Retreat Read online

  THE SAINTS OF DENVER SERIES

  Salvaged (Coming this June)

  Riveted (Coming this February)

  Charged

  Built

  Leveled (novella)

  THE BREAKING POINT SERIES

  Honor

  THE WELCOME TO THE POINT SERIES

  Better When He’s Brave

  Better When He’s Bold

  Better When He’s Bad

  THE MARKED MEN SERIES

  Asa

  Rowdy

  Nash

  Rome

  Jet

  Rule

  Retreat

  Retreat Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer M. Voorhees

  All rights reserved.

  Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBN-13: 978-1540751300

  ISBN-10: 1540751309

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Jay Crownover LLC 1670 E. Cheyenne Mountain Blvd. Box# 152, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80906.

  Cover design by:

  Hang Le

  www.byhangle.com

  Photographed by and Copyright owned by:

  Wander Aguiar Photography

  www.wanderbookclub.com

  Editing by:

  Elaine York, Allusion Graphics, LLC/Publishing & Book Formatting

  www.allusiongraphics.com

  Proofreading & Copyediting by:

  C.J. Pinard

  www.cjpinard.com

  Interior Design & Formatting by:

  Christine Borgford, Type A Formatting

  www.typeAformatting.com

  Table of Contents

  Retreat

  Also by Jay Crownover

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Sneak Peek of RIVETED

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Dedicated to anyone and everyone who has told me they would read a grocery list if I wrote it.

  Let’s put that to the test, shall we!

  From the desk and overactive brain of Jay Crownover:

  Are you scratching your head in befuddlement and asking yourself where in the hell this book came from? Are you reading and then rereading the blurb trying to figure out what it’s all about? Well, have no fear, my friends, in my very typically up-front and blunt way, I’m going to tell you everything you need to know moving forward.

  First of all, if you clicked this book just because my name is on it, thank you. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for believing in me. And thank you for having faith in my words. If you clicked because you liked the cover, the blurb intrigued you, or simply for the hell of it . . . ain’t nothing wrong with any of those reasons in my book. I will tell you this isn’t a copy and paste of anything I’ve written before, so if you’re expecting tattoo artists, heavy metal singers, or car thieves you are going to be bummed out. It’s also set up like an old-school, romantic suspense. That doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of the main couple getting on and getting on each other’s nerves . . . it just means there is also a very definitive bad guy who shows up and makes life miserable for everyone involved. This book is also a single POV, the story unfolding as we follow our little lion through the most important week of her life. I have reasons for writing it that way that I’ll get into here in a hot minute.

  Where did Retreat come from?

  Well, that’s both easy and complicated. At the end of 2015 and early on into 2016, I found myself dealing with some pretty persistent and crippling pain resulting from a messed-up tooth extraction. It ended up infected and I needed surgery, which also got infected and so on and so forth. IT WAS MISERABLE. I was miserable. I was also doped up on any number of pain meds for around four months. I couldn’t concentrate, I definitely couldn’t write. I was worthless. That forced downtime meant I spent a lot of time in front of the TV with Netflix.

  I found myself binge watching all the seasons of Longmire and got sucked into Ashton Kutcher’s show The Ranch. I watched the Hateful Eight, Jane’s Got a Gun, and all kinds of other western-based movies and TV shows.

  I know you’re thinking . . . why? I thought you only watched Die Hard and Bob’s Burgers, Jay . . . but alas . . . I actually grew up in a small mountain town littered with cowboys and ranchers. The boys I went high school with had gun racks in their pickup trucks and wore Wranglers, not Dickies. As a teenager, my boy bestie worked on the ranch next to my grandma’s property up in the hills. I would spend the weekends waiting for him to get home from either stick shows or the rodeo, or to come in from riding the property and beg him to take me for rides. (I never quite got the hang of horseback riding . . . but I can do-si-do with the best of them.)

  I think because I was so sick, and in so much pain, I digressed back to my childhood when my mom took care of me and I didn’t have anything to do other than bug Jesse for rides on his horse. I got really nostalgic . . . a little reminiscent, and decided I wanted to write a book that was familiar to me in a different way than ink is. I wanted to step back into a place that no longer fit me, but still hangs in the back of my closet as a reminder of what was.

  I decided I wanted to write a book based in the mountains, on a ranch that was run by guys who are not quite cowboys.

  Come on now . . . you didn’t think I’d go full ten-gallon hat, boots, and spurs on you, did you? You should know me better than that by now!

  I wanted to write my kind of guys but put them in a western setting and see how they fared. They fared pretty fucking great if you ask me! But you’ll have to read on and meet the Warner brothers to see if you agree with me or not.

  As for why this book is told only from our heroine’s perspective . . . that’s because it’s her story, her journey, her week where everything went so wrong even though she was trying so hard to do everything exactly right. Since I was hurting physically, I think that manifested itself into telling the story of a woman who was hurting the same way I was emotionally. There was no room for the hero’s voice in my head because I was too deeply wrapped up in purging all the nasty stuff that was happening inside of me out into our heroine’s tale. I can’t write a character if I don’t hear them speak; Cy was silent but Leo had plenty to say.

  She’s probably going to rub you the wrong way at first . . . but give her time to get it together. Betrayal burns deep and it takes a long time for those embers to die down.

  So, anyway . . . that’s the long and short of where this book came from. It’s completely different from anything else I’ve ever written . . . but it is startlingly similar to all the books I most love to read. You won’t be able to compare this to any of my words that came before it so I hope you give it a chance based on what it is and not what you think it might (or should) be.

  As always, thank you fo
r being here . . . and thank you for letting me be here.

  Happy reading!

  xoxo

  Jay

  Not Quite a Cowboy

  “They don’t even look like real cowboys.” I muttered the words under my breath low enough so that only my best friend could hear them. She turned her head in my direction and gave me a look that told me she had had enough of my whining and endless snarky commentary. We’d gotten up early to fly out of San Francisco and had landed in Billings, Montana, only to then hop on a teeny-tiny charter flight that brought us out to Sheridan, Wyoming. It had been a day filled with travel, and my sarcasm and snark were at an all-time high. Partly because I really had no interest in being here, but mostly because, for the last few months, I’d been a miserable human being to be around and I couldn’t seem to rein in my bad attitude, even when I really wanted to. She was getting tired of it, and frankly, I couldn’t blame her.

  “Just because they don’t have on cowboy hats and leather chaps doesn’t mean they aren’t cowboys; you have no idea what a real cowboy even is. When have you ever been on a ranch before or traveled any farther east than Las Vegas? The closest you’ve been to any kind of cowboy was when we went to see Garth Brooks a couple of years ago. You promised to keep an open mind, and so far you are sucking at it.”

  I sighed and shifted away from Emrys. Her dramatically shaped eyes could see right through me and I didn’t need a guilt trip from her when I already felt like crap. I turned my attention back to the three men standing before us and begrudgingly admitted to myself that two of them could pass as the sexified, carefully marketed country music version of what a cowboy should be. They could easily give Luke Bryan a run for his money with the way they were packed into their tight jeans. They were both more than passably attractive from what I could see under the brims of their matching camo baseball hats, the ranch’s logo stitched on the front. When they introduced themselves, I found out that they also had what I would consider authentic cowboy names, Sutton and Lane. I wasn’t sure which one was which because I was completely distracted by the third member of the not-so-welcoming committee. He was the one I was specifically talking about when I made the ‘not a cowboy’ comment. He looked as out of place on this working ranch in the middle-of-nowhere Wyoming as I felt. He was also watching me just as closely as I was watching him. His name was Cyrus . . . which was maybe a cowboy name but to me sounded more like the ruler of some ancient kingdom. In fact, he would fit in way better in Sparta than he did here on the range. The thought made me snicker, which got me an elbow in the side from Em, even though I kept the wayward thought to myself.

  The man, who most definitely didn’t look like a cowboy, didn’t have any kind of hat on so there was no mistaking the fact that his narrowed eyes were locked on me. His lack of headwear also revealed that he had his dark hair buzzed in a trendy undercut and styled back in a way that required product and know how. Two things I would never associate with an actual cowboy. It also showed that he had the faintest hint of silver at his temples above his perfectly even sideburns. Even with the dusting of gray, I still only put him at somewhere in his early- to mid-thirties. The silver in his hair should make him look prematurely aged, but it didn’t. He looked tough and distinguished, and if he was dressed in something other than lovingly worn Levi’s and a faded Jack Daniel’s T-shirt, he would give the executives and CEOs who I did business with a run for their money in the silently intimidating department. Not that I could imagine any of the men I worked with looking as good as this one did. He did something special for that cotton T-shirt that stretched tightly across his broad chest. And the way he impatiently shifted his weight from one heavy-looking black boot to the other pulled denim tight around places I should be embarrassed to be looking. I wanted to ask him why he had boots on that belonged on a Harley rather than in the stirrup of a saddle, but I didn’t want another sharp poke from Em, so I kept my musings to myself.

  No, the man named Cyrus didn’t fit what I had thought would be waiting for me when I agreed to this crazy plan of Emrys’s, and if he hadn’t walked out to greet us with the other two men when the passenger van we had taken from the miniscule airport dropped us off, I would have automatically assumed he was part of the tour group and not one of the guides. He didn’t look like what I expected someone who was intimately familiar with the outdoors or the inhospitable and uninhabited terrain of the Wyoming landscape to look like. His rough appearance and unwavering gaze made me question again why I had let Emrys talk me into this vacation that sounded more like punishment than any kind of fun I was familiar with. I was even more hesitant to venture off into the wooded mountains than I had been before, as my stare-down with the man dragged on and on to the point that I knew looking away would mean some kind of defeat. I wasn’t sure what the battle I was engaged in was about, but I was a sore loser at the best of times, and considering I was at the lowest point I’d ever been, I knew there was no way I could be the first one to break eye contact. I loved my best friend, but at the moment I could happily strangle her for deciding we needed this girl’s only trip that would force us both to unplug and regroup over the next week.

  “You ladies are the last of the group to arrive. We’ll get you settled in and then everyone can meet in the main house for dinner so we can all go over what to expect for the next week.” It was the guy in the middle who spoke. He was the shortest of the three and he was the only one who seemed capable of smiling. The man with all the muscles and the scowl kept watching me, while the last guy looked bored and annoyed. His expression indicated that he felt like he was being put out having to play welcome wagon for a couple of city girls. Considering this little jaunt was costing both Em and me an arm and a leg, the least these not-quite-cowboys could do was roll out the welcome mat and pretend that they were thrilled to do so. We were paying for an unforgettable experience, and so far they had delivered, but not in a good way.

  I stiffened my spine and narrowed my eyes. Unfortunately, my intimidation factor was nil considering I was dressed in comfy leggings and an oversized Henley that I stole from my ex. My outfit was great for traveling in, but not so great for trying to look like a badass who wouldn’t stand for the blatant indifference coming from a third of the trio who was supposed to be responsible for my health and wellbeing for the next seven days. I also wasn’t going to keep quiet over the overt hostility radiating off the one I couldn’t look away from. I was one of those women who was always a little unkempt and disheveled, so I had to work at appearing put together and polished. It was a constant battle every single morning as I got ready for work. I could pull off cute with minimal effort, but it took some time and some serious skill with both my clothes and my makeup to push me into the chic and professional sphere. Considering I had woken up at the ass crack of dawn, my wardrobe, hair, and war paint were nonexistent. With my unruly, wavy, strawberry blonde hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, I was keenly aware that I looked more like Raggedy Ann than a highly successful market analyst who was also a street-savvy and independent woman. Or at least I had been, until I fell for the wrong guy and he proved otherwise.

  The single pleasant member of the trio smiled again and inclined his head toward the bags sitting at our feet. When Em had booked the trip they had been very clear that this was an outdoor adventure. We would be venturing deep into the mountains on horseback and we were to leave any kind of technology and civilization behind us. There had been strict instructions on what we needed to pack, and as a result, the bag at my feet was stuffed full and contained mostly new and untried mountain appropriate attire. It was all stuff that would end up shoved in the back of my closet and then, years later, donated to Goodwill because I had very little use for any of it in my day-to-day life back in the Bay Area.

  “Sutton and I will take your bags and show you where you’re bunking for the night. You ladies have about an hour before dinner, so you can relax and get freshened up.” Getting freshened up sounded delightful. Maybe if I put on so
me blush and drew my eyebrows in, I could get Mr. Personality—with the death stare—to take me seriously when I told him that his behavior was unacceptable.

  The bored guy must have been Sutton because he took a step forward and bent to pick up Emrys’s bag. I thought I heard her sigh when he bent over but it could have been the air shifting and moving around me. The man, who looked like he didn’t belong anywhere near a place that was often referred to as the ‘Cowboy State’, took a few steps closer to me. I had no choice but to tilt my head back and look at him. I sucked in a breath as I was struck by the sharpest, clearest, most flawless pair of gray eyes I had ever seen in my life. They were the color of smoke and silver. His eyes cut through me like the honed blade of a knife as they raked over me, from my messy hair to the toes that had curled up in startled response where they were encased in a pair of super-comfy Uggs. Again, my choice in footwear had been great for traveling in, but not so great for leaving the most impactful first impression.

  Cy’s voice when he spoke was deep and raspy. It sounded slightly broken and jagged, like maybe he didn’t use it a lot and when he did, it took a minute for the words to find their way out. It was the kind of voice that belonged to a real cowboy “This isn’t a spa or some kind of all-inclusive retreat where your every want and need is catered to, Ms. Connor. This is the wild, wild west, and if you don’t listen to the boys and pay attention to what they are telling you, then things can go bad faster than you can blink.” There was a warning there, but all I could think of were nights around the warm campfire and even warmer nights in the bedroom. He had a voice that made me think about rough sex and talented hands that I wouldn’t want to say no to. “Sutton and Lane are good at dealing with girls from the city who want to come out and play cowgirl, but I would advise against looking at them like they aren’t fit to carry your bags or like they somehow aren’t meeting your high standards.” Cy had a great voice, but goddamn, did his personality leave a lot to be desired.