Page 2 of Savage Rancher
He shakes his head, wiping the counter. “Em, you stay away from Eli Turner. Those Turners are bad news.”
Don’t I know it.
I turn around on my barstool. Neon from the sign outside bleeds red across the worn wooden bar. It’s busy, the after-work crowd rowdy with their liquid dinner. I check the time.
8:56 p.m. Eli Turner will be here in four minutes.
My stomach twists, and I hold the bottle in my hand like it’s a lifeline.
Four minutes to figure out how to tell a predator to leave me alone. Four minutes to find the words that will make him understand I'm not selling the land my dad left me. That I'm not backing down. That he can't have what's mine.
The problem is, I don't know if words will be enough.
Eli Turner doesn't listen to words. He listens to power, and I don't have any. Not really. When my dad died in a car accident four weeks ago, he left me the ranch, but he also left me alone. Ihave no one to call when Eli shows up at my door with that smile that makes my skin crawl.
I've called Sheriff Garrett twice. Both times, he said there's nothing he can do without an incident.
Well, tonight there's going to be an incident.
I just don't know what kind, or if I’ll be walking away from it intact.
3
JAKE
Turner’s late.
But I know he’ll be here. The way he looked at Emma earlier, standing on her porch? The not-so-veiled threat of what he’d do if she didn’t show up?
Yeah, he was looking forward to intimidating her some more. A public place wouldn’t stop him. Most people in Iron Ridge seem to turn a blind eye to what Turner and his older brother, Cole, do. Eli Turner is the kind of man who thinks he has a big, powerful dick and, therefore, can do whatever the fuck he wants.
I’m not most people, and his dick is nowhere near as big and powerful as mine.
I’ve been in some bad situations over the years, but I’ve never felt my heart stop the way it did a few hours ago when I checked the alert from the cameras I’d set up on the Circle H and saw Emma opening the door to him. My blood froze, watching him box her in against the house, knowing I wouldn’t get there in time to intervene. I watched him grab her tits and heard his filthy mouth running off about what he would do to her if she didn’t give him what he wanted—her land and her body.
Fortunately, Jim Blocker, her foreman and my old boss, answered his phone when I called. Blocker has always been agood guy—the only guy who backed me up when I was a kid. He didn’t question how I knew Emma was in trouble. He just moved.
He got there in time to interrupt.
What did I do? I clutched my phone and watched my woman—goddamn beautiful even in the grainy video—stand proud and pretend she wasn’t scared. The possessive rage that flooded me was clinical and controlled—and absolutely lethal.
Her eyes? Destroyed me.
Even from the small screen of my phone, I could see them—those same green eyes that had haunted me through eighteen years of deployments, firefights, and missions I barely survived. Eyes that I'd seen in my sleep every single night since I was run out of this town by her father.
The only thing in her eyes earlier was fear.
I wanted to kiss her until lust replaced her fear. I wanted to fill her mind with thoughts of me—to remind her of who we were and show her who we will be again. I sat in my room, my hands gripping the edge of my bed, my breathing controlled and steady, wondering two things: Has Turner been harassing her like this since her father died a month ago? And why hasn’t she come to me for help in the past week since I’d moved back?
Then I did the only thing I could do. I made a plan to handle the situation.
Turner made the worst mistake of his life. I'd killed men for less. I'd ended lives for threats that were nowhere near as explicit. Not nearly as personal.
And Emma?—
Christ, Emma is as personal as you can get. Once upon a time, she'd looked at me with eyes full of love and trust and hope. I’d been forced to walk away back then.
Not walking away again.
