PART 2
Eli’s pistol trembled. Victor’s voice sharpened. “I gave you an order.” Dante didn’t move from his knees. “Eli,” he said quietly, “you don’t have to die for him.” Victor backhanded me across the face. Pain flashed through my jaw. “Stop talking!” I kicked backward, catching Victor’s knee. His grip slipped, and I lunged sideways. The gun fired into the ceiling. Dante exploded off the floor. He drove his shoulder into Victor’s stomach, and both men crashed through a wooden table. Eli swung his weapon toward them, then toward me, then lowered it. “I can’t do it!” he shouted.
One of Victor’s guards grabbed me by the hair. I slammed my heel down on his foot and threw my head backward into his nose. He cursed and released me. I snatched a broken chair leg, but another man caught my wrist and twisted until my fingers opened. Before he could hit me, Eli punched him across the jaw. “Get her out!” Eli yelled. “You traitorous little—” Victor fired at him. Eli ducked behind an overturned cabinet. Dante seized Victor’s gun arm and hammered it against the floor. The weapon slid toward me. I dove for it, but a boot kicked it away.
Then headlights flooded the windows.
Victor smiled despite the blood on his mouth. “You think that’s your cavalry?” Dante’s expression changed. “What did you do?” The door burst open. Two armed men dragged my father inside. “Dad!” He had a bruised forehead but was conscious. I ran toward him, but Victor’s guard caught me around the waist. Dad struggled violently. “Let my daughter go!” Victor stood, wiped blood from his lip, and turned to Dante. “Now we negotiate properly.”
He tossed a folder at Dante’s feet. Inside were transfer documents for three logistics companies, two restaurants, and a Chicago warehouse network. “Sign them over,” Victor said, “and the Harts walk out.” Dante laughed once, without humor. “You still don’t understand what you’re stealing.” Victor’s eyes narrowed. Dante looked at me. “The ranch deal wasn’t about land. Victor wanted me to expose my internal financial structure while chasing the fraud. Someone in my organization has been feeding him information.”
Eli stepped from behind the cabinet. “It was Marco.” Dante went still. Marco DeSantis was his oldest lieutenant—the man Dante trusted enough to run Chicago while he was in Montana. Eli continued, words rushing now. “Marco paid Garrett Vale. Marco arranged the fake title. Victor promised him control of your companies after you were gone.” Victor raised his weapon toward Eli again. “You pathetic child.” Eli’s face twisted. “You told me my brother died because of Moretti.” He looked at Dante. “That was a lie, wasn’t it?”
Dante answered softly. “Your brother worked for me. Marco killed him after he discovered missing shipments.”
Eli looked like he had been punched. Victor took advantage of the hesitation. He spun and fired. The shot hit Eli high in the side, throwing him backward. I screamed. At that exact moment, Dad slammed his chair into the guard behind him. I drove my elbow into the man holding me and broke free. Dante tackled Victor again.
The shack became chaos. Dad crawled toward Eli. I grabbed the fallen pistol. “Everybody stop!” My hands shook, but the barrel stayed on Victor. He stared at me and smiled. “You won’t shoot.” “Try me.”
A phone began ringing in Victor’s pocket.
He glanced at Dante. “That’ll be Marco. And by now, he has your Chicago headquarters.” Dante’s face drained of color for the first time since I had known him. Victor grinned. “While you were saving the girl, Moretti, your empire was being stolen.”
Then Dante’s own phone buzzed on the floor.
A message lit the screen.
MARCO HAS SOFIA. COME ALONE OR SHE DIES.
I looked at Dante. “Who’s Sofia?”
His silence scared me more than the gunfire had.
“My sister,” he said.
PART 3
For half a second, nobody moved. Then Dante snatched his phone from the floor. “Marco knows Sofia is the only family I have left.” Victor laughed. “Not anymore.” I kept the pistol aimed at him. “Call your men off.” He looked at me with contempt. “You think this ends because a farmer’s daughter found courage?” “No,” I said. “I think it ends because you’re surrounded by people you betrayed.”
Sirens sounded in the distance.
Victor’s face changed.
Eli, bleeding against the wall, managed a weak smile. “I sent our location before you shot me.” Dante dropped beside him. “Stay awake.” “Wasn’t planning a nap.” My father tore fabric from his shirt and pressed it against Eli’s wound. Outside, vehicles surrounded the shack. Victor’s remaining gunmen threw down their weapons. Dante’s security chief, Caleb Russo, entered first with county deputies behind him. Victor lunged for the fallen pistol. I kicked it away, and Dante caught Victor by the collar, slamming him against the wall. “You’re done.” Victor spat blood. “Marco still has your sister.”
Dante released him and immediately called Chicago. No answer from Sofia. No answer from Marco. Caleb handed him another phone. “We traced Marco’s car to a private airfield outside Billings.” My stomach tightened. “He came here?” Caleb nodded. “Forty minutes ago.”
We drove like hell.
At the airfield, a small jet waited with its engines running. Marco stood near the stairs, one arm locked around a dark-haired woman in a business suit. A gun was pressed against her ribs. “Dante!” Sofia shouted. Dante stepped forward alone. “Let her go.” Marco smiled. “You always had one weakness. Family.” “No,” I said from behind a hangar door. “He had two.”
Marco turned toward my voice, exactly as I hoped.
Sofia drove her heel into his shin.
Dante charged.
Marco fired.
I saw Dante jerk sideways, but the bullet had only grazed his jacket. He crashed into Marco before a second shot came. They slammed against the aircraft stairs. Marco struck Dante with the gun; Dante staggered. Marco raised it again, but Sofia grabbed his wrist. I rushed in and smashed a fire extinguisher into his forearm. The pistol clattered away. Dante drove Marco to the ground.
“You killed my brother,” Eli had accused earlier.
Now Dante stood over Marco, breathing hard. “And you nearly destroyed two families.”
Marco laughed from the pavement. “All for a country girl.”
“No,” Dante said. “You destroyed yourself because you thought caring about someone made me weak.”
Federal agents and Montana deputies moved in seconds later. The evidence Eli had copied—payments to Garrett Vale, Victor’s communications, Marco’s stolen-company scheme, and records tying them to multiple extortion operations—gave prosecutors everything they needed. Garrett cooperated. Victor and Marco were charged. Eli survived surgery and entered protective custody after agreeing to testify.
My father’s farm survived too, although not because Dante wrote us a giant check. I refused that immediately.
“You proposed to me with a plastic ring,” he argued from our kitchen table two months later. “I should at least be allowed to invest in apples.”
“You are not buying my farm.”
“I didn’t say buying.”
“You made the face.”
“What face?”
“The billionaire-criminal-acquisition face.”
Dad looked over his coffee. “She’s right. You have a face.”
Instead, we negotiated a real contract. Dante’s restaurants began purchasing cider, apples, and preserves from our family business at market rates. Other Montana farms joined the distribution network. For the first time in years, our property wasn’t one bad season away from disappearing.
A year after I had embarrassed myself at the Copper Ridge Festival, Dante brought me back to the exact spot where we met. No bodyguards hovered nearby. No crisis waited in his phone. He held the same ridiculous plastic ring I had used the first night.
“You kept that?” I whispered.
“I told you,” he said. “No take backs.”
Then he lowered himself onto one knee and pulled a second ring from his pocket, this one very real.
“Lily Hart, the first time you asked, you were drunk.”
“Moderately inspired.”
“You also had no idea who I was.”
“I knew you had terrible festival manners.”
He laughed. Then his expression softened. “This time I want the answer when you know exactly who I am.”
I looked at the man who had walked into a gunpoint trap for me, the man who had finally learned that protecting someone didn’t mean controlling them, and the man who somehow belonged beside an orchard more naturally than either of us could explain.
“Yes,” I said.
Dante stood and kissed me while my father yelled from twenty feet away, “She still owns the tractor!”
I laughed against Dante’s mouth.
Some love stories begin with roses.
Mine began with peach brandy, a plastic ring, and the most dangerous joke I ever refused to take back.
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