Take a Hike (Beneath the Wild Sky, #3) by Katie Ruggle 
Series: Beneath the Wild Sky #3
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca on November 11th 2025
Genres: Action
Pages: 304
Format: eBook
Source: Amazon
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WHY DATE A MOUNTAIN MAN? Because it's effing in-tents.
Bounty Hunter Charlie Pax is in a bind. Not only did her own mother skip town after putting the family home up as collateral, but it's days before her first court hearing and she still hasn't been found. If she doesn't show, Charlie and her sisters will lose everything. There's only one thing left for Charlie to make a big show of leaving town with the one piece of bait sure to lure her mother out of hiding and set a trap for her in the remote Rocky Mountains town of Simpson, Colorado.
Surly Simpson firefighter Kieran Byrne is no stranger to being on the wrong side of the law. He's the prime suspect in the murder of a local militia leader, and he needs help proving his innocence before he can take the fall for someone else's crime. Charlie's got her hands more than full, but pretty soon the two strike a deal; if she can help Kieran prove his innocence, he will use his contacts to track and entrap her mom. Two birds, meet one stone.
As they break into the local militia's compound, dodge flying bullets, and hunt for the stolen necklace, Charlie and Kieran discover they share an explosive attraction…and a growing affection neither can deny. But is there room for something as soft as romance in either of their hardscrabble worlds, or will the call of that lifelong adventure be something neither can find it within themselves to deny?
Time to say goodbye to the Pax sisters.
We have followed the five Bounty-Hunting Pax sisters as they try and bring in their own mother to justice. Jane has stolen an expensive necklace. She was let out of jail on bond and has been in hiding ever since, planning to jump bail after she put up the family house. The same house where the sisters have paid off the mortgage after their mother left them. If Jane succeeds and misses her court appearance, they will lose the house they love so much and be out on the street with nothing. As we get to Charlie’s story, they are running out of time as Jane’s court date quickly approaches. They have spent months trying to track her down with no success. They have had every lowlife in town breaking into the home, all certain that Jane has hidden that necklace in the house, even going so far as to kidnap Charlie’s twin, Cara. (Risk It All.)
It is Charlie who eventually finds what Jane was looking for when she too broke into the house–a hidden key. Charlie then goes with her sister, Felicity and her stalker-now-husband, Bennett, and they head off once again to the sleepy mountain town of Simpson, Colorado (Search and Rescue Series) to work with the (un)official murder club. They want to use the key as bait for Jane and hope their new friends will help box her in.
Of course, once the Pax sisters (and Bennett) arrive, they quickly find themselves being stalked by several amature sleuths/lowlifes who are also trying to find Jane but who are more interested in finding the necklace she has stolen than getting Jane to the court on time.
Once in Simpson, Charlie meets grumpy firefighter, Kieran Bryne. Kieran’s father had once been head of the local militia and is currently doing time in prison. Once news of his father’s activities became known in the small town, Kieran has become person non-grata. So while the Pax sisters are in town looking for Jane, he wants them to also help him find who is responsible for killing the man whose body Felicity and Bennett found. (The Scenic Route)
Something about the grumpy and quiet Kieran sets off something in the ultra-outgoing Charlie and she just can’t spend enough time around him. Every smile she gets is a win in her book and most surprisingly, he hasn’t gotten annoyed with her squirrel-on-caffeine outgoing personality.
I really like these Pax sisters and I enjoyed each of the five stories, even if the stories were broken up between Rocky Mountain Bounty Hunters and Beneath the Wild Skies series. Why? And since I have read all of Katie Ruggle’s stories, I really enjoyed the fact that she took us back to Simpson a second time and resurrected most of the Search and Rescue characters.
The only thing I found unsatisfying is the fact that they were way too lenient with Jane in the end. Jane is not much of a mother to her five daughters. She is a criminal and has lead them on a merry chase these last few months, stealing their home’s equity to fund her bond and willing to leave the girls homeless in order to stay out of jail for her crimes. Of course, they catch her in the end, or else it would have been a terrible end to the series, but they stood up for her at the Court hearing–a shitty, criminal mother who was willing to steal from her own kids and leave them homeless. Bah! Send her to prison!
I will miss these girls but maybe we can find a long-lost Pax cousin or an unknown step-sister who can use help and come back to this fun group.
Favorite Scene:
“What on earth are you doing here?” Before he could answer, she held up her phone. “Hang on.” After she typed out an It’s just Kieran text to her sister, she looked back at his scowling face. “Okay, go ahead.”
“Go ahead with what?”
“Explain why your boots are acting all menacing.” When his eyebrows crashed together in apparent confusion, Charlie realized that hadn’t made much sense to someone who hadn’t been inside her head with her for the last few minutes. She revised her question to something a little more universally understood. “Why are you here?”
“You left this.” He held out his closed fist, and Charlie automatically reached out to take whatever it was he was offering.
She stared down at the charred remains in her palm for a solid ten seconds before asking, “Uh…what is it?”
“Your screwdriver.”
“My screwdriver.” She poked at a metal bit with her free hand. “I guess I can see how it could’ve once been a screwdriver, but mine?”
“You dropped it in the fire.”
“Wait–is this the screwdriver I used to try to take off the back door of the coffee shop?”
His scowl deepened as he glared at the remains on her palm. “It was much too small for that.”
“Yeah, it broke.” She looked meaningfully at the pieces he’d just given to her. “Plus its Lou’s broken screwdriver. Why are you really here?”
A door across from them opened, and a man with a sour expression stuck his head out into the hall. “Can you keep it down?”
“Probably not.” Charlie had never been very good at maintaining a proper inside voice. When the man continued to glare at her–but not in a hot-Kieran-type way–she rolled her eyes and pulled her key card out of her sock. “C’mon.” The light by the door flashed green, so she grabbed Kieran’s sleeve and tugged him behind her into her room. Not even waiting for the door to fully shut behind them, she slapped the light switch on and turned to face him. “Now, why are you really here?”
He scowled at her so hard, looking completely offended by her presence, that she almost felt like she should leave the room–but then she remembered that it was her room and that he’d come to her for some reason. It was just that his resting-crank face was so severe that it was constantly in a state of get-off-of-his-lawn-edness.
She made a get-on-with-it gesture. “You’re very hot and entertaining to stare at, but it’s been a day, so say what you came to say and then let me collapse on that extremely comfortable-looking bed.”
That entertaining, baffled look entered his eyes, softening the edge of her glare, and the tips of his ears turned red again, possibly in response to her comment about his hotness. Just when she thought she was going to have to kick out his silent butt, he spoke. “Your sister found Cobra.”
It took a long moment to process that statement. Even thought it was only four simple words, she had to pick it apart to figure out the meaning of each one. Finally, the light bulb in her brain flickered to life. “Oh! Fifi’s dead body?” She grimaced. “Now I’m sounding like Daisy–not that there’s anything wrong with that. Daisy’s adorable. Okay, now I’m sounding like Lou. Let me start over.” Clearing her throat, she organized her thoughts into a straight line. “Fifi did indeed find the remains of Cobra Jones, the previous leader of the militia formerly known as the Freedom Survivors.”
Kieran blinked only once, which was fairly impressive. Charlie often reduced people to silent stupefaction, blinking so rapidly that it looked like they were trying to send a message using Morse code. “Formerly known?”
“Really? That’s the part you got stuck on?” Charlie shrugged. “Apparently there’s a petition out to change the local militia’s name. Not sure where in the name-change process the murder club is, so that might be premature, but I have a feeling it’s inevitable.”
“What’s inevitable?”
She gave him a consoling pat on the arm. Even if he wasn’t involved in the militia–and she really hoped he wasn’t–his dad had been, so there might be some nostalgia connected to the old name. “The murder club really hates Freedom Survivors–the name, not the actual militia.” Her head cocked slightly. “Possibly the militia too, which is understandable, since they do seem to be rather murder-y. Sorry.”
His glare took on an intensity that she hadn’t seen from him yet. “Do you ever make sense?”
She opened her mouth to tell him that she was making perfect sense, and that his listening skills must be the problem, when a heavy-handed knock on the door made her jump.
“Either that’s some sort of law enforcement officer or I have more than one brother-in-law with a cop knock.” Charlie took a step toward the door, but Kieran blocked her with his body as he peered through the peephole. For just a raw second, she wondered if she was stupid to have let this possible militia member into her hotel room, and whether she was about to be held hostage by said militia member, but then Kieran opened the door.
Peeking around his rather massive body, she saw the pair in the doorway.
“Ah,” she said. “Just a family of cop knockers then. Everyone come in and shut the door before the crabby guy yells at us again.” Glancing at Kieran, she gave him a reassuring flap of her hand. “Not you–the guy across the hall.”
By the way his eyebrows squashed into an even more angry line, he wasn’t soothed by that.
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