Page 60 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

I go back to Ryker’s ambulance. The ER doctor has arrived—a tired man in his fifties with glasses and a coat over his scrubs. He takes one look at the cracked cast and says, “You used my cast as a weapon,” in the tone of someone personally offended by the concept.

“It was the available equipment,” Ryker says.

“It was a medical device designed to immobilize a fracture, not a blunt instrument.”

“It performed both functions admirably.”

The doctor cuts the cast off with a handheld saw, muttering about patients who treat their bodies like rental cars. The arm underneath is swollen and discolored. When he palpates the fracture sites Ryker’s face goes white and his jaw locks.

“The original fractures have been displaced,” the doctor says. “You need surgery. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now. And if you tell me you have something more important to do, I’m going to sedate you and transport you myself.”

Ryker looks at me. The look is a question. Can you be without me for the time it takes to fix the arm I broke saving you?

“Go,” I say. “I’ll be here when you wake up. I’ll be in the chair beside your bed—which is a terrible chair, because all hospital chairs are terrible—and I’ll be sitting in it staring at the ceiling and thinking about you. Which, as you once told me, are very different activities from sleeping.”

He almost smiles. The bruise above his eye makes the expression lopsided and wholly his.

“I’ve got you,” he says.

“I know,” I say. “I’ve always known.”

They take him to the hospital. I sit on the tailgate of an ambulance with the shock blanket around my shoulders and the dawn coming in gray and gold over the mountains. The same mountains that tried to kill me. The same sky that was heavy for eight days before the storm broke and the stars came out.

The team gathers without planning to.

Jax appears first, leaning against the ambulance beside me with a cup of coffee. The hawk-gaze is relaxed for the first time since I’ve known him. The tension has left his shoulders. The mission is complete. He doesn’t speak. He just stands there, present in the way men like him are present—without performance, with the simple fact of a body occupying space beside another body.

Kane comes next. He sits on the bumper, opens his laptop, and starts typing. His version of decompression is documentation—turning chaos into ordered records.

Brock brings breakfast. He appears with a brown paper bag containing four gas-station breakfast burritos and a bottle of orange juice. He tosses one to Jax, sets one beside Kane’s laptop, and hands one to me with a grin.

“Is this the team breakfast tradition?” I ask.

“This is the Brock-went-to-the-only-place-open-at-five-AM tradition,” he says. “The real team breakfast involves Mason’s girl’s peach cobbler and requires a federal holiday.”

“Ryker mentioned the cobbler.”

“Ryker ate the entire cobbler. Fourth of July cookout. In front of Riley and God and everybody. Mason’s never forgiven him. It’s been a source of professional tension for months.”

I eat the burrito. It’s terrible in the specific way gas-station breakfast burritos are terrible—lukewarm, oversalted, the tortilla slightly chewy. It’s also the best thing I’ve eaten since the elk steak in the cabin, because the best food is always the food that arrives after the worst night.

The sun rises over the mountains. Someone turns off the warehouse floodlights and the building returns to its anonymous industrial shape—just another corrugated metal structure at the end of a dead-end road. You’d drive past it without a second glance.

But I’ll know. Sara will know. The four other women whose names I learned while teaching them to break zip ties will know. We’ll carry the knowledge the way we carry everything else. Not lightly. But carried. And the carrying will get easier. Not lighter. Easier. Because some things don’t get lighter. They just become things you can hold without falling.

I finish the burrito. I drink the orange juice. I sit on the tailgate beside three men who followed their teammate into a building at two in the morning because the woman he loved was inside.

The sun warms my face. The mountains hold the valley. Somewhere in a hospital in Bridger a man with a re-broken arm is being wheeled into surgery, and I know he’s thinking about a greenhouse that hasn’t been built yet.

I know because I’m thinking about it too.

The greenhouse. The herbs. The workshop with the seedling trays and the grow lights and the hand-lettered sign above the door. The life I described with shaking hands at a kitchen counter during a blizzard while a man listened with his whole body and said, “You should do it,” and meant it.

My eyes slip shut. The sun is warm. The mountains are quiet.

And for the first time since a man with evil eyes sat at my counter and ordered cherry pie, the future feels larger than the past.

Larger, and warmer, and full of light.