“We just left there,” Matthew said grimly. “Chef got drunk and laid down a pool bet he couldn’t make good on. Then a fight broke out. Now we’re headed home. The end.”
“I saw your truck,” Sam said. “Who drove the Suburban?”
“Chef took it.” Matthew didn’t sound angry, only exhausted and fed up. “I drove the pickup when I came looking for him. I’m too tired to talk about it right now, Sam. I’ll be back for the truck tomorrow.”
“I can drive it over to the ranch. Then Tyler can take me back to town. I need to hear the long version of this story.” Sam turned away, then looked back over his shoulder. “Ella is okay, right?”
“Are you kidding?” Matthew said. “She stopped the fight.”
Sam grinned with admiration. “That’s my girl.”
* * *
“What do you mean,we can’t get through the gate?” I asked.
Matthew and I were sitting in the front seat of the Suburban, facing the ranch’s entry gate, which, according to him, had been padlocked by Walt.
“It’s for safety,” Matthew said. “It’s Walt’s job to lock the gate every night, and he goes to bed pretty early, so guests and employees have to tell him if they’re coming home after ten. Most of our guests don’t rent a car, so it’s not usually an issue.”
“I thought there was no one out here, so you didn’t need locks. And why don’t you have a key? You usually have that massive keychain with you.” My voice had taken on an edge because I was tired and frustrated.
“It’s back at the house. I jumped into the truck and there was a key in there already.” Matthew rubbed his forehead. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Let’s call Walt then. Or Tyler?” It was just after midnight. We’d stopped twice on the way home—once for Chef to be sick on the side of the road and the second time because there was a pronghorn lying in our lane. Matthew could have gone around it, but he wanted to make sure the animal wasn’t still alive and suffering. Fortunately, it had already passed away because I could only assume he would have had to shoot it with a gun that was hidden somewhere inside this vehicle, and I did not want to witness that.
I had traveled far, far outside of my comfort zone.
“Pull out your phone.” Matthew waited for me to get it out of my purse. “No reception, right?”
He was correct. No bars. My stomach sank as reality set in. The adrenaline rush of the bar fight was gone, leaving me weary and weak-limbed, and all I wanted to do was climb into a soft bed and fall asleep.
“So, do we walk back?” We could pretty easily climb over the main gate, which was only about four feet tall.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. “Four miles feels longer in the dark, and you could twist an ankle in a rut.”
“We also can’t leave Chef here alone.” He was currently snoring loudly in the backseat, dead to the world.
“Why can’t we leave him?” Matthew glanced over his shoulder with a look of disgust. “He earned it.”
“Because he could vomit in his sleep, and his death would be on our hands. That’s how Jimi Hendrix died, you know.”
Matthew raised his eyebrows at me, and something about his expression made me throw my head back and laugh at the absurdity of our situation.
“I don’t want him to go all Jimi Hendrix on us,” Matthew said, smiling for the first time since the bar fight. “I guess we need to spend the night out here. Do you want to sleep in the back row of the Suburban? I’m going to sleep outside.”
“Outside?” He looked serious, but I laughed again anyway. “Please tell me you’re joking. We don’t have a tent or sleeping bags.” Camping sounded fun, theoretically, like after we’d done careful planning and preparation, not because someone locked a gate and left us stranded on the roadside.
“I’ve got a couple sleeping bags in the back,” he said, “and you can have both of them and make yourself as cozy as possible.”
“So I’d sleep in here with Chef and you’d be outside?” A nasty burp resounded in the seat behind us, and I wrinkled my nose. “I think I’ll sleep out there with you.”
* * *
Settingup camp hadn’t taken much time at all because all we had to do was roll out two sleeping bags on the ground. I let Matthew give me his fleece jacket to use as a pillow, and then we lay down next to each other, about twenty feet from the Suburban.
“Oof.” I sat up again to extricate a rock that had been poking into my right shoulder from under my sleeping bag.
“I’m so sorry about this, Lauren,” Matthew said. “I feel terrible, making you sleep out here.”
