Island park was literally an island smooshed between the two banks of the green river where it split, leaving a lush, beautiful oasis in the middle. It was my most favorite place to go, my grandmother had taken me every time I’d visited when I was younger, to teach me about nature.
“I…” I was speechless. I’d been expecting a loud bar, an action movie and then a move to get in my pants.
Dax was grinning ear to ear, and it was hard not to notice how handsome he was. “Rowena told me that your grandmother would often take you here, and that it was a special place to you. I thought it might be a nice spot for dinner.”
I just stared at him as if he’d sprouted two heads. “You asked Rowena about me?” My brain was short circuiting, I didn’t know what to think. How could I function if Dax weren’t this big cocky asshole?
He grinned again. “Often.” He took my hand and stepped in front of me. “Look, I know I have a reputation but that’s because I’m really old and this town is too small for privacy. I promise you only fifty percent of what you’ve heard is probably true.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, sixty-five. Max. The point is, I want you to take this date seriously because I’m serious about getting to know you. I’ve felt a connection with you since the first day you showed up in town and not just the physical kind.” His cheeks were a bit red and he looked… nervous.
Whoa. He’d just laid his feelings out in the open, bare and raw and… submissive-like. It was the sexiest damn thing he’d ever done. Without overthinking things like I normally did, I popped up on my toes and wrapped my arms around his neck, running my hands through his thick hair and pressing my lips to his. The second our lips touched, heat traveled south of my navel and pleasure exploded inside of me. I didn't realize until this moment how badly I'd been wanting to do this. His hands reached around to cup my butt, and he hoisted me up so that I could wrap my legs around his waist. My lips parted to let his tongue inside my mouth, and he gave a husky growl. When I pulled back, he was smiling.
“Does this mean I get a second date?” he asked, eyes pinned on my swollen lips.
I unhooked my legs from his waist and shrugged. “We’ll see.” I said with a smirk.
He chuckled.
“Challenge accepted, Tatiana.”
DAX
Mine.
THE END
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Leia Stone is the USA Today bestselling author of the Matefinder series which is optioned for film. She writes urban fantasy and paranormal romance with sassy kick-butt heroines and irresistible love interests.
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Tristan & Anna: A Bachelors of the Ridge short story
Karla Sorensen
In this exclusive short story, Tristan and Anna prepare to say "I do".
Copyright © 2018 by Karla Sorensen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
One
The night before
Anna
Maybe most brides would have a hard time sleeping the night before their wedding, but not me. From the moment I crawled under the soft sheets in our big bed, the one that Tristan and I had shared for the last eleven months, my eyes drifted shut, and I fell instantly into the kind of slumber reserved for people truly at peace with their life.
Before I went to bed, Tristan had told me he’d be right behind me, even though I knew he wouldn’t stay the night.
My future husband was a stickler for tradition. No surprises there.
Which is why it didn’t surprise me when I was pulled from my deep, contended, at-peace-with-my-life slumber by the feel of his large hand coasting up my back, sweeping across my spine. My lungs filled slowly with a deep breath and I stretched on a happy sigh.
“What time is it?” I mumbled as I tried to pry my eyes open.
“Just after eleven,” he whispered against the top of my head as he curled himself around me.
All around me was the smell of him, the sweet protective cage off his big body. Something I’d never tire of, something that never failed to warm me completely.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.
“Liar.” I turned so that I could face him, and in the stretch of bright moonlight coming through the window of our bedroom, I could see the tiny smile on his face. I cupped the side of his cheek, felt the soft bristle of beard that he’d been growing for the last couple months. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”
Tristan took a deep breath, his deeply brown, bottomless eyes searching my face in the dark. “Nothing that doesn’t go through my head every time I look at you.”
I couldn’t stop my smile. Happiness like this didn’t seem sustainable, but in the last year, he’d proven me so, so wrong, my big, quiet man.
“Tell me.”
He leaned forward to place a soft kiss on my waiting lips, slid his tongue against mine before pulling back. His massive arm wrapped around my back so that I was flush against his chest, which happened to be my favorite place in the entire world.
“Don’t you want to wait until my vows tomorrow?”
“No chance you’d tell me those tonight, huh?” I asked uselessly. For a solid month, I’d seen him scribbling in his notebook, erasing and starting over with a thoughtful look on his face. Every time I asked him if he needed help, he’d just give me a steady look with barely curved lips as he shook his head.
“What do you think?” he answered.
I huffed into the bare skin over his heart, but I softened my faux annoyance by dropping a kiss over the steadily pounding rhythm. If I thought too hard, too long about him, the kind of man he was, the way he loved me, I’d burst into tears.
Some days, it felt like too much, like I’d been slipped into some dream that I’d never be able to reconcile as reality.
My eyes pricked hotly, and I buried my nose against his chest.
“What are you thinking in that head of yours?” he asked. His hand moved up and down in a steady, never faltering pattern and I relaxed even further. When I didn’t answer, he hooked his hand over my shoulder and pulled me onto my back, so he could see my face. “Are you stressed about tomorrow?”
I shook my head and ran my hand over his forearm, up over the rounded curve of his shoulder. “No, Rory, Brooke, and Julia pretty much took care of everything. Did you see the tree?”
He nodded. “Looks good.”
“Good? It looks like a fairy tale.”
Backyard weddings, especially in the backyard of the bride and groom, weren’t for the faint of heart. There was no escaping something to be done, something to be set up, last minute details to be taken care of. But between my friends, my sister-in-law, and my mother, who’d taken up wedding planning with the precision of a five-star general, there was very little for me to worry about.
Tristan’s hand coasted around my waist in a slow track, and my skin began to hum in response. Maybe I should’ve been sleeping, maybe he should’ve been too, but it was impossible for him to touch me without this happening. Without the slow, inevitable build, the buzz in my blood that made me want to purr happily.
But his hand stopped over my stomach and stayed there. Fingers spread wide over my skin, only slightly rounded. I laid mine over the top of his and tangled our fingers together.
“Feel anything
yet?” he asked in a hushed whisper, like he was afraid to wake eleven-week-old baby Whitfield.
I smiled. He asked me this at least three times a day, from the moment we saw the positive pregnancy test.
“Not yet.”
“I still think it’s a boy.”
My smile grew and I shifted to face him. This was the other thing he said at least three times a day. “That’s because having a girl terrifies you.”
He pressed his palm even further into my skin, like he could pick up sound waves from the baby, feel it’s tiny heartbeat, learn something new that all our books, all the websites we’d read couldn’t tell him. “Of course, it terrifies me,” he said grumpily. “She’ll look like you, and then I’ll have another Anna in the world to yank my heart out of my chest. How could I ever let her out of my sight?”
I laughed, only stopping when he kissed me again. I wound my arms around his neck and hitched my thigh up around his waist to deepen it. Tomorrow, he’d be my husband.
My husband.
Into his thick, long hair, which was unbound, I dug my fingers and held onto the curve of his head. Ever since we found out I was pregnant, Tristan had treated me so gently, so carefully, and tonight, that wasn’t what I wanted. I knew tomorrow night, when we crawled back in bed as Mr. and Mrs. Whitfield, I’d be exhausted to my core from dancing and laughing and being with all the people who loved us so much, who were so happy for us, but tonight, we had everything laid out before us like the sun was just starting to rise.
Tristan’s breathing picked up as he rocked his hips into mine, and a groan came from deep within his broad chest when I sucked his tongue into my mouth.
“I don’t want you to hold back tonight,” I whispered against his lips. “Make love to me, Tristan, and tomorrow when I walk down that aisle to you, you’ll know that I can still feel where you were on my body.”
“God, Anna,” he said gruffly, rolling us so he was fully stretched out on top of me. He propped his full weight on his forearms, which caged around my head. So large that he blotted out the light of the moon, Tristan stared down at me like he couldn’t believe that I was there. Like he couldn’t believe that I was his, or that he was mine.
I wiggled my hips under him and he grinned widely when he got the hint.
Clothes. Off. Now.
He kneeled between my split legs and used his big hands to ease my sleep shorts down my legs, followed by the sensible cotton underwear. Tomorrow night would be for lace and silk, tonight was still the reality before the rest of our lives began.
Careful of my sensitive breasts, already fuller than they’d ever been, he dipped his head and licked a wide circle around my flesh.
“You taste so good,” he whispered.
I was already aching, shaking, trembling with need, and he’d barely touched me. Barely done anything.
Pregnancy was the best thing ever.
Tristan’s hand wound through my hair and tangled through the strands. “Will this be down for me tomorrow?” he asked gruffly. “I love seeing it down your back. Love seeing it and knowing that I get to be the one to mess it up later.”
“Yes,” I moaned, biting the side of his neck where I could feel the thrum of his pulse.
Tristan pushed off his boxer briefs and slid back in place on top of me, and my hands ran greedily over the ribbons of muscle under his hot skin as he moved. “Will you be my wife tomorrow?”
“Yes. Yes.”
He lined up and paused there, staring into my eyes as I shifted restlessly. “Forever. This is forever, Anna.”
Then he thrust, hard.
I cried out and held on.
It felt so good. He was so deep. He was everywhere. How I’d ever lived without him in my life felt impossible to conceive, unreasonable now that I knew what it was like.
To be loved so fully.
To be cherished beyond reason.
To be respected for every tiny thing that made up who I was.
“Tristan,” I moaned as he moved faster, held my tighter, hands dug into my skin.
“You are everything,” he rasped. “Everything.”
Sweat gathered at my temples, and along his spine under my fingers as he pressed his forehead tight to mine.
“I love you,” I said against his lips, and he captured the words with his mouth on mine, moving with a ferocity that took my breath away. The kiss was sloppy and endless, until I cried out his name, and he yelled mine into the darkness of our room.
I wrapped my arms tight around him as he tried to catch his breath, his head buried against my neck.
“You don’t have to leave tonight,” I told him in between pants.
Tristan lifted his head. “It’s tradition. I can’t see the bride the day of the wedding.” He glanced at the clock. “Which means I need to be out of here in about fifteen minutes.”
I pouted, which made him laugh under his breath.
“But,” I pleaded, nuzzling my nose against his, “we can break a little tradition like this one. No one will know.”
I didn’t want to say it out loud, because I knew it bugged him when I did, but this wasn’t my first wedding. I’d done the big ball gown with the perfect bouquet of roses, walked down the aisle to a man I knew I shouldn’t have married. Following an arbitrary tradition seemed … well … arbitrary at this point.
To him, and to me, the fact that this was my second marriage, and my second wedding, wasn’t a point we dwelled on at all during the planning. A casual, backyard wedding would have suited us just fine even if it was my first. Getting married under the tree where he asked me to marry him was exactly what I would have chosen, no matter how many times I’d done this, no matter if I’d never done it before.
Tristan exhaled heavily and rolled to his side so he could see my face. His hand swept away the mess of hair covering my face. There was such tenderness in the gesture that I felt a lump grow larger and larger in my throat.
“I’ll know,” he said after a while. His voice was so low and steady, and I knew there was no budging him. It was one of the things I loved most about Tristan. It was why he loved me for so long, even though there’d been very little hope. Because he just knew. He knew that I was it for him, even if it took six years for me to see the same thing. Be able to do anything about it. Be free to be with him. “And when you walk down that aisle toward me, my Anna, I’ll see you in that beautiful dress that I’ve never seen and feel so damn lucky that I’m the man you’re walking toward. There have been a thousand moments that I’ve waited for with you, and we’ve had almost all of them by now. But this one,” his hand slid over the tiny, undetectable bump under my skin, “and watching you hold our child for the first time, are the next on my list that I’m most looking forward to. I want to give that moment the respect it deserves.”
Well, damn it.
I sniffled, and he wiped away the single tear that fell in an awkward trail down the edge of my nose.
“Okay,” I said in a watery voice.
“Okay.”
“Are you leaving now?”
He nodded, dropped a kiss on my lips. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The overwhelming reality that was him and me crested in a staggering wave. It was something I’d never get used to. Never wanted to get used to. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” He kissed my forehead, gently touched my stomach before leaning down to kiss that too, and then he was gone.
In the silence after his departure, I waited for the sound of the guest room door to close, and I knew he’d be out of the house before dawn. Curling into a ball, I inhaled his scent off the sheets and sighed happily.
The room was lit by the bright, full moon, and I stared at the pristine white bag hanging from the hook on the bathroom door. Inside of it was my dress—flawless, uninterrupted ivory fabric with tiny straps and a simple design that banded around my waist, cut low over my modest chest, even lower down my back.
The skirt was flowy and full, perfect for a spring
backyard wedding. Also, perfect to accommodate a slightly widening waistline, a secret that Tristan and I had decided to keep to ourselves for now. Not because we didn’t want to celebrate with our families, but because there was a sweetness in having this time be just about the two of us.
I pulled myself out of bed to go clean up in the bathroom, and when I was done, because I couldn’t resist, I lowered the zipper on the garment bag by just a few inches, merely to remind myself that tomorrow, I’d walk down a flower-lined aisle wearing that beautiful dress, that at the end of it would be Tristan.
With a tired smile on my face, I crawled back into our big, empty bed and wished he was there to wrap me in his arms.
My hand gently rubbed my stomach and I stared down at it, still trying to reconcile that this was my life.
“Baby,” I whispered. “You and I won the lottery. Someday you’ll know that like I know it, but until you do, we’ll just love you.”
I took a moment and closed my eyes, imagined a little boy that had my eyes, Tristan’s smile, the one he showed so rarely. Imagined a girl with my black hair and his brown eyes. I didn’t care what we had, we’d already decided we wanted to be surprised. That we wouldn’t pick a name until he or she made their grand entrance.
How they looked, who they took after, and whatever they turned out to be, they’d be perfect.
And with my eyes closed, sleep again came easily, because I knew what would happen after the sun broke open in the sky.
Two
The Day Of
Tristan
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