Trail of secrets, p.1
Trail of Secrets, page 1
Trail of Secrets
Alexa Padgett
Sidecar Press, LLC
Contents
Trail of Secrets
1. Isobel
2. Isobel
3. Isobel
4. Isobel
5. Isobel
6. Isobel
7. Isobel
8. Isobel
9. Isobel
10. Alec
11. Alec
12. Isobel
13. Isobel
14. Isobel
15. Isobel
16. Isobel
17. Alec
18. Alec
19. Alec
20. Alec
21. Isobel
22. Isobel
23. Alec
24. Alec
25. Isobel
26. Isobel
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Alexa Padgett
Trail of Secrets © 2019 Alexa Padgett
* * *
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
* * *
Edited by Sarah Allan
Cover by Rebecca Hamilton
To Allyson. We started creating something wonderful here. I hope there’s a next time, and we get to finish it.
Trail of Secrets
A new career. A new location. An old flame. And too many secrets.
* * *
While Isobel struggles to atone for her past mistakes, Alec wants to forget his. But if they want a shot at happiness they need to expose their fears and the history they continue to hide.
1
Isobel
Isobel Petras settled the Western-style saddle on the bench with a grunt. Her biceps screamed, and her throat ached with thirst, but she smiled, happy with the final session she and the former Navy gunner had.
“Good ride?” Steve asked. His eyes smiled down at her, creating soft lines around his mouth and eyes.
Isobel turned, dusting her hands on the seat of her jeans before accepting the water bottle he held out.
“I think so. Hugh seemed to enjoy it.”
“Where is he?”
“Collecting his bags. His wife will be here in the next hour to pick him up.”
Steve nodded, his graying hair still shorn in the buzz cut he’d worn during his thirty-year career with the army. “Glad you made him go out. When we talked this morning, he was anxious about heading back to Montana, but I think you helped him work through the last of his worries, there. Thanks for being so good with the men, Isobel.”
“Thank you for giving me the job,” Isobel replied with a grin. She finished the water and double-checked the horses’ stalls before she walked toward the recycling bin at the exit. “I like working with the veterans. I like making a difference in their lives.”
Unlike how she’d managed to destroy her parents’ once-thriving restaurant and bankrupt her family. Isobel crunched the bottle. That happened years ago. Thanks to her online degree, she was a newly-minted counselor who focused on PTSD and veteran issues. Not the job she’d planned for herself when she started at one of the most prestigious culinary schools in California all those years ago, but one she loved more with each day.
She frowned, scuffing her boots along the stable floor. She’d messed up then. Why had she been so sure of herself? Isobel sighed and rotated her head, trying to ease the tension building in her shoulders—as it did each time she thought of her massive mistakes.
“Hey, now, none of that.” Steve cuffed her shoulder. “I don’t like seeing you so down. In the time you’ve been here with us, we’ve had a happier, healthier group of ex-soldiers. Can’t ask for more than that.”
“Well, you could,” Isobel said. “I mean, I want them all to integrate back into civilian life.”
Unlike culinary arts, the counseling work she performed on the Bar V, veteran rehabilitation ranch, made a lasting difference in people’s lives. A profound difference if Hugh could be counted as an example.
Satisfaction warmed Isobel’s chest. Hugh began treatments as a surly, uncommunicative man, but now he spoke often and with ease. He was going home with his wife and getting to know his twins again. And, thanks to Hugh’s progress, Steve was able to bring in a new patient. Turnover was low and slow—the last new guy they brought in… Isobel suppressed a shudder.
Steve stopped outside the barn door. Isobel walked to the other side and leaned into the latch, helping Steve slide the door shut.
Isobel sucked in a breath of clean air. Moments like these, she understood why so many of Steve’s veterans seemed to find solace in the location. Jagged mountains capped in bits of snow rose to the north. The sun dipped low, softening the temperature and adding the first hints of gold to the deep blue of the sky, washing the outbuildings in a warm light.
The two-hundred-acre sanctuary of buildings fanned out in neat, army-regimented rows, each made from rough-hewn native rock. The veterans who came here had the option for his or her private cabin. Some chose to room in the larger bunkhouse. Steve’s “main house” was the original building—the only one made from clapboard siding with a rambling white porch that had settled into a slight sag. That two-story building accommodated the “mess hall” as the vets liked to call it. Steve had knocked out most of the walls on the first floor and turned the space into an airy cafeteria. Her office was on the second floor.
The mere idea of spending time in the kitchen brought back memories of shutting the door to the café that last time. Isobel shook her head, forcing away the image that still caused her such pain. She didn’t cook anymore. Her parents did, in the main house and also in the smaller kitchen in their cabin that had been outfitted with professional-level equipment.
Steve had contacted her folks about the opportunity not long after their café closed for good—mere months after its relocation. At first, Isobel planned to stay in Salt Lake City and pursue a degree in something very unrelated to food preparation.
Then, she visited the ranch for her youngest sister’s birthday and fell in love with the serenity. Still, Isobel refused to cook, choosing to work instead as a horse wrangler, falling back on her years of 4-H and as a camp counselor throughout high school.
Isobel knew horses better than she knew how to make a béchamel, especially since she hadn’t been back in the kitchen in months. Or was it years?
“Come on,” Steve said, interrupting her thoughts. “You’ve got to be hungry. Don’t think I didn’t notice your lack of appearance at lunch.”
Isobel was starving. She shoved her hands into her pockets. “I need a shower,” she said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
“You need to eat, Iz.”
Isobel smiled up at Steve. “I will. Don’t you worry.”
His brow furrowed as it always did when he worried over an issue or one of his soldiers.
“Any information on our newest vet?” Isobel asked, trying to change the subject.
Steve’s frown smoothed out and he arched a brow as if to say he knew what she was doing. Of course he did. Steve had been a counselor for years now—he was well-versed in all attempts to redirect.
“Yeah. Thanks for asking. I was hoping to add the newbie to your workload.”
“What do we know about him?” Isobel asked.
“I went over his psych eval again before meeting you at the barn.” Steve scrubbed his palm across his chin. “It’s a hot mess. If I didn’t know how much his mom wanted him here…” Steve blew out a breath. “I worried after seeing it, so I called my buddy at the hospital he’s coming in from—Landstuhl—and got a better scoop. Our boy fought the psychiatrists in Germany about coming back stateside.”
Isobel nodded. “The usual,” she quipped, trying not to feel disheartened. No one wanted to come to the ranch and get help—at least initially. “Sure, I’d be happy to work with the new guy.”
Steve shook his head. “I don’t know… Maybe it’s better if you take over with Martin. He doesn’t need as many sessions as the new guy will.”
Steve kicked a pebble, avoiding her eye as he always did when he spoke of Martin. Isobel could never quite understand Steve’s willingness to allow that guy to reside here.
“C’mon, Steve. Tell me more about my new guy,” Isobel said. Isobel avoided Martin whenever possible, both in conversation and in person.
“I think you’re right—there is a lot of the usual about him. But some differences are important. He’s young—maybe even younger than you—and from what I heard, he watched most of his buddies die in a firefight. He was the medivac pilot. But the IEDs in the area were so thick, he couldn’t land the chopper.”
Isobel rubbed her palms up and down her arms. One of the reasons she liked working on the ranch w as that the veterans had real problems—lived through real terror and life-and-death situations. Isobel managed to stuff up her parents’ restaurant with one critic. Not because the food wasn’t delicious. Nope. The woman said it was too good for a Greek family restaurant, too elevated for the working-class neighborhood where her parents were forced to relocate after they lost out on their former lease.
The new patrons worried the prices would go up or the café would move soon, so they quit coming.
Isobel had been so sure her ideas to improve the food would salvage the steady decline in customers.
“Sounds rough,” she murmured, forcing her mind back to what Steve had said. “Does he have a history of violence? Toward himself or others?”
“No. He’s totally cogent and, if anything, emotionally closed off. I’d never dump something like that on you, Iz. Plus, you know the policy. Violence means a one-way ticket out of here, fast.”
A policy Isobel found comforting. Working with men, especially these types of trained men, had worried her in the beginning. But that was why she had the discretion to take a ranch hand with her on her trail rides—and why she never set up a ride until she was confident in the soldier’s ability to maintain a relationship with the horse.
“So, nonviolent but doesn’t want to open up. Got it.” Her mind began to whir over the best options to help him heal—both from the emotional distress of watching friends die and the reasons he didn’t want to return home.
A complex case. Isobel relished the challenge.
“He’s coming to us straight from the hospital in Germany. He’s a born-and-bred Utah boy and I got the sense your family might know his. Alec Monson’s his name. Should be here in the next couple of hours.”
“Alec Monson?”
“Yep.” Steve eyed her. “Do you know him?”
“I…I knew an Alec. He was friends with my brother, Grant.” He was more than that, for the one, brief summer after he graduated high school.
Steve scratched his smooth-shaven cheek. “The physician?” He waited for Isobel’s nod. “Then, you, Alec and Grant were close in age.”
“We were, but I was older and hung out with a different crowd.”
Steve frowned. He hesitated, then said, “If it’s too much to have a guy you used to know—I mean for either of you—I can put him on my roster.”
Isobel swallowed down the water that tried to bubble back up her throat. Alec was the neighborhood golden boy. The perfect son of a perfect family who always, always did the right thing. He’d turned into a medivac pilot for crying out loud.
“No, I can handle him.” Working with Alec, someone she knew, trusted, was so much better than working with Martin. “It’s not like he and I were all that close.”
Because Isobel kept her distance, annoyed by her crush on the boy a full year younger than she was…until their desire for one another flamed too bright to ignore. But, then, before they discussed their almost-relationship, Alec disappeared. She’d returned to her second year of culinary arts school and attempted to get over the boy she’d always wanted. Only months later, she found out Alec didn’t go on his mission and he didn’t attend BYU as his father planned.
But by then, Isobel was struggling to save her parents’ restaurant across town and didn’t have time to delve into Alec’s decisions.
“How about you keep me posted,” Steve said, his expression sliding toward disgruntled.
His words lacked any censure, but Isobel felt it creep up her spine and tether to her shoulders. She slid her shaking hands in her jean pockets. No way she could give Steve a reason to doubt her—or change her work load. She’d handle Alec Monson as she’d handled the closing of her parents’ restaurant or moving out here to the Bar V.
She’d figure it out.
Because the alternative was to fail. And Isobel couldn’t handle being a disappointment all over again.
Alec
As Alec’s ride came to a stop in front of a large farmhouse, the dust around the truck settled back to the ground.
“Thanks, man.” Alec smiled at the driver who’d met him over at the small, regional airport, then hopped from the cab. He grabbed his single, large duffel and plucked it out of the truck’s bed.
“No problem-o. Head on into the big house. It’s about supper time, so’s everyone’ll be there.”
More dust kicked into the air as the other man—one of the ranch hands as Alec understood it—headed to someplace else on the large property.
Alec steeled himself and walked up the path. He did not want to go into the mess hall and have all eyes on him. Still, the sun beating down on his face should help chase away some of the itching inside. Alec fought the almost overwhelming desire to take cover, to assess the situation before stepping into it.
That urge was only there because his fight or flight reflex was all messed up—that was what the army shrink said, anyway.
This place was supposed to help with that. Ease him back into civilian life. He didn’t have any more faith in that happening than he did in the church his parents raised him in.
But his mother asked him to come here, and she hadn’t asked anything of him in a long while. He hadn’t been able to ignore her request. Plus, he liked the idea of being in the same vicinity as his siblings.
But not his father.
He stepped onto the front porch of the ranch house, wondering where Steve was. He’d prefer to meet Steve inside, in his office, to go over the ranch’s rules and get set up with his bunk. Food and social niceties could wait.
In fact, he’d decided on the way to the ranch to deal with the rest of the men tomorrow, after he recovered from his hours of traveling and, hopefully, screwed his head on straight again.
Or, at least as straight as he could get it these days.
Granted, Alec had already read through the rules and agreed with most of them, which he’d told Steve in his last correspondence a few days earlier. He didn’t want to meet with the counselor, but his psychiatrist in Germany wouldn’t release him back to civvy life without more time with head-shrinkers.
Why couldn’t anyone else understand that day was past? More importantly, anything related to his failure needed to remain behind him.
Alec glanced around the outbuildings, and a sense of rightness settled over him. He felt…home. He jerked, shocked by the emotion—one he hadn’t felt in ages. But his intuition told him that things would be calm here. If he were lucky, they’d be good.
He inhaled the sharp Utah mountain air. It smelled like summers with his siblings—hours in the lake or the forest. Good memories, those. Ones he’d focus on while he lived on the ranch.
His time, years ago, with his almost lover back in Salt Lake might have gotten him through the worst of his rehab, but, now, he needed to create a life, a future, and that didn’t involve looking back on a woman he couldn’t have and friends he couldn’t save.
Starting today, Alec had a chance to adapt, to remake a life—one he wanted to live. He’d even been promised cabin twelve. His lucky number because that had been his age when he met the most beautiful girl ever. It was also the street number for her house. One less than the very unlucky thirteen…the number of his friends killed on the battlefield that day.
No, he wouldn’t, couldn’t, think of that.
A shout tore through the air, followed by a thud, and his pulse kicked off like a machine gun. The commotion came from around the back of the house.
He dropped his bag and sprinted toward the noise as all his other thoughts blurred in the background. He’d been trained to help. To run toward the danger, not away. Like he had when his friends needed him.
