Prey Read Free

anything in particular. All she wanted at the time was to support herself. So when her dad died, the logical thing had been to move back home and take over his guide business. After all, she’d often helped him before she moved away, so it wasn’t as if she was a novice and didn’t know how to conduct a guide trip. She was a decent tracker, and a decent shot. At the time, she hadn’t seen any reason why she couldn’t make a go of it, and she was kind of ready for a change anyway, so why not?
    And then she’d found something she hadn’t expected to find: She loved it. She loved being out on the mountains, she loved being in charge of her own destiny. There was something special about stepping out of a tent into the pristine early morning and being overwhelmed by the solitude and beauty around her. How could she have gone so many years without realizing this was
exactly
what she wanted to do? Maybe she’d had to go away for a while in order to see how suited she was for this life. Not that she hadn’t enjoyed living in a city; she had. She’d liked the variety, the people, the friends she made; she’d even taken some cooking classes and thought about maybe doing some catering on the side. But she
loved
being a guide, and enjoyed living here way more now than she had when she’d been growing up.
    She did wish she’d made some different decisions, such as selling the horses and keeping the four-wheelers, instead of doing the exact opposite. Hindsight was great, except it was so damn slow in coming. She hadn’t anticipated that the economy would bottom out and discretionary spending would almost disappear. She hadn’t known Dare Callahan would move back home and siphon awaymost of her business. Why couldn’t he have stayed in the military where he belonged, safely away from her little patch of Montana?
    If only—
    No. No
if onlies
. Never mind that she was thirty-two and he’d given her butterflies. She didn’t trust butterflies, didn’t let herself get carried away by emotions and hormones. Once had been enough. She’d made such a fool of herself that whenever she thought of her abbreviated marriage her stomach still curdled from an almost overwhelming sense of embarrassment. A strong desire to leave Billings, the scene of the debacle, had made her that much more eager to take over her dad’s guide business when he died.
    No doubt about it, if she’d been happily married at the time she’d have sold off the business and stayed in Billings, simply because she’d built a life there. When her personal life fell apart, though, she’d withdrawn so much that her friends had almost given up on her in exasperation. After moving back here and getting her feet under her again she’d mended those relationships—a woman always needed other women—but by then she’d fallen so in love with her way of life that dynamite couldn’t have blown her back into an office setting.
    Thinking that she needed to send some e-mails when she got home, just to keep in touch, she opened the truck door and was about to climb into the cab when she abruptly remembered that she needed some nails and staples to repair fencing, which she might as well get now while she was right here at the hardware store and save herself a trip later. She also wanted to catch up on the community gossip, such as it was, with Evelyn French, the chatty half of the husband and wife team who owned the hardware store. Their son, Patrick, had been the only other kid her age in their little community, and all during their school years the Frenches and her dad had swapped out driving them to school in the nearest real town, forty miles away. Patrick was a cop now, in Spokane, married, with two ankle-biters of his own. Evelyn wascrazy about her grandchildren, two little boys ages four and two, and always had time to relate the latest tales of what they’d said and done. She seemed to relish their mischief, as if she thought Patrick deserved everything they did.