Page 1 of When The Dust Settles

Chapter 1

“THERE, BOSS, take a left.”

I took the turn as directed and the five other people in the pickup truck with me—three in the back seat, two in the front—yelled at the same time that it was the house on the right.

There were a lot of lights on, and clothes and stuffed animals were strewn all across the front lawn.

Crap.

I got out and heard the passenger’s side door open, along with movement in the back of the pickup, at the same time.

“No,” I barked, whirling to stare into the interior and the truck bed as I slammed my door shut.

Five pairs of eyes all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two were pinned to me. A quarter of my staff had insisted they were going with me, cajoled, and finally flat-out refused to get out of my truck when I left to go pick up Josie Barnes. The rest of them, those old enough to know better than to leave a restaurant during the nightly dinner rush, stayed there, taking care of the place that had become home for all of us, not just me.

“Everybody stays in the truck,” I ordered from where I stood in the street. “I don’t want any of y’all hurt.”

“But boss, her dad and her brother are up in there. We gotta go in with ya,” Andy Tribble, one of my busboys, pleaded. “You didn’t bring no backup.”

“Kevin’ll be here in a second,” I explained quickly. “He’s right behind us—he’ll go in with me.”

“Yeah, but—” Shawnee Clark began to argue.

“No!” I yelled and then included them all with a wave of my hand. “Any of y’all that gets outta this truck is fired, ya hear?”

“But I was the one that answered the phone when she called,” Danny LaRue chimed in. “I should go in since I told her I was coming.”

I sent up a quick prayer for strength. “What were her exact words, Danny?”

Silence.

“Time’s a wastin’.”

He coughed. “She said since you were still fishing that—”

“Since I was still fishing,” I repeated. “Meaning that if I was there, I was the one she wanted, right?”

Nothing.

“D?”

He huffed out a breath. “Yeah.”

“Well, then.”

When he looked at me, his face was scrunched up. “You shouldn’t go in alone.”

Everyone nodded at once in support of his statement.

I knew why. I did. They needed me. I was the boss; it was my place, our restaurant, The Bronc. I’d pulled it out of thin air into existence, and they’d all taken refuge there with me in one form or another. I was the glue. Without me, if anything happened to me… they would all be adrift, and while for a few that would be a brand-new experience—some were too young to have lived totally alone yet—for others, it meant being without an anchor all over again.

So I understood that the fear was first for me, second for them, real and tangible and in no way self-serving. None of them wanted me in danger.

“Just nobody fuckin’ move,” I growled, those my final words on the subject.

There was lots of nodding and they all stayed put. I knew it wasn’t the threat that kept them in their seats, though, but the look on my face. I had on my serious one.

I was almost to the porch when the screen door banged open and Josie’s brother—she’d only ever called him Bubba—about twenty years old, came charging out with an electric guitar clutched in his fist. Since I knew from our Christmas party eight months before that it wasn’t his, I surprised him and grabbed it out of his hand.