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But I learned it didn’t help much. For the first five years, I stumbled through life without her. I was a walking heartache with a bad Jim Beam habit. I can’t describe how much I missed her. How desperate I was to hear her voice, to feel her skin, to catch that shock of red hair that was her calling card, and my salvation.
Eventually, my brothers, all scattered to the wind, followed me.
Wyatt was the first. Two weeks in and he was busting down my door.
“You ain’t doin’ this alone,” he said, and he stayed.
A year later, Ford joined us, and a year after that, our brother Davis.
It was Davis’s idea to turn this overgrown plot of land into a working ranch.
“Listen,” he said in that hard-ass, no-nonsense military way of his. “You can mope the rest of your goddamn life, but the rest of us, we gotta make a fucking living.”
So, it’s what we did.
Runaway Ranch, my brothers, and Resurrection saved me.
Sometimes I’m still pissed off about it.
The deep buzz of the two-way radio cuts through the silence of the outdoors, and I reach for it.
“Charlie?” Davis’s deep voice crackles through the speakers. “You there?”
“Yeah, I’m fuckin’ here,” I say with an edge.
“What’s up your ass?”
I watch a cowboy hat-clad family of five squeal and point at the emerald-green horse pasture. The sound grates at my skin and I grit my teeth, feeling the irritation building in my bones.
“There’s too many people here.”
“We need people,” Davis barks back. “They pay our bills, remember? You’re the one who had to buy a fucking ranch.”
I rub my brow, disgruntled at the reminder.
“Besides we might not have people here much longer.”
I frown. “What’re you talking about?”
“Get your ass over to the Bullshit Box and I’ll tell you.”
Christ. Now what?
“Wyatt. Ford,” Davis says before there’s another crackle on the radio channel me and my brother’s all share. “Get your asses up here, too.”
Redirecting my course, I veer right, heading for the Bullshit Box, a tiny corrugated metal home that we use as our business headquarters. Since it’s situated in the center of the ranch next to the lodge, it allows us to do our office work while monitoring comings and goings.
When I step through the large garage-style door, Davis’s Belgian Malinois rescue, Keena, tearing up a box in the room’s corner, spazzes, then barks at my appearance. After roughing her fur, I clock Davis at the computer, wearing his standard attire of a tight navy USMC T-shirt, blue jeans, and boots. He has a video paused mid-action. The stiff hunch of his broad shoulders tells me he’s in alert-mode.
At thirty-five, Davis is as opposite as he can get from his twin Ford. In looks and personality. Tall and muscular, Davis, a veteran marine, is quiet and intense—no-nonsense and take-charge—with a determined set in his dark brown eyes.
As co-owner of Runaway Ranch and head of security, as well as heading the Montana Search and Rescue operation in Cascade County, Davis handles the safety of the ranch. Anyone who tries to make it past my older brother better have a death wish or a prayer.
Davis, not taking his stare off the computer screen, says, “You hear our sister’s ready to pop?”
“You got me up here for that? Emmy Lou?” Our baby sister is pregnant with twins and expecting any day now.
I shake off the worry threading through me, focusing on what’s got me stuck inside when I could be out on the land. Since Maggie’s death, I’ve fought against being an overprotective bastard about my family. That feeling of whatever can go wrong will, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
