Take Me, Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

  She shifted, sighing heavily before she continued. “And then there was my dad. He didn’t know what to do with a daughter. As pissed as he was that his wife left, I think in some ways he was relieved, because he didn’t have to figure out how to fit a woman into his life anymore. But then I kind of started becoming a woman. And he really didn’t know what to do. So I learned how to work on cars. I learned how to talk about sports. I learned how to fit. Even though it pushed me right out of fitting when it came to school. When it came to making friends.”

  He knew these things about Anna. Knew them because he’d absorbed them by being in her house, being near her, for fifteen years. But he’d never heard her say them. There was something different about that.

  “You’ve always fit with me, Anna,” he said, his voice rough.

  “I know. And even though we’ve never talked about this, I’m pretty sure somehow you knew all of it. You always have. Because you know me. And you accept me. Not very many people know about the musicals. Because it always embarrassed me. Kind of a girlie thing.”

  “I guess so,” he said, the words feeling inadequate.

  “Also, it was my thing. And...I never like anyone to know how much I care about things. I... My mom loved old musicals,” she said, her voice soft. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to watch them with her.”

  “Anna...”

  “I remember sneaking out of my room at night, seeing the TV flickering in the living room. She would be watching The Sound of Music or Cinderella. Oklahoma! of course. And I would just hang there in the hall. But I didn’t want to interrupt. Because by the end of the day she was always out of patience, and I knew she didn’t want any of the kids to talk to her. But it was kind of like watching them with her.” Anna’s eyes filled with tears. “But now I just wish I had. I wish I had gone in and sat next to her. I wish I had risked her being upset with me. I never got the chance. She left, and that was it. So, maybe she would’ve been mad at me, or maybe she wouldn’t have let me watch them with her. But at least I would’ve had the answer. Now I just wonder. I just remember that space between us. Me hiding in the hall, and her sitting on the couch. She never knew I was there. Maybe if I’d done a better job of connecting with her, she wouldn’t have left.”

  “That’s not true, Anna.”

  “She didn’t have anyone to watch the movies with, Chase. And my dad was so... I doubt he ever gave her a damn scrap of tenderness. But maybe I could have. I think... I think that’s what I was always trying to do with my dad. To make up for that. It was too late to make her stay, but I thought maybe I could hang on to him.”

  Chase tried to breathe past the tightness in his chest, but it was nearly impossible. “Anna,” he said, “any parent that chooses to leave their child...the issue is with them. It was your parents’ marriage. It was your mom. I don’t know. But it was never you. It wasn’t you not watching a movie with her, or irritating her, or making her angry. There was never anything you could do.”

  She nodded, a tear tracking down her pale cheek. “I do know that.”

  “But you still beat yourself up for it.”

  “Of course I do.”

  He didn’t have a response to that. She said it so matter-of-factly, as though there was nothing else but to blame herself, even if it made no sense. He had no response because he understood. Because he knew what it was like to twist a tragedy in a thousand different ways to figure out how you could take it on yourself. He knew what it was like to live your life with a gaping hole where someone you loved should be. To try to figure out how you could have stopped the loss from happening.

  In the years since his parents’ accident he had moved beyond blame. Not because he was stronger than Anna, just because you could only twist death in so many different directions. It was final. And it didn’t ask you. It just was. Blaming himself would have been a step too far into martyrdom.

  Still, he knew about lingering scars and responses to those scars that didn’t make much sense.

  But he didn’t know what it was like to have a parent choose to leave you. God knew his parents never would have chosen to abandon their sons.

  As if she’d read his mind, Anna continued. “She’s still out there. I mean, as far as I know. She could have come back. Anytime. I just feel like if I had given her even a small thing...well, then, maybe she would have missed me enough at some point. If she’d had anything back here waiting for her, she could have called. Just once.”

  “You were you,” he said. “If that wasn’t enough for her...fuck her.”

  She laughed and wiped another tear from her face. Then she shifted, moving closer to him. “I appreciate that.” She paused for a moment, kissing his shoulder, then she continued. “It’s amazing. I’ve never told you that before. I’ve never told anyone that before. It’s just kind of crazy that we could know each other for so long and...there’s still more we don’t know.”

  He wanted to tell her then. About the day his parents died. About the complete and total hole it had torn in his life. She knew to a degree. They had been friends when it happened. He had been sixteen, and Sam had been eighteen, and the loss of everything they knew had hit so hard and fast that it had taken them out at the knees.

  He wanted to tell her about his nightmares. Wanted to tell her about the last conversation he’d had with his dad.

  But he didn’t.

  “Amazing” was all he said instead.

  Then he leaned over and kissed her, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Liar.

  A thousand things he wanted to tell her swirled around inside of him. A thousand different things she didn’t know. That he had never told anybody. But he didn’t want to open himself up like that. He just... He just couldn’t.

  So instead, he kissed her, because that he could do. Because of all the changes that existed between them, that was the one he was most comfortable with. Holding her, touching her. Everything else was too big, too unknown to unpack. He couldn’t do it. Didn’t want to do it.

  But he wanted to kiss her. Wanted to run his hands over her bare curves. So he did.

  He touched her, tasted her, made her scream. Because of all the things that were happening in his life, that felt right.

  This was...well, it was a detour. The best one he’d ever taken, but a detour all the same. He was building the family business, like he had promised his dad he would do. Or like he should have promised him when he’d had the chance. He might never have been able to tell the old man to his face, but he’d promised it to his grave. A hundred times, a thousand times since he’d died.

  That was what he had to do. That was on the other side of making love with Anna. Going to that benefit with her all dressed up, trying to help her get the kind of reputation she wanted. To send her off with all her newfound skills so that she could be with another man after.

  To knuckle down and take the McCormack family ranch back to where it had been. Beyond. To make sure that Sam used his talents, to make sure that the forge and all the work their father had done to build the business didn’t go to waste.

  To prove that the fight he’d had with his father right before he died was all angry words and teenage bluster. That what he’d said to his old man wasn’t real.

  He didn’t hate the ranch. He didn’t hate the business. He didn’t hate their name. He was their name, and damn him for being too young and stupid to see it then.

  He was proving it now by pouring all of his blood, all of his sweat, all of his tears into it. By taking the little bit of business acumen he had once imagined might get him out of Copper Ridge and applying it to this place. To try to make it something bigger, something better. To honor all the work their parents had invested all those years.

  To finish what they started.

  He mi
ght not have ever made a commitment to a woman, but this ranch, McCormack Iron Works...was his life. That was forever.

  It was the only forever he would ever have.

  He closed those thoughts out, shut them down completely and focused on Anna. On the sweet scent of her as he lowered his head between her thighs and lapped at her, on the feel of her tight channel pulsing around his fingers as he stroked them in and out. And finally, on the tight, wet clasp of her around him as he slid home.

  Home. That’s really what it was.

  In a way that nowhere else had ever been. The ranch was a memorial to people long dead. A monument that he would spend the rest of his life building.

  But she was home. She was his.

  If he let her, she could become everything.

  No.

  That denial echoed in his mind, pushed against him as he continued to pound into her, hard, deep, seeking the oblivion that he had always associated with sex before her. But it wasn’t there. Instead, it was like a veil had been torn away and he could see all of his life, spreading out before him. Like he was standing on a ridge high in the mountains, able to survey everything. The past, the present, the future. So clear, so sharp it almost didn’t seem real.

  Anna was in all of it. A part of everything.

  And if she was ever taken away...

  He closed his eyes, shutting out that thought, a wave of pleasure rolling over him, drowning out everything. He threw himself in. Harder than he ever had. Grateful as hell that Anna had found her own release, because he’d been too wrapped up in himself to consider her first.

  Then he wrapped his arms around her, wrapped her up against him. Wrapped himself up in her. And he pushed every thought out of his mind and focused on the feeling of her body against his, the scent of her skin. Feminine and sweet with a faint trace of hay and engine grease.

  No other woman smelled like Anna.

  He pressed his face against her breasts and she sighed, a sound he didn’t think he’d ever get tired of. He let everything go blank. Because there was nothing in his past, or his future, that was as good as this.

  Thirteen

  Chase woke in a cold sweat, his heart pounding so heavily he thought it would burst through his bone and flesh and straight out into the open. His bed was empty. He sat up, rubbing his hand over his face, then forking his fingers through his hair.

  It felt wrong to have the bed empty. After spending only one night wrapped around Anna, it already felt wrong. Not having her... Waking up in the morning to find that she wasn’t there was... He hated it. It was unsettling. It reminded him of the holes that people left behind, of how devastating it was when you lost someone unexpectedly.

  He banished the thought. She might still be here. But then, she didn’t have any clean clothes or anything, so if she had gone home, he couldn’t necessarily blame her. He went straight into the bathroom, took a shower, took care of all other morning practicalities. He resisted the urge to look at his phone, to call Anna’s phone or to go downstairs and see if maybe she was still around. He was going to get through all this, dammit, and he was not going to behave as though he were affected.

  As though the past night had changed something fundamental, not just between them, but in him.

  He scowled, throwing open the bedroom door and heading down the stairs.

  He stopped dead when he saw her standing there in the kitchen. She was wearing his T-shirt, her long, slim legs bare. And he wondered if she was bare all the way up. His mouth dried, his heart squeezing tight.

  She wasn’t missing. She wasn’t gone. She was cooking him breakfast. Like she belonged here. Like she belonged in his life. In his house. In his bed.

  For one second it made him feel like he belonged. Like she’d been the missing piece to making this his, to making it more than McCormack.

  He felt like he was standing in the middle of a dream. Standing there looking at somebody else’s life. At some wild, potential scenario that in reality he would never get to have.

  Right in front of him was everything. And in the same moment he saw that, he imagined the hole that would be left behind if it was ever taken away. If he ever believed in this, fully, completely. If he reached out and embraced her now, there would be no words for how empty his arms would feel if he ever lost her.

  “Don’t you have work?” he asked, leaning against the doorjamb.

  She turned around and smiled, the kind of smile that lit him up inside, from his head, down his toes. He did his very best not to return the gesture. Did his best not to encourage it in any way.

  And he cursed himself when the glow leached out of her face. “Good morning to you, too,” she said.

  “You didn’t need to make breakfast.”

  “Au contraire. I was hungry. So breakfast was needed.”

  “You could’ve gone home.”

  “Yes, Grumpy-Pants, I could have. But I decided to stay here and make you food. Which seemed like an adequate thank-you for the multiple orgasms I received yesterday.”

  “Bacon? You’re trying to pay for your orgasms with bacon?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” She crossed her arms beneath her breasts and revealed that she did not, in fact, have anything on beneath the shirt. “Bacon is a borderline orgasmic experience.”

  “I have work. I don’t have time to eat breakfast.”

  “Maybe if you had gotten up at a decent hour.”

  “I don’t need you to lecture me on my sleeping habits,” he bit out. “Is there coffee?”

  “It’s like you don’t know me at all.” She crossed the room and lifted a thermos off the counter. “I didn’t want to leave it sitting on the burner. That makes it taste gross.”

  “I don’t really care how it tastes. That’s not the point.”

  She rested her hand on the counter, then rapped her knuckles against the surface. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Stop it, Chase. Maybe you can BS the other bimbos that you sleep with, but you can’t do it to me. I know you too well. This has nothing to do with waking up late.”

  “This is a bad idea,” he said.

  “What’s a bad idea? Eating bacon and drinking coffee with one of your oldest friends?”

  “Sleeping with one of my oldest friends. It was stupid. We never should’ve done it.”

  She just stood there, her expression growing waxen, and as the color drained from her face, he felt something even more critical being scraped from his chest, like he was being hollowed out.

  “It’s a little late for that,” she pointed out.

  “Well, it isn’t too late to start over.”

  “Chase...”

  “It was fun. But, honestly, we accomplished everything we needed to. There’s no reason to get dramatic about it. We agreed that we weren’t going to let it affect our friendship. And it...it just isn’t working for me.”

  “It was working fine for you last night.”

  “Well, that was last night, Anna. Don’t be so needy.”

  She drew back as though she had been slapped and he wanted to punch his own face for saying such a thing. For hitting her where he knew it would hurt. And he waited. Waited for her to grow prickly. For her to retreat behind the walls. For her to get angry and start insulting him. For her to end all of this in fire and brimstone as she scorched the earth in an attempt to disguise the naked pain that was radiating from her right now.

  He knew she would. Because that was how it went. If he pushed far enough, then she would retreat.

  She closed the distance between them, cupping his face, meeting his eyes directly. And he waited for the blow. “But I feel needy. So what am I going to do about that?”

  He couldn’t have been more shocked than if she had reached up and s
lapped him. “What?”

  “I’m needy. Or maybe...wanty? I’m both.” She took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m both. I want more. Not less. And this is... This is the moment where we make decisions, right? Well, I’ve decided that I want to move forward with this. I don’t want to go back. I can’t go back.”

  “Anna,” he said, her name scraping his throat raw.

  “Chase,” she said, her own voice a whisper in response.

  “We can’t do this,” he said.

  He needed the Anna he knew to come to his rescue now. To laugh it all off. To break this tension. To say that it didn’t matter. To wave her hand and say it was all whatever and they could forget it. But she wasn’t doing that. She was looking at him, her green eyes completely earnest, vulnerability radiating from her face. “We need to do this. Because I love you.”

  * * *

  Anna could tell that her words had completely stunned Chase. Fair enough, they had shocked her just as much. She didn’t know where all of this was coming from. This strength. This bravery.

  Except that last night’s conversation kept echoing in her mind. When she had told him about her mother. When she had told him about how she always regretted not closing the distance between them. Always regretted not taking the chance.

  That was the story of her entire life. She had, from the time she was a child, refused to make herself vulnerable. Refused to open herself up to injury. To pain. So she pretended she didn’t care. She pretended nothing mattered. She did that every time her father ignored her, every time he forgot an important milestone in her life. She had done it the first time she’d ever had sex with a guy and it had made her feel something. Rather than copping to that, rather than dealing with it, she had mocked him.