Page 7 of Roads Behind Us
Quickly grabbing my phone from the dash, hoping he didn’t get spooked by the movement, I snapped a picture of the mountain protector, this once nearly extinct behemoth and guardian of the West.
He grunted a breath, and it turned to steam in the cool, fall air, and then he lumbered back into the trees and was gone. With him went the fog I’d been battling through the last two hours. It rolled in waves off the hilly, winding highway, leaving Togwotee Pass and lifting back into the sky like steam rising from hot coffee in the cold.
As the sawtooths of the Teton Mountain Range revealed themselves to me, I sat in awe, holding my breath, still barely daring to move as the deep blue-green roadside fence of evergreens with their wood-post trunks led my eyes to the orange sunset deepening in the distance. The impending twilight lit up those impressively tall peaks and darkened their sharp valleys, washing them in a powerful peach and dusky lavender glow.
And now I got it. I finally understood why Brand had been so homesick, and how, when he talked about the mountains surrounding his home, he got this cheesy, faraway look in his eyes.
It was silly, but I felt Wooly Wally’s approval of my reaction to his land, and somehow, it felt like I’d been called home too.
Chapter Three
Sweetie
The bison really shook me up, and I gripped my steering wheel like it was the only buoy in a sea of mountains and sharp, switchbacking roads.
He’d been there to welcome me. I was sure of it, and how ridiculous was that?
If you asked anyone who knew me, they’d laugh in your face if you told them Beatrice Baker had been seen communing with a very large land mammal. In fact, I’d earned the nickname “Sweetie” initially because everyone at Lee Construction thought I was so nice, but I had just been settling in and learning my way around my new job. Once my coworkers realized I really wasn’t that sweet and that I tended to be a bit of a Brunhilda on the job, the irony made the nickname stick, not that any one of those knuckleheads knew the actual definition of the word irony.
The guys probably thought I didn’t have a nurturing or animal-loving bone in my body. I’d never had a dog or a cat. Not even a goldfish. Why on earth I thought I’d felt a connection with a bison was beyond me.
Driving slowly through the Jackson Hole valley, I found my way in the intensifying night. The road to Bax’s place rose in elevation quickly, and the fields and open areas I’d driven through earlier disappeared and gave way to climbing pine forests with dark mountains bookending them in every direction.
For a good twenty minutes, I’d been convinced I was lost and that any moment I’d hit a deer or an elk or something. There were wildlife signs everywhere, not that I could actually read them because apparently the entirety of Teton County had taken an anti-streetlight stance.
When I took my second-to-last turn onto Old Fish Creek Road, I breathed a sigh of relief. Brand’s directions told me I was only five minutes away from the house he’d grown up in, and finally, I saw the new sign he’d just installed at the start of the Lee’s property that had thankfully been backlit and read “Spitfire Ranch at Lee Valley.”
Like it was on tiptoes instead of tires, my truck crept up the graded and graveled drive slowly, and I scanned the still darkness for animals, but when I saw Bax’s big, two-story farmhouse and parked in front of it, stress left my shoulders and I took a deep, steadying breath.
You made it.
Standing on the small porch, Bax Lee was also backlit by a warm glow coming from inside the house Brand told me his brother had inherited when he took over running the Lee’s family farm.
Bax held himself upright with a crutch beneath each arm. A thigh-to-toes plaster cast encased his right leg. He’d covered it with a pair of loose jeans, but I knew it was there, and it made his leg look twice as thick as the non-broken one.
In the dark, I couldn’t see the house well, but it felt a little run-down to me, which surprised me since Brand’s house in Sheridan was new and modern.
Bax squinted, trying to get a better look at me. “Thought you got lost,” he said as I stepped out of my truck. “I expected you a little earlier.”
The night we’d met flashed through my head, when he’d said in front of my coworkers, “My brother call you Sweetie ’cause you got a sweet little ass?”
Still waitin’ for an apology, asshole.
“No,” I said. “I wasn’t lost, but there’s no streetlights around here. I had to drive five miles an hour ’cause I’m terrified of hittin’ somethin’. I mean, the least y’all could do is put some road reflectors along your driveway.”
“Oh.”
I laughed into the quiet between us. “You never thought about it?” The stillness in the dark was a little unnerving. Sheridan wasn’t some big, busy, bustling city, but it wasn’t this quiet.
“Honestly? No, which is dumb, but it’s just that I grew up out here, you know? I don’t need lights.”
Wanting to see him better, too, I climbed the porch stairs and stood in front of him. His eyes traveled the shape of my face, and mine did the same to his.
Yup, the fucker’s still gorgeous.
I’d forgotten how sexy Bax was. His hair looked the same as it had last week on my computer screen, thick and light brown and kind of messy, and he had the same strong, athletic build I’d noticed back in Sheridan two years ago.
And those baby-blue eyes? Damn. Women had been brought to their knees with far less.
