Page 189

Eight months later

Ethan knew his father’s ranch had burned.

When he returned from his deployment, he had listened to Hank describe the damage over the phone in the flat, practical voice men in their family used when the alternative was admitting a thing had gutted them. The barn, the outbuildings. House scorched but standing. Sanctuary animals evacuated in time, which was the most important thing to Hank.

None of it prepared Ethan for seeing sky where buildings had always been.

He slowed the truck. The place looked wrong.

Not just ruined. Wrong.

The geography of the property had changed. Trees he remembered as all leafed out in the summer were cut down to stumps, black as burned bones. Fresh lumber gleamed pale against older weathered wood where repairs had already begun. New fence posts marched along one pasture, too new to belong to the ranch Ethan carried around in his head.

He parked and shut off the engine. For several seconds, he stayed behind the wheel with both hands resting on it.

Home.

The word didn’t fit what he was looking at.

He had spent years assuming the ranch would always be here. His father would be here. The sanctuary would keep doing its good work whether Ethan was deployed, training, overseas, Stateside, reenlisting.

But the tone in his father’s voice the last few times he’d spoken with Ethan changed everything as surely as the fire had changed the landscape.

For the first time Hank sounded tired. Old. Fragile.

Ethan didn’t re-up. He came home instead.

Such as it was.

Through his open window, Ethan noticed the ranch still smelled faintly burned. Anger seethed. Hank had downplayed the damage. He’d called it “just one of those things” as if a bad windstorm had blown off a few shingles.

I knew he needed me, but the stubborn old fool was too proud to ask.

So Ethan had taken it upon himself to end his military career to come home and help. But it looked like he’d already gotten help, judging by the new wood and fence posts. The barn was still in ruins, though.

As Ethan studied it, a woman with a camera walked around from behind one of the partially standing walls.

Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my father’s land?

She hadn’t seen him. She was too busy angling the camera lens toward the collapsed side of the barn. Her hair lifted in the breeze and caught against one shoulder. She wore a faded shirt with the sleeves pushed up, work boots, and jeans that hugged some mighty fine curves.

But she didn’t belong here, poking around, taking photos of his father’s loss.

He opened the truck’s door and started toward her. By the time she noticed him, he had already decided she was probably some species of influencer who had discovered tragedy photographed well against golden-hour light.

Startled, she looked up and lowered her camera.

The woman was gorgeous.

Dammit.

She looked at him with open curiosity, not embarrassment, which irritated him more than it should have.

Before he could ask her what the hell she was doing here, she said, “Either you are related to Hank, or you are Hank and I need to ask you where you found the Fountain of Youth.”

Ethan stopped dead in his tracks. “You know my father?”

Her eyebrows rose. “Wait. You're his son?”