Hunter Moon (Lupine Moon Series) (3 page)

I made my way back over to Brad’s place and hooked up my trailer again, this time laden with alfalfa. When I got back in my truck, I couldn’t help but think that the dispute over Grandpa’s will wouldn’t be settled easily. Nothing in my life had ever been this easy. It made me nervous.

I took my time on the way home up road 400. My rusty 1988 Dodge one ton worked harder with the weight of the alfalfa. The grass was still golden from the summer heat, the rains hadn’t started yet and it’d be a few more months until the rolling hills greened up again. The grass was interrupted by randomly dispersed oaks that grew in frequency the higher I climbed in elevation.. I loved these hills.

My ranch was a piece of an old granite quarry, and parts of the ravine that ran through it still had chunks of rock cut out of the side. Peppered with scrub oaks, manzanitas, and bull pines, it was beautiful to me. When I got close to my land, I spotted some horses out to pasture and herds of Angus and Herefords grazing on the hills. I could breathe here.

What would I do if it was all taken away?
It was the only constant thing in my life; my grandpa’s ranch,
my
ranch. What would happen if it was gone? I supposed I could get a job working for another ranch or maybe train horses, but there wasn’t much out there for a girl who only had a high school education. Not only that, I’d be homeless. Everything I owned was in the fifteen hundred square foot trailer on the property, and I doubted my cousins would be magnanimous enough to let me continue on living there. At first I’d hoped my mother and aunt would speak up in defense of me, since they both knew it was Grandpa’s wish to have me continue running cattle on the ranch, but my mother couldn’t be prevailed upon to leave her bottle of vodka, and my aunt was swayed by her children.

I still didn’t understand how my grandpa could have raised me so well and screwed up so badly with his own two daughters. He’d never volunteered information about how my mom had turned to booze and men and my aunt to the mood-stabilizing medication, and I hadn’t asked. Maybe I would inherit the insanity of the previous generation.
Oh hell, I hope that ball wasn’t rolling at me.
It seemed I was already going crazy if I saw things like a wolf in California.

 I thought about the night before. I couldn’t have been the only person to have seen the wolf in the area. I decided after I unloaded the trailer to swing by the store and say hi to Jesse. She might have overheard any of the old men saying something about seeing a wolf around town. It was an unusual enough occurrence to have those old-timers salivating over the weeks of gossip and hearsay it’d provide.

Jesse was my best friend. She and I had bonded over stale pretzels in the bar our mothers lived in when we were little girls. She hadn’t been rescued from out of that life like I had, but she managed to survive by practically living with my grandpa and me when her mother brought strange men home night after night, and we endured. She married her high school sweetheart the summer after graduation and had since worked at the general store. Her husband was a kindhearted boy who was also the deputy sheriff. He was my age, but I still thought of him as the boy who fell in love with Jesse in junior high.

I’m happy for Jesse
.
I just wished I could have settled down with a nice man like she had and be content.
A nice,
hot
man,
I thought wistfully. Someone exciting, different. But I lived in a small town with men I’d known since they were in diapers, which made the phrase ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ really start to apply. I hadn’t had a boyfriend since Dawson Smith in sixth grade. I’d slapped him when he tried to kiss me, and that pretty much ended things between us. We still weren’t on speaking terms.

I pulled the trailer down my driveway and over to my covered barn. Reggie, my blue merle Australian shepherd ran over to my truck. He was getting old and a little arthritic in the cold months, but I loved him like family.
Heck, he was my family.

“Who said I don’t have a boy to come home to, huh Reg? Did you miss me?” He just gave me a doggie grin and jumped in the back of my truck.

“I guess so.” I laughed. I didn’t think there would be any rain soon so I left the truck and trailer where they were to tackle another day. I wasn’t up to the exhausting task of unloading all of the alfalfa at the moment. Over fifty bales would take several hours, and I wanted to make it to the store to see Jesse before it got dark.

“Come on Reg, let’s go see Jesse! I’ll buy you a hot dog.” I hopped into my treasured 1972 lemon yellow Blazer. Grandpa had bought it new, and I’d inherited it when I turned sixteen. I loved it fiercely. I turned on the radio and tuned it to KISS country and listened to Miranda Lambert.

I sang along at the top of my lungs, belting out one of her newest hits. The top was still off of the fully convertible Blazer and I enjoyed the feel of my hair blowing in the cool wind. I knew I’d have to put the top on eventually, but every time I did it always made me a little sad, so I procrastinated as long as possible.

The early afternoon sun warmed my wind-cooled skin as I pulled into the general store’s parking lot. The building was old and separated into two spaces. One side was a general store and café and the other was a bar. It wasn’t that busy since the lunch crowd was through, so I brought Reggie in with me.

“Hey Jesse. What’s up?” I called.

She turned with a look that revealed she was surprised to see me. She was always mischievous, but why was she surprised to see me? I stopped by all the time.

“There’s our lucky troublemaker. You’d better tell me what you did to get that hot piece of uniform after you!”

“Hey, have you heard anything about—wait, what? The fuzz is after me?” I sifted through my recent actions, but couldn’t remember doing anything illegal that would put a cop on my tail. “Wait, you’re not talking about Tyler, are you?”

One of her husband’s favorite pastimes was making me pull over without cause. I was always tempted to pull a stunt like I was on
Cops
and lead him in a high speed pursuit. But since I’d gotten out of a few speeding tickets by dropping his name, I guess it was a wash.

“What, Tyler? No, I wish he was this hot.” She leered. “The game warden stopped by about five minutes ago asking all about the girl who lives on the Flint ranch.” She waggled her eyebrows at me.

It was Jesse’s mission in life to set me up with a man. It was the bane of her existence that I’d sworn off cowboys. A cowboy hadn’t worked out too well for my mom, and that was pretty much all there was around Raymond. It was probably the only lesson I’d learned from my mother.

“I have to say, Matt Albert wasn’t a fan of Mr. Warden asking about you. Gave me one scary glare when I told the hottie where you live.”

“Oh geez. You haven’t told Matt I’d date him again did you? The guy’s dumber than a box of rocks!”

The Albert clan was huge in Raymond. Half the population was related in some form or another, and Matt had his eyes on me since grade school. I’d always chalked up his infatuation with me to the fact we weren’t related. Kissing cousins were
so
Alabama.

Matt liked to get drunk at the rodeo and pick fights. The one date I had gone with him I ended up with four glasses of Coors on my shirt and a bruise on my cheek where the other guy had elbowed me to get at Matt. That had been four years ago. He was either tenacious to the extreme or stupid, and I leaned toward the latter.

“Of course not. Especially if you’ve got Hunky McWarden in the wings!” I rolled my eyes at Jesse’s outrageous nicknames. It was never a good sign when she waxed poetic.

“Why do you keep saying that? I thought the game warden was an octogenarian?”

“Yeah, that was Bill Freedman, and he retired last month.
Officer Hotstuff
must be his replacement. Lucky for us! Lord knows we need an infusion of new blood around here.”

While that was certainly true, I wasn’t in the mood to play ‘The Dating Game’ with Jesse. “Oh quit it. I’d better get home if there’s a popo waiting for me. Wish me luck!”

I walked back to my truck and looked down at Reggie.

“Sorry, I forgot your hot dog. I guess I owe you one.”

He hopped in the back, forgiving as always and off we went. I wondered why the warden would be looking for me. I hadn’t hunted or fished in years, not since grandpa’s health went downhill. I hoped one of my cows didn’t get out. That could be a nightmare if it ruined property or someone hit it with a car.
Great, that’s all I needed right now.

I saw the warden’s forest green Silverado when I pulled in, but no sign of the warden himself anywhere. I lowered the tailgate of the Blazer to let Reggie down and he took off toward the barn. I trusted his instincts and followed him and found an image I could use to warm the lonely, cold nights. On the trailer of alfalfa was a 6’4’ Adonis. The man, or god, who I assumed was the warden, had his shirt off while he was unloading hay. His fantastic shoulders were bare and rippling as he unloaded bale after bale of hay. His biceps flexed as he squatted to pick up another and bless him, I had a front row seat to his fantastic rear.

The warden couldn’t have been any older than late twenties or early thirties, and his golden skin just added to the Greek god effect he had going. Something stirred in me while I watched him work, something I had never felt before.
Pure unadulterated lust
. I wanted that man more than anyone in my whole life.

Irritated with my surging libido, I tamped down my unwelcome feelings as much as I could. I definitely didn’t need that kind of complication in my life right now. He bent over and picked up another bale and I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from moaning.
No man should look that delicious.
I nodded my head in agreement with myself and continued to gawk. His shoulders were nearly twice as wide as mine, and his broad chest narrowed to flat, rippling abs and a trim waist.

In the ten minutes I supposed he’d been there he had almost the whole trailer unloaded, and it didn’t even look like he’d broken a sweat. If I’d unloaded that much I would have been a puddle of exhausted goo. I stood there, staring at all his assets, for a few minutes longer before I climbed on the trailer and started helping.

When I came up behind him, he stopped working and stared at me. His nostrils flared wide, but he didn’t seem surprised at my arrival. Unnerved a bit by his piercing gaze, I picked up a bale. He just shrugged and resumed unloading, maintaining a silence the whole time we worked. In between bales he brushed his dark brown hair off his forehead to reveal two eyes the brilliant blue of sapphires.

He looked at me for a moment, and then unloaded the last bale of alfalfa. I hopped off the trailer, suddenly needing distance from his cobalt stare. Without the hay bales to occupy my hands, they were itching to touch the ripples of all six of his abs. I stared at the ground, shifting from foot to foot.

“Thanks. I really appreciate the help. If I was by myself, this would have taken hours.” I handed him his uniform shirt that was hanging off the side mirror of my truck and glanced at the name tag. “Officer Newcomb.”

“It’s warden Newcomb, but you can call me Cash.” He put his uniform back on and I couldn’t help feeling a sense of loss. The fabric covered a spectacular chest with just a judicial smattering of curly brown hair that drew together in a fuzzy line that lead south.
Talk about a happy trail.

“So I take it you’re Ms. Flint?” He held out his hand and I took it. I couldn’t help but note how mine was dwarfed in his.
You know what they say…
said a naughty voice in my head.

“Uh yeah, I’m Shelby. Nice to meet you. Jesse said you were looking for me?”

He finished tucking in his shirt and walked towards my trailer in long, graceful strides. I was tall for a woman, but even at 5’11” I was almost jogging to keep up. He reached down to pet Reggie on the head. Reggie’s tongue lolled out his mouth and he leaned against the warden’s hand.
Traitor,
I thought, wishing Cash was petting me instead.

“Ms. Flint, I received a call last night about some gunshots coming from your property. I don’t need to tell you that hunting at night is illegal.” My shock must have been evident on my face because I caught a little glint of amusement in his eyes.

“Of course I know it’s against the law! I was
not
poaching,” my voice outraged. I forced myself to continue on with a more reasonable tone. “I’ve lost a few calves to coyotes this fall, and I saw something going after them again, so I fired. Only once, though.” His face didn’t give any hint of his thoughts.

Hands on my hips, I regarded him warily. “Who called? I don’t have any neighbors for miles.” He still seemed to laugh at me with his gorgeous eyes and he ignored my question.