by Maisey Yates
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to say it like that. Like it was easier.”
“It is,” she said softly.
“Is it?”
“In the sense that I don’t know what I’m missing.”
He looked at her for a long moment, but didn’t press the issue. Then he grabbed the white disposable container of worms and his pole, and she took hers, and the two of them began to walk down toward the lake.
They set up on some rocks a ways from each other and cast out as far as they could. It would’ve been better to have a boat to fish in a lake, but since they didn’t have one, this would do. The place they were standing was a pretty decent drop-off, and Jamie really was concerned that all that she was doing was dragging the bottom and snagging catfish. She reeled back continuously, trying to make sure that her bait didn’t snag the bottom.
Her dad had taught her to fish when she was a tiny child. Something she learned that was a part of her now. Muscle memory. Same with horse riding. Same with shooting a gun.
If she’d had a mother, would putting on makeup have been second nature? Would all that have been her secondary skill set? Baking pies, making biscuits.
She would never know.
She sighed heavily.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.” As soon as she said the word, she wished she hadn’t. She’d spent her life not sharing. Holding it all in. She’d never had to do that with Gabe, and she didn’t have to do it now. The realization made her feel like a small weight had been lifted from her heart. She didn’t have to pretend to answer. She could answer. “Except...the really hard part about losing a parent you don’t even remember is that you wonder all the time. What would your life have been like? Who would you have been? That’s what I wonder. And I didn’t let myself wonder it for a long time. I didn’t even let myself think I might want any of the things my mom might have been able to give me.”
She reeled her line in, then cast out to the center of the lake again. “I know all the things my dad taught me,” she continued softly. “But what would she have taught me? All of us, really. What would have been important to her to have us know? And who else might I have become? Amelia will probably wonder that. She will probably wish that she knew what his voice sounded like. That she could just once know what it was like to be held in his arms. People talk about that. A mother’s love. A mother’s touch. What it’s like to be cradled by your mom when you fall down and get hurt. I don’t know what it feels like. I don’t know... I don’t know what that kind of love feels like. And sometimes I wonder if it means I’m missing something. If I have a hole that can never be filled by anything else.”
She turned away from him, and her pole jerked. She yanked up hard, making sure the hook took purchase, before beginning to bring the fish in.
“Fish on,” she said as her pole wiggled and resisted against her emotions. She brought him in, a tiny rainbow trout that was barely legal. She dispatched him quickly, and cast her line back out. Before long she and Gabe had caught the daily limit, enough to have themselves more than a decent supper. And some breakfast. They worked in silence, cleaning the fish, and then Gabe got the fire started, and they began to panfry the trout and the rice. Jamie left the cooking to him while she put the salad together and wrapped the rolls in tinfoil, placing them next to the coals to get them warmed up.
When it was done they sat together, eating what Jamie thought might be the best damned birthday dinner on the face of the planet.
“I know how to do all that,” she said, taking a bite of fish and grinning.
“And you do it pretty damn well,” he said.
“My dad wanted to make sure that I was never going to go hungry. So I learned how to be self-sufficient.” She blinked, unexpected emotion pressing down against her eyes. “I learned how to be self-sufficient. I’m not sure I ever learned how to need anyone. Or...how to be comfortable needing people. And sometimes I...I feel like I really do need people and I don’t know how to tell them.”
Suddenly, Gabe’s arms were around her. She set her plate down on a stump by her feet and let him hold her. “You said earlier you felt like you had a hole. Like you were missing a certain kind of love. But I think... Jamie, I think love is pretty much love. And there’s a whole lot of people in your life who love you.”
“I wish I had hers.” Her throat tightened all the way to closed, and tears started to pour down her face.
She never cried for her mother like this. Because there had never been anyone to answer those cries. She let him hold her, and she cried.
She cried like a motherless child, because that was what she was.
Tears that she’d never allowed to exist, coming from a grief she had told herself was pointless to have.
But maybe, just maybe, some things didn’t need to be fixed. Maybe some things just needed to be felt. And this needed to be felt. With all of her. From the deepest part of her soul. And it was like that hole she’d been talking about was filled with tears, filled with pain, but filled. And Gabe’s arms held her, rough and tight and comforting. “I need you,” she whispered. “I really do need you.”
She’d been afraid of this. Of this need. Needing another person. But she needed him, and she’d admitted it. And the world hadn’t fallen to pieces. The world was just fine. And she might be a little broken in it, but he was holding her together, so she wouldn’t fall apart. Not totally. He angled her head and kissed her, and she let him kiss her. She let him comfort her. Let him see her. See how wounded she was. How badly in need of healing.
She wasn’t going to get up and wipe the blood off.
She was just going to bleed for a while. With him.
When Jamie finished crying, they finished dinner in relative silence. They worked together to get everything cleaned up, to get everything that might attract a bear dealt with. Their sleeping bags were already unrolled inside the tent and zipped together, because his mother—though a problem for him right now—had not raised him to be a fool.
He hung a Coleman lantern up in the center of the tent, the light raining down in strange, wavy lines.
While he’d been out making sure the fire was dead, Jamie had changed into soft-looking pajamas, which covered a bit much of her body for his taste, but also looked soft and made him want to touch her. So as far as he was concerned, that was a decent enough trade-off.
He had not brought pajamas. He didn’t own pajamas.
He kicked his boots off, pulled his shirt up over his head and stripped off his jeans. She looked up at him, her eyes still a little bit red from crying earlier. “She died two days after I was born,” Jamie said.
His gut seized up tight. He had known she died when Jamie was a baby, but he hadn’t known it was so close to her birthday.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me, too. Really sorry. And I think I’ve been sorry for a long time, and didn’t really let myself feel it. I was afraid because somewhere in all of that I’ve...I’ve blamed myself. And I...I feel like I can deal with it all better now. There’s something about you that makes me want to...feel things.” She laughed, a watery sound. “That sounds really cheesy. But...it’s true. It’s weird. Nothing like I thought it would be. This whole thing. This whole physical thing.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
He didn’t know why, but the way she said that made his stomach get all tight.
“Is everything all right with you? With your family?”
“Yeah,” he said.
He brushed that off, and she looked hurt. And it made him miss the Jamie she had been a few weeks ago, who would have probably just taken him at his word, and not notice that he was holding anything back.
He had liked that about Jamie. That she seemed invincible.
She didn’t now. And she was blaming him for that. And he wasn’t sure he was up to the ta
sk of handling the responsibility of Jamie when she wasn’t made of Teflon and bravado. But then she was crossing the space between them and kissing him, and he couldn’t think. This woman... She knocked him on his ass. She wasn’t like anyone or anything that had come before her.
“You’re like Annie Oakley,” he said.
He felt her mouth curve against his. “Straight shooter who never misses?”
“Yeah. Like some kind of strange that only comes around once every hundred years. Some kind of magic.”
She looked dazed, and again, he had to wonder what the hell he was playing at. Same as he had wondered when he’d taken her down to the river. Danced with her in the water.
She made him feel like he had just been introduced to a part of himself he didn’t know existed. But he knew it was alive. All that romance and shit wasn’t in him. Not really. Not sustainably.
That was the problem. He knew better. Knew people didn’t change without putting themselves and those around them through a lot of broken glasses, sweat and tears.
And that what was in your blood... Well, it stayed.
His father might have changed, but his mother was a liar.
He didn’t know what the hell his life was.
Then she stripped her shirt off, and he couldn’t think.
Her breasts were small and perfect, so close to his chest, he wanted to crush her to him so that he could feel her body in that way.
He didn’t know if he’d ever get enough of touching her. It didn’t seem to be possible.
She pressed her hand to his chest. Her hands... They were all Jamie. Just like her. Delicate in their way, but strong. Soft skin, but calloused in places, from all the work that she did.
A true kind of cowgirl who didn’t shy away from any challenge.
Who rode horses better than anyone he’d ever seen. Who sensed what the animals felt.
Who’d brought him back to a place where he did, too.
Who looked beautiful with her hair and her makeup done, and knew how to catch and clean a fish. Who looked beautiful without makeup, and with nothing at all.
Strong as steel and hard as flint. And wept in his arms.
And somehow gave him the feeling it was the only place she cried.
And that should terrify him. But it didn’t.
Because there was just no damned way to be terrified when Jamie Dodge had her hands on his body.
He kissed her and captured her hands in his, laying her back on the sleeping bags, the motion rocking the tent, rocking the lantern above them, stripes of white dancing over her body, teasing him, giving him glimpses without revealing all. He lowered his head and sucked her nipple deep into his mouth. She was beautiful. Was it possible she hadn’t always known that? He could barely believe it.
And he certainly didn’t deserve any kind of adoration or credit for that. And yet she seemed to give it to him. And he didn’t want her to stop, because he wanted all that adoration.
The way she looked at him...
Like his hands were magic and like his mouth had told her the secret to life... Well, no man was ever going to want that to stop.
He moved his fingertips slowly down her stomach, to the waistband of those flannel pajamas, and he made quick work of those, leaving her naked before him, watching as the light painted shapes over her skin. And then letting his hands trace the path. Tasting her, touching her. Listening to every sigh, every moan, every sound she made. She was a revelation. And he wished...
He wished that he could be the man that she seemed to think he was. The way she looked at him... He didn’t know a man that deserved to be looked at like that.
He couldn’t have her forever. And he knew it. But he could have her tonight. Bathed in light and nothing else, and he would damn well take it.
She was different. His hard-riding girl who didn’t mind if things got sweaty, didn’t mind if things got rough.
Tonight she was soft. Open.
And it made his knees weak.
It made him weak all through.
And when he thrust inside her body he was lost. And found, all at the same time.
It was a fitting thing, because it was just like Jamie herself. That soft, strong creature made of contradiction and glory. She was a woman who might wonder what she could have been, but in his mind, there was no doubt she knew who she was. And for a man who had lost that anchor, who had no earthly clue what tethered him to his life anymore, what the hell choices had brought him to where he was, it was a beautiful, terrible thing.
Jamie was almost ten years younger than he was. But she was so much more grounded in many ways.
He had done what he’d done to protect his mother. To get back at his father.
But part of him wondered...just for a moment...if what he’d really been protecting was himself. But that revelation got lost on a tide of pleasure, on a whole ocean of longing that pulled him under and made him its slave. She arched against him, crying out, her body pulsing around him, her orgasm drawing his own out. This time together had been making love, and it had been remarkably different from anything else he’d ever done.
But this orgasm wasn’t gentle. Wasn’t a calm, easy pulse of pleasure. It was fearsome, and it was deadly, savaging him down to the bone. Leaving him less than he’d been before, and somehow more.
Like she’d stripped every last ounce of bullshit right out of the way, and left behind nothing but him.
And he was desperate to hold on to it, to hold on to her. Because this was the closest thing to a glimpse at certainty he’d had in days. When they finished, he was spent, and after taking care of the protection, they both fell asleep wrapped around each other.
When he closed his eyes all he saw was a woman, riding her horse through the field, her hair blowing in the wind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
WHEN JAMIE WOKE UP, she was warm, nestled against Gabe’s body. Her face was cold, thanks to the biting mountain air, though.
If not for that, she might have forgotten that they were camping.
Well, that and the hard ground. But she was so comfortable with Gabe that she barely registered it. She sighed heavily, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Then she leaned forward, unzipping her tent, revealing the broad expanse of field and mountains before them, the sun just cresting over the trees, creating a rose-gold ring that lined the ridges there.
She took a breath, looking all around them, and then back at the man still sound asleep in her tent. Her aspiration suddenly felt flipped. Because somehow, life right here felt complete. And she could imagine existing here. Just here. With him.
This was all that love-changing-you stuff, she imagined.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to barrel race anymore. Of course she did. She wasn’t just going to change her thoughts on that because she...
Well, she loved Gabe.
She snuggled back down in the sleeping bag with him, enjoying the view, and enjoying touching him.
She supposed everybody who was stricken down with love had that thought, though. That they could be completely happy, out in the middle of nowhere, removed from the reality of life.
It was life that worried her.
She turned over onto her side and examined his face. When he slept, the lines in his face weren’t as deep. As if some of the tension and pain he carried around with him when he was awake lifted when he dreamed.
He was such an intensely beautiful man.
The strong slash of his dark brows, his dark lashes. That mouth. She wanted to lick it. All the time. She’d never understood the giggling obsession girls around her in high school had had with boys.
She felt like giggling around Gabe. She felt obsessed.
He stirred, opening his eyes, those blue eyes hitting her somewhere deep in her soul. “Good morning.”
“G
ood morning,” she said. “Thank you for yet again holding me through another emotional breakdown.”
“Sorry that there wasn’t any hot chocolate.”
“The trout was pretty good. And anyway, we can have some campfire coffee this morning.”
“Can we?”
She stretched. “Yes,” she said, some of the stretch lingering in her voice. “But one of us has to go out in the cold and start the fire.”
“I think that falls under the purview of pioneer woman.”
“No,” she said stubbornly. “I think that’s men’s work.”
“No, pretty sure men chop wood, and women stoke fires. The wood has been chopped. So...”
“That’s not chivalrous,” she pointed out.
“Oh, I didn’t know you wanted chivalry. I thought you were a strong, independent woman.”
“I’ll bite you,” she said.
“I don’t think you—”
She sank her teeth into his shoulder and he growled, before climbing out of the tent, stark naked, and heading outside. “I’ll light the fire. But only because you’re crazy.”
She smiled, enjoying the view. Who would have ever thought that she, Jamie Dodge, would someday go camping and get to watch the most perfect male specimen she had ever seen start a campfire in the buff. It was a triumph that she hadn’t even known she might want to achieve.
“Be careful,” she warned as he got a flame going. “You have some very extreme exposure happening there.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I promise to protect all relevant parts of me. There is no way you can be more concerned about it than I am.”
“Hmm,” she said, “I think I can give you a run for concern there.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” he said.
Silence fell between them for a space, and Jamie decided she couldn’t let it go, not anymore.
“Are we going to talk about what’s wrong?” she asked.
“What?” he asked, getting the flame lit, and getting the blue-and-white-speckled pot placed over the flame.