by Sasha Burke
He smiles and gives me an approving nod. “You’re not merely existing alone in this world anymore, which is why I’m not worried about you digging more into your past. Because you’ve got some strong anchors now here in your present that’ll very likely become a part of your future.”
Wow. I had no idea that’s how he saw me. And the thing is, he’s not wrong. About any of it.
At the sound of a polite knock on his door, I gather up my things to clear out. “Thanks for meeting with me today, Professor.”
“My pleasure. Even though we accomplished nothing on your academic agenda, per usual.”
The best kind of meeting, in my book.
As I make my exit out of his office, he calls out none too quietly, “Full new life or not, I expect you to graduate some time before I retire, Katelyn.”
I just chuckle in response.
The man won’t be retiring for at least a decade.
16
| Cade |
I tell you, watching a foal be born just never gets old.
We had a few complications, but thankfully, we’d been ready for every worst case scenario. The foaling stall has been all prepped to go for weeks now, and while my vet doesn’t live all that far away, I’d built a pseudo loft inside the foaling barn two years ago when we’d lost both foal and mare during labor. So now, I pay Doc extra to stay overnight here if at all possible when we’re within twenty-four hours of delivery, just in case.
I’d been worried as hell because the mare started showing labor symptoms in her musculature and behavior a full two weeks before we were expecting. And when she began labor, the biggest concern had been more orthopedic than anything else during the delivery given her still unhealed injuries. But Doc worked his magic and managed to get the foal out safely without any trauma to the mare. And now both baby and momma are doing just fine.
With that official good news, I finally head on home, making sure to stop by the bunkhouse on the way to update whoever’s up. My men have all been as worried as I have so I figure at least a few of them will be up.
The last thing I expect to find is all the lights on in the bunkhouse, and every last man in the place wide awake.
It’s obvious there’s some kind of commotion going on inside so I throw my truck in park and go running.
No exaggeration, when I recognize the jacket on the ground just outside the front entrance as Katelyn’s, and then see her jeans thrown over a bush a few feet over, I’m ready to kill every last man who works for me in cold blood.
“What the fuck is going on here?!” I bellow into the now silent bunkhouse.
Every man in there scatters like roaches with the piss scared out of them.
…But not before they each point outside to the east door.
I go storming off, only to find Katelyn flinging her t-shirt into the air out by the stables while muttering to herself about coming down with a fever, which she’s now apparently dealing with by jumping in for a cold bath in the horse’s stock tank.
She lasts about two seconds in the freezing water before she hops out and announces that her fever’s gone now.
And as she stands there checking her temperature with a hand against her forehead, seemingly oblivious to the fact that her underwear is all but transparent, suddenly, all the guys come back out from where ever they ran off to. Just so they can stare at the gorgeous creature.
My gorgeous creature.
I bark at all of them to get lost while I grab a couple of towels to dry her off and cover her up from nose to toes.
She isn’t injured, thank hell. But she is drunk off her ass. Which means it’s possible I may still kill someone tonight.
Leaving her bundled up on the couch, I shout down the hall for all my guys to get their asses out here.
“Uh, boss,” calls out Harvey, one of my older hands. “I don’t think you want to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Turn your back on her.”
I spin back around to the couch and find she’s vanished into thin air.
“I got her!” shouts Clint from out back.
A haggard and fairly terrorized-looking Jonah appears at the doorway with his radio, with two guys trailing behind him escorting Katelyn back to the common room.
“We got all the exits covered this time,” says Jonah, sounding exhausted as hell. “And fun fact, did you know your girl’s got a mean right hook? Because she does.”
I survey my guys who are all in here now and see that Chris, the gentlest one in the bunch is the one with the shiner. Nice guy or not, I narrow my eyes and stalk over to him.
Jonah steps in between us. “Calm down, boss. Nothing happened. Katelyn came over while we were watching a movie. After a fight scene, she asked us to teach her how to throw a punch, so we did.”
Now I’m advancing on Jonah.
He throws his hands up in defense. “We didn’t lay a hand on her, I swear. We just gave her pointers. She took turns throwing punches at us after that.”
I look over at Chris. “That how you got decked?”
Chris laughs. “No, actually. I was sleeping. I woke up to get something to drink and she nailed me in the doorway. Apparently, she was shadow boxing…with her own shadow, and I came out of nowhere and spooked her.”
She was what?
“She heard one of the guys in the movie mention shadow boxing,” explains Harvey. “So she went to go find her shadow to give it a shot.”
I’m wondering then if all my men are drunk.
I grab a nearby chair and direct all my men to sit as well. “Start at the beginning. All of you. And don’t leave anything out.”
“So,” begins Mikey, “It all started with Winston being bummed out because some potential buyers had been by to look at his place today. He’d been quiet all afternoon, so of course, the guys and I went over to try and cheer him up.”
Yeah, okay. A quiet Winston’s about as disconcerting as a quiet Katelyn, so I could definitely see why the guys had been concerned.
“Katelyn stopped by just before sundown,” continues Clint. “When we explained that you wouldn’t be in for supper, she made us all some soup and sandwiches over at Winston’s before joining us in cheering him up.”
It takes me two seconds to connect the dots. “Meaning you all let her have some of Winston’s moonshine?!” I bark incredulously.
“The woman only had one glass, boss! We swear!”
Holy hell? Seriously? I mean I know Winston’s moonshine is potent, but not enough to warrant the drunken display I just caught the tail end of.
“Fine. What happened after you let her get hammered?” I grouse, making it clear I’m pissed at every last one of them for any part they had in Katelyn drinking even a drop of that stuff.
With everyone looking at me a little warily, Jonah mans up to pick up the story. “At first we thought she was just a lightweight so we tried to get her to eat stuff, but somehow, she just kept getting drunker as the night went on. I’m serious boss, we were all losing our minds chasing her around. Got even worse when she started going through the stages, you know?”
Ryan chimes in, “She was in Stage Three when she woke my ass up.”
“Stage Four for me,” calls out someone else.
Usually, I don’t let my guys get past the first two stages of drunkenness when they’re on the ranch. The fact that she was far gone enough to reach Stage Four isn’t helping to calm me down.
To be clear, these aren’t the official clinical stages of intoxication. Nope, these are the good ole fashioned stages you see in bars and nightclubs.
And like I said, I usually cut my guys off before it gets too far. Meaning I threaten to fire their asses if they pass the stage where they don’t just think they’re the smartest guys on the planet, but the most good-looking guys in the universe, too.
I turn to Ryan, “You actually saw Katelyn in Stage Three?” That stage, when it happens for my guys, is when they start buying rounds for the entire bar like they�
��ve got money to burn. It’s a harmless stage, really, unless you don’t actually have money to burn. Which I know is the case for Katelyn.
“Yep,” answers Ryan. “She started shopping for all of us online, putting all kinds of crazy things in her shopping cart. We just barely managed to wrestle her phone away from her before she could finish ordering a couple hundred dollars of matching bunny slippers, on account of her worrying about how cold the ground can get for us out here at night.”
The woman is lucky she’s so ridiculously cute because I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be agreeing to give all my men hazard pay before this story is through.
“Alright, what else? What’d Stage Four look like?” For most guys, this is when they start picking fights with random dudes for no good reason. There’s no way in hell my sweet Katelyn picked a fight with anyone. “Was that when she started the boxing thing?”
“Nah, that was way before,” clarifies Jonah. “She didn’t get aggressive in Stage Four, but she did start thinking she was super strong. She kept trying to lift heavy things and at one point, she got the big sledge hammer we use for the wooden fence posts and started playing her own version of that carnival strongman game.”
For crying out loud. “And you let her?” I look around at them like they’ve all lost their minds. “She could’ve broken her foot!” Have they not met the woman?
“Relax, when we figured out what she was trying to do, we just grabbed one of those pool foam noodles the therapist uses to mark her walking routes for the injured horses. We swapped that out for the sledge hammer and let Katelyn start whacking away at everything.”
“I made the dinging noises for her,” says Mikey.
For chrissakes, these fucking guys. “Why on earth were you guys encouraging this?”
“Because she looked sad when she thought she wasn’t winning the carnival game,” reasons Clint. “Which was when we popped up a vat of kettle corn for her because she started jonesing for some.”
Good lord, she’s got them all wrapped around her little finger. “Keep going. What happened next?”
Mikey shrugs. “Then all of a sudden, she said she was burning up and started pulling off some of her clothes. Which was when you came by looking ready to commit bloody murder.”
When I see Mikey smiling adoringly over in her direction, I glance over and see her crouching behind one of the sofas, popping her head up like a gopher.
“What the hell is she doing now?” Every time we look over at her, she freezes and stays frozen like a statue.
“She thinks she’s invisible,” whispers Chris behind his hand, grinning.
Well, that’s a new literal variation of the last stage. Normally, this one is when the guys start dancing like everyone around them can’t see them.
“We took good care of her all night, boss, promise,” says Jonah.
Yeah. Clearly they did. “Thanks, guys. I’ll take it from here.”
I chase her down when she tries to scamper off again and carry her out to my truck, spending the entire ride home trying to come up with an explanation she’ll accept as to how I was able to see her while all my men—being the bunch of enablers that they are—had all been pretending they couldn’t.
This lasts clear until I’m tucking her into bed, after which, she finally decides to accept the cockamamie explanation I pulled out of my ass and turn the topic of conversation to me.
“Did you know that you get more handsome every time I see you?” she asks me muzzily. “Doesn’t seem very fair to all the other men in the world, if you think about it.”
“Yeah? Well, you get even more fucking beautiful every time I see you so I guess that makes us even. And same goes for any unfortunate woman who has to stand beside you, as far as I’m concerned.”
She sighs softly at that, and then whispers, “Want to know a secret?”
I gaze at her cute, drunken expression. “Sure. Lay one on me.”
“I’ve been hiding your handcuffs,” she says in a hushed tone.
God love the truth serum effects of alcohol. “Where’d you hide ‘em?”
She immediately pitches headfirst over the side of the bed and starts rummaging around the duffle she’s stuffed underneath, her tempting little ass waving around in the air for me to admire the entire time.
“Found it!” she cries out triumphantly, holding it up like a trophy. Then she looks around furtively. “I was going to use it on you to get you back for that time you cuffed me.”
Interesting. Here I thought she’d hidden it because she was pissed. “Is that so?”
“Yep.” She holds a finger up to her lips. “But shhhh, don’t tell. That’s another secret.”
Suddenly, she springs up to her feet like she’s caught a second wind. “Where’s my sledge hammer? I have to show you how I won the biggest stuffed animal at the… Hey, where’d my unicorn go? I had it with me earlier.”
I assume she means the pillow she’d been walking around with at the bunkhouse so I hand it to her. Now the sweatshirt the pillow had been stuffed into makes sense. Those doting guys had attempted to actually make a unicorn stuffed animal for her.
Hell, I’m definitely giving the whole lot of them raises in the morning.
With her ‘unicorn’ clutched tightly to her, she’s halfway out the door before I catch her by the waist.
“Okay, enough of that, sweetheart.” I grab the handcuffs and secure one of her wrists to the headboard, just like last time.
Instead of fight me or even argue with me like last time though, her eyes just grow hungry as she looks from her cuffed wrist to me. Back to the cuffs and back to me.
Fuck.
Before I know it, she’s sighing my name and stroking her free hand all over me, petting me like I’m one of her goddamn rocks. And I take every bit of that torture without reciprocating in kind, not wanting her anything but a hundred percent sober when I touch her again.
After a minute or so of driving me closer and closer to the edge of my sanity, out of nowhere she stops.
And falls asleep.
Exhausted, I roll onto my back and tuck her against my chest. Damn, she feels good in my arms. I tell myself I’m just going to hold her until I know she’s settled in for the night.
I’m out like a light a second later.
17
| Katelyn |
I wake up completely disoriented. I don’t know if it’s day or night, or how I even got into bed.
The last thing I remember is drinking some of Winston’s moonshine, the most likely culprit for the gaps in my memory.
After figuring that mystery out, I quickly catalog a couple of other important discoveries as they hit me all at the same time.
One, I’m cuddled up in bed next to Cade as the little spoon with only my underwear on.
Two, the big spoon in question has got a giant erection wedged against my back.
And three, my wrist is cuffed to the bed again.
Seriously, what the heck happened last night?
Quietly so as not to wake Cade up, I roll over to check the second drawer for the key and find it right where he left it last time.
It takes me no time at all to get myself uncuffed, and about half that time to think about doing the unthinkable.
Then, I actually do it.
I cuff Cade to the bedpost.
Holy moly.
I wonder what the statute of limitations are on blaming my actions on the moonshine? I almost don’t care. Because now I have over six feet of pure alpha muscle laid out for me to explore.
Consequences be damned.
Every other time we’ve been remotely intimate, Cade’s always been in control so I’ve never had the chance to give all his granite-like features the true appreciation they deserve, which is a crying shame. The man truly is beautiful. All rugged hard lines and sexy rough edges.
And the more I touch him, the harder he gets.
Everywhere.
Palming his thick, hard cock in bo
th hands—because I need both hands to get that feat done—I give his shaft a slow pump. And then another.
Until he jackknifes, fully awake now, and growls out, “Fucking hell, woman.”
His dazed eyes fly up to see the handcuff on his wrist and I swear, the dark, sinfully sexy look he nails me with an instant later has me practically going up in flames. Because that wicked look just promised me pure, sexual retribution of the best kind.
Which I fully intend to earn.
Keeping my eyes on his, I slowly run my tongue along his entire length, reveling in the way he groans and throws his head back when I start sucking softly on the head of his cock.
His pupils dilate and every muscle in his body seizes up as I take my time and start working him deeper and deeper until he’s nudging the back of my throat.
And then I take him deeper still, until I’m swallowing him whole.
“Katelyn,” he rasps raggedly. “Baby, if you don’t stop, I’m going to end up coming down your throat.”
I love how out of it he sounds, how he can’t seem to stop himself from thrusting into my mouth every time I moan when he tugs on my hair.
When I start deepthroating him once more, with every wicked intention of having him lose control and come in my mouth, belatedly, foggily, that’s when a realization hits me.
He’s got two hands on me.
I look up and see the handcuff dangling from the bed post about a split second before Cade flips me over and spreads my legs wide. His eyes trace over my entire body and I shiver at the naked possession I see engulfing his gaze.
“My turn now, baby.”
Sliding two thick fingers inside me, he teases and tortures me by only making slow, shallow plunges. Never deep enough, never hard enough.
“Rub your clit for me, sweetheart. Like that time in the barn. I wanted to taste you so fucking bad that night while watching you play with yourself. So do it for me now while I lick your sugary little slit.”