“Will do!” She gave him a mock salute before she jumped the fence and rummaged in the bed of her pickup.

  It took her almost an hour to rig up a temporary fix, but when she stepped away and stared at it, she was pleased with her handiwork. It would do until she could come up with a better solution. She had her work cut out for her to keep everything running, but it was all worth it. She had never been happier than to be working for herself and making her own money.

  Sliding into the cab of the truck, Eli shoved the vehicle into gear and headed for the house. She needed to figure out what the directions were on the toilet before Bill showed up in the morning to do it all for her. She loved him, had grown up living next to him, grew up with his kids—his daughter was her best friend—but she didn’t want him to think she was taking advantage of his kindness or his knowledge. She could easily do it all on her own if she needed to, and she wanted to prove it to him—and to herself for that matter.

  Eli had grown up in this small western Kansas town, and even though she was an adult, she always felt like she had to prove she was twenty-eight and not eighteen, or even eight for that matter. Bill had been able to keep up with that for the most part, but then again, she’d gone to school with his daughter. The rest of the town still thought of her as the kid who hung out at the vet clinic one too many nights a week.

  As soon as she was back at the house, she started the casseroles for the hunters and cleaned up what she needed to of the mess in the upstairs bathroom. Two days and she’d have to have it ready. Sarah was due to arrive, her only guest in months, and someone who was staying—oddly enough—for two whole weeks. She was curious about a woman who could take that much time off, but until they met and Eli got to know her and just what she was taking a break from, she was left to wonder.

  With dinner cooking and her mess cleaned up, Eli plopped onto the couch in the common room and closed her eyes for a few brief minutes. She was about to head straight into a long busy season, and it was already taking a toll on her. Calving season was not for the faint of heart, and this year she was short-handed, meaning she’d be doing more of the middle-of-the-night checks than normal. She could do it, though. She’d have to. She didn’t want there to be another option.

  Chapter 2

  The album had been finished months ago, but every time she heard the released single on the radio, she cringed. Sarah wanted to go into the studio and tweak it—the curse she had grown up with rearing its ugly head again. It turned her into an anxious perfectionist who strove to do the best and make everything perfect—which yes, she knew was unattainable.

  Sarah paced in the tiny apartment she rented. She only spent half the year there at most. The rest of the time she was on tour or out recording or visiting family since she missed most everything that could be considered a special event. Her twin sister hadn’t taken kindly to her missing their birthday or her nieces’ birthdays every year. Unfortunately, there was little Sarah could do to change that situation.

  She stopped at her window and put her hands on her hips. For some reason, she could not settle. She needed the break, and she knew she was about to get a full two weeks of nothing other than rest—well, as soon as she could manage to rest after she got there—which was the point of the inordinately long break. She’d been planning a vacation of some sort for weeks, but she really should have taken it sooner after finishing recording.

  Sighing, Sarah plopped onto her couch and threw her hand over her eyes. It was three in the damn morning, and she couldn’t settle enough to sleep. Nothing had helped her in the past either. She was notorious for pulling all-nighters, especially when writing or on tour, but most people didn’t know she also pulled them regularly when she was home by herself.

  She grabbed her phone and twisted it between her fingers as she debated. Kara would likely be asleep, which irked her only because she needed something to do, otherwise she was going to go crazy. The bars in Dallas were shut down for the night, the streets had emptied out, but it wasn’t like she could just go anywhere either. Sarah always preferred to have someone with her to help get her out of those awkward conversations of “Hey, are you Sadie Bade?”

  Sighing, she bit her lip and gnawed on it, knowing the habit she had attempted to break for decades wasn’t going away anytime soon. She was a forty-one-year-old country singer, still living on her own, with only a handful of true friends. Bouncing her heel up and down rapidly against the soft rug on her living room floor, she groaned. She was failing at being an adult in so many ways.

  Sarah tossed her phone onto the couch cushion next to her and groaned again before folding herself onto the couch, plopping her face into the pillow, and half screaming. She didn’t want to disturb her neighbors, but at the same time, she needed the release from all the pent-up tension. It was nearly becoming too much for her to handle, and the last time that happened—well, the last time that happened, it was bad.

  Rolling onto her back and staring at her ceiling, Sarah fumbled around for the cellphone she had abandoned minutes before. She grabbed it and sent an SOS to Kara, texting, “You awake?”

  She rubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes and face and closed her eyes as the energy she was so desperate to get rid of filtered through her body and made her skin crawl with jitters like she’d drunk two pots of coffee in the span of ten minutes. It took ten minutes, but her phone buzzed a response.

  “I am now.”

  Grinning, Sarah gnawed on her lip some more as she typed out a response. “Can’t sleep.”

  “No shit, asshole.”

  Kara’s response made her laugh.

  “Go on vacation already.”

  Sarah paused and pursed her lips. Kara wasn’t wrong. That had been the entire point of the trip, the one Kara had insisted she take—the one Kara had practically planned everything for. The silence of the apartment echoed at her in a way she hadn’t expected. Normally Sarah was surrounded by noise, but it was in the quiet moments in the middle of the night that she found she could think most clearly.

  Staring at the phone, she tried to come up with some sort of snarky reply, but words failed her. “I leave in the afternoon.”

  “Leave now.”

  “What?” Sarah said out loud before texting the same thing to Kara. She wasn’t going to sit in the airport for hours doing nothing while she waited for her stupid plane to get there. No, that was just stupid.

  “Leave. Now.”

  Shaking her head in confusion, Sarah responded, “Like right now?”

  “Yes. Leave now. I’m sure you’re packed already, and I don’t want to listen to you all night. I want actual sleep. You need this, so go. Drink an energy drink, call a ride, and leave now.”

  Stunned, Sarah stared at the phone in her hand. Could it really be that simple? Could she start her vacation a few hours earlier than she had intended? She checked to see if she could upgrade her flight to an earlier one, but that was impossible. There were literally two flights in and out of the airport each day, and she had no other options except to just sit in another airport for hours. Maybe it would be better that way because she would feel like she had gone somewhere.

  Kara knew her well enough to know she was packed. She always was, to be fair. She never knew when she was going to be home for long, so her suitcase always sat packed but open in a corner. With her lip pulled tight between her teeth, she wondered if she really could just up and leave.

  “Are you serious?”

  She knew Kara was fed up with her insecurities, but truthfully, Kara was the only one she felt she could share them with. At one time it had been her sister, but the past few years had only put distance between them in ways Sarah couldn’t explain.

  “Yes, and if I get one more text that isn’t ‘okay I’m leaving,’ I’m coming over there and taking you myself.”

  “All right. All right. I’m leaving. I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  Chuckling, Sarah stared at her ceiling for another full minute before she rolled off her couch and planted her feet on the plush carpet below. She wiggled her toes through the strands before standing and running a hand through her shoulder length hair, tugging lightly at the knots before pulling out the always-present tangles.

  “Okay, I’m leaving.” With a breath, Sarah moved to her bedroom and shut the lid on her suitcase, zipping it. She dragged socks onto her feet, shoved them into her boots, and then stared at herself in the mirror. She was a sight. No one would recognize her with the wild look in her eyes, but being careful, she pulled on a loose beanie and hooded jacket, putting her sunglasses in her pocket.

  She put in a request for a ride before she grabbed her guitar. Her heart raced. She had no idea what she was doing. It would be nearing five in the morning before she arrived at the airport, and her flight wasn’t for another six hours, but Kara was right. She needed this. She needed it more than she’d realized. With a heavy sigh, Sarah went outside to wait for the car to arrive.

  As soon as she was through security and had her printed boarding passes stashed in the back of her pocket, Sarah sat heavily at her gate, needing to be with people for a few hours before isolating for two weeks. The hot cup of tea was balanced on the chair next to her. She’d kept her guitar with her, never trusting anyone with it although she wasn’t going to have much of a choice once they boarded the plane.

  It took her an hour to get up the courage and boredom, but Sarah eventually leaned down to her guitar, pulled it out, and strummed while she checked to make sure all her strings were tuned up. She hummed lightly to one of her favorite lullabies her mom had sung when they were kids. She had no idea who wrote it, what the name of it was even, or if her mom had just made it up out of nowhere. She’d never asked, too scared to ruin the magic.

  People watched her carefully, eyeing her up and down, before moving on. She sat with one leg crossed over the other, her guitar louder as her confidence grew and as she focused on the music, not her surroundings. Her songs changed from modern rock to pop to country to bluegrass, and everything in between. People stopped and stood by her for a while, took video of her, no doubt to post to their own social media pages. Her publicist would either eat it up or hate it. She didn’t care. She was on vacation.

  Closing her eyes, Sarah listened to the music in her body, the vibrations from the guitar against her chest, the feel of the strings against the tips of her calloused fingers, the edge of her thumb that had had so many blisters over the years from forgetting her pick or just refusing to use one.

  Her voice got louder while her disregard for the unexpected quiet but enthusiastic audience surrounded her. Closing her eyes briefly, she opened them again to see the clock on the wall. It was about time for her to stop, but she wanted to finish her song. Her voice carried around the wide-open room, the acoustics awful since the building was designed to dampen sound, not amplify it.

  When her voice rang out on the last note, a round of applause went up. Blushing, Sarah dipped her head in thanks and settled her guitar into its case. She knew people would want to come and talk to her, and she welcomed it. While she enjoyed the silence at night sometimes, most often she enjoyed the chatter of other people. She was surrounded by others so often that being alone scared the shit out of her. After signing autographs, she begged off and headed toward her gate. It wouldn’t be long until her vacation really kicked off.

  As she sat in her seat, Sarah closed her eyes, put on her headphones, set her phone to play random songs, and fell into the world of music she knew and loved so well. Oftentimes her escape was music more than anything else, but every time before a tour and after an album release, music felt more like a chore. She missed moments of bursting out in song when it didn’t mean anything, when music flowed through her heart to her fingers and through her lips into the world around her. She had to find that again.

  The plane took longer than she had expected because of delays, and by the time her second flight landed, it was eleven at night and she was done with being awake and traveling. Sarah had been up for the better part of two days, and her eyes drooped. She’d thought she could get an energy drink or at the very least coffee at the airport, but she wasn’t even sure she could call that an airport.

  There was one terminal. Literally one. There were no restaurants inside the building, no vending machines functioning properly to give her sweet caffeinated elixir. She would know; she had tried all of them. Sarah gritted her teeth as she waited in line at the one single car rental place.

  She stifled a yawn as they filled out the paperwork and gave her the keys to the car. She smiled down at them, hoping she could find someplace open in town that could at least give her enough caffeine to make it to the elusive bed-and-breakfast Kara had found for her. She’d been hesitant to try it. It was a fairly new one, but it was out in the middle of nowhere, over an hour’s drive from the airport. It offered seclusion, which was exactly what she had been wanting. She needed to think, and to think, she needed the quiet, not just the quiet of the few hours in the middle of the night, but quiet for days on end.

  She threw her suitcase into the trunk of the car and settled her guitar in carefully next to it. “I’ve got this.”

  Her phone buzzed, and she grinned when she saw Kara’s name light it up. “You’ve got this.”

  Snorting, Sarah texted back quickly and slipped behind the wheel. She knew she was going to look out of place wherever she was going. In the city she might be able to fit in a bit, but out in the country? She would stand out like a sore thumb—another reason why she wanted the seclusion of a bed-and-breakfast that had nothing around it.

  Indigo Ranch and B&B told Sarah absolutely nothing. Its website had been nice but vague. There was a listing of things to do in the neighboring towns, most of it not interesting to Sarah in the least. There was a larger list of what she could do in the countryside, a lake nearby or a weird rock formation. She wasn’t sure. She’d only skimmed the literature.

  She’d seen the availability of six rooms and the max occupancy for said six rooms. She’d checked religiously over the weeks after she booked it to make sure no one else stayed there while she did and had even debated renting the other rooms herself to guarantee she would be alone. Sarah stepped on the gas pedal and pulled away from the airport. It was an hour drive. She could do this.

  She found the highway readily enough. After thirty minutes of driving on it, she turned onto a second, less kept highway. The asphalt clearly hadn’t been done up or patched in years. Her tiny little sedan hit each pothole like it was a crater in the moon telling her to go home. Her heart raced as nerves ignited in her belly. This was a bad idea. She couldn’t do two weeks on her own in a strange place. Kara had refused to come with her the multiple times she had begged, and she didn’t really have anyone else she could ask.

  Sarah shook her head. She was stronger than this shit. Biting her lip, Sarah pushed the gas pedal a little harder and sped up until she hit the next pothole, and then she slowed down again. She muttered, “That was stupid.”

  Taking it slower and more carefully, she cringed when the first bolt of lightning flashed across the sky. They had flown through that. That had been what had slowed them down, and it seemed as though the nasty storm she’d already weathered once had caught up with her again. Sarah gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.

  It had been years since she had driven a car, and it had been even longer since she’d driven a vehicle during a rainstorm, but that lightning bolt had been close. One loud, hard thump in her chest told her she was going to have to start some deep breathing exercises to make it through.

  Another bolt of lightning jolted down to the ground, this time a whole lot closer than before. Sarah strained her eyes to see the road in front of her, but it was pitch black outside, so dark she wasn’t sure she’d ever been someplace quite so blanketed in black. With her heart in her throat, tightening her airway, she tensed her fingers on the steering wheel, stiffened her back and shoulders, and focused on what she could see of the thin yellow line in the center of the road because there was no white line on the outside.

  “I’ve got this. I’ve got this,” she muttered to herself repeatedly as a chant, forgetting the words as soon as they slipped from her lips.

  The car jolted as she hit something. She couldn’t be sure if it was another pothole or a small animal. Her mind was elsewhere and couldn’t decipher whether the car had gone up or down when it hit the bump. Her stomach twisted hard, causing a sharp pain in her side, a pain Sarah was eerily familiar with.

  Glancing at her phone, she checked to see how much longer she had to go, and she noticed her battery was nearly dead. Her charger was buried in the suitcase in the trunk of her car, and she was not pulling over on the side of the road in an unknown area of the country with a storm literally on top of her.

  “Deep breaths.”

  Drawing in on a ten count and blowing out on a ten count, Sarah readjusted her hands on the steering wheel and tried again to calm her racing heart. It was worse than if she’d had a whole case of energy drinks in one day.

  Her phone slowed its tracking of her vehicle, and she cursed under her breath. The feeling in the pit of her stomach that had grown throughout the day of traveling took over, and she knew something bad was going to happen. She had no doubt of it. Her phone blinked twice before it cut out. Grabbing it sharply, Sarah tried to turn it back on, but it was dead as a doorknob.

  “Fuck me.”

  Then she laughed. If Kara had been there, which she should have been, she would have said “gladly,” and then they would have avoided the awkward friends-don’t-have-sex tension before Sarah skipped out of the conversation as fast as she could.

  Sarah tried to remember the directions she had attempted to memorize before leaving the airport. She slowed down as she waited for the next county road to pass her by so she could read the sign, but it seemed like it was never going to show up.