Lone Wolf Cowboy Read online

  She had been running with the wrong crowd. Being wild.

  But if there had been any knowledge or subtext to her interaction with Ellie, Vanessa hadn’t sensed it. And she usually did. When people knew her background, they often spoke to her as if she was fragile. Perhaps mentally incapacitated. And if not that, then simply with a slight curl to their lip and a bit of disdain. Ellie had given her none of that, and Vanessa was grateful for it.

  If she could just find enough people to surround herself with on a daily basis who knew her only as she was now, things would be great.

  And if Jacob Dalton could just not remember her. That would be even better.

  Or, maybe, she wouldn’t end up having to deal with him at all.

  It was optimistic, but she could hope.

  That was the thing. No matter what, Vanessa Logan could always hope.

  It was the only reason she was still breathing now.

  So she would cling to it no matter what.

  She took a deep breath and walked back to her car, fishing a large duffel bag out of the back. It had everything in it she would need for overnight. That way, if she didn’t get around to unpacking the other couple of boxes she’d brought, she would be fine.

  She was feeling pretty exhausted, and mostly she felt ready to make herself a glass of lemonade and sit.

  That was the point of this new life. This new pace.

  That was the point of coming home.

  * * *

  JACOB DALTON WAS tired down to his bones. It had been a long-ass time since he’d done ranch work like he’d done today. But his brother Gabe was actively attempting to recruit him into a full-time capacity at the ranch, and somehow his sales pitch included working Jacob until his knuckles were bloodied.

  He sat down heavily at the table, a beer clutched tightly in his hand. “You’re a sadist,” he groaned, leaning back in his chair.

  “Hey, I got you to come out and drink. So I must’ve done something right,” Gabe said.

  His brother was in a good mood. He was in a good mood a lot lately, thanks to his recent engagement to Jamie Dodge, a little tomboy, hell-raiser cowgirl that Jacob would never have thought his brother would take an interest in. But it turned out he’d taken more than an interest in her. He had fallen in love with her.

  Nice for him, Jacob supposed.

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t going to turn down free beer.” Though he had beer up at his cabin, so it wasn’t like he couldn’t drink there. And anyway, he couldn’t drink to excess, because he didn’t have anyone to drive him home but himself. One beer and he was out. He could get back to the solitude of his cabin.

  “The place is really looking good,” his brother Caleb said, leaning back in his chair.

  Only eleven months younger than Jacob, Caleb was almost like a twin. Though things had been different since their friend Clint died in a helicopter accident. He had been a part of their band of brothers, he had grown up eating dinner at their house, fought fires with them. He had been such a hugely important part of their life. And something about losing him, about losing that piece, had made everything different.

  It didn’t help that he felt responsible for Clint’s death in a lot of ways. He and Caleb were the ones who had dragged their friend into the orientation for wildland firefighting. It was along the lines of what Jacob had done in between riding and the rodeo, back in the day. Since he had gotten work as an EMT right outside high school. And Caleb...Caleb had just been looking for a hit of something.

  He was close to his brother, or rather, he always had been, but something had changed when they became adults, and Caleb was difficult to read. He was friendlier than Jacob, had a readier smile and made conversation with people pretty easily. But if you paid attention, you would notice that it was light conversation. Easy. Nothing behind it all.

  “I do appreciate you picking up some work,” Gabe said. “This has been a pretty huge project.”

  “No kidding,” Jacob responded.

  The throb in his shoulder agreed.

  Caleb nodded. “I’ve been enjoying it.”

  Jacob suspected that his brother’s enjoyment had to do with the amount of time it allowed him to spend with Ellie, but he wasn’t going to say anything about that. For the simple fact that Caleb never said anything about it. He didn’t need to, though. He took care of her. As if it were his job, and Jacob didn’t think it had to do with guilt. And maybe it was just caring. Maybe Ellie was like a sister to him, and Caleb worried for her now that Clint was gone. But Jacob somehow doubted it.

  “I honestly never would have thought you’d get involved in opening up... Well, it’s a whole damn school,” Jacob said. His brother wasn’t a particularly caring or paternal type of person, at least not in Jacob’s mind. And yet he’d thrown himself into this with a passion. He had a feeling it was connected to the way that Gabe felt about horses, and the power that the land and the animals had to transform someone’s life.

  But still seemed surprising to him in a lot of ways.

  “It all started with McKenna,” Gabe said, referencing the half sister they’d found out about a couple of years ago. “I got to thinking about how different her life would have been if she’d had more help. And then especially thinking about Dad’s other sons. There’s all kinds of boys in that position, and we can’t go back in time and fix what’s broken. But we can go forward and make a place for those kids now.”

  “How is the half brother hunt going, by the way?” Caleb asked.

  “The same,” Gabe responded. “I know about West, and that’s it. I haven’t got names or locations for the others. West’s mother was completely uninterested in helping me with that.”

  Jacob essentially wanted nothing to do with this whole endeavor. As far as he was concerned, if the other children sired by Hank Dalton wanted to come forward, they would have done it sometime ago. He wasn’t under the impression that their parentage was a secret. Not from them.

  Jacob felt...well, deeply unsurprised that his father had more children other than just them. Other than just McKenna. Really, the appearance of McKenna had confirmed things he’d always suspected.

  And if he’d been careless once, with all the sleeping around he had done, it stood to reason he might have been careless twice. It turned out, it was more like four times.

  And so Gabe had made it a personal mission to track down Hank Dalton’s other sons to try to make things right.

  Jacob felt like he already had a surplus of siblings, but that was just his opinion.

  He wasn’t going to make a deal out of it, or argue with Gabe. Mostly because, as far as he was concerned, he could just do what he always did. He could go off and do his own thing. It wasn’t that difficult. Someday he might leave Gold Valley altogether. But as for now, his cabin up the side of the mountain served him well enough.

  He finished his beer and stood up, groaning a little bit. “I’m going to go and fall into bed now,” he said. “Especially if we have to do all that again tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have to,” Gabe said.

  That just made Jacob want to flip them off. Because Gabe knew that Jacob felt obligated to get involved in this venture and help. He wished he didn’t feel obligated. That was the problem.

  The baseline issue with being a Dalton. Their father had always been unreliable. Sending home a check, and rarely rolling in himself until it was good and convenient for him.

  The Dalton brothers had always picked up the slack for each other, banding together strong. And, however Jacob felt about life at the moment, his inclination was to support his brothers no matter what.

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  “Appreciated.”

  He raised his beer bottle, and Caleb did the same. Then he nodded and began to walk out.

  As soon as his foot hit the top step out the front door, he realized his brother was walking behind him.

  “Stay and drink,” he said to Caleb.

  “I will,” Caleb said.r />
  But Caleb stood there and looked at him. And there was something about that look on his brother’s face that reminded him of old times. Easy times. Hell, all their times had been easy for a while, and that had been by design.

  Jacob had learned a long time ago that if you didn’t talk about bad things, you didn’t have to deal with them. And he’d thrown himself into that hard during all his growing-up years. He and Caleb had been hell in cowboy boots. And inseparable at that.

  And now he could feel the distance between the two of them. And he didn’t know what to do about it. All he knew how to do was avoid it.

  He’d hidden his pain as a kid because no one had known what he’d been through. But with Clint... Well, everyone had known what had happened with Clint.

  And more to the point, it had dragged the other side of his carefree lifestyle out from the dark and shown the ugly side.

  Dark things didn’t go away because you didn’t talk about them. They just festered. And waited.

  And really, they were still there, not dealt with, not discussed. He was trying to change. Trying to be reliable and there for his brothers when they needed him. To never again be the one who let the world fall to pieces because of his own selfish stupidity.

  “How are things?” Jacob asked.

  Caleb looked shocked. “Um...me?”

  “Yes, you. We used to talk. We don’t really anymore.”

  They’d been best friends, the three of them: Jacob, Caleb and Clint. Losing Clint had changed it all.

  Caleb looked down, then back up. “Good.”

  “How’s Ellie?” he asked, his voice gruff.

  He felt guilty about Clint because of Ellie most of all. Because if he hadn’t wanted to stay in bed that day, sleep in and wrap himself around the woman in his bed... If he’d gone on that fire like he was supposed to, then Clint wouldn’t have been in that helicopter crash.

  “You see Ellie almost every day,” Caleb pointed out.

  “Yeah, but how is she?”

  Damn but he still didn’t like talking about the hard things.

  “Good,” Caleb said. “I mean, it’s been four years, man.”

  But they both knew that didn’t mean much of anything. Because they both felt the loss of Clint still, and how much more must his wife feel it? Every day that her daughter kept on growing without a father.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “How are you?” Caleb asked.

  “Getting on,” he said. “Hey, I’m doing this thing, right?”

  “The school?”

  “Yeah. I...I show up now,” he said, lifting a shoulder.

  God knew he’d spent years not doing that. Being the one who blew off family barbecues because he was hungover. Leaving texts from women he’d slept with unanswered.

  Because avoidance...avoidance had been his friend since he was ten years old. Ignore the problem and pretend it was never yours to deal with.

  It might not make it go away. It sure as hell couldn’t bring anyone back from the dead. But it made it so he never had to deal with it at all.

  “You didn’t cause the helicopter crash,” Caleb said.

  Jacob shifted. “No. But it happened. And you tell me...if it was supposed to be you, do you think you could just let it go? Do you think you’d ever quit thinking about it? Wondering?”

  Caleb shook his head. “No.” The answer was gruff. Thick.

  “Sometimes it helps me to spend some time alone.” His life was so different now than it had been when Clint died. He hadn’t spent a night alone, not in those days. He’d worked, partied and lived on his own terms. Now he needed that solitude sometimes to get his thoughts in order. Because he spent his days trying to figure out how to be better, and he found that took a hell of a lot of energy.

  “I worry it makes you think about it all a little too much.”

  “Well, I spent a lot of years not thinking at all. I kind of hope this is an improvement.”

  “It’s different,” Caleb said. “That’s for sure.”

  “Damn sure,” Jacob said.

  Caleb tipped his hat and walked back into the saloon, and Jacob began to walk toward his truck.

  He got inside and closed the door behind him, thankful for the silence.

  His conversation with Caleb replayed on a loop in his mind, and he tried to let it fade. But inevitably, he thought of the crash. Being at the crash site. Feeling frozen.

  Flashing back to another accident. Another death.

  Knowing that whatever happened with this one, he had to come out of it changed. Because last time he’d used it as an excuse. Live like you might die, because he’d been aware you could at any moment from the time he was a kid. And push all the bad things down because talking about it didn’t fix anything anyway.

  And that...that selfish crap he’d taken forward with him had been the reason Clint was on that helicopter in Jacob’s place.

  The reason Clint was dead.

  Because the crash had been so devastating there was no way to rush into the rescue. No way to fix it. Everyone on that helicopter was dead. And he’d known it the moment he’d watched it hit. He’d been there, and that was bad enough. He supposed he should just be grateful he hadn’t had Caleb’s job.

  Actually being the one to tell Ellie.

  He would never know how Caleb had found the strength to do that.

  He turned onto the gravel drive that would take him up to his house, the sound of the rocks beneath the tires creating white noise that filled up his brain and made it easier for him to think. Or not think, as the case may be.

  The sky was pink, casting a glow off the tops of the pines the road cut through. But off to the left he saw a cloud of billowing smoke that he knew meant one thing: fire.

  Well. Hell. He could radio in, but it might be better to just see what it was. He was trained, after all. There was a house over there, but it hadn’t been occupied for a long time. He hung a sharp left and saw a little house up ahead, with flames coming out of the chimney.

  Great. Someone had lit a fire without making sure the flue was cleared. The house itself looked like it was filling with smoke, and Jacob parked, springing into action.

  The front door opened, and a woman came out, smoke pouring out behind her.

  “Is there a hose?” he asked. “And an extinguisher?”

  She looked around, bewildered.

  “Is there a hose?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean, I think so.”

  “Dammit, woman,” he said. “You don’t know if your chimney is clear. You don’t know if you have a hose.”

  “I just moved in four hours ago,” she said.

  “Well, then, your landlords have something to answer for.”

  “Can you keep my house from burning down, please?”

  “Have you called anyone?” He grabbed the hose that was hooked up next to the porch and went straight into the house. The hose was for backup. He hoped he didn’t need it.

  “No,” she said. “I was just hoping I could figure out how to put it out myself.”

  “Lucky for you,” he said, “a fireman is already here.”

  He stuck the hose right next to the fireplace, and then walked over to the kitchen sink, and was relieved to find a fire extinguisher underneath. “Let’s start with this,” he said. He went over to the fireplace and looked up. The heat and sound from the fire burning up toward the top of the chimney was intense.

  “It’ll get worse for a second,” he said, opening up the draft stop to give him better access. Then he pushed the nozzle to the extinguisher into the chimney and directed the stream upward. It was easy, and it was handled in only a couple of minutes. And when he was confident that there were no sparks left, he straightened. “Next time, make sure your chimney is clear if you haven’t lit a fire in the fireplace before.”

  The woman was pretty. Glossy brown hair, a slender figure and lips that put a man in a sin-filled mood. And it had been a long time since Jacob had go
tten involved in any good sin.

  She also looked familiar. But he couldn’t place why.

  “I’ve never had a house with a fireplace. I didn’t know.”

  “That’s fine.” He looked around. “Hopefully nothing is damaged. It’s going to smell like smoke for a few days...”

  “Probably.” She looked up at him, and there was something that felt like an echo from the past in her distressed expression. She looked dazed but upset, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why those brown eyes caught something inside him and held on tight.

  Olivia Hollister. She looked like Olivia Hollister. But she wasn’t Olivia Hollister. The two women shared features, but they would never be confused for each other. It was strange because she was identical to Olivia on a surface level, and yet so apparently different too.

  Then she lowered her head, and when she looked back up at him, an image from the past matched itself up with her now.

  Him giving CPR. Praying that the woman would wake up.

  And then she’d opened her brown eyes, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

  The past faded away, and it was at that moment he realized that she knew who he was too.

  “You’re Jacob Dalton,” she said. “And here I thought I could avoid you for a little while longer.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHE HAD KNOWN that this would be a part of it. A part of coming home. It was unavoidable. She was going to see people she knew. That was how small towns worked. It was one reason why she had avoided coming back for so long. She had already stuck her toe into the shallow end of this particular pool when she had returned home for her sister’s wedding.

  But then, she had only dealt with her family. She had met her new brother-in-law. And no one had asked her any questions. Which was good. Because she hadn’t been prepared to answer them. Though she had a feeling that the lack of questioning had nothing to do with her sensibilities, and everything to do with the fact that her parents weren’t sure they were ready for what she might say.

  That was fine. She had worked out her sobriety on her own. Still, she supposed, working it out with other people was the next step. Working it out here. Not that she felt like her sobriety was in any danger, but she also knew she had to continue to treat it seriously. She did not know how her family would deal with the fact that she’d been sober a lot longer than just these past two years. They had just been so happy to find out that she was sober at the wedding that they hadn’t dug deeply about timelines. Once they did they would probably have questions. Wonder why she hadn’t come home sooner.