The Ranch (A Second Chance Romance)

And perhaps seeing a couple of trouble-making teenagers pull up in front of their cabin had scared the Bailey folks even more than they’d scared us.

That was a possibility, at least. And one which made me marginally more cheerful about our current trip.

Not a lot, by any means, but a little.

“Well...” Cooper hit the brakes as we came to an abrupt clearing. “We’re here.”

It was hard to tell for sure. There was plenty of moonlight, thank God. Otherwise, we would’ve seen a damn thing.

There were a couple of rundown cabins—shacks, really—tucked in among the trees at the far end of the clearing, plus the remains of three old cars clearly jutting out from the weeds like rusty skeletons in the dark, and I suspected a few others were hanging back in the gloomy overgrowth.

If it hadn’t been for the fresh tire tracks in the mud in front of us, it would’ve been easy to assume nobody had stepped foot in that clearing for years. Possibly decades.

“Shall we go up to the door?” Poppy asked once we’d come to a stop.

“Which door?” Muriel asked, craning her neck to peer ahead through the windshield. “I can’t decide which one looks scarier.”

“I think Cooper and I should go first,” I said. “But we should leave the truck running, just in case.”

“No,” Poppy said. “We’ve all come this far together. We’re all going to the door together.”

Without another word, the four of us started getting out of the truck. Cooper and I exchanged knowing glances as we slowly started walking toward the closest cabin. For all his talk earlier, he was finally starting to get anxious, too.

They’re just normal people. They’ll want to know about Jasmine. They’re normal people. They’ll want to know about—

A twig snapped under my boot, making me and Muriel jump before she realized what it was and gave me a dirty look.

“Sorry,” I started to say, then froze in my tracks when I heard the old wooden door up ahead of us start to creak open.

“Who the hell is out there?” a gruff, gravelly voice shouted over the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being loaded.

I took a step forward and tucked Poppy behind me as Cooper did the same with Muriel. I wasn’t in a hurry to get myself shot, but I was more worried about keeping Poppy safe.

“Nolan Reed, sir,” I shouted back. “We aren’t here to cause any trouble.” And we’ve come unarmed.

We had the usual shotguns on the farms to tackle predators and clay pigeons, but we never greeted people at the door with them. They stayed locked in the gun safe. Of course, we had the dogs as the first line in defense and security if we needed them.

“You’d better fucking not be,” came the reply. “Who’s that with you?”

“Cooper Price, sir,” Coop called out. “And we Poppy Evans and Muriel Tennyson are here, too.”

Poppy moved out from behind me. “We’re here to ask about Jasmine. I don’t know if you remember us, but—”

“What about her?” The man took a couple of steps out of the shadows—shotgun first—and even after all the years that had passed, I instantly recognized him as Jasmine’s uncle. “We don’t like strangers, and we don’t have any friends from town, so you’ve come to the wrong place tonight. Y’all had better get back in that truck and get the hell off my property before someone gets hurt.”

He cocked the shotgun for emphasis; he didn’t need any. I was more than ready to take him at his word, and I was pretty sure Coop and the girls were of the same opinion.

“We need to find out if Jasmine has been here,” I said. “Can you tell us where she is, or have you seen her today? That’s all we’re here to find out.”

“And then we’ll leave,” Cooper added quickly. “We’re worried about our friend is all.”

Several long seconds passed, and I wondered for a moment if the grizzled old man might shoot us for the hell of it. He still had the shotgun pointed in our general direction, so it was a possibility.

I hoped to God he didn’t fucking sneeze with his finger on the trigger.

“We ain’t seen my uppity niece around here in years,” he answered before he spat on the ground. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

I hadn’t been holding out much hope of getting any news out of the guy, but hearing him confirm my suspicions out loud still made my stomach sink.

If she hadn’t been seen at the resort and she hadn’t been back to visit her family, where the hell had she gone?

Had aliens come down to beam her up?

She couldn’t have vanished.

Poppy spoke up again. “Thank you for your time. If you, um... if you do happen to hear from Jasmine—if she calls or stops by—can you please tell her we’re worried about her and we’d like to hear from her? Please? We just want to find out that she’s okay.”