Caught Up

by Rya Stone

Jase hovered over the stove. He was probably afraid she’d do damage to his badass range. Like he couldn’t afford to replace it a hundred times over.

  “Would you back off?” she finally asked.

  “Just making sure you have everything you need.”

  She poured some heavy cream—and a ton of calories—into the sautéed onions, mushrooms, and peppers, stirring the thickening poblano sauce she’d simmer with the ground beef patties waiting beside the stove.

  “I know my way around a kitchen. You’re not the only one here who knows how to cook.” That was only partially true. She did know how to cook this…and, errr…throw together a few sandwiches? She didn’t get much practice living on the road and was seriously pulling out the only stops she knew. Though she had a firm command at the moment, Jase just couldn’t help pulling the lid off the rice after cocking his eyebrow her way. She slapped his hand with the back of a wooden spoon. “I’m serious. Back off.”

  He leaned against the granite counter and crossed his arms.

  “What?” she asked. “Think I don’t know a whisk from a spatula because I live in a motel?”

  Jase grinned, probably guessing she’d dug pretty deep for that answer.

  “My mother is a fabulous cook,” she said finally.

  “She teach you to make this?” he asked, nodding toward the browned steaks she lowered into the sauce.

  “Yes,” she said, turning down the heat and placing a lid over the skillet. “But I’ve made a few adjustments of my own.” Mostly because her mother didn’t like peppers and Cassie seemed to crave them.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” And her Salisbury steak poblano with cilantro crème sauce was going to melt in Jase’s mouth. She hoped.

  A few minutes later, they settled into the large dining table, and Jase, showing no outward fear of her cooking, dove in.

  “Damn, this is good,” he said around his second bite.

  It was, thank the kitchen gods. And served over rice, the steaks and sauce were heavy, with a capital H, so Cassie took bird bites, concentrating mostly on her salad. And on her revenge plans.

  “Been keepin’ your skills a secret.”

  A secret? Oooh, wrong thing to say, buddy.

  “No secret.” She eyed him over her tea glass. “I just haven’t had the opportunity.” Unlike you.

  “Well, anything that tastes this good is highly relevant.”

  Highly relevant? Strike two.

  “And you came up with this yourself?” he continued, shaking his head. “Got a gift, babe.”

  “Not really.”

  “Explain.”

  Explain? Me explain?

  She let out a shaky breath. “I suck at cooking. This is about the only thing I know how to make except for grilled cheese. My mom was the cook of the family, and I know it sounds stupid, but even attempting to follow in her footsteps chokes me up more often than not every time I try.”

  Jase’s big hand wrapped around her forearm. “If you’re anything like your mom,” he said softly, “she gifted you with a hell of a lot more than culinary skills.”

  He squeezed her arm, and Cassie’s fork shook. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t carry through with her plans to impress him, turn him on, then disappear into the bedroom—a different bedroom—claiming she didn’t feel well. It would serve him right after leaving her all hot and bothered earlier, but it was childish and deceitful, and she’d had enough of that. She let her fork clatter to her plate and wrenched her arm away.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  His brows knitted.

  “That you own Black Drum?”

  Jase shook his head, seemingly nonplussed. “I wanted to keep it simple.”

  “Simple?” She swept an arm around the airy room.

  “Cassie—”

  “No.” She held up a hand. “How many rigs do you operate?”

  He sighed, and set his fork down. “Five.”

  A small outfit for sure. But each of those rigs made hundreds of thousands of dollars. A day. Drill site locations cost a hell of a lot of money to put in. They cost millions.

  “There’s nothing simple about owning a drilling company, about owning…this,” she said, looking around again, taking pointed note of the top-of-the-line…everything, down to and including the freaking light switches.

  “This house? The boat?” he asked. “They’re business investments.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t a khakis man.”

  He chuckled, bringing her blood to a near-boil. “Got a pair somewhere. Can’t even remember the last time I wore them.”

  “How?” she asked, trying to smother her rage before she threw a plate or something. “How is that possible?”

  “I told you, babe. Keepin’ it simple.”

  Life’s an effing beach, huh? “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “That Black Drum’s mine? Because it’s not who I am. It’s just what I do.”

  “Not who you are?” Rein it in, Cass. You sound like a banshee. She couldn’t help it. “Who are you then? Because I thought you were a rig hand.”

  He pushed his plate halfway across the table. “Is that what you want? Some asshole who snorts half his paycheck up his nose? Who’s got God knows what kind of diseases from banging rig rats and pretty little landmen every chance he gets? Who takes that shit home to his wife?”

  She couldn’t form a response because her heart stuck painfully in her throat. And it pounded in anger.

  “Is that what you’re after?”

  She somehow spoke, but did it through clenched teeth. “Of course not. Why would you even ask me that?”

  He sat back and crossed his arms. “Because you get off on me.”

  “What?”

  His steady gaze faltered, but only for a second. “I’m not exactly clean-cut, not like that ex of yours. I think maybe you’re looking for something different. Something dirty to play with while you’re fishing for leases.”

  She was speechless, literally, and reaching for that plate after all when Jase ran a hand through his hair. She swore it shook. She was shaking, too. And seriously having to control her breathing. She’d known this wouldn’t be pretty but hadn’t imagined it would be…this. She cleared her throat. “You’re not dirty,” she managed.

  “Yeah, I am. I’m dirty. I’ve got grease under my nails and stains on my hands that don’t scrub off.” He gave her a long, loaded look. “But I’m not just talking about that kind of dirty.”

  Cassie swallowed, attempting to dislodge that damn lump in her throat. “You’re like that then? Like what you just described?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t do drugs, no. And I don’t stick my dick in trash.”

  For once, his dirty talk didn’t turn her on. It made her stomach churn. Trash. Oil-field trash. Was this really the world she lived in? Or rather, just outside of, circling, but never looking too closely? “They can’t all be like that.”

  “They’re not, but enough are that the name goes with the description.”

  “I…I don’t even know what to say right now. You’re dirty, but you’re not. You’re a roughneck, but you’re not…”

  “Yeah, I’m a roughneck. But I don’t just work with my hands; I work with my mind, too. I’m also a site coordinator and a drilling supervisor. I’m—”

  “The owner of the company!”

  “That, too,” he smiled.

  “I haven’t kept anything from you. I told you an embarrassing story about myself almost as soon as we met. I told you about my mother, about my absurd dream of becoming a novelist, and you’ve told me nothing. Now you’re telling me all kinds of things, but you’re still telling me nothing.”

  Jase grabbed her hand, and before she could protest, pulled her up, flush against him. He stared at her for a long moment and something moved deep within his eyes, something she couldn’t name. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside.”

  Cassie couldn�
�t see anything except Jase’s broad back in front of her. He hadn’t turned on any of the outside lights. He hadn’t stopped to flick on the pier lights when they’d stepped onto the long boardwalk leading out to a double-decked platform above the water. And he didn’t say a word as he led her across the planks.

  By the time they reached the end of the pier, her eyes had adjusted to the dark and she spotted some long benches running along the lower length of the T-head on either side of the walkway. She plunked down on the side without the extra level and crossed her arms in defiance.

  “No, baby.” Jase spread the quilt he’d nabbed from the couch over the boards. “Here, with me.”

  When he drew her down to the quilt and settled on his back, she went rigid in his arms. It was almost impossible to stay that way after he nestled his big warm body to hers and curled an arm around her shoulder. Still, she struggled to hold on to her anger—her only weapon in this dangerous game Jase played with her emotions.

  “Do you know your constellations?”

  She shook her head and gazed up at the stars. It was a strange segue, but she tried to go with it. Their dinner exchange had turned downright ugly and she wanted to know why. She needed a reason to stay…or at least validate her unreasonable desire to stay.

  “My dad taught me. He said an outdoorsman needed to know, that at night you can tell where you are by looking at the stars.”

  “Isn’t that what GPS is for?”

  Jase snorted. “GPS. And what the hell good is that when it’s sitting at the bottom of the bay after your boat capsizes or you lose it falling down a ravine?”

  She didn’t say anything because he had a point. The man usually had a point, even if he didn’t care to explain it.

  He gazed up at the stars. “Hunting and fishing. They’re all I wanted to do since I can remember. It isn’t about killing animals, and anyone who says that after ordering a steak can kiss my ass. It’s about the forest primeval, about the groves being God’s first temples and all that. It’s about—”

  “Wait.” She laid a hand on his chest and propped her head up to look at him. “You know Longfellow and Bryant?”

  “My mom,” he said. “She homeschooled me for half of sixth grade while I spent a few months in and out of the hospital fighting off a blood infection.”

  “A blood infection?” Poor kid. “It was that bad?”

  “Bad enough that my mom kept me home. She read to me. Constantly. History, philosophy, poetry.”

  Wow. Wherever this headed, she liked it a lot more than the direction of their previous conversation.

  “The woods, the water, they sink into your soul…only then do you realize a huge piece of it was missing.”

  Wow again. The tattooed tree branches peeking out of his sleeve made a lot more sense now. Hell, he’d made them into a sleeve, the aquatic stuff on the other side, too.

  “And this?” She ran her finger across his belt buckle. “You rodeoed, too?”

  “Not really, just ranch rodeos here and there when my buddies needed an extra on their team. The buckle was my dad’s. Clint kind of followed in his footsteps with that. He could’ve gone pro but ended up taking the football scholarship to A&M instead.”

  “And you?”

  “I was the hunter.”

  “You joined the Corps so you could…hunt?” Hunting animals was one thing. Hunting people? “Jase, that’s—”

  “Not how it happened. My parents were trying to protect me.” He laughed harshly. “So they sent me to war.”

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered, sliding a hand under his shirt to run her fingers over his dog tags.

  “The house in the woods—”

  Her breath caught, interrupting him, and Jase slid a comforting hand under her dress and along her bare thigh. “I remember the day Clint and I stumbled across something we weren’t supposed to see. Or maybe we were.” He laughed again, an angry sort. “I don’t even know why we were there. I just remember it felt different. We could sense it before we saw them through the window. We—”

  “Who did you see?” she whispered.

  “Illegals.”

  A harrowing memory flashed through her mind. They’d been a band of dead-eyed faces peering back at her as she’d made her way through the Border Patrol checkpoint south of Kingsville a few years ago. One of the women, she…she’d been holding tight to a stiffened bundle of soiled blankets. She’d known. Somehow Cassie had known that baby hadn’t made it.

  “They come up from the border,” he said, and the fact that he spoke in present tense alarmed her. The map on the wall of the house flashed through her mind—the stars, the highlighted routes…a whole Underground Railroad system. “But the drugs come in from the Gulf on shrimp boats.”

  “I…I don’t understand…”

  “It was just marijuana when I left. Coke, too, when I came back. It’s made a big resurgence in the oil field because it leaves your system in only a few days.”

  “Your family traffics drugs?”

  He nodded. “And Cassie…” He gripped her tighter. “The cartel uses humans to mule the drugs.”

  “What?” Oh, God. “Why would—”

  “In exchange for their passage across the border. All I can figure is that it’s safer for the cartel that way. If any of the mules get caught…well, they don’t know shit. They don’t know names, locations, nada.”

  “Why would your father allow it? I mean, is any amount of money worth that kind of moral compromise?”

  “I have no idea why he allowed it. We lived off the land and did all right for ourselves, even had a little money trickling in from some shallow oil wells drilled back in the seventies…” He shook his head at the starry sky. “And once I found out? I did try to stop it.” He laughed a bitter, brittle laugh. “Tried to put my own smuggling operation together, at least get the kids out of there before the cartel decided to use them as more than pack mules. I almost got gutted for it. My parents packed me off before my wounds were even healed.”

  “At least you—”

  He cleared his throat, and she zipped it. When a man like Jase went on a roll, best let him, especially with something of this magnitude. “I guess I finally grew a big-boy pair and came home demanding my dad put an end to it, no compromises.” He swallowed hard. “That’s when Clint found him at the foot of the damn.”

  “At the creek crossing?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded. “His body had been mutilated, carved up with all these strange symbols—a message of some kind, I’m sure—at the very least to let us know it hadn’t been suicide. And Clint blamed me. A few weeks later, we started fighting near the top of the stairs. I mean really brawling.” She buried her head into the crook below his armpit, knowing where it headed. “My mom came running up the stairs.”

  “Oh, Jase…” She breathed, her body curled tight around him now.

  “We both share that blame. She got in the middle of it, in the middle of us, or tried to. Next thing we knew, she was at the bottom of the stairs. I left for the oil field two days after her funeral.”

  “And Clint?”

  “My brother kept right on, like none of it ever happened.”

  “You didn’t go to the authorities? With what you knew—”

  His rough chuckle cut her off. “Those sworn to protect and serve us are making as much cash as Clint.”

  “I saw that deputy, Slick, on TV,” she said. “When they were talking about those people who suffocated in the FedEx truck—” Her heart stopped. “Oh, my God. Please tell me—”

  “They were headed for our place,” he said. “Clint admitted it.”

  Her head spun and her thoughts raced, though no words came out of her mouth. They lay there in silence, the bay lapping below, the heavens yawning above, and Jase finally spoke. “I didn’t tell you about Black Drum because I wasn’t ready to tell you about any of this. Hell, I wasn’t planning on telling you any of it.”

  “What changed?” she whispered.


  “Everything.”

  The heaviness of that statement settled in her chest, both hot and cold, a truth and a lie, one she had no idea how to unravel. “What does Black Drum have to do with it?”

  “I told you Black Drum was a means to an end.” He swallowed heavily. “The day I left, I promised myself I’d see that land untainted by this shit, that I’d keep it that way for my children. And I’d tried fighting with my body. I knew I needed something more powerful than my fists.”

  “What?” She was almost afraid to ask, but Jase’s story wasn’t one shared lightly. He trusted her. And strangely, she…she trusted him.

  “I thought I could buy Clint out. But I needed money. A lot of it.” His voice dropped. “And that took years. All the while, I convinced myself I could sell Black Drum at the height of the boom, the whole shit show, and at a high enough profit Clint wouldn’t have a choice but to sell me his portion of the land. I’m talking ten times what he’d make harboring criminals. And when you came around, dangling your lease…” He shook his head. “I started thinking it might actually work. Hell, if Clint would even agree to sell the surface, he could keep executive rights on his minerals. He could retire to a private island and have wells flooding his account. He wouldn’t have to take payments from anyone he didn’t want to for the rest of his life.”

  “So why not?”

  “It didn’t even get that far. There’s more to it than money.” His voice faded. “Clint won’t let it go. And he won’t even tell me why.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Partition instead. Calhoun’s preparing the deed. Nine hundred acres, all mine to do with as I please,” he said. And then, after a long pause, added, “The lease is for your mother.”

  She rolled on top of Jase so she could look down at him, too moved for words. She swallowed back a fierce emotion, joyous and pain-tinged and not un-akin to love, as he threaded both hands through her hair. “It all came together in you. The lease, the land, the promise of something better. Cassie, those people who died…” He grunted. Hard. “I didn’t know what I was waiting for until you stumbled into this. Their deaths are on my hands.”

  “That’s not your fault.”

  “I could’ve done something sooner.”