My heart sped up as my eyes widened. What? “They… can’t?”
She shook her head, then turned and leaned against the counter. “Nope. You didn’t know that? Well, let me put your mind at ease. They—shifters, I mean—have superhuman healing properties. Nash got shot last year by my ex.” Her eyes filled up with tears and she took a moment to pull herself together. “It was horrible! I watched him go down, and he was bleeding. I thought he was dead and I was out of my mind with grief, but he was feeling better within a few hours.” She took a deep breath, calming herself. “It was incredible. There’s no mark or scar or anything.”
Wow. Like, holy shit kind of wow. “But I thought… wasn’t there a wolf that was killed by a rancher years back?”
Rachel’s eyes rounded. “Wow. I don’t know. I think if they get shot in the head it could kill them because there’s no time for the body to recover from that before they die. So maybe the wolf got picked off with a head shot.”
I shuddered, thinking how it must have been even more tragic to a community that believed they were immune to bullets to have one of their own taken from them that way. I would find a way to bridge the divide. Whether things worked out between me and these two guys or not, I needed to heal this rift.
HOLT
“I don’t like it,” Theo grumbled after he shut Ali’s truck door and gave the hood a knock. The two of us stood there like abandoned puppies as she drove off after breakfast at the diner.
“Me neither,” I agreed, my wolf practically howling at me to follow her.
We didn’t want to let our beautiful mate go back to her ranch today. Hell, we didn’t want to let our beautiful mate go, ever.
“She’ll be safe,” Theo said in that voice that said he didn’t quite believe it, but wanted to convince himself.
“Yeah. She promised she wouldn’t go near the trailer again, and I trust her.” I shot a glance at Theo. “We can trust her, right?”
He scrubbed a hand across his face as we walked toward his truck. “I think so. But she’s headstrong. I don’t like what she overheard at that trailer. There was a threat to her father’s life, which means hers won’t mean much either if she gets in the middle of whatever is going on out there. Her dad’s done a good job of keeping her out of whatever he’s up to, but she’s too curious for her own good.”
“We need to move on that shit. Today,” I vowed. We needed to get things straight down at the ranch right away, or we’d both go fuck-nuts crazy.
“Right. I’ll call the lab in Cheyenne to find out the results from the samples we sent in to be tested. Hopefully they’re back.” He put the phone on speaker as he drove us both to the sheriff’s office.
“You were right, Agent Decker,” the lab technician said. Judging by his voice, he was a young, eager sort. Proud of his findings. “Definitely traces of ammonia and acetone.”
“Email me the lab results right away so I can get a search warrant,” Theo barked.
Fuck, yes.
“I already sent it, sir.”
“Thanks, Eric. That’s all I need.” Theo ended the call and looked at me. “We have the proof. How quickly can you pull a warrant?”
“Hopefully, we can get a judge to sign off by this afternoon. Tomorrow morning at the latest. The delay would be because some of these judges out here are in the pockets of the ranchers.” I grumbled the last, knowing the fight wasn’t an easy one.
“Fuck,” Theo said. “Well, let’s get the paperwork filled out and filed, pronto. Normally I’d want to poke around without alerting them a little more first, but we can’t fuck around when Ali’s life could be in danger.”
Even though I felt the same, hearing him say the words out loud sent a jolt of panic to my wolf, and a growl volleyed out of my throat. “We need to get her the fuck out of there. I can’t believe we let her go back.”
“I know,” Theo said grimly. “I feel the same way.”
12
ALI
I’d gone away to college. To Chile. Australia. I’d been away from home for years. I thought I’d changed a lot during that time. Grown up. Become independent. Even deciding to return and work the family land, which put me back into the same bedroom I’d grown up in, I felt… different.
But after a few days with Holt and Theo, I saw everything about the Jenkins Ranch in a new way. What the place meant to me. My role as a steward of the land from one generation to the next. Keeping it just as my great-grandparents had made it for my own kids. With some additions like indoor plumbing and Internet, of course.