by Megan Crane
But that was the beauty of having lost everything. It meant she literally had nothing left to lose. She remembered how worried she’d been, way back when she’d started dating Thayer. About everything. What to wear, what to say, whether he liked her, whether he’d call…
She didn’t care about any of that now. She wasn’t sure she ever would again. She’d learned a terrible lesson in what was really important, and there was no stitching herself back together to be the heedless girl she’d once been.
So while he worked on his buckle, Skylar simply stood up. She reached down to find her tattered, ripped panties on the ground, balled them up, and stuck them into the pocket of her sundress. She smoothed down the skirt, and then she reached up and did the same to her hair, the comfortable gesture soothing her.
“Thank you,” she said. Formally.
Too formally, she realized the next instant, when his head tilted slightly to one side and that hard gaze of his settled on her.
“Thank you?” he repeated.
Which told her that was clearly the wrong thing to say.
But Skylar didn’t need to say anything more than that. She knew he was a bull rider. She could probably find out who he was in an instant, with a simple Google search, if she wanted. She didn’t want. Not tonight. There were fireworks up ahead, and still entirely too many inside of her, and she was content.
Changed.
Free of chains she hadn’t even known were holding her back.
“Thank you,” she said again, firmly.
And then she turned away, and headed back down toward the house. Leaving her cowboy and the things they’d done together behind her in the dark. Because up ahead of her was light, and she was finally ready to embrace it.
She was finally ready to let it shine on her.
Chapter Four
The local sponsors’ cocktail event was in full swing the Thursday night before the weekend bull-riding event and Skylar’s cheeks ached a little with all the polite smiling she was called upon to do as a representative of Grey Sports. Not to mention the laughing without finding anything all that funny, necessarily, or the pretending to understand what overly boisterous men with their too-red noses shouted at her over the clamor.
You were an event planner for how many years? her father had asked when she’d suggested that she might not be the best choice for the job. Especially given the fact her stepmother was a former model and could always just stand somewhere and stun men to grateful, exuberant silence. You can work a room like your old man, Skylar. It’s a gift.
Skylar wasn’t sure it was a gift she wanted, but that was what she was here for tonight, so she did her best to make each smile seem as genuine as possible. She used all the tricks she’d learned at the events planning firm she’d interned at after college and had worked in ever since, right up until she’d left Atlanta.
Even when the people she was smiling at were old family friends who knew all about her and her last few years, which meant a whole lot of apologetic glances and the odd squeeze of her arm instead of easy cocktail conversation. That was when all those friendly smiles and easy pivots in conversation served her well, and an event like this was simple in that regard, because everyone in the room was a fan of the American Extreme Bull Riders Tour and more than happy to discuss it. At length.
Every conversation she was a part of turned to statistics and rankings—either on its own or because Skylar made sure of it. This bull. That rider. What had happened last weekend in Deadwood, South Dakota, who people thought would claim the top spot in Billings this Saturday night, and their take on the season so far for the tough, athletic cowboys who fought to score high and keep riding, week after week, despite injuries and uncooperative bulls and whatever else might befall them along the way.
She did not think about the man she’d left behind her in the dark. She didn’t think about the long, hot shower she’d taken when she’d gone into the house that night, when every square inch of her skin had seemed alive with sensation and the hot water had only exacerbated it. She certainly didn’t think of all the dark, erotic images that had chased through her head as she’d tried to will herself to sleep. They’d followed her into her dreams and yet, despite that, she’d slept deeper and woke more refreshed than she had in ages.
She told herself that was because she’d had sex again, pure and simple. It was because of all that release, that was all. A physical reaction to all those endorphins—nothing more and nothing less and certainly nothing to worry about.
Or hate herself for in the bright, unsparing glare of the morning after, tucked up in her childhood bedroom with no shadows to hide in.
“Simple biology,” she’d muttered to herself as she’d gotten dressed, entirely too aware of how different her body felt. A twinge here, a faint scrape there. That tugging, low in her belly, as if her cowboy had woken up something deep within her and it wasn’t going back to sleep.
And more than that, the odd sensation that she was turned inside out, somehow, though she looked the same on the outside. That she’d crossed a line she didn’t entirely understand and there was no going back now. No changing what would happen next—what she’d put into motion with that recklessness she hadn’t known was in her.
She refused to feel badly about it.
Skylar had stood in a pool of sunlight in her bedroom and breathed in, past that odd little uncertain feeling that she suspected wanted to bloom into shame, and then blew it all out.
She would not feel badly about doing something she’d wanted to do, and so well, apparently, that she was still flying high all those hours later. She would not.
Thayer had been dead for years. It was long past time Skylar set about crawling out of his grave. And there was nothing to feel badly about in any of that.
Even if she was starting to suspect that she’d viewed herself as a shrine to Thayer all this time, maybe even more than others did.
Angelique had blinked at her across the kitchen island downstairs a little while later and asked her why she was in such a good mood all of a sudden, and Skylar had tried to dim the silly smile she hadn’t realized she’d been aiming at her coffee. She’d chalked it up to an unexpectedly good night’s sleep. That was what she’d told her stepmother.
But the good mood had lasted. All of yesterday and into today. She’d gotten ready for the party this evening with a little too much anticipation bubbling around inside of her, fizzy and impossible.
She didn’t know her cowboy’s name and she’d gone out of her way to make sure she didn’t learn it. That was how she wanted it, because what mattered was that she’d felt something again. She’d felt.
It was her gift to herself. The other night could fade into memory, as darkly erotic as the images in her head, and there would never be any need to deal with what she’d done in reality.
Skylar was full up on reality.
But she’d always loved the rodeo. Bull fighting and barrel racing, roping and all the rest of it. She’d had the odd dream of being a bit of a cowgirl in her time, like every other girl growing up in Montana and the rest of rural America, but it had never taken. She hadn’t gone on to dedicate her life to horses, ranching, or farming the way so many of her high school classmates had. Most of the time, she didn’t have any regrets about that. Of course, most of the time, she also wasn’t back home in Billings, her life at a serious crossroads.
This weekend was as close as she’d get to the childhood dreams of land and the West and the particular sweetness of Montana that she only ever seemed to have when she came back here, and she was resolved to enjoy it. She would talk stock and stats and get her western cowgirl on tonight. She would work at her father’s booth in the Rimrock Auto Arena this weekend while the bull riders did their thing.
She would be grateful for her own very personal Independence Day the other night, and on Monday she could figure out what on earth she was going to do with this brand-new life of hers.
It wasn’t the one she’d planned,
but it was still hers. Like it or not.
Skylar was determined that she would live it. No matter what that looked like.
“Here you are,” she heard her father’s familiar voice boom from behind her then, jolting her back from that little spiral off into the ether. She’d moved off to the far side of the party for a little breather by the restaurant’s big windows, but she was sure the few moments she’d had were enough. She was already smiling when his arm landed on her shoulders and swung her a good one-eighty around from where she’d been standing, looking out at the summer evening hanging on over downtown Billings, gold and blue and breathless. “I want you to meet someone, sweetheart.”
And Skylar had spent years learning her party smile, which was much different from her widow’s smile. Polite and even a little merry, as befit a party. Delighted straight through, from her eyelashes to her dimples. Her old boss had claimed that a woman’s greatest power lay in how well she mastered, harnessed, and deployed her smile.
But when Skylar saw the man standing there with her father, dark eyes glittering and no trace of a smile on his hard mouth, her stomach seemed to free-fall straight out of her body and through the floor beneath her feet.
Because it was him, of course. Her cowboy.
The last man on earth she wanted to see again.
Though her body hadn’t gotten that message. Her heart was thumping at her. Her pulse was so loud in her ears that for a moment she worried she might have gone deaf. And everything else was a riot.
She concentrated on holding herself very, very still, as if the slightest movement would give her away.
Her cowboy didn’t look a whole lot different than he had the other night, though he’d foregone his hat this time, which only called more attention to the careless way he wore his dark-blond hair. He wore a different button-down shirt, a bit fancier and with a hint of western flair, that only seemed to emphasize those strong shoulders of his and his narrow hips. Skylar could see the shiny, obviously handcrafted belt buckle he wore that announced his prowess at his sport, and then she jerked her eyes back up because she didn’t need to look below his waist. She already knew what he had in his jeans.
And that gleam in his eyes told her he remembered it all just as clearly as she did.
“This is my oldest daughter, Skylar,” her father was saying in that hearty salesman’s voice of his that usually made her brother roll his eyes, but had always made Skylar feel loved. Protected. Home, even.
She felt none of those things tonight. Not even close.
The cowboy’s hard green gaze moved all over her, relentless and entirely too knowing. She had no doubt that he could see the way she flushed, almost instantaneously, as if the way their gazes clung together for that brief, hot, stomach-dropping first second of recognition was his mouth on her body.
Skylar was certain he suspected—or just knew—that the rest of her was mounting a revolution against the calm exterior she was working hard to keep in place. She felt like a knot, inside and out. She felt slippery between her legs, melting and aching and needy. All over again. And she was terrified that if she looked down, she would see her own nipples, hard and obvious behind the thin fabric of the dress she wore.
She didn’t look down.
The cowboy’s hard mouth was in a flat line, and the fact she knew how he tasted was no reason she should feel…deliciously hollow. Scraped raw.
Hot and shuddery, and something like greedy, all the way through.
And they were standing there with her father. Her father. It was so horrifying that Skylar almost burst into a spate of completely inappropriate laughter. Because she could hardly think what other reaction she ought to have in a situation like this, besides tears.
Her father was still talking, and Skylar hadn’t heard a single word he said. Was he telling this man she couldn’t really claim was a stranger her tragic life story? She couldn’t hear over the racket her pulse was making. But there was no hint of sympathy or softness or the typical uneasiness on the cowboy’s face, so she doubted it.
Skylar could feel something a little too close to hysteria clawing at the back of her throat, and promised herself that whatever else happened, she would not open her mouth and make it worse. For example, she absolutely would not say: Oh, Dad, you don’t need to introduce us. I can’t say I know his name, but I did get acquainted with far more important parts of him in the dark on the picnic table up behind the house.
Billy Grey might not have led much by example when it came to morality, with all his affairs and wives, but that didn’t make him any less her father. In the sense that he certainly wouldn’t want to hear about the sexual exploits of his little girl and would likely react to tales of such things badly. Very, very badly.
Skylar felt caught in a harsh grip, as if the cowboy had his hands wrapped around her throat. Or that hard arm of his that he used to keep himself situated on the back of a twelve-hundred-pound bull tight around her middle again.
She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to breathe.
What she ought to do, she understood in a flash, was simply turn and get away from this. From him. Run, if necessary. Do whatever she had to do to put space between her and this man of granite who stared at her as if he planned to take her apart.
Piece by piece, with no thought or expectation of ever putting her back together again.
Possibly right here and now.
But her father was still talking in his merry way, completely oblivious to the tension swirling around him.
“This right here is Cody Galen,” he said, sounding genuinely thrilled that he had the opportunity to introduce Skylar to such a star. And star was the right word. Skylar didn’t follow bull riding that closely but she’d heard his name before. “One of the American Extreme Bull Riders Tour veterans, and for my money, one of the best damn bull riders ever.”
Cody, Skylar thought, unable to help herself. His name was Cody.
Her first thought was that it wasn’t a hard enough name for a man who made steel look weak in comparison. But then her gaze drifted down the length of his hard, lean chest again, back to that belt buckle. It shone bright like the trophy it was, no doubt won on the back of an absolute monster of a bull somewhere, with all the broken bones and pulled muscles and torn ligaments that went with it. Weeks on the road and an endless season and injuries that would sideline most athletes, all for eight perfect seconds in one arena or the next. And Cody suited him, she thought. It was an unflinching western name. It sounded like the cowboy he was.
And she knew Cody Galen, who she’d heard about for years in the same distant way she knew about all the greats of the sports events she didn’t watch, was one of the best.
That his name rang through her like some kind of bell, she would keep to herself. As if it was the answer to a question, when she knew it wasn’t. Because he wasn’t, either. He was just a man. Just a cowboy.
Just a one-night fling, and that night was over.
“I’m afraid my daughter doesn’t follow bull riding as closely as her daddy does,” her father was saying now, apparently unaware of the way the cowboy next to him was watching the daughter in question with a look that Skylar could only call predatory. She had to fight to repress her shiver—but she would have sworn Cody saw it anyway.
“They can’t all be cowgirls,” he drawled.
Her father laughed. Skylar realized her smile was slipping off her own mouth, and that would call even more attention to what was happening. More than that, it would show Cody that she wasn’t handling this well. And she wanted—she needed—to handle this well. She wanted to laugh it all off. She wanted to play that light and airy, carefree girl she was certain someone else would be in a situation like this, but the truth was, she didn’t know if she had that in her.
“It’s an honor to meet you,” she said instead, summoning up every bit of professional polish she’d learned at her old job, and beaming at Cody as she said it. “My father really is a huge fan.”
&
nbsp; There was the faintest hint of a curve on that granite mouth of his, then. Maybe that was what pricked at her. Skylar didn’t know what devil it was, but she suddenly stopped caring that she was flushed too hot. She had no reason to be embarrassed. It wasn’t as if he knew any more about her than she did about him. So she allowed her gaze to get a little challenging as she held his, watched the answering flare in his dark green eyes, and then stuck out her hand as if they’d really never met before.
As if she was going to pretend they never had.
And when Cody reached out to take it in the next instant, because every cowboy had manners, at least in public, she didn’t look away. She didn’t react to the shower of sparks that seemed to course over her when his hand closed around hers. She even pretended she couldn’t feel that punch of sensation low in her belly.
No ache, she told herself. No deep melting.
It was just a handshake like all the others she’d had tonight. Impersonal gestures that made people feel as if they were connecting without having to actually do so.
“The pleasure’s all mine, ma’am,” Cody said after a moment, and Skylar didn’t really understand how the man’s drawl could get even slower. Until it rivaled molasses.
Or maybe that was just how it felt sliding over her, into her, until she wanted nothing more than to tear her hand out of his. And then stop whatever game she thought she was playing with this man who was so obviously used to various debaucheries that nights like the one they’d had were run of the mill to him, and hightail it out of this restaurant.
And maybe out of Billings, for that matter.
Instead, she let him hold her hand for a shade too long. Then she waited until he was the one to drop it, and found that she was inordinately proud of herself for something that she couldn’t even call a victory. Especially not when his dark green eyes were gleaming at her, showing a kind of very male amusement that had even made it down to that distracting curve in the corner of his mouth.