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Her people.

Then Mac flashed through her mind, now number one among her people. She’d barely seen him all week. He’d been out on a bodyguard detail since Wednesday, only popping into the office once while she was at lunch and again to drop off paperwork after she’d already gone home. She knew that because she did the schedules.

She also knew it had absolutely nothing to do with what happened in the parking lot after pizza Tuesday night.

Probably.

You were paying attention? To me?

Four days, and she could still hear exactly how he’d said it.

She’d spent an embarrassing amount of time wondering whether she’d pushed too hard about Sand Wash. Mac had laughed before they parted. He hadn’t been angry. Still, she’d seen his shoulders tighten the instant she mentioned the heat.

Maybe she should have kept her mouth shut and not brought up his susceptibility. Or maybe adults were allowed to care whether their friends cooked themselves in the desert.

Friends.

There was that word again.

“There you are,” Arden called from the shaded portion of the patio, distracting Jodie before she could start dissecting the way he’d looked at her mouth, too.

A collection of folding tables had turned the patio into command central. Blueprints, graph paper, clipboards, water bottles, and three measuring tapes covered one end. The other held enough food for a church picnic—crockpots, foil pans, salads, sandwich trays, chips, cookies, and coolers packed underneath. Nobody had been stupid enough to expect the woman pregnant with twins to feed twenty people, even if she insisted on giving it a go.

Arden sat at the center of it all with her feet propped on another chair. Maren was beside her with a clipboard, and Rochelle was helping Ellie arrange food while Star toddled between the chairs carrying a wooden spoon like a scepter. April and Wren had claimed the deepest shade, Frankie had baby Danny strapped against her chest, and Sandra, Rochelle’s younger sister, stood near the edge of the patio with a camera in one hand, the way she had at every gathering since she’d started her BFA in photography. More dogs than Jodie could count crossed the yard, obviously overseeing operations for their less-intelligent humans.

Juni and Kevin were in the yard filling Camo’s bowl straight from a hose. Kevin held the hose while Juni crouched beside the dog, who was now leaning with his entire body weight against her. Jodie’s eyes teared up at the sight of the girl, and the dog who would give everything he had to protect her the way he’d protected her father. She quickly blinked them away.

When Camo tried to drink directly from the stream, Kevin calmly lowered the pressure rather than soaking all three of them. Jodie smiled. Just a kid and already more sensible than half the adults on the property.

Arden pointed at the empty chair beside her. “Sit.”

“My ankle feels fine. Great, even.”

“Fabulous. Your organizational superpowers are needed here, though.” She pointed at the chair again.

Jodie eyed the men working across the yard. “I can carry things.”

“You can carry a clipboard.”

Jodie turned her stare on Arden and narrowed her gaze. “Rude.”

“I’ll tell your doctor on you,” Arden scolded.

“My doctor specifically did not tell me I couldn’t carry lumber.” Jodie folded her arms.

“Oh, yeah? Well then I guess mine told me not to kill anybody, which I will do to you if you hurt yourself hauling anything on that ankle.”

“Wow. Pregnancy’s really agreeing with you.” Jodie laughed and dropped into the chair. “Fine. I’ll sit here. For now.”

She looked over the site plan on the table beside her chair, and within five minutes her initial irritation at being helpless disappeared, replaced by irritation from a different source.

Clipped to the top of the plan was the printout she’d made Friday afternoon. Six-foot fences. Four hundred square feet per animal. Poles, pipe, or heavy plank—no wire, nothing standing on T-posts alone. Shelter appropriate to the climate, which in Colorado meant a roof and at least two walls. Every line of it had to be built, standing, and passed by an inspector before anyone would let Arden put a bid on a single horse coming out of Sand Wash.

Somebody had moved the proposed quarantine pen thirty feet north, for one thing. The hydrant Colin was tapping off the main line had to feed the quarantine pen and the holding pens on separate runs so nothing shared a trough. Two material deliveries were due before noon. And the same rented post-hole auger had been assigned to two different crews for the same two hours—in Kyle’s handwriting, she noted.

“Bear,” Jodie called.

He looked over from where he and Kyle were measuring.