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“I think she’s in trouble.”
“Okay,” the woman said. “Why do you think that?”
“Gut instinct,” he said.
“Do you know where she is?”
“Fishing Run Cabin?”
The woman sad something and started tapping on her keyboard, the strokes of it so loud in his ear. “No Fishing Run Cabin,” she said. “Sir, this line is for emergencies only. Do you have an emergency?”
“Yes,” he said, practically barking the word. “My friend has been taken to Fishing Run Cabin.”
“Wow, Robert,” Emma said on the other line. “Look at this place.” He paused, because she didn’t seem to be talking or acting like a woman scared for her life.
“Sorry,” Ted said. “I have to go.” He hung up while the operator attempted to say something.
He looked to the bowl where the other cowboys kept their keys. Technically, Ted wasn’t supposed to leave the ranch. But, he could leave with Emma. So he’d get to her, and then they’d be together, and it wouldn’t matter that he’d broken the rules—again.
Without second-guessing himself, he grabbed a set of keys and went out to the garage. Emma had gone silent on the call, though the timer indicating how long they’d talked continued to tick.
He wasn’t even sure whose keys he’d grabbed. He used the fob to honk the horn, and that was how he got behind the wheel of a ratty, once-white pickup. He couldn’t think too hard about what he was doing, or he’d turn around and go back inside.
Instead, he drove past the gate, over the bridge, and off the ranch.
* * *
Twenty minutes later,no one had pulled him over. He’d even passed a police cruiser going the other way, and he hadn’t suddenly spun around, spit gravel behind his tires, and come after Ted.
His phone had told him to turn right, and Ted eased the ancient truck off the highway and onto a dirt road. His heart pounded in the back of his throat, because he couldn’t see very far down the road, and trees stood tightly against it.
Anyone could be anywhere, and they’d surprise him. His muscles bunched, and tension radiated from the front of his body to the back. He’d felt like this before—during the fight in the office, at his trial, on the way to the federal correctional facility. The low-security prison had very few fights, but there had been a couple, and Ted thought of his friends still in River Bay.
Determination filled him. He would always fight for what was right, and going to Emma’s aid was right.
“She called you,” he told himself. The call had ended only a few minutes after he’d left Hope Eternal Ranch, and he hadn’t dared call her back.
He eased around a corner, and a gate loomed ahead. Made of red and brown bricks, it stood sentinel on both sides of the dirt road, and the Texas flag protruded from the top of it on the left. On the right, a sign said Fishing Run Cabin.
A brief moment of relief calmed him, because he’d made it. Funny how his app on his phone had found this address, but the emergency operator hadn’t.
He turned another corner, and a massive cabin came into view. Made of logs and glass, it was easily the biggest house Ted had ever seen. A set of stairs led up to the wide front deck that wrapped around the sides of the cabin, and that shiny, black truck Ted had seen before sat out front.
Ted pressed on the brake and stopped. The entire front of the three-story cabin sat in front of him, and if anyone looked out of any of the windows, they’d see him. “They probably already have,” he muttered, and he pulled right up next to Robert’s truck.
Ted got out of the truck, his cowboy boots crunching against the gravel and dirt beneath them. He looked around, trying to see everything at once. The trees had been cleared around the cabin, and anyone could come out of the thicket at any time.
Ted stayed behind the black truck and his open door, listening. He couldn’t hear anything but the rustling of leaves with the breeze and something else he couldn’t identify. Perhaps the distant sound of music playing from somewhere inside the house.
Ted left his door open so the slam of it wouldn’t disrupt the silence out here, and he edged away from the front of the cabin. Around the back, a set of double doors entered the cabin on the bottom level, and the music became louder.
It came from down the hall to the right, and something whispered to Ted that he wouldn’t find Emma that way.
He started up the steps, moving slowly and wondering what he was going to do when he ran into someone. He’d just broken into their house.
Panic filled him, and he nearly ran back out the double doors, leaving them open behind him. “Stupid,” he muttered under his breath as he went back around to the front of the house. He was playing this all wrong, and he was going to go back to prison because of it.
“Not happening,” he told himself. He was allowed to be off the ranch with Emma. He was. He went straight to the pickup he’d arrived in and slammed the door shut. He walked up the front steps of the cabin, trying to think of a reason why he’d have come down this deserted road to this luxury cabin in the woods.
