Nate’s hand still held mine in a loose clasp.
I liked the feel of his grip: strong enough to be a rodeo hero but underscored with a gentleness that kind of enchanted me. He didn’t say anything for a while and it was nice to just drink in the sights, with him at my side. I’d never been to a city this big. It felt all cosmopolitan and layered in a way I wasn’t used to. There were people speaking different languages. I saw some of the designer stores that are advertised in Cosmo. Gucci. Ralph Lauren. Dolce and Gabbana. Nate was sort of watching me and my wide-eyed fascination like my fascination somehow fascinated him.
I had to admit, it was nice, walking along hand in hand like that. Cal didn’t stroll. He rode his Harley. And when he wasn’t riding his Harley, he was strutting around in the echo of its engine rumbles, as though his identity resided in those engine rumbles. Cal craved those throaty vibrations like some people crave cigarettes. In a particularly philosophical moment he’d once said to me, “The only time I really feel alive is when I’m vibratin’.” Deep stuff.
“When are you expected in Austin?” Nate asked me casually.
“What? Oh, I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“Not expected.”
“They don’t know you’re coming?”
“No. I … I have a friend there. From high school. I didn’t have her number, so I’m going to try to look her up once I get there.” God, it all sounded as desperate as it actually was.
Nate seemed to find this almost amusingly unbelievable. “You don’t know where she lives?”
“She’s at – well, at least she was at – UT. I’ll start my search there and see if I can track her down.”
“What if she isn’t?”
I had tried not to think about that. My hasty escape hadn’t given me a lot of options, but sometimes freedom is more important than options. “She will be.” I almost whispered it when I said, “She has to be.”
Now that he realized I was serious, Nate’s amusement had been replaced by curiosity. And a marked concern, if I was reading him right. “You don’t know anybody else in Austin?”
“Everybody I know lives in Tulsa.”
I was distracted then by a shiny white stretch limo with tinted windows that rolled by us slowly. I felt the tug of Nate’s hand. He’d stopped. In front of a store. Valentino, the sign said. He was looking at red dress that was displayed in the window.
“What do you think?” he said, smiling at me in that cool way he had.
“About what?”
“That dress.”
“It’s nice.” The dress was unbelievable. It was a simple wrap dress, cut so well it made you want to cry.
“Try it on.”
I looked up at him, realizing only then how tall he was. How big. Of course I knew all that but it was the first time I’d actually stood next to him like this. And he was stunning me again with the sheer volume of those wide shoulders. His arms, too, sort of stretching against the short sleeves of his shirt whenever he moved, really were some kind of work of goddamn art.
He might have been able to tell I was ogling him idiotically. He lifted up his sunglasses as though to get a better look at me, and his eyes were glinting with humor. “You’d look good in red.”
What? Oh, yeah: the dress. “I think that dress would cost more than my limited budget would allow.”
“My treat. You’ll need something to wear to dinner tonight.”
“Nate. No. You’re not going to buy me that dress. You already paid for my hotel room last night. Thank you, by the way.”
But he wasn’t listening to me. He was pulling me into the shop.
He wouldn’t take no for an answer. And I had to admit, the dress was the most beautiful thing I’d ever worn in my life. It clung to me like a second skin, accentuating every curve, softly. It was low cut but flatteringly so, and hung to halfway down my thighs, flouncing gently. Regarding myself in the fitting room mirror, wrapped in such a masterpiece, for some reason, made me feeling like crying. It was too perfect. He was too perfect. But when the saleswoman asked me to show them, to show him, Nate was sitting on a leather chair waiting for me, leafing through a magazine. And the look on his face when he saw me was hands down the most enchanting experience I’d could have dreamt up. He looked star-struck. Awed, almost. His jaw slackened and he just stared at me.
“I think he likes it,” the sales lady whispered conspiratorially, smiling. “It’s stunning, honey. Enough to bring a red-blooded Texan to his knees. Don’t you dare refuse to let him buy it for you.” She’d heard our exchanges as we’d shopped and she’d found my size. “You’d regret it ‘til your dyin’ day.”
I thought she might be right about that.
And so, with the dress neatly wrapped in tissue paper, paid for understatedly with a swipe of Nate’s credit card, we left the store, bag in hand.
Nate chose a small, French-style Bistro with a roof garden that had been decorated with palm trees, fairy lights and cream-colored umbrellas. The place was crowded but comfortably so, with modern Euro-style music filling the space. He pulled my chair out for me, something no one had ever done for me before. We sat in silence for a second or two but it was a relaxed silence, filled not with awkwardness but instead with a shared appreciation of where we found ourselves. And of who we found ourselves with.
“Let’s start here,” he said. “Right here, right now.”
What we’d so far shared had been utterly wild, borderline illicit and also beautiful, in a way that I could never explain to anyone and would never need to. It seemed clear enough that we’d be spending the afternoon and evening together. And if I was going out to dinner with him, and meeting up with Riley and their clients, well, it was possible that I might be staying in Dallas for another night. Beyond that, though, the future was wide open. I understood his meaning. We already had a mini-past. A very intense one. If there was ever to be anything of a future – which was unlikely at best – this was where it would begin.
The waiter poured two glasses of a light red wine Nate had ordered and he clinked his glass against mine. I hadn’t tasted a lot of wine before. I found it earthy and delicious.
“Your family must be wondering where you’ve run off to,” he said.
I looked at him and decided to give it to him straight up, because he was interested, I could tell, and because I wanted to. “My mama died three and a half years ago. My daddy skipped town when I was twelve and never bothered to even send so much as a postcard. I’m an only child. My boyfriend of two years is a loser and a thief and well and truly out of my life, which I told him right after he punched me and stole all my money. All I’ve done for the past eight months is work double shifts to save enough money to give myself an out, which didn’t pan out quite like I’d hoped. So the only people that might be wondering where I’ve run off to is the choice clientele of The Rusty Nail. It’s about time for me to start fresh, which is exactly what I’m planning to do.” That pretty much summed it up. I wasn’t looking for pity, God knew that. But there was no point sugar-coating where I’d come from and where I was going.
“Gutsy to just take off like that,” he commented, taking a sip of his wine. With his hair sort of smoothed back and his arms half-folded across his chest, he looked less like a fighter pilot and more like a muscular, sun-tanned intellectual. The juxtaposition of his brawny physical beauty somehow worked with this air of power and acumen. Like he was a superhero dressed in his regular clothes.
“If I’d stayed in Tulsa,” I said, “I’d probably have run into my ex-boyfriend, since he knows everyone I know. I didn’t want that to happen. If I’d stayed, I’d probably never leave. Not now, not later. It’s a sticky old place, Tulsa. I saw a chance to fly so I took it. Even if I crash along the way, I’ll figure it out.”
Nate contemplated me for a while, like he was running a few things over in his mind.
“What about you?” I asked him. “Have you lived in Houston your whole life?”
; “Yeah, I have. But I’ve done a lot of traveling. Around the States, mostly. Mexico, a couple of times. Europe, once.”
“Your family’s in Houston?”
“Yeah. My parents, my brother and sister. Cousins. All there.”
“That must be nice,” I said, feeling an unfamiliar gnawing emptiness somewhere deep inside my soul. That must be nice. To have a family all around you like that. Supportive and there if you wanted to drop by unannounced or if you needed something or a place to stay. Or just someone to talk to.
“Have you ever been to Houston, Lacey?” he asked. My name, spoken in his kindness-edged man’s voice, almost startled me. It sounded so good the way he said it. The way it rolled off his tongue all soft and sexy like that.
“No. This is my first time to Texas, believe it or not.”
The waiter brought our meals. Steaks and gourmet-style potatoes and vegetables, with a drizzled, fancy-looking gravy that sort of decorated the plate like something you’d see in a food magazine.
I’d never tasted anything so sublime as that steak. And that tangy polka-dotted gravy. Its flavor went perfectly with the earth-toned wine.
We ate in silence for a minute or two. Nate took a sip of his wine. “Your ex-boyfriend sounds like a piece of work.”
“Yeah. I think I knew it was doomed. But we got into a routine, I guess. Once you’re stuck in a rut it’s sometimes hard to dig out of it.”
“I know what you mean.”
I remembered Riley talking about Nate’s girlfriend of two years that he’d recently broken up with. “You’re newly single too?” I ventured.
He’d left her, that’s what Riley had said. I wasn’t going to push him into talking about it if he didn’t want to, and I was a little shocked when he said matter-of-factly, “I walked in on her and another guy. In my bed. A couple weeks ago.”
I stared at him. “Wow. Nate. I’m sorry.” What I was thinking was why? What woman in her right mind would cheat on this?
He sort of shrugged it off, as though he was over it. As if he’d just realized he was over it. “I wasn’t all that surprised, to tell you the truth. Things hadn’t been great for a while. I worked too much, she said. She hated that I was never home.”
I ate the last bite of my steak, giving him time, waiting for him to continue, if he chose to.
“Once I got over being fucking pissed off about it, I felt relieved,” he said.
Intrigued by our common ground, I nodded. “Trust is crucial. I don’t think it’s something you can really repair once it’s broken.”
Nate went sort of still when I said that, staring at me with an almost disconcerting seriousness. “Yeah,” he agreed, and then he was quiet, contemplating me as he fingered the stem of his wineglass.
“Tell me about your companies,” I said, hoping a change of subject might lighten the mood. “How’d you get into business?”
“I got my MBA in Houston, in finance. I worked for a while for a web design company and got a feel for it, then decided I thought I could do it better myself. So I started my own company and took on some investment work on the side. Which ended up being a lot more lucrative than I ever imagined. I brought in Riley and my brother Leo to run the company with me so I could spend more time on the portfolios. We’ve taken a couple of property management contracts as well. It’s something Leo’s always been interested in, and it’s worked out well.”
I’d never met a single person who owned a single stock, but I’d read about it. I always carried books around for when a shift was slow, and one day I’d brought along a book about investing that I’d picked up at the library, on a whim. When it came to reading, I wasn’t particular. My mother told me I was the only person she knew who read a cereal box, Doctor Zhivago and Cosmo all at the same time. Books, magazines, travel brochures, newspapers: I read it all. Reading transported me and I never got tired of learning stuff that was beyond the scope of what reality offered me. “I’ve always imagined the stock market was a little like gambling,” I said. “You must need to know a lot to win.”
He smiled. “It’s not as hard as you might think. It’s all about controlling emotion and doing your research. It’s surprisingly straight-forward.”
I sipped my wine, fascinated by the topic and also by his insights. I had never had a conversation like this before, or at least not for a long time. One that encouraged and inspired me.
Nate pushed his clean plate to the side and leaned forward, setting his folded arms on the table. “Maybe you should try it out sometime. You seem to me like you’d be good at it.”
“Sure,” I laughed lightly. “I could invest my last one hundred and twelve dollars and sixty-two cents in Berkshire Hathaway and hope for the best.” I wasn’t sure why I was in such a good mood, especially considering the subject at hand. Then again, I knew exactly why I was in such a good mood. I could worry about tomorrow when it reared its ugly head. For now, I was having lunch with the most virile, alluring, magnetic man I had possibly ever met. Who had not only a spectacularly beasty wild side but also a charming, steady stability in the light of day that was dazzling me.
“You’d get a slow return,” he said, “but a secure one, if you’re prepared to sit it out for the next decade or so.”
“That’s a little longer than I need for a return, I’m afraid. Rented couches in Austin don’t come cheap.”
“You know,” he said, his fingers brushing mine as he reached for my hand. His tone had become more serious. “Bookish little mermaids shouldn’t be hitchhiking to unknown destinations with no money and no reliable place to stay. Especially when they look like you do. It’s downright dangerous.”
“Danger is my middle name,” I smiled, but the smile fell flat.
“Well, Lacey Danger Callihan, let’s see if we can work out a better plan, how about that?” Then he pulled the roll of cash from his pocket and peeled off two hundred dollar bills, placing them on the table. He stood up and offered me his hand. “But it’s gonna have to be later, because if we want to go back to the hotel to shower and get changed before meeting up with Riley for drinks, we should probably head back.”
I stood and slipped my hand into his, following this yellow brick road just a little further, to see where it might lead me.
Chapter Seven
There was no sign of Riley back at the hotel. And Nate seemed restless.
I turned on the shower and as I waited for the water to heat up, I laid out the red dress on the bed. Nate was sitting in a chair, only steps from where I stood, talking on his phone. We were sharing a room, after all. His suitcase was there and so was mine.
I could tell by the conversation that he was talking to Riley. The conversation was brief, and noticeably tense. He’s a little irritated with me. I told him I don’t want him touching you again.
Nate finished the call and tossed his phone onto the bed. He ran his hand through his hair and looked up at me. I was standing close to him, and I bridged the small divide. I stood between his spread knees. A raw and visceral current passed between us, a ripple of lust that almost unsettled me. Yesterday we’d been opportunists, swept away by something wild and uncontrolled. Today the mood was different. There was emotion involved now. Friendships, our pasts and an unmistakable note of reality had entered the fray. We weren’t just in this for the loose abandon of it all this time, for the fun and the freedom; this time, it was closer to the bone. A deeper connection was being made, and this would begin to cement it.
“You trying to tell me somethin’ by steaming up the hotel room?” he said, and I was encouraged by the play of a half smirk at the corner of his mouth.
I twirled a coil of my hair. “I guess I’m wasting a lot of water.”
“Maybe we should do our part to conserve.”
“I think maybe we should, yes. Carbon footprints and all that.”
His indigo gaze painted me with low, slow-burning heat. He placed his palms on my thighs and just left them there, making no move to slide them higher
. “You’re so damn pretty, Lacey. You just about break my jaded heart every time I look you.”
“You’re not jaded,” I whispered, touching his hair. “You’re a romantic. All you need is a romance that lives up to what you’re hoping for.” I didn’t, before I said it, mean to suggest that I could be the one to provide such a thing. But once the words were out, I just kept going. “You need someone who you trust. Who trusts you. Who lets you fly as high as the sky.” I leaned over to kiss him, and his eyes closed like he was high, just on the anticipation of my touch. Very, very gently, I touched my mouth to his. His quiet sigh was a revelation to me. I could sense that he was drinking in the feel of my lips, soft on his, and the words I was telling him, too. Like he wanted more. “You need someone who makes you feel good,” I murmured. “So good. Like this.”
I licked his lips gently, opening them to the soft exploration of my tongue. I kissed his face, across his jaw, his cheekbones. I kissed his eyelids. Empowered by the knowledge that I knew how to pleasure him and already had, to devastating effect, I kissed his lips.
“Last night was a crazy place to start somethin’,” he drawled, and I noticed again the way lust deepened the Texan accent. Of Riley. And of him.
“It was. So’s Mars or the wide-open frontier.”
He laughed as I continued to kiss his face. “Not sure I get the analogy, but yeah, I guess so.”
“Doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.”
“No,” he murmured, like a cat’s purr. I kissed him again, concentrating on his mouth, teasing, enticing him to say something. I already knew that little litanies of sweet, poetic foreplay were his style. “I like your smile,” he started, his eyes still closed. “I like the sound of your voice, so sweet and sincere. I like how I believe what you’re tellin’ me, how I want to know what you’re thinking about. Every second. I like the way you move. Like a hometown girl. Like a dancer offstage. And how your hair coils at the very ends. Little angelic white-blond curls. I like how you look all sparkled and wet in the pool. I don’t know where you came form. Or how or why or what do to with you. All I know is I want you with me. I want you.”
WILD RIDE Page 9