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He grins, hazel eyes glittering like fool’s gold.
And I guess I’ll be the fool to believe him when he agrees.
“I can definitely work with that, honey,” he growls.
My cheeks go hellfire red. Damn, he’s lucky I’m too tired to give him another lashing when I’d rather be six feet under than be his honey any day of the week.
I nod sharply. I don’t care if he’s lying or not.
I’m gonna hold him to it, one way or another.
This might be the only way to get him off my butt.
It has to be.
Because I can’t let him see what’s on the outskirts of my ranch and discover the secrets Dad took to his grave.
* * *
It’s weird to think it’s still out here.
The place creeps me out so much I wish I could pretend it didn’t exist.
I almost never come out to this distant end of the property unless I’m checking the barbed-wire fences that are more to keep prowlers and predators out than to keep anything in. I don’t use barbed wire on anything holding live animals.
But I can’t say I really feel bad for anyone who gets themselves tangled up in spikes, trying to sneak onto my land.
There’s a rusty-hinged wooden gate almost hidden in the bushes overgrowing the fence out here, though.
This is where the land bumps up against the mountains. They rise up out of the earth pretty suddenly here—just a few tall, tumbled rocks, and then suddenly you’re looking up at stone crags dotted with scrub brush and those tiny twisted trees that cling to the face.
And between those high walls of stone, I see it.
A mountain pass.
One that someone, a long time ago, turned into a road.
It’s almost gone now, long buried under scrub brush and grass and fallen trees. It’s unpaved, just the suggestion of wheel tracks.
It leads deep into the mountains, to places better forgotten.
I can’t help but smile faintly.
Dad was a born storyteller. He used to spin all sorts of wild yarns about ghosts and monsters to keep me and Sierra from going down that road.
But while Sierra listened?
I said I was a ghostbuster, and I ain’t afraid of no ghost.
So when I got older, I’d try to sneak off down that road every chance I got.
Problem is, when I was a little girl, I had the worst sense of direction.
If pigeons have iron in their beaks that helps them navigate, I must have that kinda weird magnetic metal that makes compasses go haywire.
For the longest time, I’d just get lost. Turned around, wandering in the bushes, prowling through the grass.
I’d go in circles for ages, make a game out of it, act like I was a cougar out there hunting in the grass, pouncing at squirrels and birds with a little growl.
But when Dad would call me in to wash up for dinner, his voice would always help me find home.
It’d usually be dark by then, too, the stars coming out.
Familiar friends.
Show me a constellation, and I’ll show you the way home.
It wasn’t until last year that I finally got serious about finding out what was down there. I’d forgotten about it for a while, to be honest.
Dad got sick slow at first, then fast, and he stayed real sick for a long time—and ever since I turned eighteen, more and more of the ranch’s management was on me anyway.
When you come of age running a ranch full-time and trying to graduate high school, you don’t really remember old stories about overgrown, haunted roads. By my twenties, I’d halfway forgotten them all.
You learn real quick not to rely on anyone but yourself, too.
Not on smooth-talking bankers.
And not on dirty-talking bastards with gorgeous hazel eyes.
Dad was kind of a legend before everything went crazy and this little town found new heroes. He was the brilliant NASA scientist who came home to settle down and retire on the land that’d been in our family for generations.
Heart’s Edge knew him as a kind man, a gentle man, a wise man with a good heart.
And I want people to keep thinking of him that way.
I want to remember him that way, too.
It’s been a struggle ever since I found out about the avalanche of back taxes, went to survey everything myself, and finally found that long lost road again.
I wandered down it and found something I’ll never forget.
It wasn’t long before the end. In the final days of his life, I hardly got more than two coherent words out of Dad about it.
But the last thing he said to me…
No.
I can’t even think about what he confessed, or it’s gonna break me, on top of the other stress.
I can’t bear to think my father wasn’t the man I thought he was.
It won’t help anyone.
He always called this road Nowhere Lane, though I doubt that’s the official name on any survey maps. He’d laugh and say it’s just the path to nowhere, and no one goes down it unless they want to get lost and never come back.
