“I think someone was snooping around the property,” Eli said to anyone at the table who would listen.
Sam and Boone both looked up from their sorry excuses for scarves, and he took their identical wide-eyed stares as proof of their envy at only his second attempt at knitting stripes.
“You’re jealous, right?” he added. “That I’m this good on only my second Saturday?”
“You know what?” Sam responded. “I don’t think I give as much of a shit about your snooping issue as I thought.” He turned his gaze back to his own pile of yarn.
Boone laughed. “Who knew you had such a competitive streak?” he replied. “And I’ll ask about the snooping while Callahan pouts.”
“I’m not pouting,” Sam grumbled.
He was totally pouting.
“I don’t know,” Eli continued. “Last Sunday, I woke up to Lucy staring at me through my bedroom window, and I always make sure the coop is locked at night.”
“I’m not entirely convinced there isn’t some sort of sorcery at play with that hen,” Sam added, still grumbling.
“Jenna’s not a witch,” Colt chimed in. “At least not in the sense you’re thinking. I can attest to Lucy’s abilities and assure you they are hers and hers alone.”
Eli chuckled, aware now that this was a common—albeit good-natured—argument between Colt and Sam.
“Yeah, but even if you believe she’s psychic, Lucy can’t unlock a coop with those powers or abilities or whatever, can she?” Eli was only half kidding.
“No,” Colt continued. “Last I checked, she wasn’t letting herself in and out of the coop.”
“Okay, but there’s something else.”
Eli sighed and set his needles on the table. The rest of the men did the same—even Sam—and gave him their full attention.
“Later the same morning, I got a call about a potential permanent placement for Midnight, someone who happened to be in town and wanted to see if we could meet.”
Boone shrugged. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Eli nodded absently. “It was… I mean it is. We met at that diner by the interstate.”
“The one with the burnt out N in the sign?” Colt asked.
“That’s the one,” Eli replied. “He was a young guy—”
“So not your age,” Boone interrupted with a grin. When Eli didn’t smile back, his brother at least had the decency to look chagrined.
“Last name was Doyle. He was in this nice suit, had the papers all drawn up, and I don’t know… It felt too quick. I hadn’t even put my feelers out yet about placing her, so how’d the guy know I had her?”
“You’re the only veterinarian for miles,” Sam reminded him. “Any one of your clients could have passed on the news about Midnight.”
Eli crossed his arms and leaned back against his chair. “He said his buyer didn’t care about her lost passport or her injury as long as she was riding like she used to again.” He paused. “That like she used to set off a warning bell. So I took the papers home and asked for time to look them over. And this morning, when I left to come here and Beth headed out to ride, the sensor on Midnight’s door was loose.”
His pulse raced. The other men stared at him.
It was Fury all over again. She’d been smart enough to outrun her would-be captors, but the storm coupled with her fear had proven to be a lethal combination, for the mare and for Tess.
“Eli…” Boone began gently, and Eli abruptly pushed back from the table and stood.
“Don’t, Boone,” he warned.
“Don’t what?” his brother asked, holding up his hands.
“Give me a little credit, will you?” Eli told him. “I don’t need you to tell me that I’m looking at the situation through an already warped lens. I’m not just basing this on a gut feeling. I know what I saw, and I don’t think Midnight or Cirrus or Beth are safe.”
“So you left them all on the property and came here?” Sam asked, though Eli could tell he was starting to put it all together. And when Sam sighed, Eli knew he already had. “They’re all at my place, aren’t they?”
Eli gave his friend a crooked grin.
“Cirrus is at your ranch, but Beth wouldn’t leave Midnight. She’s tied up in your backyard. The mare…not Beth.”
Boone slid his own chair from the table and stood, clapping his hands together. “I guess that settles it,” he announced.
“Settles what?” Eli wasn’t sure he wanted to know where this was going because obviously his brother thought this was all in his head, and Sam now had a random horse on his property, and Eli realized he was spewing his worry about the horse in question, and holy shit… What if Boone was right? What if he was regressing back into that loop of Fury and Tess and not being able to save either one of them?
“We’re cutting this session early so we can up the security on the barn,” Boone told him.
And without one word of protest, the rest of them started packing up their knitting gear and assigning one another tasks.
“We got an extra baby monitor as a gift when Nolan was born,” Sam said. “It’s not even open. It might say Hello Baby on it or something like that, but it’s one hell of a security camera. Even has night vision. We can set it up right inside the barn.”
“Carter’s on call at the station,” Colt said. “But I bet he’s got a ladder we can borrow to install that puppy high enough that no one would notice it.”
“Are she and Cirrus chipped yet?” Sam asked.
Eli scrubbed a hand across his jaw. In all the craziness of letting not just one but two horses back onto the property, he hadn’t thought far enough into the future of them staying on the property and needing to chip them. Usually that was a decision made by the owner.
“Shit,” he mumbled.
“He was supposed to chip Cirrus a few weeks ago, but then Trudy came in with Frederick,” Boone tossed out in his brother’s defense.
“I should have rescheduled you,” Eli admitted.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sam told them. “Ben’s on the property. He’s trained in the procedure and has chipped every stallion and mare in our barn. He can take care of Cirrus.”
And Eli would take care of Midnight when they brought her home tonight…or back to Eli’s property. Her temporary home.
He cleared his throat. “Thanks, everyone. I—just thanks.”
They started filing out of the still empty bookstore café and down the stairs, but Eli grabbed his brother’s arm once Sam and Colt were out of earshot.
“You think I’m crazy, right?” Eli asked him.
Boone shrugged. “I think you give a shit about Cirrus and Midnight…and Beth.”
Eli nodded. “And you think I’m losing my shit, right?”
Boone clapped his brother on the shoulder. “If you believe something’s up, then I believe something’s up, okay?”
Eli’s chest tightened, and he nodded. He didn’t know how to navigate this, his younger brother taking care of him when for all intents and purposes, Eli had been a father figure to Boone since his younger brother’s teens.
He tried to form the words, to thank Boone for what Eli never knew he needed from his brother, but nothing came out of his mouth.
“I know,” Boone told him instead. “I know.”
A few hours later, not one but two night-vision baby monitor cameras were installed, the sensors on Midnight’s stall door were tightened (with Eli conceding that normal wear and tear could have been the culprit), and Cirrus was chipped and surprisingly happy with the change of scenery. According to Ben, he’d even taken a liking to his horse, Loki, and the two were currently grazing on the Meadow Valley Ranch property.
So Eli, Sam, Boone, and Colt finished off the job sitting on the arena fence, each with a bottle of beer in hand.
“It’s five o’clock somewhere, right?” Sam declared, raising his bottle.
“We earned it,” Boone added. “Baby monitors are no joke.”
“Not when you mount them fifteen feet in the air with a ten-foot power cord,” Eli admitted.
“Not a fan of tall ladders, boys.” Colt took a healthy swig from his bottle. “Not a fan.”
Maybe Eli had gotten bent out of shape for nothing, but he wasn’t complaining about this—the four of them baking in the midday heat, cold brews in their hands. For years, he felt like he’d been crawling through a fog. But somehow, when he wasn’t really looking, the clouds broke and who knew? There was a goddamn sun after all.
They were only a few sips in when Colt’s phone chirped with a text.
“Shit,” he hissed. “Jenna’s car won’t start, and we need to get the girls to their dance class in Quincy.”
Boone’s phone went off next, but his sounded more like an alarm. “Dammit!” he added. “Casey has a client in fifteen minutes. Daddy duty starts now.”
Eli turned to face Sam, who had his head tilted toward the sun as he downed several sips of his beer.
“What?” he finally asked, rubbing his forearm across his mouth.
Eli shrugged. “Just waiting for you to get your bat signal.”
Sam laughed. “Why do you think I’m downing this thing so fast?” He shook his almost empty bottle. “Nolan’s napping, and Delaney is ovulating. Gotta head home to try for baby number two. Not sure if I’m ready for another newborn in the house, but the trying part is pretty enjoyable.” He winked at Eli. “Might want to come by to pick up your mare and your girl.”
Eli laughed. It all felt so normal. So perfect. So what his life was supposed to be.
His mare.
His girl.
None of it made any sense, yet at the same time, it made the most sense.
If he kept Midnight, did that mean Beth might stay too?
“I’m right behind you, Callahan.” He hopped off the fence and grabbed each man’s bottle, one by one, waiting until they each drained their respective brews down to the last drop. “Let me just get these in the recycle bin, and I’ll be right over.”
The four of them dispersed, and he brought the bottles inside, rinsed them out, and then headed toward the large bin behind the chicken coop. But he stopped short at the coop entrance, dropping the bottles into the grass.
The sliding lock to the coop door wasn’t just loose. It had been completely pried off the wooden door. The chicks were still in their brooder, but he found several of Jenna’s hens strutting around the fenced-in yard, Lucy included.
One by one, he snatched them up, carrying each like a football back into the coop, trying at the same time to account for them all. But for every two hens he brought back inside, one would escape again because there was no lock on the door.
Sam was going to wonder where he was. Worse, Sam was going to want to kick his ass if he missed out on trying for a baby because Eli didn’t make it back on time. And while Eli had never really come to blows with anyone before, he didn’t want his first time to be with a buddy who boxed for fun.
Eli finally had the brilliant idea to use the recycling bin as a barricade, and chasing down only three more hens, he finally had everyone inside. Only once he was inside his truck, the adrenaline waning, did he realize that he hadn’t been making something out of nothing.
Someone was nosing around his property, his animals.
It might have been déjà vu, but it was also real as hell, and Eli wasn’t going to let shit go down again the way it had before.