“Yeah. Four of them.”
“Bachelor party? Birthday?”
Nic shook her head. “Looks like it’s a group of friends just taking a trip together.”
At this, Lily groaned. At least bachelor parties were on some kind of mission, usually to sneak booze and have a week of debauchery they’d talk about for years to come. But the groups that came to Lily’s tourist expedition company, Wilder Adventures, just to “get away” always needed more babysitting, more structure. Sometimes that was fine—helping people enjoy a vacation on horseback had been Lily’s joy growing up and was to this day—but right now she was running on fumes.
“All of them signed the waiver?” Lily asked.
Nic scratched her cheek, hesitating. “Yeah.”
Pointing, Lily asked, “What’s that mean?”
“Well,” Nicole said, “it kind of looks like they were all signed by the same person.”
Lifting her beer to her lips, Lily muttered a quiet “Shit.”
“Dub, it’s a formality.”
“Unless it isn’t,” she said. “I can’t afford a lawsuit.”
“Girl, you can barely afford this beer.” When she ducked to catch Lily’s gaze, Nic’s wild hair fell over half her face, leaving one glimmering blue eye free to study her best friend. “How are you thinking this will be our last trip out?”
Lily squinted down at the whorls in the scuffed wood bar. Truthfully, she had been hoping more than anything that this would be the last hurrah for Wilder Adventures. She wanted this to be the last time she took city slickers out into the desert to team-build and “rough it” and hunt for fake treasure. She wanted to put her dad’s journal away and never have to look at it again. She wanted to live where no one asked her about Duke Wilder’s maps or his stories and she could forget all about Butch Cassidy. Lily wanted to never again see a man wear polished dress shoes while riding a horse or hear another woman wearing a Prada “western” shirt complain how sore her ass was after a half hour in a saddle. She wanted to be running a ranch, to tack up Bonnie at sunrise and wrangle her own horses across sagebrush and frost-tipped grass that glimmered like diamonds and crunched beneath hooves. She wanted enough money to move out of her dad’s old run-down cabin and leave this dusty shit town. She wanted this to be her last trip out more than anything.
But wanting didn’t get her anywhere. She’d learned that lesson a long time ago.
Still, quitting this gig consumed Lily’s every waking thought; seven years into this business and she felt trapped. She scraped by leading tourists around the desert, but horses were expensive, and Lily needed horses to lead tourists around the desert in order to scrape by. Chicken, meet egg.
“How did things go at the bank?” Nic asked, coming at it from a different angle.
Lily shook her head.
“Again?”
“Who’s going to give someone like me a loan? What’s my income going to be if I stop leading treasure hunts?”
Nicole leaned in again. “Did you tell them that was your plan? What do they even know?”
Lily looked over at her. “I didn’t, Nic, but they’re not dumb. The guy said, ‘So if you buy some land and start up a new outfit, how are you going to make money until it’s solvent?’ And I told him that it would take a couple years but that I knew the area, knew the business, and knew what people wanted in a Wild West vacation, but it didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what I say; I’m not a good investment.”
Nicole blew out a breath and stared down at her hands. It was then that Lily noticed an envelope with her name poking out of the stack of mail and liability waivers. She’d recognize the return address anywhere. It used to be hers.
Immediately, she was buried under a deluge of memories—the astringent, crisp punch of sagebrush; herding horses as the sun tipped its hat over the top of the mountains; fat, warm butter biscuits in the mornings; the precise moment she’d laid eyes on him, and, weeks later, the heat and fever of his body—
Rubbing the ache beneath her breastbone, Lily cut those thoughts off at the pass, pointing at the envelope. “What’s that?”
Nic tucked the envelope away again. “Nothing.”
“It’s from Wilder Ranch. And it’s got my name on it.” She reached for it. “Give it.”
But Nicole slapped her away. “You don’t want it right now, Dub, trust me.”
Right now?