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She did love this state. She felt like she belonged to the big sky, the wide open ranches, and the Rocky Mountains.
“All of that exists in Ivory Peaks,” she whispered, the thought there in her mind and filling her mouth.
She couldn’t believe she’d found Mike again. She couldn’t believe he was going to be the CEO of his family company, and that she would be at his side.
“Maybe,” she whispered, though the way their relationship was going suggested that she’d get to experience life with him.
City life had never been on Gerty’s agenda. Her heart fluttered with a vein of panic, but a loud bang sounded behind her. She spun that way, her pulse now filled with speed and adrenaline.
“Daddy?”
“We’re fine,” he said from somewhere inside the depths of the unit. He appeared a moment later, anxiousness in his expression. “You’re going to need to come help, baby.”
“Yeah.” She rounded the truck too, noting he’d lowered the tailgate already. “I’m coming.”
She arrived in front of the storage unit and stopped, her eyes taking in the space. The last time she’d seen it, she’d barely been able to get the door closed and locked.
Right now, it was empty.
Mom came forward with what looked like a post that would go on a porch deck. Gerty recognized it immediately, and her thoughts that her daddy had unlocked the wrong storage unit dried right up.
She reached for the post. “This is from my headboard.” The headboard that wasn’t here. It went with the bed that didn’t stand against the left-hand wall where she’d left it.
“There’s nothing here,” Daddy said.
“I can see that.” Gerty turned around and tossed the post into the back of the truck. “Let’s go.”
“Go?” Mom asked. Gerty practically ripped off the door handle she pulled it so hard, and she got in the back seat while her parents looked at one another in bewilderment.
Foolishness raced through Gerty, tying her stomach in knots and kicking her anger into a new gear. She’d blocked James’s number from her phone, but she knew where the Johnson Manor Ranch sat.
For it was going to be her home too.
She jabbed at her phone to put in the address, and by the time her daddy got behind the wheel, she had it ready for him.
She leaned over the seat and handed him the device. “Go here.”
* * *
Half an hour later,Gerty slid from the truck once again. “Stay here,” she said to her parents. She expected her mother to do so, but Daddy? No way.
Gerty wasn’t surprised to find him standing at the front of the truck, his arms folded, glaring at the house where James supposedly lived. She’d be shocked if he didn’t come outside to talk to her, because she’d inquired after him with the first person she’d run into on the ranch, and that had been his brother.
He’d been shocked to see her, but he’d stammered out that James lived in this cabin, and Daddy had dutifully driven them here.
Gerty had just collected the post from the back of the truck when she heard James’s low chuckle. It had once made her warm from the inside out, and had always brought a smile to her face.
Not this time.
The hair on the very base of her spine stood up, and Gerty rounded the hood as Daddy said, “Gerty, I’m not bailing you out of jail.”
She didn’t respond as she threw the post as hard as she could. James, who had been coming down the steps, stopped. He didn’t wear a cowboy hat, and he looked like he’d been asleep in the middle of the afternoon.
“You forgot this,” Gerty yelled, not even stepping a toe of her boot onto his property. “Thanks for cleaning out all of that old stuff. I wish you’d have called, so I didn’t have to drive all this way, but thank you.”
He wore complete bewilderment on his face, and Gerty couldn’t stand to look at him for another moment. She turned toward her father and stepped toward him.
“I’m going to wrap my hands around his throat if we stay for another ten seconds.”
