When he was able to relax, he pulled slowly out of her, and she lamented the loss of that perfect fullness. But he fell to her side and pulled her close, and she snuggled in and heard herself make a sound that could only be called a purr.
“I’m sorry that goes so fast. I need to build my endurance back up.”
“If you last much longer, I might stroke out.”
He chuckled and kissed her head. “Stay with me tonight. I owe you a massage, and I can fix us some dinner after. Do some more endurance work, too. Then Sunday breakfast with the family, if you want. And I can take you back up to the Moondancer after that.”
She nodded and hugged him tight, feeling suddenly emotional.
They were moving fast, but Gabe didn’t care. After all that time alone and dead inside, she had somebody who cared about her, who wanted her and wanted to take care of her, whom she wanted and wanted to take care of. He came with a whole family, a whole town, a whole life. She couldn’t imagine ever willingly giving him up.
She could see love in her future. She felt it in her heart right this moment, but she knew better than to say that out loud.
Chapter Eleven
One of the first things Catherine had told Gabe when she’d hired her was that there was a strict no-fraternization rule—staff could not hook up with guests.
Gabe learned quickly thereafter that the strict rule was a bit different in implementation: no fraternization drama was what Catherine was really interested in. She didn’t actually care if there was hanky-panky going on, as long as it didn’t get in her way. In fact, in some ways, she encouraged it.
A majority of the Moondancer guests were men. Even though they hosted family reunions and multi-family vacations, which included women and children, and corporate retreats, which often included women as well, still the balance worked out strongly male. Groups of buddies ‘getting away from it all’ and companies with, for whatever reason, a preponderance of male employees seemed especially drawn to dude ranches. At least this particular dude ranch.
After two months working at the Moondancer, Gabe strongly suspected that Catherine hired her staff with an eye toward their appeal for the guests. Every one of the housekeeping and hospitality workers was female, and every one of those who worked among the guests, as maids, waitresses, and desk staff, was young—all of them fit, and all of them landing at some point on the conventional attractiveness scale from cute to beautiful. The ranch staff was more traditional—and more male—but the few women who worked as trail guides were just as pretty and young as the women working the main house.
She wouldn’t have said that Catherine intentionally whored her staff out, but she understood the appeal pretty women had for the kind of men who wanted to play cowboy, and she made sure not to notice when staff and guests got friendly—unless there was some kind of trouble between them. That was where her ‘strict rule’ applied—and on the side of the guest.
Generally speaking, that atmosphere wasn’t too hard to manage. Some of the girls were interested in getting with a guest, either just to play around or because they were hoping for more, and those girls had busy social calendars on the ranch. Gabe obviously wasn’t, but for the most part, it was fairly easy to navigate around the guests who were hoping to play around with a cute little cowgirl. She’d had her ass grabbed more times than she could count, and she’d gotten a couple dozen outright invitations to rooms, but she smiled and ignored them.
Strangely, and vexingly, it wasn’t in the stag groups or the corporate retreats where the actual problem guests showed up. Unfaithful men away from their wives were just plain old flirts. They overtly tried to pick girls up, like any other guy, and they were easy to handle.
The problem guests were those who’d come with their wives and children. They were the ones who’d grab a waitress’s leg or ass while their wives sat beside them at the dinner table, or who’d try to catch a maid in the corridor and pull her into a dark corner. Like the chance of getting caught was part of the appeal.
After she’d figured that out, Gabe set her mind toward identifying the possible problem guests. The staff talked about them, too—working out ways to do their job and not get caught up. Even the girls who were happy to play around weren’t interested in men whose wives were nearby. That was a one-way ticket to drama and dismissal.
Gabe hadn’t told Heath about any of it, because she thought his possessive-protective thing would be a problem, and what he’d done to Brandon Black was still a vivid memory. On the other hand, it seemed like one of those things that everybody knew but nobody said aloud, so maybe he understood and simply assumed she was handling any advances.
And she was—though she hated family reunion bookings. Like now: one family had booked the entire ranch for two whole weeks and had converged from all over the country to play cowboy. At least four different married men in that one group had gotten handsy with the staff. Two of those had wives who were paying attention. One girl, Melodie—Britnee and Gabe’s roommate for all of about six days—had already been fired because she’d gotten caught banging a married guest. Everybody was on alert.
That morning at breakfast, one of the problem married men in question—the same one who’d gotten Melodie fired—came up behind Gabe while she stood at the beverage station and refilled a water pitcher. Under the guise of reaching for a glass, he pressed right up against her and ground his hips on her ass. She felt him get hard, but she stood still and didn’t react.
“You got yourself a helluva fine ass, Curly-Sue,” he mumbled behind her. With a thrust of his hips, he walked away.
Gross. Gross, gross, gross. Getting her ass pinched or slapped was bad enough, but what that guy—Mr. Cross was all she knew of his name—had done was almost assault. Her stomach twisted into a knot. She should have done something. But what? Cause a scene in a full dining room and get fired for her trouble? Shit.
No, it was nothing. She’d been bumped into on crowded buses in similar ways. She took a breath and finished filling the pitcher, then carried it with a smile around the room, refilling glasses.
Mr. Cross winked at her when she filled the glasses at his table. She looked away. Gross.
*****
Melodie had been wait staff, and with her sudden ouster, the other girls had to fill in her schedule. On this day near the end of the Cross-Michener family reunion, Gabe was working a double, taking an extra shift that night to work the Chuck Wagon Dinner.
She hated those dinners a whole lot. They were held outside, after dark, and with the exception of the ‘chuck wagon’—which was really just a food truck, a mobile kitchen under a canvas dome made to look like an old Conestoga wagon—the whole area was illuminated only by a bonfire and a few torches. It was hard to serve in the dark, and people got drunk, and then the staff had to navigate an obstacle course of grabby mitts. Not fun. Not being able to see Heath that night? Even less fun.
But that afternoon, she had a break between shifts, and that break happened to coincide with Heath being at the ranch to do a farrier presentation. A glimmer of silver in her cloudy work day.
She’d guessed, when she’d first arrived in town and met him, that he would hate those, but it turned out that he enjoyed them. He didn’t make much eye contact with his audience, but he was proud of his work, and he didn’t mind explaining what he was doing and why he was doing it that way. He made a show of his work when people were there to watch, doing a lot more than he needed to do to put shoes on the horses.
Gabe walked down to the stable while he was in the middle of his spiel. There was a group of a dozen or so people watching him. She stayed back, out of the way of the guests, and watched her man, the muscles in his arms flexing as he hammered a hot shoe into a new shape, then dunked it into the quenching bath.
She knew some of the terminology now, after being with him for a month. She’d watched him work a few times, here and at his shop. What he did was art. Even making a horseshoe was a kind of artistry.
As he fi
nished his little show, he looked up and saw her, and a smile brightened his face. As the little group dispersed—Mr. Cross among them, his little boy riding on his shoulders—Gabe went to Heath.
“Hey, you.” He pulled her into his arms. “I was hoping you’d come down and see me.”
“I have a break before dinner. Can you hang out up here for a while? Maybe come back to the bunkhouse with me?” She shoved her hands under the back of his t-shirt and raked her nails across his sweat-dampened skin.
With a groan, he grabbed hold of her arms. “I can’t. I’ve got three more appointments this afternoon.”
“Well, that sucks.” She stuck her lip out in a dramatic pout.
Grinning in a way he only made for her, he bent his head and sucked her lip into his mouth. “Poor baby. I tell you what—hold on.” He pulled his leather apron off, put his gear away, shut down his equipment and closed up his truck, then took her hand and led her into the shade of the stables.
In the middle of the day like this, the stables were nearly empty. The few horses that had been kept back for shoeing were their only company. Heath pulled her into a nook at the front of the building, next to an empty stall, where leads and halters hung from rows of hooks.
He pushed her against the far wall and leaned in, looming over her, his hands on either side of her head. “No time to get naked, but we can make out for a few minutes. You game for that?”
Reaching up, she swiped at the brim of his hat and knocked it off his head. Then she grabbed fistfuls of his t-shirt and yanked him close. Yeah, she was game for that.
As his mouth claimed hers, he held her head, his long fingers tangling in her hair. She twisted her arms around his neck, arching her body so that she could mold herself to him. He groaned, the sound muffled in their joined mouths, and she ground against his hard cock.
Soon, they were all but fucking against the stable wall. Anyone walking by might think they were going at it full tilt; Gabe met each of Heath’s feral grunts with one of her own, and she could hear how noisy they were. She could hear, but she couldn’t care. For her part, if Heath had opened his jeans and flipped her to face the wall, she doubted she’d have stopped him.
Fucking him was her favorite thing to do in the world. With sleeping in his arms a close second. Being with him in general took up about the first ten slots on her list of favorite things. She’d been happier in the past few weeks than she could remember being ever before.
Finally, he pulled back. “Damn. Okay, okay. Okay. I’m about to lose it in my damn jeans.”
“I don’t want to stop,” she whispered, irrationally. They obviously could not fuck in the Moondancer stable while fifty guests and a couple dozen staff roamed the grounds. Still, she clung to him.
“I don’t, either.” Sadly, he belied that sentiment by pulling her arms free of his neck. When she whined, he chuckled and kissed her nose.
He played with a lock of her hair, stretching it out to its full length and letting it spring back into its waves. “I’ll come up and get you after your shift. Call me when you’re off.”
She shook her head. “I have to work breakfast tomorrow.” She didn’t like him chauffeuring her back and forth like that. He had work of his own. “I really need a car.”
“How much’ve you got? You close?”
“Jerk said he’ll give me eight hundred for my dad’s truck, as is. Is that good?”
Heath laughed. “That’s Jerk being nice. I’ve seen that truck.”
“Should I not take that much, then?”
“You should let him be nice. He likes you, and he’d be happy to do you a good turn.”
And she was happy to accept a kindness like that. “Okay. With that and the money I have left from when I got here, and what I’ve saved from my earnings here…about thirty-five hundred? I can find a good used car for that, right?”
He frowned. “That’s not that much, Gabe. But let me make some calls. I know some people in Boise. Will you let me do that?”
When he’d offered to help her pay for a car, she’d stomped hard all over that idea. As wonderful as it was to be with him, as much as it felt like the real deal, it was too early for stuff like that to be between them. But she wasn’t opposed to a little help with finding the right car and the right seller. She grinned up at him. “That would be great. Yes! This weekend?”
His evident disappointment at that surprised her, but he said, “Yeah. This weekend.”
He picked his hat up off the stable floor and squared it on his head, then took her hand and led her into the sunshine again.
There were a few people around, mostly ranch hands. She could tell by their expressions that they’d heard what had been going on in the stable—or what they thought had been going on.
She simply grinned back and walked her man to his truck.
*****
Naomi had a standard menu for the Chuck Wagon Dinner: fancied-up takes on traditional cowboy foods, like chili and beans and cornbread, and some traditional Shoshone dishes as well. It was usually the highlight of the visit for the guests, but nobody liked to work it. Gabe had never been to Hawaii, but she’d seen stuff about it on television, and she guessed it was kind of like those luaus at Hawaiian hotels—big hits with the tourists and irritating for the staff.
Still, this one was going okay. Britnee was working it, too, and she was really great with the guests. With her big personality, she managed to control the attention of anyone she wanted, turning over-the-top advances into harmless flirtation, and it took a lot of pressure off Gabe and the few other girls like her, the ones who only wanted to do their work and be left alone. Gabe wasn’t auditioning friends or boyfriends or fuck buddies. She was doing her job. Period.
Mr. Cross hadn’t paid her any attention all evening, so she decided that the thing at breakfast was just a one-off weird moment. Maybe he’d been pouting that Melodie was gone. She relaxed a little and served her tables. The meal was done ‘family style,’ with platters and large bowls brought to the tables, and plates filled from there—another reason she hated the dinner, since there was so much more opportunity for spills and mistakes.
She was headed to the ‘chuck wagon’ to get towels to help one of the other girls clean up a spilled bowl of beans when a hand clamped around her arm, just above her elbow, and she was yanked around to the back of the truck. It was dark back there; the food truck only had windows on the serving side.
Mr. Cross pushed her, face first, against the truck, holding her in place with his body. He was only a couple of inches taller than she, and his face was almost level with hers. She could almost taste the cowboy dinner on his breath. And the whiskey.
“Hey, Curly-Sue. I’m gonna need some of this ass to get me through the night.” He slid his hand down her side, then over her ass until he could push his fingers between her legs.
This asshole’s wife and kids were on the other side of the truck, sitting at their table with the red-checked tablecloth, eating cornbread and listening to Luke play cowboy songs on his guitar.
Gabe tried to keep calm. She needed the job. “Mr. Cross”—he was leaning so hard on her, grinding again, his fingers probing around on her jeans, that her voice sounded stilted—“you need to let me go. Please.”
“I saw you with that blacksmith. I heard you two going at it right out in public. I know what you like.”
“That’s my boyfriend. I have a boyfriend. Please let me go.” Gabe clenched her teeth to hold back the shakes. If they got into her jaw, they’d take over her whole body.
“I will. When I get what I want. I can buy this place a hundred times over. I get what I want. Stupid little waitresses don’t tell me no.”
When his hand came around to her front and went for her belt, Gabe was done asking nicely. She meant to scream, but she forgot to unlock her jaw, and she made an odd, grunting roar instead. Then she stomped on his foot as hard as she could. She was wearing boots, but so was he. She didn’t think she’d done much damage, but it
was enough to startle him and make him hop back. She turned around and did the only other move she knew. She kicked him in his arrogant balls.
Her boots were much more useful there.
He dropped to his knees and then fell over, curled into a fetal ball, clutching what Gabe hoped were swelling nuts. She stood where she was, transfixed by the scene. Besides, she didn’t know where she would go.
When he could take in a breath, he howled, then howled again. On the other side of the truck, the noises of the dinner crowd petered out.
Luke was the first one to arrive at the back of the truck, his guitar still strapped over his chest. He scanned the scene quickly, then came to Gabe. “You okay?”
She nodded. Words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. Her jaw wouldn’t unlock.
Catherine had been right behind Luke. She went to Mr. Cross and helped him to sit. Then his wife was there. She gave Gabe a poisonous sneer and went to her husband.
“She attacked me!” the asshole wailed. “I want that stupid little bitch fired. Now!”
“My office, Gabe. Now. Luke, help Mr. Cross to the infirmary.”
With a quick, supportive squeeze of her shoulder, Luke did as he was told. Still speechless, Gabe couldn’t defend herself against the accusation, so she walked away from the scene, too, and headed toward the big house and Catherine’s office.
Halfway to the house, the shakes took her over. She needed this job. This was how she stayed in Jasper Ridge. How she stayed with Heath. How she got her new start. She couldn’t lose this job. Everything would fall apart.
By the time she sat down in the wingchair in front of her boss’s elegant desk, Gabe was sobbing.
*****
Rather than sit behind her desk, Catherine took the matching wingchair beside Gabe’s.
Gabe had pulled herself together, more or less, but she was still sniffling, and she imagined her face was a bleary mess. “Please don’t fire me.”
Somewhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 1) Page 14