PART ONE
Chapter One
The morning had risen bright and warm, and the weather forecast promised a perfect June day. Ellen Emerson took her first cup of coffee onto the balcony outside her suite in the big house of the Moondancer Ranch and opened all her senses to the new day.
She’d lived her whole life within five miles of the balcony she stood on, and she’d never lost her keen awe of Idaho’s natural beauty. The Sawtooth Range loomed to the north, its east-facing angles aglow with rosy dawn. The air pulsed with mingled birdsong and the lows and bleats of waking animals, and each breeze surged with the scents of pine and grass and good earth. Even the animal scent, from the ranch’s small flock of sheep and smaller herd of cattle and its stable of horses, had a tang that was pleasingly right. The aroma of her coffee wafting up from the cup was a perfect complement to the sensory smorgasbord.
Spread out before her was the Moondancer itself, rousing into the day. Ranch hands led the animals out to pasture as the day shift of the hospitality staff wandered on foot over from the bunkhouses or pulled their cars into the lot from the road. Those that looked up and saw Ellen watching lifted their hands in greeting. Some called out “Mornin’, Ellen,” or “Hey, boss”; to each, she raised her cup in greeting.
Seventeen years, she’d been working at the Moondancer, and she knew it from bottom to top. Hired after high school, she’d started out in housekeeping and had worked that job for years before she finished an Associate’s Degree from Boise Community College and was promoted to desk staff. A few years back, after a major shakeup in ownership and management of the ranch, the new general manager, Wes Taylor, had offered Ellen the position of assistant operations manager. Then, after another shakeup in which the original owner of the place sold out her remaining shares and left town, Wes had promoted Ellen again.
Though she ran the place now, it didn’t stretch her memory much to remember what it had been like to clean toilets and make beds. She tried to run the ranch with that memory close, and make sure she never slighted the lowest-paid of her staff, who did the hardest and least fulfilling jobs.
The Moondancer Ranch was a luxury dude ranch, catering specifically to an ultra-wealthy clientele that had no interest in roughing it while they played at ranching. They wanted to dismount from their docile horses after a day’s ride with a catered lunch break and stroll into their cabin or suite for an hour-long shiatsu massage followed by a six-course meal. They wanted thousand-thread count sheets and French-milled soaps.
They paid for it, of course, but they often believed they’d paid for much more—for impunity, for instance, and free access to the young women who made up most of the hospitality staff.
The original owner had turned a complicit eye to all that. Wes and Ellen did not. Ellen, who vividly remembered the days when a young maid had to keep the guests happy no matter what or risk her job, had made changing that culture one of her main missions even before she’d had the reins.
The transition had been a bit rocky, and they’d lost a few longstanding and very profitable accounts, but Wes—and the Cahills, Wes’s family by marriage, who owned the place—had been fully in support of the change. Wes said any accounts they lost for that reason weren’t worth keeping anyway.
The Moondancer had always been an elite resort, but now there was no seamy underside. Occasionally, though it was discouraged, staff members still hooked up with guests, but now it was absolutely consensual, and when it wasn’t, Ellen and Wes protected their employee—and their staff knew they could trust them to do it.
Just as Ellen finished her coffee and was about to turn back to her suite and finish dressing for the day, Luke Taylor, the livestock manager and Wes’s cousin, rode out from the stable on his big dapple gelding and tipped his black Stetson to her, as he did every morning. His female goshawk, Minerva, was perched a leather pad strapped to his shoulder; he often let her out for a hunt first thing in the morning.
Ellen dipped a little ironic curtsy in response to his hat-tip, as usual.
“Hey, Ellie,” he called up. “Are we still havin’ lunch today?”
Ellen came back to the railing and frowned down at him. “Were we ever on for lunch today?” Her phone was inside, so she couldn’t check her calendar, but she’d checked it once this morning, and was pretty sure she was free at lunch. Dinner was routinely devoted to wining and dining prominent guests, and breakfast usually happened on the run, if at all, so she tried to preserve lunch for a moment to herself.
Luke frowned. Minerva shifted on his shoulder impatiently, and he rubbed gloved fingers over her talons.
“I wanted to talk about some ideas I have for the classes, remember?”
“Right, right. I wasn’t thinking straight when I said I could do it. Today’s too busy.” Luke knew what was going on today.
“Too busy for lunch?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“You gotta eat, Ellie. Half an hour’s all I need.”
She could probably wedge in half an hour, and she felt bad for forgetting. “Okay. Thirty minutes. At 12:15 sharp.”
“Thanks. See ya then!” With another gentlemanly brush of his brim, he urged Teddy forward and headed at a trot toward the far fields and the woods, where his hawk could hunt up breakfast.
Ellen went back inside and finished getting ready. Fridays were their busiest days of the week, the day that week-long packages began and ended, and they ran at full capacity from May through August. In addition to guests checking out and then a new batch checking in, all the rooms needed full turns and the pubic areas needed full refreshes, too.
This Friday would be especially busy, because the ranch had been booked for the next week by a single international company—one of the biggest communications companies on the planet—holding its annual management retreat. After a decade using the same resort on the California Central Coast, they’d booked the Moondancer for the first time, on a recommendation from a friend of the CEO. The opportunity for this retreat to become an annual thing had both Wes and Ellen drooling.
They had other regular corporate clients, and it wasn’t unusual for one corporate client to book out the whole ranch for their retreat. The Moondancer always treated its guests well and gave them the luxury they sought, so they got mentioned in the right circles. But this company was such a huge deal their word of mouth could cover the globe. Ellen meant to give them a little extra sparkle and really impress them.
Honestly, she really couldn’t afford the time for Luke. But at least it would make her stop for a second and get a sandwich or something.
*****
As was her custom, Ellen roamed the main areas of the big house between eleven and noon, the busiest hour of the Friday check-out. The ranch had been booked the previous week with a wedding group. Destination weddings were Ellen’s favorite events to book and plan—and also had some of the things she hated most about this work.
She loved them because they gave her a chance to spread her planning wings and were invariably beautiful. Sometimes she and her staff were the sole official planners; other times, like this one, they worked with a planner the bride had hired. Either way, Ellen really enjoyed the work of creating someone’s fantasy—and there was, in her humble opinion, nowhere on Earth more beautiful than right here at the base of the Sawtooth Range.