she said, edging to one side to pass him, as if he’d let her go without an explanation.
Levi barked from somewhere in the house before trotting up to Troy and giving the sniff test. Apparently, he passed because the tail started going nuts.
“Troy, is that you?” called his dad from somewhere in the back of the house. It was a relief to hear his dad’s voice before his anxiety could assume something had gone wrong. She must have been some sort of nurse.
“Yeah, Dad. Where are you?”
“Come on back. Megan was just helping me unpack some stuff.”
He heard his dad but eyed Megan, trying to telepathically tell her to stay until he could figure out more about her. Torn between following his dad’s voice and staying rooted to the spot, he broke away in a huff and walked back through the small double-wide, manufactured home to the main bedroom.
His dad sat on the edge of the bed in a white T-shirt, and a warm smile tore across his face.
