by Megan Crane
Please Me, Cowboy
A Montana Born Rodeo Novella
Megan Crane
Please Me, Cowboy
Copyright © 2014 Megan Crane
Kindle Edition
The Tule Publishing Group, LLC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
ISBN: 978-1-942240-03-7
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
The Copper Mountain Rodeo Series
About the Author
Chapter One
‡
He was much, much worse up close.
Gracelyn Packard had worked for noted billionaire Jonah Flint for a year now, going about her business happily unnoticed in the swathe of lower level employees who made up his entrepreneurial think tank in Dallas. But this peremptory summons to appear before him, deep in his lion’s den of an office, was different.
This verged on terrifying—and Gracelyn was not easily intimidated. She’d ejected that from her system years ago. If she hadn’t, she never would have made it out of her dead-end prairie town and her family with no aspirations extending beyond the greater limits of Custer County, Montana. To say nothing of its crowning joke of a would-be metropolis, tiny little Miles City.
But something about Jonah Flint set her teeth on edge, made her skin seem to shrink tight against her bones, made her nearly shiver in unexpected reaction to his proximity. Made her the kind of restless she associated with the sudden, shocking summer thunderstorms of her childhood out there on the Great Plains, hot and electric and lethal. She tried to stand a little bit straighter, wishing she hadn’t worn the most perilous pair of stilettos she owned today, even as she ordered herself to keep from fidgeting.
She would not smooth her hands down over the deceptively simple shift dress she wore. She knew it was exquisitely tailored to look both feminine and professional at once; that’s why she’d bought it in the first place. She would not check to make sure her long, dark hair was still neatly arranged in its slicked back, high ponytail. She paid a lot of her hard-earned salary for the high-end products that ensured not a single strand of her thick hair dared defy her, no matter the Texas humidity outside on a late summer day like this one, still broiling and sweaty hot in September.
She would not act like this man’s prey, here in this frigidly cold office that catered to the suit he wore and only added to her unease. Not that it mattered how she felt inside. She would not act, ever again, like she was less than anyone, despite a long, poor childhood that had taught her she’d never be anything but.
No matter, if that was exactly how it felt to stand there in the center of Jonah Flint’s loft-like, steel-accented and sunlit office as he sprawled behind his massive desk like the king she supposed he was, all of his formidable and breathtaking and notoriously dangerous attention trained directly on her.
He was more than six feet of lean, lethal muscle packed into a very, very rich man’s suit. He had dark blonde hair cut short to accentuate the poetic asceticism of his narrow, intelligent face. And his mouth was a grim, hard line that made her insides quake and roll as he trained his dark, brooding hazel gaze directly on her.
He’s beautiful, she thought, almost dreamily, as if she couldn’t help herself.
Gracelyn was instantly horrified with herself.
He was her boss. He was her boss’s boss’s boss. He was Jonah Flint, for God’s sake! She might as well find the sheer, dizzying face of a remote mountain attractive, and he was about as approachable besides.
And his shocking male beauty was the last thing anyone was likely to notice about him, anyway. That air of barely-leashed ferocity, of all that power and influence he wielded precisely as he pleased and in that particularly grim way of his, was the first and last thing that Gracelyn had ever noted about him before now from the great distance of her low-level analyst’s position.
He was her boss, but he was so much more than that, she could see now that she was much too close to him. He was dangerous beyond measure, which she could feel in her bones like some kind of sudden-onset arthritic ache. And he was looking at her as if she was very small and very, very breakable. She knew she was neither, but then, who knew what could happen should he choose to wield even the smallest bit of all the power she could practically see surrounding him? He was like a storm cloud.
Or a premonition, the fanciful part of her that she’d been so certain she’d left behind in that barely-there town far outside Miles City more than a decade ago whispered, horrifying her even further.
Making her feel like an alien in her own body—or maybe that was just the way her heart hit at her ribs, low and slow and nearly as overwhelming as he was.
“You’re from Montana,” the great Jonah Flint said, Texas in his voice and an assessing gleam in his gaze. He didn’t stand. He didn’t sit any straighter in his throne-like CEO’s chair. He didn’t give an inch, as unyielding as the great granite desk he sat behind. And of all the things Gracelyn had imagined this lion of the business world might say to her one day when her business acumen and dedication gained his notice, as she’d been determined it would, that was not it.
That had not even been on the list.
“I am, yes.” Gracelyn’s voice sounded strange in the great room then, too prim and too forced. Clear indications of the nerves she knew better than to let a man like this see. She would not pretend to clear her throat when it was only her sudden, unmanageable embarrassment that needed clearing. She would not avert her gaze from his, look meekly at the floor like some submissive thing desperate for his approval, or show him in any way how much he got to her. She knew better than that. Powerful men respected power above all things. Gracelyn knew that the way she knew her lungs would fill with her next breath.
“Good.” His voice was like the rest of him. Unyielding, she thought, and granite besides. His sharp hazel gaze was the same as it swept over her, from head to toe and then back, while she told herself she had no reaction to that. None at all. “You’ll do.”
“I’ll do?” she repeated, like an idiot. But she couldn’t seem to help herself—something she’d have to think about later, when she had the space to analyze whatever the hell this was. “I’ll do what?”
Some kind of awareness sharpened in the air between them then. Something thick and hot, though Jonah still didn’t so much as move a muscle. Only those gleaming eyes of his changed; darkened. And suddenly, Gracelyn felt as if there was no space between them at all, and certainly not the great heft of that dark, imposing desk of his that should have felt like half the state of Texas or more.
It didn’t feel like any kind of barrier at all. It might as well have been a sunbeam, for all the protection it granted her. She couldn’t breathe.
And Gracelyn had never been any good with feeling trapped. It had always made her angry, as her entire childhood and teenaged years as one of those low-class, ill-bred Packards could testify. At length. Worse than angry. The feeling of claustrophobia—of too many low
expectations and no hope she’d ever exceed them—had always made her mouthy. That particular combination had been the impetus for, among other things, her hasty departure from her middle-of-nowhere hometown about four seconds after she’d graduated from high school. It had gotten her into more trouble than she cared to recall.
Today, in this man’s office, even feeling that old sensation return in the way her hands itched to curve into fists, was damn near suicidal. She knew that. Of course she knew that.
“You’ll do whatever I want,” he drawled, and his voice was like a touch, seductive and demanding at once. She would not react to it. “Isn’t that what I pay you for?”
“You pay me for my willingness to work well over eighty hours a week and forgo any semblance of a normal life,” Gracelyn retorted, unwisely. She knew it was ill-advised even as she said it, but that didn’t help her stop. It never had. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here.”
She had the sensation of the world shifting beneath her, and she knew what it was: the glorious future, far away from her mess of a family, that she’d busted her ass to create as it spiraled off into nothing because she couldn’t keep her big mouth shut.
You’re going to get yourself into trouble with that mouth, her grandmother Betty had told her a thousand times if she’d told her once. Maybe, one day, the kind of trouble you can’t turn off, either.
Jonah rose then, more than six feet of trouble in a sleek black suit, and she wished he hadn’t. God help her, him sitting was bad enough. She watched, fascinated and apprehensive at once, as he uncurled his long, hard body from that chair and got to his feet in a simple sort of uncoiling that shouldn’t have made her pulse skyrocket. He smoothed his hand down the front of his suit jacket and he did not look the least little bit like prey when he did it.
Beautiful, she thought again, and it was worse this time because she felt it—him—everywhere. Like he’d run that hard palm of his down the length of her spine.
“I’ve read your file,” he told her after a moment of shrewd hazel consideration that made her think he’d felt it too, that spark of sensation that still bloomed a path down her back. But that was crazy. “You’re ambitious.”
“I prefer the term ‘dedicated,’” Gracelyn demurred, though a wise woman would have long since shut the hell up. Well. She’d never claimed to be wise. Just much too stubborn for her own good. A trait she’d heard called hard-headed more than once.
“I like ambition. And I like that you have balls.” Jonah eyed her, that mouth of his far more intriguing than it should have been, when he hardly let it move outside that same set, unimpressed and impatient line. It warmed her almost as much as his praise did. “Most employees at your level who get called in here fall apart right where you’re standing. Stammering, flushing, apologizing all over themselves before I say a single word.”
He liked that she hadn’t done any of that. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Like pure, incontrovertible fact. Like that same warm spark, still spreading its lick of flame and bad decision-making all through her.
“Is that why you like to wait a minute or so before you speak?” she asked, and her voice wasn’t tart, exactly. It wasn’t that she was teasing him, which would have been crazy. But she didn’t sound particularly deferential, either. “To see if you might have to call in the paramedics?”
She still hadn’t looked away from him. And she’d have sworn on a stack of her grandmother’s collection of family bibles that what moved over his face then, a mere shine in his eyes and a ghost on his lips, was a smile. And there was absolutely no reason why she should feel that the way she did, like a flare of dark heat. Like fire, everywhere, especially in the places it shouldn’t have been.
Like a whole lot of trouble, a wise woman would run away from.
But Gracelyn dug her heels into the floor beneath her, because she’d been a lot of things in her twenty-nine years, but wise had never been one of them. Clearly.
“I need to spend some time in Wherever-the-Fuck, Montana,” Jonah told her in the next moment, that hint of a smile gone as if it had never been.
Yet, Gracelyn could still feel that intense heat. There was that earthquake rolling, deep within her, every time his gaze met hers, and it didn’t appear to be going anywhere. Nothing but trouble, she reminded herself—but then again, that might as well have been the Packard family’s call to arms. Maybe she’d been kidding herself all this time, thinking she was any different from the rest of them.
She smiled politely rather than turning and running from the room, which would have been the smart thing to do. “I don’t think I’ve heard of it.”
A glint of gold in those brooding hazel depths. “It’s a family matter that requires my personal attention and a week or two of my time.” He waited a moment, his gaze never shifting from hers. “That’s where you come in.”
Gracelyn blinked. “And you need me, a random employee you’ve never met before, to help you handle a personal family matter because . . .?”
“I don’t need you. I need a Montana native who knows how to work a small Montana town in general and one small town Montana woman in particular.” That gaze of his swept over her, leaving brushfires everywhere it touched. It was a warning and a punishment, a terrible temptation all at once, and that was before his mouth crooked and wrecked her completely. “I need a girlfriend.”
*
Jonah Flint was pissed before he left the Dallas city limits. He’d been irritated ever since his twin brother Jasper’s phone call—or really, if he was honest, ever since Jasper had left Dallas and their old, insanely profitable well stimulation and hydraulic fracturing services company behind for no good reason a couple of years back.
By the time he hauled himself all the way to Marietta, Montana, slap down on the outskirts of absolutely nowhere he’d ever want to go willingly—much less settle down permanently, as his twin had unaccountably done—Jonah had moved far beyond pissed into brand new territory.
And the woman beside him wasn’t helping his mood any. She’d flown with him from Dallas and now rode with him in the back of the Range Rover in what looked like a perfectly composed, perfectly calm silence she could maintain until the seas rose. Damn her.
If he was bothered—and since Jonah tried to be honest with himself, he could admit that he was a whole lot more than bothered by this woman with all that heat in her eyes and that enigmatically cool smile on her lips—he thought she should be, too. It only seemed fair.
Beside him, she shifted slightly on the leather seat, her eyes on what even Jonah could grudgingly admit was a pretty view of the nearest mountain range, and he really didn’t need to be any more aware of her. But just like that, he was.
Of all his employees, only three had fit his criteria: female, raised in small town Montana, and within a reasonable age range of his thirty-six years. The first had been much too young for him. Worse, she’d been completely overawed in his presence, meaning Jasper would have spotted her as a bright red-faced ringer from a mile away. The second had been great on paper, but hadn’t fit the sort of physical requirements Jonah had always historically had for the women he slept with. That meant that since Jonah wasn’t actually head over heels for her, his damned brother would see right through that, too.
Which had left only this one. The most intriguing and disconcerting woman he’d encountered in ages, and also the perfect person for the job.
Jonah had spent the past few days telling himself that Gracelyn, from God Only Knew Where, Montana, merely fit his requirements. On paper, as well as in person. That fitting the requirements was enough. That this little adventure would take the two weeks he’d allocated to sort out his twin brother’s monumental stupidity. And that she fit into his plans smoothly and easily, which was all he’d wanted.
I don’t expect you to understand emotion, Jonah, his brother had drawled in that all-too-amused way of his that Jonah had detested since they’d been kids. Because neither
one of them had ever been that amused about anything. But I do expect you to show up and pay your respects anyway. If you think you can handle that kind of human interaction.
Jonah could damn well handle anything. That was why he’d tripled his already excessive fortune in the last two years, while his twin brother was off playing Messiah of the Microbreweries in his little small town hiding place. But he was good at leverage. And it had occurred to him that a girlfriend on his arm would prove things to Jasper in a way his bank balance could not. Especially since Jasper apparently no longer saw the point of money, and had decided he was more into marrying more gold-diggers instead.
His mercenary first wife—who now lived in Jasper’s old Preston Hollow house in Dallas with Jasper’s replacement—had been bad enough.
Jonah didn’t understand any of this. But, he knew his twin. And he knew what he had to do to rescue the idiot from his mid-life crisis. So what, if Jasper honestly believed his slide into irrelevance was “happiness?” It was pathetic, was what it was. He was Jasper Flint, not merely Jonah’s brother, but his identical twin. He was meant for better things than some nowhere town and a schoolteacher.
But the pleasant anticipation of the good deed he planned to do for his befuddled twin didn’t quite explain the hum of something a little too much like excitement he’d felt when his secretary had buzzed this woman into his office. Gracelyn Baylee Packard of the country-fried name and exemplary resume.
A whole lot like Jonah himself, not that he was making comparisons with underlings he planned to use for his own purposes. He’d been rocked when she’d strode into his office that afternoon, all long legs in killer heels and that sulky mouth he’d been unable to stop imagining under his. That smooth, silken fall of dark hair that she was still wearing in a precise and perfect ponytail today, which gave him the nearly ungovernable urge to bury his fingers in it and see what kind of mess he could make of her. She’d almost made him laugh and God knew, Jonah didn’t laugh about much these days.