Page 14 of Promised to the Cowboy
Gabriel looks shocked. “You gave up?”
I nod. “It was… time. I train for other people now.”
Gabriel looks at me when I say that. A long look that reads more than my words revealed.
His gaze falls to the crooked knuckle on my right ring finger.
“Roping accident,” I say. “Seventeen. Caught my finger instead of the horn and popped it clean out of the joint.” I wiggle it at him. “Set it myself. Ran the same day.”
“You set your own dislocated finger.”
“Nearest urgent care was an hour away, and I had a check coming. You learn.”
He looks caught between horrified and impressed and doesn’t quite manage to land on either. “That a brag or a confession?”
“Yes,” I reply.
He almost smiles, but I count it as a win.
I take another sip of coffee, watching two men unload fencing posts from the back of a flatbed. “They’re the scariest ranch hands I’ve ever seen.”
Gabriel follows my gaze.
The two men are built like brick walls. The younger one is maybe early thirties. He has a sleeve of faded military tattoos which disappear beneath his flannel and a beard that could probably stop a bullet. The older one looks to be late forties. He moves with the economy of someone who has spent years carrying too much weight on his back—nothing wasted, every post liftedand placed as though he decided where it belonged before he touched it.
A corner of Gabriel’s mouth lifts. “They’re not ranch hands. Not really.”
“Oh?” I glance at him.
“They’re part of the Veterans Program.”
“The what?”
He shifts on the tailgate. “My uncle Ben started it over at Havenridge years ago with Sheriff James Lucas. They’re both ex-military and saw too many good men come home carrying things they couldn’t put down. PTSD. Injuries. Losing the structure they’d had their whole adult lives.” He shrugs. “Some just needed somewhere to land.”
“So they built them one.”
He smiles faintly. “Pretty much.”
The tattooed man drops his end of a post deliberately, making the other one take the sudden weight.
The second man does not so much as stagger. He glares across the flatbed at him.
The tattooed man grins.
“Who are they?”
“The one trying to get himself murdered is Everett Hooper. Comms specialist. Everyone calls him Wire. Man can fix anything with a circuit board and a piece of gum.”
Gabriel nods toward the older man. “Donovan ‘Falcon’ Kirk. Reconnaissance. He sees things others miss.”
Right on cue, Falcon turns his head toward us. Not sharply. Just enough to make it clear he knew we were watching.
He lifts two fingers in greeting. Gabriel returns it. I raise my coffee.
Falcon’s attention moves over me once—not rude, not curious, simply registering a new person on the ranch—then he turns back to the truck.
“He doesn’t say much,” Gabriel adds.
