Page 14 of The Wrangler and the Tenderfoot

I unbuckled the saddle, set it on the rack, and ignored both of them. Buck grinned, his sun-bleached teeth catching the only thing in the barn whiter than his hair. “That’s what I like about you, Reid. Man of mystery.”

“I’m a man of efficiency,” I said, patting Ghost’s neck.

I made quick work of the tack, then headed for the house. As I walked the shaded path, I tried to file away what I’d learned that morning. Jennie Cardin wasn’t a geologist. Or, if she was, she’d missed some basic training. When I brought her to the fossil, she’d looked at it with blank indifference, not the reverence it deserved. That stuck with me. Most people faked their expertise, but she didn’t even try. Her notes were sharp, her eyes sharper, but her reactions didn’t fit the profile. She watched the world like a cop, not a scientist. The way she held her phone, scanned each fence line, never let her right hand drift far from her holster, none of it was accidental.

The kitchen was cool and quiet, the hum of the fridge the only sign of electricity in the old house. Calder was at the end of the table, arms crossed, head bent over a tablet, looking at some spreadsheet. He looked up as I walked in. “Well?” he asked.

“She’s smart,” I said. “Not a geologist, though.”

He grunted. “Did she say what she was looking for?”

I shook my head. “No, but she’s casing the land. She hit the ridges, the water cut, the old firebreak. Didn’t touch the buildings, just the borders.”

Calder was quiet, the fan over his head making his hair dance. “You think she’s law?”

“Maybe ex,” I said. “She doesn’t act like a Fed, but she’s still running their script.”

He tapped the ledger, not looking at me. “If she’s law, she’s here for us.”

“I don’t think she knows what we are,” I said. “Not yet.”

“You sure?” The edge in his voice was mild, but there.

I considered it. Thought about how the whole time, my wolf had been clocking her every step, mapping her location, predicting when she’d zig and when she’d zag. Hunting wasn’t the right word. Scouting, maybe. Keeping her close, just in case.

“She’s got instincts,” I said. “But she’s not gunning for us. I think she’s more curious than anything.”

Calder relaxed, just a little. “That’s worse. Curious people get themselves killed, or worse, they get us killed.”

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” I said.

He nodded. “Good. But don’t let her inside. Not unless you’re willing to gut her if it goes bad. If she’s a problem, we need to know sooner rather than later. Reid, you’re point. Anything changes, you bring it straight to me.”

I slipped outside, past the glow of the porch light. The cicadas were at it again, loud enough to drown out anything short of a rifle shot. I walked the yard, let the humidity stick my shirt to my back, and tried to shake off the sense that something was coming. Not a threat, exactly. Just a shift.

In all my years running with this pack, I’d never felt my wolf track a person the way it tracked her. It wasn’t hunger, or even the hunt. It was a compass. The old stories didn’t talk about this. I didn’t know if anyone’s did.

I stood at the edge of the yard and watched the house pulse with light and life. Maybe this was fate. Just the slow, inescapable draw of something I couldn’t name. I let it pull me for a while, then turned and walked back inside. If anyone noticed the change in me, they didn’t say a thing.

Chapter 5: Jennie

The Coleman house could have doubled as a prison if a person overlooked the windows and ignored the history. I'd never seen a residence with more deadbolts, crossbars, or locks installed at random on interior doors. Dinner was at eight sharp. I turned up on time.

Wyatt found me right before I walked into the dining room. “You made it,” he said, with the air of a man expecting me to fall flat on my face at some point, preferably soon. He arrived trailed by the scent of a cologne that smelled incredibly cheap. He was dressed for a corporate retreat, crisp white shirt, cuffs unbuttoned but rolled exactly three turns, slim-fit slacks, boots so shiny I could see the ceiling fan reflected in them. If he’d done a single hour’s work on the ranch in the past decade, I’d eat my boots.

I smiled the way I do when a bouncer tells me my shoes are almost club-appropriate. “I am staying just upstairs, after all.”

He scanned me head to toe. Yuck. “You’re wearing black,” he said.

“It hides stains,” I replied.

“Ah,” Wyatt said, and nodded as though he had any idea what it meant to work in the field.

He motioned me down the hallway toward the dining room. The walls were hung with oil portraits of men in hats and women in pearls, all with the same hawkish cheekbones and hungry eyes. The house was curated within an inch of its life, every old photograph, every trophy, even the cracks in the baseboards felt arranged, a diorama of generational eccentricity. We passed a door that was padlocked, and then a staircase with its bottom three steps cordoned off by velvet rope, and I debated whether to ask or file it under “rich and/or weird people shit.”

“Do you ride?” Wyatt asked as though he hadn’t gone out with me and left me to the clutches of a wild boar and wolf. That was how he dealt with being a coward, apparently. Pretending it never happened.

“I grew up in Texas,” I said. “Everyone rides, or at least enough to fake it.” Even though my mom hadn’t been big on outdoorsy stuff, we’d had riding lessons through the local church, day camps, the whole nine yards. I could stay on a horse, mostly.