Page 1 of On the Wild Side
PROLOGUE
ABBI
Five Years Ago
“What am I supposed to do without you?” I can’t stop the tears that fall onto my cheeks. Nate has been in and out of sleep, and they tell me that he’ll likely slip into a coma soon, so I should say everything that I want to say now, while he can still hear me.
He’s on a ventilator, but he’s watching me with those big, brown eyes, and his hand tightens on mine.
“I’m so sorry this happened,” I continue and lean in to kiss his cheek. “It’s not fair. It’s not right.”
He squeezes me again, comforting me.
Nate is thesweetestman on the planet. He’s good and generous, and he doesn’t deserve this.
“I’ll take care of Daisy. Don’t worry about us. I promise we’ll be okay.”
His eyes suddenly look panicked, and I brush my fingers through his hair, doing my best to calm him.
“I won’t let her near our baby, Nathan. I willnot.” He blinks, and I can see that he wants to talk, but he can’t.
“I know,” I continue. “We already talked about this, and everything is in place, so she can’t touch us. I’ll make sure of it. And I’ll make sure that Daisy always knows you. She’s still so little.”
Not even two years. Nate didn’t even have two whole years with his daughter before he caught pneumonia that devolved into a systemic infection, causing his organs to fail.
He isn’t going to get better. He isn’t going to leave this hospital.
And I want to wail at the injustice of it.
“I love you.” His eyes droop, and I can see that he’s so, so tired. “Thank you for five wonderful years. Thank you for being my best friend and such an awesome dad to our baby girl.”
He squeezes my hand once more, and then he’s asleep again, and all I can do is lay my head on the bed next to him and cry.
CHAPTER ONE
BRADY
“Come on, girls, it’s going to be a bitch of a winter.” I crack my whip and maneuver my horse through the snowy pasture, herding our cattle to a meadow closer to the barn, where we can keep an eye on these ladies during the coldest months of the year. Winter in Bitterroot Valley, Montana is a bitch, and it’s only early December, which means we haven’t even hit the solstice yet. We’ve already seen record snowfall this year, which tells us that it’s going to be a long, cold season.
And we need to make sure these girls make it through calving season in a few months.
“Storm’s moving in,” my oldest brother, Remington, yells out to me, and I tip my head back to look up at the sky. The wind has picked up, and the clouds have dropped and grown darker.
“Fuck,” I mutter and crack the whip again before I call back to him. “We’ll be down this hill in an hour!”
“Let’s hope the blizzard holds out that long,” Lucky, our senior ranch hand, replies. He’s got to be ninety if he’s a day. I swear, there’s never been a time when Lucky wasn’t old as fuck. And no one on this ranch knows what they’re doing better than him.
Which is saying something, because my family has owned this land for well over a hundred years. My father, leading us all up ahead, passed the reins on to Remington a few years ago. Ranching,cattleranching, is in our blood. It’s who we are.
It’s what we do.
But shit, I think Lucky worked for mygrandfatheronce upon a time.
I wonder if he’s a goddamn vampire.
When we’re about a mile from the pasture that the cattle will spend the winter in, the snow starts to blow harder. None of us, the humans or the animals, want to be out here in this, but it reinforces that it’s the right time to move the herd.
We might not be able to get to them in a few days, and they’ll have a better chance of survival if we can watch them.