With the gate closed, we managed to keep most of the cows together. My brain couldn’t make sense of why they were down from the summer pasture. Everyone knew they weren’t due down for a while yet. Everyone knew the ramifications of bringing them down early. Having to feed that many cattle cost money. Money we would’ve saved if the cows were left in the grazing pasture, where they ate for free.
I was trying to edge cows out of Mom’s garden when Dad exploded out of the house. I took one look at him and groaned.
“What the hell happened?!”
I gestured at the cows. “They got out somehow. I need to go and check, but right now I’ve got to get them out of here.”
“I told you to check those gates up there! Look at this! This is going to cost us, Lacey!”
I snapped up straight, forgetting that I was wearing lingerie and a mostly unbuttoned shirt. “I checked them. I checked them twice. I fixed what was broken and I wrote it all down in the books. I know what I’m doing here. This wasn’t me. I’ve got to ride up there and see what happened.”
Dad shook his finger at me. “No, you go inside and put some damn clothes on. I’ll handle it. I’ll handle everything. Retirement’s off. You can’t handle this.”
Without thinking, I grabbed a clump of Mom’s unearthed tulips and threw them at him. “You stubborn old man. You never thought I was good enough to do this job. You’ve been filling my head with fantasies of you leaving me be here while you go on vacation. You never had any intention of leaving, did you? You think I’m going to run this place into the ground. Well, truth is, Daddy, I’ve been cleaning up messes for you for years. You think what you want. I know what I’m doing. You can just go back inside and crawl into bed. I’ve got this.”
He stared down at the dirt on his shirt from where the tulips hit him. “You’ve lost your ever-loving mind!”
“What I’ve lost in my patience! Go back to bed, Dad. I’ll handle it.” I stomped towards the barn and eased Jameson out. I wanted to race him right out of there, but I didn’t want to spook the cows and start a stampede that got Jagger ran over.
I winced at the sight of him, standing on the steps of the porch, arms crossed over his bare chest. I’d missed a chance at sex with a man who would’ve made me scream. I knew it as well as I knew my name.
The thought just worsened my mood as I climbed on Jameson and moved away from the cows. The saddle rubbed my bare thighs and I wondered if I should’ve been level-headed enough to grab pants. It didn’t matter, though. It was too late. I was already heading up to the place where the cows had been secured, hoping that I found some kind of freak accident.
*
After I’d witnessed what kind of mess we were dealing with, I went back home and got dressed in real clothes, quick to avoid the prying eyes of my parents and Bradley. I called in all the ranch hands and went back to start working on the fences that’d been knocked down.
Purposefully knocked down.
It took the entire next day and on into the next night to get the fences repaired and the cows back up to the pasture. I’d skipped meals and barely taken the time out to drink the water Bradley kept shoving at me.
I was good and truly pissed off. Someone had taken their pranks to a new level. Sure, messing with my truck was bad. It made me look stupid and it’d caused frustration with Dad. Leaving rats on the doorsteps to our house hadn’t been great, either, and it had upset Mom, but we could deal with it. Knocking down a huge line of fencing and somehow managing to wrangle nearly a thousand cows down from their pasture was past a prank.
I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d been inside and hadn’t heard the cows moving around, whoever did it could’ve had the rest of our cows out, too. If we hadn’t gotten the gates closed when we did, it could’ve been terrible. As it was, we’d managed to lose nearly ten cows before the gates closed. While I’d worked on the fences and getting the cows back in them, Dad had looked for the missing ones with no luck.
My mind was racing with things I wanted to do to the asshole who thought messing with our livelihood was funny. When I was able to do more than just grunt, I was letting out profanity that would’ve made a sailor blush.
I was exhausted. I’d ruined the lace lingerie set at some point. My ass was covered in mud that I’d slipped and fallen into. Even my boots had been lost. I was a wreck. The cows were finally put up, though. That was what mattered. That and Bradley was sitting point outside the fences for the rest of the night.
That was another thing that had crawled under my skin and pissed me off. Crimson Security had officially been promoted from installing our security system, to guarding the family and land. My plan for a one night stand and then never seeing Jagger again was screwed. Unlike me. I was still pent up and ready to explode at the drop of a hat.
I hadn’t seen Jagger since I rode off on Jameson, but I knew he was around, installing crap and just existing. It felt like a personal attack that he was still going to be around and I’d missed my chance at a great orgasm. The moment was gone, though.
I slumped into the kitchen that night, barely standing, and grabbed a water and a sandwich from the fridge before trudging up the stairs and stumbling into my room. I ate with my head sticking out of the shower and then fell into bed, naked and already half asleep.
After what felt like being asleep for just a few minutes, a loud shriek came from the bottom floor of the house. I jerked upright, recognizing my mom’s voice, and yanked on the closest clothes I could find. I threw open my bedroom door and nearly collided with Jagger.
He hesitated for long enough to keep me from falling over and then bolted down the stairs, towards the sound of Mom’s sobbing. I was right behind him, my heart in my throat at the idea of what we were going to find.
She was kneeling on the kitchen floor, her hands around her throat like she couldn’t breathe. In front of her, in nearly the exact spot where Jason had died, was a large pool of red liquid. A rat had been stabbed into the floor with a knife.
I immediately shut out the emotions threatening to overpower me and scooped Mom into my arms. She’d gotten so frail over the years that she didn’t weigh much of anything. I tugged her out of the kitchen and into the living room.
“Mom, you’ve got to keep breathing. You’re okay. We’re all okay.”
She gasped for air and clawed at her chest. “Jason!”
The wrecked sound of her voice hit me as deep in my soul as it could. I looked up as Dad came into the room and stood up. I needed to be away from her to catch my breath. Her pain was so overwhelming that it was almost like I couldn’t breathe. “Sit with her, Dad. I’ll take care of it.”
I hurried back to the kitchen and started grabbing towels. I wanted it gone.
“Hey, what are you doing? We need to take pictures and make sure there’s no evidence we’re fucking up.”
I glared at Jagger. “You’ve got until I find the bleach. I’m not leaving this here. I’m not… Just do what you have to do. The bleach is in the laundry room. Hurry.”
In the laundry room, I had to stop and lean against the washing machine for a few seconds. I felt shaky. I felt like my heart was trying to climb out of my body. It hurt. I didn’t know if I wanted to scream or cry and I was afraid if I did either, I’d never be able to stop.
When I made it back to the kitchen, Jagger was pulling the knife up from the floor with a plastic bag over his hand. “Just in case someone left prints. Do you think the local sheriff could get this to a lab?”
I laughed a bitter laugh and dropped to my knees. It took me three time to get the lid off the bleach and when I did, I sloshed it over my hands and arms. “Andy? Only if ‘lab’ was code for breakfast bar. Doesn’t your fancy security company have its own resources?”
“Sure, but it’ll take time to get it to them.”
“Do whatever.”
I scrubbed at the blood until it was just a figment of my memory. But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t blood. It hadn’t been blood in twenty years. It was sticky like syrup. Someone had made up some kind of fake blood mixture and poured it on the kitchen floor to remind us of Jason dying there.
I scrubbed even after the floor was spotless. I scrubbed until my fingers hurt and the skin grew soggy from the bleach. I scrubbed until my eyes, nose, and throat burned.
“That’s enough, Lacey. There’s nothing left.” Jagger’s voice came from above me and I was shocked to find him standing there. “Get up.”
I shook my head. “Still working here.”
He grabbed my arms and roughly yanked me up. “That’s enough.”
I tried to push away from him, planting my hands on his chest and turning my head away. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to see anyone. I couldn’t stop seeing Jason. “Let me go. I’m not finished!”
Jagger shook me and then held me to his chest. “You’re finished. It’s done, Lace. You’re going to hurt yourself.”
I slumped into him and buried my face in my hands. I wouldn’t cry, but I felt like sobbing. I couldn’t be Mom, though. We could only afford for one of us to fall to pieces and that wasn’t me. She’d taken that role, understandably.
“What happened to the security system, Jagger?” Dad stormed into the kitchen, eyes red and angry. “Why the hell did we set it up if it didn’t work? Someone was in our house!”
Jagger ignored my struggling to get away from him and sighed. “It wasn’t on last night. I didn’t get a chance to show Lacey how to use it because she was busy taking care of the cows and I was asleep before she came in.”
Dad’s glare turned to me. “When did you get in? Another late night out in the barn?”
I couldn’t appear weak and helpless if he was going to dig into me. I pulled away from Jagger, who’d gone rigid at my dad’s tone, and straightened to my full height. “I came in late. I don’t know. It took me that long to make sure everything was locked up tight. I walked the fences after I got the cows locked in and made sure they were secure.”
“Who were you with?”
“I was alone! What’s gotten into you?”
“They could’ve hurt you. They could’ve grabbed you while you were out that late without any protection. They could’ve hurt you the same way they hurt Jason.”
It was too much for me to handle. I dropped my arms and looked up at the ceiling. I prayed for peace, for understanding, for something to take the edge off. When nothing came right away, I shook my head and walked towards the stairs. “I’m going back to sleep for a little while. I’ll be down for the meeting with the insurance adjuster. If everyone could just keep the screaming to a minimum, that’d be great.”
Dad opened his mouth, but I held up my hands. “I can’t right now, Dad. Oh, if one of you could ride up to the pasture and check on Bradley, that’d be great. He could probably use a break.”