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Ididn’t sleep, not a wink. I’d spent most of the night in my office trying to stop myself from envisioning the horrors that Kirk Quentin, the thirty-five-year-old scumbag who’d ruined my girl’s life, had inflicted on her. Instead, I called every connection I had, booking flights from California to Montana and gathering some of the finest private security contractors I could find to converge in Hot Springs.
Henry Carlson and I had worked together for a few years in our twenties, back when I was just making a name for myself as a tech tycoon. Ex-Military, Special-Ops—the kind of guy you didn’t want to run into if you had any problems with the people he knew.
He’d picked up my call on the first ring, and now he was about to board a private jet to Montana with three of his buddies.
I didn’t know who he was working for now, and I didn’t bother to ask. Henry couldn’t tell me those kinds of things, anyway, especially if he was still working as a contractor for the CIA.
Kirk might have connections, but so did I.
I also had a lot of money at my disposal.
A private investigator was gathering intel on Kirk and his associates, as well as any information on whether it was known that Kirk had broken his parole to travel across the country in search of the woman he so violently abused and her son.
As far as I knew, this had all just happened, and Moira would have likely been the last person to know that Kirk had escaped the halfway house. It was fucked up, but unfortunately, that was the way these things tended to go.
I finally went downstairs at four in the morning, making a pot of coffee before going out to the stables. George was already awake and feeding the horses before doing his rounds in the pasture to check on the cattle.
“It’s bad,” I told him, sipping my coffee as I moved from stall to stall. “But there’s a plan in place. Everyone needs to be on guard. I have some… friends,” I continued, leaning on one of the stalls and facing George. “They’ll be here in a few hours. I’m going to set them up in the bunkhouse.”
“I take it Moira and Holliday are moving into the big house, then?” George said with an uncharacteristic grin.
“Yeah, they are.”
“For good?”
“I sure as hell hope so,” I admitted, taking another drink.
George gave me a knowing look as he dumped a bucket of oats and grains into a feeder hanging on the side of one of the stalls.
“When’s the wedding?” He smirked. I rolled my eyes.
“I’m not thinking that far ahead, yet. Moira is as hardheaded as they come and I’m just enjoying the fact that she agreed to move in and… stay. Make a home for her son, you know?”
“Mhmm,” George murmured, moving on to the next stall.
I wasn’t sure I liked that smug grin on his face, so I decided to knock him down a few pegs. “Wanna talk about Keely?”
George’s cheeks went ruddy and he paused, but then got moving again without looking at me.
“Nothing to say,” he muttered, his back turned to me.
“Sure,” I teased. “I’ll be back later; we need to move the cattle back to the creek side of the property today.”
* * *
Moira was sweating, her hair pulled into a messy bun on the top of her head as she tossed random stuff into a box and kicked it toward the front door of the bunkhouse. Day was running around outside, like usual, seemingly having forgotten all about what happened last night.
I’d been helping Moira clean out their things from the bunkhouse, which hadn’t been a lot of stuff, but Day’s rock collection and all of the trinkets Charmaine had gifted him had been piling up.
“He’s going to need his own room,” I said, tossing a few more rocks into the plastic bag hanging over my wrist. “With some shelves he can display all of this stuff on.”
“Well, it’s your house, so you can do what you want—”
“Ourhouse, Moira. I want that to be clear.”
She looked up from the new box she was stuffing Day’s things into and gave me a weak, apologetic smile. “I feel like you’re doing way more for us than you need to.”
“I meant what I said.” I chuckled, tossing the bag of rocks onto the porch for Day to collect later. “We’re living together now, as a couple. A family. I don’t care if it happened quickly.”
