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“I don’t know. Bring her over to the house. Give her some breakfast. Unless she shoots you.”
“Which is a good point,” Grant said. “I don’t want to get shot.”
“Bring your gun.”
“I don’t want to be in a shootout.”
“Bring something.”
Grant hung up the phone. His brother was just getting on his nerves now. He grumbled and grabbed hold of his hunting knife, which was in a leather case that snapped onto his belt. He put it on his hip, grabbed his cowboy hat and went back to the front door.
He was not using a hunting knife on a woman, even if she came at him. But he supposed if there was a gun involved he might have to use something.
He just felt resigned, really. If she wanted to shoot him he might let her.
Then at least he could get some rest.
He grunted and walked out of the house again, shoving his phone in his pocket, because he should probably bring that, too. In all honesty, he would need the phone before he needed the knife.
He walked quietly across the heavily wooded ground, careful not to land any heavy footfalls. Of course, if he did, he might wake her up, startle her and send her off running. And if she did that, then she wasn’t his responsibility. Not anymore. If she wasn’t on the property, what did he care where she was?
He didn’t.
He gritted his teeth and stopped right in front of the cabin door. And then he pushed it open.
* * *
MCKENNA TATE WAS used to sleeping lightly. And tonight was no exception. She had been keeping one ear tuned into the sounds around her, just in case, even while she dozed.
Not that deep sleeping in this place was likely. It was cold, and the floor of the little cabin was hard. Two days spent in it didn’t make it feel any more like home.
Except it wasn’t fine right now, because she heard something. And that was why she’d stirred.
Suddenly, reality slammed into her. The door to the cabin was opening.
She scrambled into a sitting position, attempting to push herself onto her feet, but then the door flung open completely, and she found herself stumbling back, hitting the wall and curling up there like a startled animal ready to strike.
It was a man. Which, out here in this big bad world, was the scariest thing she could think of. She would rather tangle with a bear any day. This was definitely a man.
Silhouetted in the doorway, tall and broad and terrifying. He had a cowboy hat pulled down low over his face, and she couldn’t see any of his features. She could just see that he was big.
“Calm down,” he said, as if a command issued from a stranger would make her feel calm.
“What?” So, now she knew he was insane, which was great. Telling a woman whose sleep he’d just interrupted to be calm.
“I said,” he responded, “calm down. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Like you would announce you were going to hurt me if that was your plan,” she said, curling up tighter.
“I have no idea what I would do if I was going to hurt you. Because I’m not going to. I do, however, want to know what you’re doing here.”
“Sleeping.”
“I can see that. Or rather, I could. Though you aren’t sleeping now.”
“Very observant. I’d give you a trophy, but I’m fresh out.”
He shifted, crossing his arms. “You’re awfully mouthy for somebody sleeping on someone else’s property.”
“And you’re awfully chatty for a guy who just found someone sleeping on his property. Don’t you have follow-up questions?”
“Several. But I don’t want you crouched there in the corner like you think I’m about to stab you.”
She snorted out a laugh. “Oh, I’m not really that worried you’re gonna randomly stab me. It’s other things I worry about with men.”
“You don’t have to worry about that, either,” he said.
His voice didn’t soften it all. He didn’t look like he felt bad for her, or like he pitied her in any way. That would not be the angle to take with him. Crying or anything like that. She could see that right away. She could paint a glorious picture of her tragic plight, and he would probably just stand there like a man carved from rock. Unmoved. Whoever he was, he was not a soft touch.
She was pretty good at identifying a soft touch. They were the kind of people who came in handy in desperate situations. People who wanted to wrap you in a blanket, give you a piece of pie and say some encouraging words so that they could go on with their day feeling like they were decent human beings.
She had a feeling this man did not care whether or not he was a decent human being.
She recognized that in him, because it was the same thing in her.
You couldn’t care much about whether or not you were decent when you mostly just wanted to be alive.
“I just want to sleep here,” she said, holding her hand out. “That’s all.”
“You don’t have anywhere else to sleep?”
“Yeah, actually, I have a mansion up on the hill. But I like a little impromptu camping. Bonus points if it’s on someone else’s land, because it adds to the spirit of adventure. I love being woken up in the middle of the night by large, angry ranchers.”
“It’s not really the middle of the night. It’s almost five in the morning.”
She groaned. “Close enough to the middle of the night in my world.”
“This is usually about the time I get up every day.”
“Don’t brag to the less fortunate,” she said. “I’m liable to get jealous of such decadent living.”
“Are you a runaway?”
She laughed. “Right. Because somebody would care if I left.” He kept on staring at her. “I’m twenty-six.”
He nodded slowly, as if now he understood. “Running from someone?”
“Nope,” she said.
Not that she’d never run from someone, but she’d given up counting on men to take care of her. That only ended one way. It all bumped along nicely for a while, and then inevitably it exploded and she was left with less than she had before. Always.
It was why she’d been resolutely without a man for about three years.
“Then why are you sleeping out here?”
“I’m new to town,” she said, keeping her tone casual, as if they’d met on a bustling street in the bright light of day and not like this.
And she was new in town. That much was true.
“My truck broke down and it cost a crap load to fix.” And ultimately she’d had to let the thing go and give it up for dead, after giving up all the money she had to get this far. “While I was waiting for the prognosis, I was stranded for a few days longer than I anticipated. Had to stay in a hotel for some extra time.” And then she’d ended up hitchhiking into Gold Valley after her truck’s inglorious death on a stretch of lonely highway. “Anyway. I ran out of money. I’m hoping to get a job in town, but I haven’t managed it yet. Even when I do get a job I’m not going to get paid for a few weeks.”
“You couldn’t camp?”
“As much as I would love to sleep out under the stars beneath this threadbare blanket, that’s a hard pass. I mean, obviously I would have if I had to.”
“Homeless shelters?”
She snorted. “I’m not homeless.”
With a hard bump of her heart against her breastbone, it hit her that...she was lying. This cabin was the only place she had to sleep. She had nowhere to go back to. Nowhere she was heading to.
That was the definition of homeless, and she was it.
She never figured rock bottom would look like a damp wooden floor. But hell, it seemed to be.
She had managed to stay a few steps ahead of that since she had been turfed from the last foster home she’d been in eight years ago. But now... Of course, it was the move back home that had done it.
Home.
Gold Valley was home.
A home that she couldn’t remember, but it was the place her father was from, the place her mother had been born. The place she had been born. She had decided that it was time to come back. Time to try and... Find where she came from. She had to do something. Otherwise, she was going to be stuck in this endless loop. Dead-end jobs, crappy apartments. Nothing but barely making ends meet forever.
She supposed that was life for some people. For a lot of people.
But she’d hit the end of it. She’d had her birth certificate in a folder with all her legal documents—all gifted to her by the great state of Oregon on her eighteenth birthday when she’d been turfed out into the real world—and it had simply been sitting there.
Her every connection printed on a black-and-white document, as flat and dead as the paper itself.
Annie Tate was listed as her mother. And under father, a name McKenna had never even heard before. Henry Dalon.
Searches for him had turned up nothing promising.
While working as a waitress, McKenna had ended up having a conversation with a customer about a website that allowed free searches for public records. And McKenna had gone searching. She’d started with her father’s name, and then switched tactics.
She’d searched her own, and discovered not the printed, digitized version of her birth certificate but a scanned version of the original. Where handwritten down in the bottom corner, and smudged, was a name that looked a lot more like Henry Dalton.
Apparently, she’d learned after calling the records office, misspellings on records were common enough. Especially when no one had requested the documents, or done any checking on them. Seeing as Annie Tate had surrendered her parenting rights when McKenna was two, it didn’t shock her that her mother had never done her due diligence making sure everything on McKenna’s birth certificate looked right.
From there, McKenna had printed off the certificate and folded it up in her backpack, a piece to the puzzle of her life she was actively trying to put together.
She’d started searching for him after that.
Annie Tate, with her common first and last name, was impossible to track down, and anyway, McKenna already knew she didn’t want to know her.
There were a few Henry Daltons, but one in particular that was in the right geographical location to be a likely candidate. Henry “Hank” Dalton.
He’d had been all over her searches. A famous rodeo rider with three sons. Three sons who were McKenna’s half brothers, most likely.
Caleb, Jacob and Gabe.
Brothers. Family.
In Gold Valley.
But she had to figure it all out. She had to get the scope of things. The lay of the land.
She watched as the man took his phone out of his pocket, and the screen lit up.
“Come with me,” he said.
Panic fluttered around in her breast like a caged bird. “Are you calling the police?”
“No,” he said, his thumb swiping over the screen a few times. “I’m taking you to my brother’s house.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s food there,” he said simply.
She scrambled to her feet, her stomach growling. She realized that she had only eaten a couple of times in the past three days. And trail mix and granola bars could only get you so far. They weren’t...food food.
“Why do you want to feed me?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said. “But you’re harmless.”
She huffed. “I’m not harmless.”
“Really?”
“I have a pocket knife. I can cut you up.”
“Right. Anyway. Harmless. And probably hungry.”
“And you care?” This offer of food and his lack of...calling the cops on her had all her defenses up. People weren’t just...nice.
It made her feel compelled to push. To push him away. To push him to get down to what his deal actually was.
She didn’t trust people. She didn’t trust anyone.
