Page 7 of Savage Rancher
Frankly, just the fact that I can go home tonight and actually sleep instead of staying up with my dad’s old baseball clutched in my hands, waiting, jumping at every creak in the night, makes me want to throw my arms around him and sob in thanks.
Four weeks of feeling powerless while Eli threatened everything my father left me, him pressing his disgusting body against mine, his breath creeping on my skin as he told me accidents happen—like my daddy’s—and how I should sell the land before somethingunfortunateoccurs.
I lift my head. So no, I'm not scared of Jake Callahan.
I'm grateful.
And I'm something else too—something I haven't let myself feel in eighteen years.
I'mwanting.
9
JAKE
"Is he dead?" Emma asks, her voice hoarse and low. Her hands fist at her sides, and there's something in her posture—not fear, not horror. Something else.
It bugs the hell out of me that I can’t read it. "Yeah."
"Good."
The word punches through the night air like a gunshot.
She exhales, slow and deliberate, her gaze on mine—wide, stunned, processing. But there’s resolve too. Strength. Relief. And something darker that I’d never seen when I knew her before.
Years don’t change a person. It hones them into who they truly are.
Eighteen years. Eighteen fucking years since I've seen her in person, and here she is—standing in the gravel parking lot of a dive bar, a corpse behind me, with harsh neon lighting that should have made her look washed out.
It doesn't. It just highlights how goddamn beautiful she is.
At eighteen, she’d been all long legs and sharp edges with big green eyes, trying to hide how badly she wanted me from her father. Sneaking out to meet me. Letting me touch her, kiss her. Letting me fuck her—in the back of my truck, in the hayloft ofher dad's barn. In her bedroom. Coming apart under my hands with her teeth sunk into my shoulder to keep quiet. Listening to me, my plans for the future. Believing in me.
Who is thirty-six-year-old Emma?
I study her. The years look good on her. The softness of eighteen has been replaced by something sharper, more defined. Lines around her eyes now, a maturity that wasn’t there before. Her dark hair trails down her back, longer than it used to be. Her mouth is fuller than I remember.
I used to know what that mouth tasted like.
I’ve been imagining that mouth on me for more years than is probably healthy.
She's wearing jeans with boots caked in mud, like anyone in Iron Ridge, but on top she’s bundled in a green wool coat with the collar buttoned up high. I’ve kept tabs on her over the years, so I know she’s a successful wildlife photographer who’s in-demand. I know she was stationed in Chicago until four weeks ago when her father died, and that she’d been married to the same man for nine years, initiating the divorce a year ago.
But I don’t know the important things, like if she can love me again.
Honestly? I’m not sure I care, as long as she’s mine.
And for a second, I’m that randy boy again—the one who needs her bad, who can’t keep his hands off her, and doesn’t want to. Who wants to deserve her because she’s everything.
It’s by sheer force of will that I pull my head back into the operation.
"Emma." My voice comes out rougher than I intend as I step in front of her. I'm acutely aware of Turner's blood on the ground and the need to get him and his truck out of here. "You need to leave. Now."
She doesn't move. Her eyes drop back to Turner's corpse, and I watch her face, waiting for the fear, the panic, the scream.
It doesn't come.
Instead, she looks back at me, her green eyes the only light in my night. "He's been intimidating me since I moved back, showing up at my property and making threats disguised as offers, telling me what he'd do if I didn't sell.”
