Near & Far by Nicole Williams

nothing beat the feeling of stepping onto Montana soil and breathing its air while knowing my favorite people in the whole world were within arm’s reach.
    “There’s a pair of legs a man could never forget.”
    Okay, some of my favorite people in the world. And some of my not-so-favorite.
    “And there’s a face a woman wished she could.”
    “Rowen Sterling,” he said with his dark smile. In his dark clothes. With his dark ways.
    “Garth Black. Minus the enthusiasm.” I made sure not to return his smile. Garth and I had made some serious progress in the friendship department, but it was kind of a contest to see who’d blink first. Instead of blinking, the loser was the first one to smile . . . and not that curved-at-the-corners one he flashed most of the time. The emotion behind that was the opposite of a smile. We were talking about whoever cracked a real, honest-to-goodness smile aimed at the other person first. “Where’s Jesse?” He’d always picked me up. He’d always been the first person I saw when I stepped off the bus. He would beam and wave, with a new white tee and still fresh from the shower. It was actually one of my favorite sights: Jesse Walker in all his glory waiting for me.
    My second favorite sight? The view later that night when everyone else was asleep.
    “Emergency.” Garth lifted a shoulder and snagged my giant black duffel from the storage compartment.
    I froze. “What kind of emergency?” So many different kinds of emergencies could crop up from the kind of work he did that I’d started having recurring nightmares. Getting stampeded by the cattle, getting bucked off a horse over the edge of a cliff, and the most gruesome one of all gave away that I’d seen way too many horror movies in my lifetime—Jesse tripping and falling chest-first into a pitchfork. I woke up in a cold sweat whenever I had that one.
    “Relax, señorita. No emergency involving Jesse or any part of his body you like to get freaky with.”
    His reassurance, pithy as it was, unfroze me. “What happened then? Who was involved? Are they going to be all right?” I slid up beside Garth and matched his pace into the parking lot.
    “Don’t know.”
    “You don’t know.”
    “Nope.”
    “You didn’t think to ask?” My eyes were scanning for Old Bessie. When I realized that would be the first drive from the bus station to Willow Springs I’d taken without the ancient rust-can, I felt a little . . . sad.
    “Nope.”
    “Really?”
    “Nope.”
    “Anything other than nope you’d like to add?”
    “Nope,” he replied, his eyes gleaming.
    I groaned. Of course I’d be stuck with the most cryptic cowboy ever created when the words Jesse and emergency had come up. Again. It wasn’t the first time those two words had been joined. Even though it didn’t involve him directly, I hoped I’d never have to hear them combined again.
    “Listen, before you go and start ripping out that once-again dark hair of yours, here’s the deal. Jesse called me a couple of hours ago, said there’d been an emergency and he might not be able to get here soon enough to pick you up. He asked if yours truly,”—Garth stuck his thumb into his chest—“would swoop in, save the day, and pick you up. End of story. Any questions?”
    I felt a little better. If the emergency Jesse was a bystander in could be fixed in a couple hours, lost limbs, pints of blood loss, and bullets wouldn’t have been involved. I hoped. “That’s all he said? There wasn’t anything else?”
    We stopped at the tailgate of an older Ford pickup. From the color, I had a pretty good guess who its owner was.
    “Yeah. There was something else.” Garth lifted his brows and waited.
    “I’m dying here, Black.” I crossed my arms and leaned into the truck.
    “He said to keep my hands, booze, and cock to myself or he’d rip me a new one.”
    I crossed my arms tighter and gave him a stern look.
    “Fine. He didn’t say cock . Only a real man with a