Chapter 12: Ranch Hands and Saddles
The hotel suite was too quiet. It was a silence you paid for, thick and soundproofed, but to Bethany it felt like the pause before a verdict. She stood before the floor-to-ceiling window, the city’s electric dusk bleeding into the darkening sky. In six hours, she would be sitting across from him.
She had chosen the restaurant deliberately: Le Jardin des Sens, a place she’d once loved, a place they had never been together. It was neutral territory, a stage where she could control the lighting, the distance between chairs. Her dress, a column of liquid obsarkeraim satin, lay across the bed like a shadow. Beside it, the unlit candle on the vanity stood as a silent accusation. She hadn’t touched it since that night over a week ago, when the air between them had crackled with unfinished arguments and his bergamot-cedar scent had lingered long after he’d left.
Her phone vibrated on the marble countertop, a harsh buzz against the stone.The screen flashed: Dove. A lifeline, or an anchor.
Bethany took a breath, smoothing her expression as if her sister could see her, and answered.“Hey, D.”
“City Girl. You sound wound tighter than a eight-day clock.” Dove’s voice was a slow, warm drawl, a sound that immediately conjured the scent of dust, hay, and distant thunderstorms. It was the sound of a life Bethany had meticulously excised from her biography.A faint smile touched Bethany’s lips. “Just prepping for a meeting.” The lie was automatic, a vestige of the divide she maintained.
“At eight p.m.?Try again, sugar. You’re either working a hostile takeover of a nightclub or you’ve got a date.” Dove’s tone was light, but the acuity beneath it was razor-sharp. She could read a person’s truth in the space between their words.Bethany walked away from the window, the plush carpet muffling her steps. “It’s dinner.Not a date.”
“Mhm.” The skeptical hum was perfectly timed. “With who? That French vineyard guy with the pretentious hat?”
“No.” Bethany paused.She never spoke of Damien to Dove. Her sister knew the outline—the divorce, the betrayal—but Bethany had presented it as a business partnership gone sour, a closed chapter. She had sanitized the heartbreak into a strategic error. “It’s Damien.”
The line went so quiet Bethany could hear the whisper of wind across the open fields hundreds of miles away.
“Damien,” Dove repeated, the name stripped of its drawl, becoming flat and hard. “As in, the Damien.”
“There’s only one.”
“Bethany Elise Montgomery, have you lost your ever-lovin’ mind?” The question wasn’t shouted; it was delivered with a deadly calm that was far more frightening.“After what that man did? The calls I got from you, sitting in that empty penthouse of his, crying so hard you couldn’t breathe?You told me he was a cancer. You told me you were cutting him out.”
Bethany closed her eyes.She had said those things.They were true.And yet. “It’s complicated, Dove.”
“No, it ain’t.He’s complicated. You’re choosing to step back into the complication. There’s a difference.” A chair creaked on the other end of the line. Dove had likely sat down at the big, scarred kitchen table, the one their grandfather had built. “What does he want?”
“Dinner.”
“And you believe that?”
Bethany’s own doubts, so carefully managed, echoed in her sister’s question.“I don’t know what I believe. But I know… I need to see.” Her own accent, usually polished to a neutral metropolitan sheen, began to soften at the edges, vowels stretching slightly.It always happened with Dove, a linguistic homecoming.“See what? If he’s grown a conscience?Men like him don’t grow those. They just learn better ways to hide the lack of ‘em.” Dove sighed, the sound weary. “Is this about the business?Is he a threat?”
“No. Not… not in the usual way.” Bethany moved to the vanity, her reflection pale in the dim light.“He’s being… persistent. And transparent, so far. He brought me a croissant.”
“A croissant.” Dove’s deadpan was a masterpiece.“Well, hell.Ring the wedding bells. He remembered your breakfast preference. That absolves all.”
“Stop it.” But a real laugh bubbled up, breaking the tension in her chest.It felt good.Normal.
“I just don’t like it, Bee. You’re the smartest person I know, but with him… your sense just packs its bags and heads for the hills.” There was another pause, filled with the distant lowing of a cow. “You remember what Mama used to say about snakes?”
Bethany’s smile faded. “You can let a snake sun itself on your porch, but you don’t let it in the house. It’s still a snake.”
“She was right about that.” Dove’s voice softened.“You gonna be careful? For real, this time?”
“I’m always careful.”
“Not with him, you ain’t. Never have been.” A lighter flicked, the inhale of a cigarette. Dove only smoked when she was truly worried.“You need an out?A reason to cancel?I can provide one. A ‘family emergency.’ Uncle Clyde’s prize bull could suddenly be gravely ill. It wouldn’t even be a lie, that devil’s always one stall kick away from a heart attack.”
The offer, so typical of Dove’s practical, ruthless protectiveness, warmed her even as it highlighted the chasm between her worlds.Damien knew her as Bethany Montgomery, self-made empress. He knew nothing of Uncle Clyde, of prize bulls, of the fact that ‘family emergency’ in her world could mean anything from a bovine crisis to a body that needed discreet relocation.
“I appreciate it,” Bethany said, her voice quiet. “But I’m going to go.”
“Okay.” Dove accepted defeat with grace.“Then you call me after. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning my time.You call. And if he so much as makes you feel small for a second, you give me the word. I’ll make sure he has a real compelling reason to leave you alone.”
Bethany knew it wasn’t an empty threat. The Montgomerys didn’t make empty threats.“I will.”
“Good.” Dove took another drag. “Now, tell me about the dress. Because if you’re walking into a snake pit, you might as well look like a goddess while you do it.”
For the next ten minutes, they talked of fabric and silhouette, of shoes and jewelry, Dove’s commentary veering from shrewd to absurd. The conversation was a balm, pulling Bethany back from the cliff-edge of her own nerves. She was leaning against the cool marble, describing the absurd height of her heels, when Dove’s tone shifted again, the levity draining away.“Bee,” she said, her voice lower. “You ever think about telling him?About us? About the ranch?”
The question landed like a stone in still water.Bethany stared at her own wide eyes in the vanity mirror. “No.”
“Never?”
“There was nothing to tell.” The answer was too quick, too practiced. “I left.This life here, it’s mine. The ranch… that’s yours.”
“It’s yours, too.Your name’s on the deeds same as mine. Your blood is in the dirt.” Dove’s voice was gentle but unyielding. “That life didn’t end when you boarded that plane.It just changed shape. He’s a man who trades in secrets, Bethany. What happens if he finds out you’ve been keeping the biggest one of all?”
A cold thread of anxiety coiled in Bethany’s stomach. She had built her identity here as a fortress, but Dove was right—its foundation was secret, and therefore vulnerable. Damien, with his networks, his instinct for weakness… if he ever saw the ranch not as a picturesque relic but for what it truly was, he would understand it as leverage.As a threat. As a part of her he never owned.
“He won’t find out,” Bethany said, but the words lacked conviction.“Mhm.” Dove let the skepticism hang.“Just… be smart, city girl. And remember, the house isn’t the only place a snake can bite you. Sometimes they lurk right there on the porch, real pretty in the sunlight.”
They said their goodbyes, love buried beneath the practicality.After hanging up, the suite felt emptier than before. The satin dress on the bed seemed less like armor and more like a costume. She looked at the candle, the cold wax. She thought of Damien’s face in her office, that stark honesty when he spoke of wasting time.
Then she thought of the sprawling Montana ranch, of the safe buried under the west pasture, of the ledgers Dove kept in a cipher only they understood. She thought of the women in her family, generations of them, who knew how to clean a rifle, negotiate a deal, and disappear a problem with the same steady hands.Damien knew a version of her. A brilliant, driven, wounded version. He had no idea there was another, forged in a different kind of fire.She picked up her phone, her thumbs hovering over the screen. A part of her wanted to cancel, to retreat into the immaculate, controlled fiction of her life here. But a stronger, deeper part—the part that was still a Montgomery, still Dove’s sister—stiffened its spine.She wouldn’t run.She would go to dinner. She would sit across from the snake on the porch and look it right in the eye. And she would decide, once and for all, if she was willing to let it know what lay inside the house.