Claimed by the Cowboy

by Sarah M. Anderson

  She bore down on his hand and buried her fingers in his hair as she held him against her breast. Just when she didn’t think she could take it for another second, Josh groaned, “Lucy,” and she lost whatever control over herself she’d been clinging to.

  She climaxed in his arms with such force that she almost pitched herself right off his lap. “Oh, God,” she whispered in a shaky voice as Josh gathered her back in his arms and pulled her against his chest.

  “You’re beautiful,” he got out before he was kissing her again with even more urgency.

  She wasn’t sure she could buy that—she wasn’t beautiful and, besides, it was pitch-black in this room. But he grabbed her bottom again and was grinding up against her, and even though she didn’t think she could handle another climax like that, she could already feel the pressure building again. “You,” she tried to tell him in an authoritative voice. “Your turn.”

  His only response was to groan as she shifted against him. She didn’t know what she was doing, but that didn’t seem to matter. She kissed him and let her body move as it wanted to and—

  Her phone buzzed and lit up, an unwelcome spotlight in their dark little world. Lucy jolted against him. “Ignore that,” she told him. Whoever it was, they could just call back later. There was nothing in the world so important as what was happening right now between her and Josh.

  Then he had to ruin it by asking, “What time is it?”

  She froze. There was something that she was maybe supposed to be doing right now—she was supposed to be at the Winchester estate, seeing if they’d gotten a room set up for Sutton Winchester so he could continue his treatment at home.

  “Oh, crap—the Winchesters.” She pulled away from Josh and threw herself off the couch. She managed to get a light turned on without breaking anything and hurried to her phone. Yep, it was a series of texts from Nora Winchester, asking her where she was and if she was still planning on stopping by. “Oh, crap,” she repeated again. It was nine o’clock.

  She was late. God, how she hated being late. People depended on her. The least she could do was be dependable. Instead, she’d been throwing herself at Josh Calhoun—the very last person she should be screwing around with. She’d completely lost her mind, hadn’t she? Because she was not the kind of person who put something as fleeting as physical desire ahead of her duties and responsibilities. There were lives on the line, damn it. She knew that.

  But Josh had made her forget for a few glorious, humiliating moments. He’d made her forget everything, including herself. Especially herself. Shame burned at her cheeks and she couldn’t meet his gaze when he said, “Lucy?”

  One simple rule—she was not to embarrass herself in front of Josh. Not again. Never again.

  And she’d done just that.

  Damn it all.

  Six

  Josh sat on the couch in a state of shock. What the hell had just happened?

  One minute, he was enjoying good Thai food with an old friend, watching the sunset over Lake Michigan and not actively hating Chicago.

  The next, they were wrapped up in each other, hands and mouths everywhere. Although Josh was a little out of practice, he was pretty sure he’d made it good for her. He wasn’t some green boy anymore. Lucy had moaned and writhed and shuddered against him, and damned if it hadn’t been good. Amazing, even.

  And then, just like all the light switches Lucy was actively flipping on, the whole thing was over and done.

  He scrubbed his hand over his face and willed his erection to stand way the hell down as he tried to make sense of the situation. He wasn’t having a lot of luck at that. He hadn’t wanted—really and truly wanted—in such a damned long time that the whole thing had turned his brain into mush.

  He shifted, trying to figure out what he needed to do next.

  “I can’t...” Lucy muttered. “I don’t even know what to pack. And I’m late!”

  That’s what she was thinking about? He was trying to figure out how he could finish what they’d started together and she was worried about being late? “Lucy.”

  Not that she listened. She didn’t. “I can’t be late, Josh. I’m never late.”

  Well. At least she was acknowledging he was still in the room. “Why do you have to pack?”

  “Because I’m supposed to stay at the house while Sutton’s being treated,” she replied, looking at him as if he were a special kind of stupid.

  That made no sense. “But I thought he was still in the hospital?”

  “He is,” she snapped and then he thought she muttered something about...penguins?

  He shook his head again, trying to get the blood to start flowing to his brain instead of other parts. He could still feel Lucy’s weight as she straddled him, so close... “You’re not going to discharge him tonight, are you?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Why are you packing right now, then?”

  Lucy came to a dead stop. “What?” she asked in utter confusion.

  Josh forced himself to stand, although this was not much more comfortable than sitting had been. “If Sutton isn’t going home tonight, why do you need to stay there tonight?”

  “I...don’t?” She was completely, if adorably, flustered. “I guess I thought I should—I don’t know—already have my stuff over there? Before he got there?”

  Josh couldn’t help but grin at her. One of the smartest people he’d ever known—and she hadn’t made that mental leap. “You know, there’s such a thing as being too prepared.”

  She shot him one hell of a mean look—easily the meanest look she’d given him since he’d first seen her again. But if she was trying to scare him off, it wasn’t working. In fact, it was having the opposite effect.

  Because all he wanted to do was walk over there and kiss her until she stopped scowling at him.

  He didn’t, though. Being married for seven years had taught him a few things and he wasn’t so slow as to forget what those things were. Kissing her right now would guarantee failure.

  So, instead, he grabbed his keys and said, “Come on, let’s go.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “You’re not coming with me,” she said in a tone of voice that made it clear this point was not up for discussion.

  Except it was. “Yes, I am. Come on.” He opened her door. And then he waited because he knew damn well she wasn’t going to fall in line that easily. Not his Lucy.

  Then he caught himself. When had she become his Lucy?

  The moment he’d kissed her.

  “No, you’re not.” It was at that point that Josh realized she might actually punch him. At the very least, she wanted to.

  Unexpectedly, a wave of guilt hit him. “You’ve had some wine and you’re upset.” He hadn’t thought it possible, but her glare got even meaner. This was going from bad to worse. “And we need to talk.”

  “No, we don’t. Nothing to talk about.” She grabbed her purse, slung it over her shoulder and began to wrangle her hair back into some semblance of order. “And you’ve had some wine, too.”

  He grinned at her again, not that she saw. He easily had sixty, maybe seventy pounds on her and he’d had half a glass of wine. “Lucy.”

  She stopped her frenetic movements, but she didn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t say anything, either. He had that odd sensation of guilt again—that he’d embarrassed her.

  True, he’d kissed her—but she’d kissed him back. Enthusiastically. And he was pretty sure that she had said, “I want this,” and he was even surer that she’d told him it was his turn.

  So why the hell was she so embarrassed?

  He tried a different approach. “I want to drive you. I want to spend more time with you.”

  She took a step back and he saw that she hadn’t be
en ready for that line of attack. “You can’t,” she said definitively. “Patient privacy.”

  He had to go with his ace in the hole. She was not going to be happy about this. “Carson asked me to stop by the Winchester estate and make sure that everything was in order.” Which was not something Josh was happy about. But he’d mentioned he was going to have dinner with Lucy before she went out to the Winchester estate and Carson had made his request. Josh had almost forgotten about it while he’d been in Lucy’s arms and it about killed him to bring it up now.

  The color drained out of Lucy’s face.

  “Oh. I see.” And just like that, she shut down. It hurt to watch. “Well. If you’ve been invited by family, then by all means.”

  She stalked past him, her head held high and her eyes focused anywhere but where he stood. He knew, without a doubt, that he was screwed.

  As he followed her down the stairs, he tried to think—what would Sydney say? They’d had their share of disagreements and occasional fights in the ten years that they’d known each other. And Josh was known for being a peacemaker. He was the one who smoothed over fights, not the one who made them worse.

  Which was clearly what he had done right now.

  Lucy was not Sydney. While the two women probably would’ve gotten along and maybe even been friends, they were not the same woman. Appearances had been very important to Sydney. When a woman started her own high-end interior design business, appearances were everything. For her, Josh had willingly put away his hats and shoved his shit-kicker boots into the back of the closet. He’d worn corporate suits with the lawyerly ties because having a professional husband who made her look good had made Sydney happy.

  Lucy, on the other hand... Today she wore basically the same outfit she’d been wearing at the hospital work site. A blouse, some dark slacks and her lab coat. She didn’t have coordinating jewelry and her hair had a mind of its own. At best, her shoes could be described as serviceable—the round-toe things with thick heels that so many medical professionals wore.

  She hadn’t really changed that much. Exchange the slacks for jeans and the blouses for sweatshirts and she looked almost exactly the same as she had in high school.

  Except for the curves. The soft, luscious curves that he had had in his hands for way too short a period of time. The Lucy he remembered had been someone who hadn’t blossomed yet. Maybe that was why she had always fit in with him and Gary so well—she’d been something of a tomboy and had certainly looked the part. No one in their right mind would have ever accused Sydney of being a tomboy.

  No one in their right mind would have ever asked Sydney Laurence to go cow tipping on a Saturday night. But Lucy used to.

  They made it out of the building and Josh pointed toward where he’d parked his truck. Lucy froze again. “Wait—you’re still driving that truck?”

  “Yeah. Is that a problem?”

  “No...” He glanced down at her and saw that she was worrying her bottom lip—the very same lip he himself had been worrying not twenty minutes ago. “I would’ve figured you’d had a new car since then. That thing has to be twenty, twenty-five years old.”

  “Close. It’s nineteen years old. I had the engine completely rebuilt about five years ago.” When he’d come home from Chicago, actually. But he didn’t tell her that part. “It looks like hell, but it runs great.” He held the door for her.

  She still had her car keys in her hand. “Do you even know where you’re going? This isn’t Cedar Point, you know. This is Chicago.”

  “Believe it or not, I know my way around this town. And after my last conversation with Carson, I programmed the Winchester estate address into my directions.”

  Lucy sighed and climbed up into the truck. As gallantly as he could, Josh closed the door—which took a bit of force, since he didn’t use the passenger side door much and parts of it had rusted. Then he went around to the driver’s side, climbed in and started the truck. The engine gurgled and then roared to life as he called up the directions on his phone.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes. For once, traffic was not horrendous as they headed up the North Shore toward the Winchester estate.

  Josh was at a loss as to what he was supposed to say now. If it were anyone else but Lucy sitting in the car next to him—anyone but a woman he had been kissing and hoping to do a whole lot more with—he would’ve known what to say. What was it about her that tied him in knots?

  Wait, don’t answer that, he told himself.

  So he said nothing while the silence between them grew heavy. He didn’t regret kissing her, though. He didn’t regret touching her, either. He wanted to do it again. For the first time in five years, he wanted to hold a woman in his arms and lose himself in her touch and her sounds and her body.

  Maybe that was part of the problem. He hadn’t done this dance in such a long time—long before Sydney had died. He was thirty-five and the last time he’d started a new relationship had been fifteen years ago. He was rusty and it was showing.

  But he wanted Lucy. It didn’t make complete sense to him, but he wanted her. He wanted to go back to being tangled up with her on the couch in the dark and listening to her sigh his name. He wanted to know he could still do that for a woman.

  He wanted to feel alive again, and for a few short minutes that was how Lucy had made him feel. No one else had given that to him.

  And if he didn’t get his head out of his ass, those few short minutes were all he was going to get.

  At a stoplight, he glanced over at her. Her back was ramrod straight and her eyes were focused straight ahead. She looked almost as if he were driving her to her doom. Was that because they were going to the Winchester estate or because she was in the car with him?

  Discretion was the better part of valor. “I’m sorry.”

  She made an indelicate snorting noise. “Is that a general all-purpose apology? Because if you’re hoping that will solve the world’s ills, I’m here to tell you it won’t.”

  Damn. Not that Sydney had ever bought that lame attempt, either. So he tried again—and this time, he was very specific. “I thought you were enjoying our time on the couch. I would never do anything to hurt you. Including putting you in an awkward position.”

  She snorted again, this time louder. Because, yeah, even he had to admit that the inside of this truck was awkward. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Crap. He was in serious trouble here and he knew it. “It won’t happen again.”

  He hit another stoplight and glanced at her again. He wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but she was sitting up even straighter now. “No. Of course not.” Her voice had gotten quiet and something in her tone pulled at him.

  It was that guilt again, damn it. Not the same kind of guilt he’d felt when Sydney had died.

  If it was possible for guilt to feel familiar, though, this did. It niggled at the back of his mind, like an old bug bite that he’d accidentally brushed so that it suddenly itched again. “Okay, I just apologized for the wrong thing. Are you going to explain why you’re mad at me or should I just keep guessing?”

  She didn’t even snort this time. “The light is green.” The moment she said it, horns began to blare behind them.

  God, he hated Chicago. Josh accelerated through the intersection and started to drive like he meant it. He hadn’t expected to suddenly find himself weaving across traffic lanes like any native Chicagoan would do, but he was upset at Lucy and he was upset at himself. This whole situation stunk and he didn’t know what else to do.

  And he always knew what to do. That’s what made him so good at his job. He ran the Calhoun Creamery because he had the vision to know what needed to be done to move the company into the future. He had the skills to negotiate with federal regulators and lobbyists and other dairy farmers. He had enough detachment that he could do thin
gs like walk into the middle of a fight between Eve Winchester and Carson Newport and identify the best course of action for everyone involved.

  Everyone except for Lucy. He didn’t have any detachment when it came to her.

  It was going to be a problem. Hell, it was already a problem.

  When she spoke, her voice was so soft that he almost missed it. “Do the Winchesters know you’re coming? Or was your entire goal this evening to make it look like I invited you along?”

  Oh. “You think I would use you like that?”

  “Sutton Winchester is worth at least a billion dollars. Lots of people would do lots of things to get a piece of that. Including the Newports.” She threw that out there as if that could explain everything.

  Well, it didn’t. “You realize I’m a multimillionaire in my own right, don’t you? The Newport boys can’t bribe me into doing things like that. I don’t need the money and even if I did, I would never use you like that.”

  “What happened on the couch was merely...a fringe benefit, then?”

  Josh was getting madder by the second. “You are acting like—”

  “Oh, this I have to hear.” She turned her full body toward him and stared. “How am I acting? Let me guess. Like a prim prude? Like an ice-cold bitch? Wait. I know. I’m not good enough for you. I have never been good enough for you.” She paused, leaving a silence so sharp it could have cut glass. “Let me know when I’m getting close.”

  “No, goddamn it. Lucy, would you just listen? That’s not it at all.”

  She crossed her arms just as Josh took a corner a little harder than he meant to. They were leaving the bright lights of Chicago proper behind. There was more open space as they moved into a more exclusive neighborhood. He was almost out of time and he was doing a piss-poor job of explaining himself. “I am not better than you. I never have been. If anything, I’m not good enough for you.”

  She threw her hands up. “Sure. I’ve heard that before, too.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Because it didn’t sound like she was still talking about what happened on the couch. Enough of this crap. “You listen to me, Lucy Wilde. I like you. I have always liked you. I am not sorry for kissing you. I am sorry that we got interrupted because all I want to do is turn this truck around and take you back to your apartment and lay you out on that bed until you’re screaming my name in pleasure. And the fact that I want that confuses me just as much as it confuses you because I didn’t think I could still feel that anymore. So stop acting like I’m torturing you. We’re not kids anymore and this is not a game I want to play. Now tell me why you’re upset with me or get over it.”