The Flood Stranded Me With Three Ranch Men, So I Kept All Three novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sage Creek
The creek takes Jess's car, three men pull her out, and she orders skin to skin and kisses the foreman first.
Three men pulled me out of Sage Creek, and the foreman cut my jeans off with a pocketknife before I could tell him my name.
The water had taken my Subaru at the ford, a quarter mile below the ranch gate.
It had taken my left shoe, my phone and most of the feeling in my legs.
I had crawled onto the gravel bar on my hands and knees.
Then there were headlights, and a very large man had me in his arms.
"Got her," he said.
"Good," said the man with the knife.
"Hold her still, Dutch."
"I'm a nurse," I said.
My teeth were knocking together so hard that it came out in pieces.
"I know what I'm doing. Don't cut my coat."
"I'm cutting the jeans," he said.
"They're wet to the hip, and they're pulling the heat out of you."
He did it in two pulls, quick and careful, and the denim fell away from my legs.
The cold air hit my bare legs hard.
The third man stood back at the truck with his arms folded and his hat tipped low.
"Bridge is gone," he said.
"Whole thing, abutment and all. I just walked down to look."
"Then she's here till it's back, Nels," said the man with the knife.
"Grader can't reach us for ten days if it's a day."
"I figured," Nels said.
They put me in the cab of a flatbed with Dutch's coat over me and the heater on high.
Dutch drove.
He was the biggest person I had ever sat next to, six and a half feet of him.
He had white-blond hair and hands as wide as dinner plates.
He kept both of them on the wheel and said nothing the whole way up the lane.
The foreman held me against his side in the middle of the seat.
He smelled of wet wool and horse and woodsmoke.
His arm was hard around my shoulders, and my head sat just under his jaw, where the gray stubble started.
"What's your name?" he said.
"Jess."
"Jess what?"
"Just Jess," I said.
"Tonight that's all of it."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Emmett Stensrud," he said.
"I run this place. Dutch there is hay and water. Nels is cattle and horses."
"Whose place?" I asked.
"Rasmussen's," Emmett said.
"For another month, anyway."
I closed my eyes.
I had driven up the Sage Creek road that afternoon to look at a ranch I had never seen.
I did not tell him so.
It was true that my name was Jess.
It was not all of the truth, and I knew it, and I let it stand.
The house was a long log building with a tin roof and a porch that sagged in the middle.
The power was out.
A generator thumped behind the shed, and one lamp burned in the kitchen, and a woodstove put out a red glow from the front room.
Dutch carried me in anyway, though I could walk, and set me on a sofa in front of the stove.
Emmett knelt and took my hands in both of his.
They were rough, warm and enormous.
He looked at my fingertips, then at my lips, then pressed two fingers to the side of my neck.
"Pulse is slow," he said.
"You're shivering, which is good. If you stop, tell me."
"I'm going to stop," I said.
"That's what happens next, and it's the bad part, so don't let me."
"You said you're a nurse."
"Hospice," I said.
"I've warmed up a lot of people. Mostly the last night."
Nels laughed once through his nose.
Emmett didn't.
"What do you need?" he said.
"Dry blankets. Wool, if you have it."
"Dutch."
"On it," said Dutch, and he went.
"The wet things off me. All of it."
"Nels, go see about the horses," Emmett said.
"Don't think I will," Nels said.
He leaned in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed.
He was lean and dark and about forty-five, with a scar through his top lip.
"Somebody ought to stay with the stranger who showed up in the creek," he said.
"Somebody has," Emmett said.
"I'll hold the lamp, then."
I looked at the two of them.
I was twenty-four years old and half dead, in a house I had come to take away from them.
I wanted very badly to be warm.
I also wanted something else, which I did not examine.
"Out," I told Nels, in the voice I use for families.
He went, and he took his time about it.
Dutch came back with an armload of gray wool blankets, put them on the cushion and left without looking at me.
Emmett did not leave.
"Turn around, then," I said.
"Jess."
"If you're staying, you're helping."
He turned around.
I peeled off the wet shirt, the bra and the underwear, with fingers that would hardly work, and wrapped myself in wool.
It was not enough.
I could feel it was not enough.
"Skin to skin works faster," I said.
"It's what I'd tell your family to do."
"I'm not your family."
"No," I said.
"Take your shirt off, Emmett."
He stood for a long moment with his back to me.
Then he took off his coat, and his flannel, and the undershirt under it, and folded them over the arm of the chair.
He turned.
He had a chest made by thirty years of work, broad and scarred, with gray hair across it.
A gold ring hung on a chain against his sternum.
He sat down on the sofa, and I opened the blankets and slid across his lap, and put my cold arms around his neck.
He made a low sound when my skin met his.
His hands came up and hovered an inch from my back.
"Put them on me," I said.
He did.
They were hot, and they were slow to land.
They spread across my spine, then down to the small of my back.
I pressed my whole front against him and felt him go rigid under me.
"I'm not," he said.
"Emmett."
"I'm forty-nine years old, and I have not touched a woman in three years."
"Then you're out of practice," I said into his neck.
"But you're warm."
The shaking in my body was starting to ease, and something else was starting instead.
I felt his heart slam against mine.
I felt the hard length of him, trapped beneath my thigh, through his jeans.
He felt me feel it.
"This is the cold talking," he said hoarsely.
"You don't know me."
"I know you pulled a stranger out of a creek and cut her pants off with your own knife," I said.
"I know you didn't look."
"I looked a little."
"Good," I said.
I lifted my head, and his face was a few inches from mine, weathered and tired, with gray eyes that were not tired at all.
I put my mouth on his before he could say no, and he didn't.
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