“The last thing we need is someone like you wigging out,” his commander had said.
Not his name. Not his rank. “Someone like you.” And he couldn’t deny that the job had started to change for him. No, he had started to change. To think.
“Colt?”
She nibbled on her bottom lip. Her blue eyes were anxious but also sensual as they met his. For the first time, he was not sorry he’d stepped up to help coach. Standing on that makeshift stage, looking and feeling like an idiotic, tongue-tied hunk of meat just might be so totally worth it, if he could hook up with her for the short time he was here. But she wasn’t a random woman, looking for some quick, dirty action for a night. And she had a kid.
Talon was a blinking neon sign for Not-A-One-Night-Stand. And that was all he’d even been by choice and design.
So get your head out of your pants and back on your neck.
“Told you.” He hopped up beside her and sat down. “Can.”
“That was so cool. Like Tarzan.” Parker ran around from the other side of the platform stared at him, mouth and eyes rounded in awe.
And then Colt shocked himself by yodeling the Tarzan yell.
“Even better.” Parker approved. “Can you swing from the rope?”
Colt looked at it.
“No,” Talon said. “Definitely not. Don’t even encourage him.”
“Can.” Colt mouthed and was rewarded with her eyes widening and her delectable lips, which he could barely resist tasting, parting.
“No. Way. We are climbing down. Now.”
Although Colt noticed she looked nervously at the ground as she said this. “Stairs would have been nice.”
“I was nine,” he said. “Maybe ten.”
“Can’t we stay up here, mom? Look at the view? I can see Copper Mountain through the trees.”
“It is beautiful,” she said, her voice full of an imminent ‘but.’
“I want us to finish it,” Parker said, his lower lip trembling. “Like Mr. Meizner wanted.”
“Honey, he was too sick to work on it,” she said. “I know you and he took walks around the property before he got too sick, and he told you about the cattle drives. I’m sure he wanted to finish the tree house, but his body was giving out.”
“But he really wanted to finish it.” Parker, hands on hips, looked determined.
Colt couldn’t remember ever speaking back to an adult like Parker was, especially his uncle, at least not after the first few slaps that would knock him to the ground.
“He wanted to tone. I want to hear the music, too.”
Again the weird word. Colt stared at Parker, thinking he really shouldn’t care, but he felt curious. And bad that the kid obviously was in for a big disappointment.
“Ah, honey.” Talon sighed. “Atone. It means doing something to try to make up for a mistake in the past. He wasn’t trying to hear a song.”
And Colt felt as if the platform just whooshed out from under his feet.
She looked at Colt. “Why didn’t you and your uncle finish it when you were nine or ten?”
He barely heard the question. He stared blankly out through the leafy oak as the years rushed past in vivid, graphic detail.
Colt stood up. “Your mom said time to go, Parker. I’ll spot you on the way down, and then I’ll come back and help your mom.”
He didn’t know what he’d do if Parker argued. He’d used his military team leader voice.
Parker got up. “I can do it by myself.”
“Show me.”
*
Talon walked back to the house more slowly than Colt and Parker. Thinking. He was a puzzle. He held himself so still and silent, yet he’d made a joke, and had done the silly yell, seeming to surprise himself as well as her. And then when he’d helped her up the tree, it had been like he’d been trying to connect with her. It had seemed so sexual, and when she’d felt herself instantly responding, for a second, she felt like she’d seen a flash of something more.
His relationship with his uncle had obviously been painful. She’d heard from Meghan that Colt hadn’t attended prom or walked graduation or attended the grad party. He’d left town without telling anyone, not even Coach or his friends.
It was so sad. Talon couldn’t imagine ever wanting to leave Marietta. She hadn’t had a hometown, but Marietta was going to be hers, and it was going to be Parker’s. She wished she could find a way for Colt to feel connected to his roots. But how?
She absently twirled her finger through one of her curls, caught back in the bandana. What were his secrets? She felt like she knew him, but she didn’t, and what she did know was sketchy. He didn’t talk about himself or his job or his past, but when she looked in his eyes, when she touched him, she felt like they belonged. And to someone who had never really belonged anywhere, but had kept trying, that feeling was something she didn’t want to let go of, at least not without a fight.
She smiled. So typical. She wanted to dig roots and settle down in Marietta so she started falling for a hometown boy, who didn’t want to come home, settle down, or connect with her, except sexually. Although that part would be fun. But she knew herself. She couldn’t keep it physical. She would always want more. Crave it.
She walked by the barn, which was still in fairly good shape, a few worn spots in one corner of the roof. She stopped and took in the sight as she always did. It seemed so quiet now. Her steps slowed and then stopped. Every time she looked at the barn, she’d feel a wave of longing sweep through her. Up until six months ago, there had been a herd of twenty Nubian goats that had seemed to make Mr. Meizner happy since he had sold off his cattle a year into his liver cancer diagnosis when it became clear he couldn’t beat it.
Then the goats had been sold since Talon was too busy taking care of Mr. Meizner with the help of the hospice nurse. She still missed the goats, and she’d missed Mr. Meizner. He’d been a bit like a dad, worrying about her. Curious about her life. Insisting she use the truck when she went into town. Telling her to stay at the cabin until his son came home.
She was really going to miss this place. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she’d dreamed of buying the ranch after she became a vet, which was years away. Still, Talon sighed and scraped her boot toe in the dirt, she loved the small farm house and had put in a lot of elbow grease to make it shine and look welcoming, and the barn and the outbuildings that probably in the happier days of the ranch had bunked ranch hands, would be perfect for her ultimate fantasy project, an animal rescue facility where teens, or vets, or anyone needing the healing touch of animals could volunteer, benefiting both.
Now the farm only had Muriel, the emu who strutted around the property keeping fairly close to the house. She wouldn’t be a good therapy animal as she liked to charge if anyone got too close, although Muriel did like it when Talon sang to her.
She shook off her dreams and tucked them back into her future drawer just as Parker ran back towards where she’d lingered.
“Mom, mom, mom.” Parker ran into the barn yelling. “Colt needs help.”
Chapter Nine
“What?” Adrenalin flooded her body. “What happened?” She looked Parker over carefully. “Are you okay? What’s wrong with Colt?”
“He needs wire cutters,” Parker said breathlessly then ran away from the barn again.
“Parker wait.” But even as she called out, she hurried over to the tack area of the barn where she’d seen a lot of tools before.
She grabbed the wire cutters and then strode after Parker, who’d taken off the across the field near the house and to the fenced in former vegetable garden.
“It’s the dog wolf mom,” Parker shouted and then hopped from one foot to the other, clearly agitated. “The one we’ve seen in the field the past couple of weeks. It’s stuck.
Talon approached the backside of the garden that had been deer fenced long ago. Her heart sank. The dog was caught under the deer fencing, the broken bits, digging into its back, and it had already done a
lot of damage trying to free itself. It alternated between snarling at Colt, who clearly was trying to figure out a way to approach the dog to free it, and whimpering.
“Parker, go get my bag,” she whispered. “And a blanket.”
Parker ran off.
“Your dog?” Colt asked.
She shook her head. “Stray. I’ve been leaving food out in a live trap, trying to catch it to see if it’s chipped, but she’s too smart for that. Raccoons and skunks not so much.” She approached quietly. “She’s definitely a Great Pyrenees mix. Probably a livestock dog that went missing. I left a notice in town at the feed store and Big Z’s, but nothing yet.”
She watched the dog carefully. “Don’t get too close,” she said, tucking her hands behind her back. “She’ll try harder to escape.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“I want to treat her wounds. And she’s far too skinny. Probably needs antibiotics.”
“What do you need me to do?”
Talon liked that he was going to help, that his first instinct had been to help. And the fact that he was deferring to her, definitely earned him points.
“You need to stop being so perfect,” she said.
“Not an issue.”
It was definitely an issue. A serious one.
“Parker’s going for my bag. First thing is the cone of shame,” she said.
“Poor bastard,” Colt said eying the dog.
“Actually, she’s a bitch,” Talon said. “And then I want to sedate her just a little and restrain her so I can treat her, and then I’d like to pen her in the barn once we can nail up some extra boards so she’ll stay put. Maybe once she’s fed properly and feeling better, she won’t be so feral. Maybe I can find her family.
Colt continued to eye the dog narrowly. She could practically hear his thoughts. That dog did not have an anxious family missing her. She was skinny, ragged with her fur pulled out in patches, and filthy. She looked like she’d been in a fight with something recently, possibly the emu. Blood coated her sides and now she was prone, panting, eyes rolling. Her stomach was hard and distended. Serious worms or disease or pregnancy, Talon thought with despair.
“It’s all right, baby.” Talon began to speak softly. Nonsense words. Sweet words, letting her voice slow and soften and deepen. The dog kept its eyes on her as she approached, ears flattened, tail down, sides heaving as she sucked in air. Talon slowed her own breathing, lowered her eyes so she didn’t make contact, and continued slowly but steadily. She tapped her hand lightly on her leg, slower and slower, keeping a soft beat, all the time talking.
The dog stopped pulling so hard to get away, and instead looked at her more beseechingly than terrified.
“Yes, that’s right, baby. We’re going to free you, and stitch you up, and then give you something delicious to eat. Are you hungry? I bet you are. Just another minute.”
The sound of fast footfalls cut through the calm she was trying to weave, and Talon held her hand out behind her. Parker slowed.
She was closer now, almost to touching. She crouched down.
“Parker, give the cone to me and the wire cutters and blanket to Colt. Put my bag down on the ground and scoot it to me. Don’t come too close.”
She sang a lullaby that her friend Jenna used to sing to Parker when he’d been a baby.
Without her telling him to, Colt dropped to a crouch and began to ease the blanket down flat, his eyes on the ground but clearly eyeing the dog briefly in his peripheral vision.
“Closer,” she whispered.
He leaned towards the dog, and immediately her attentions shifted to him. Talon slid the collar around the dog’s neck and pressed the Velcro in place.
“Okay, slide the blanket under her.”
He did while she drew up a shot of pain meds.
“She’s going to also need an IV.” She pulled out a bag of fluid. She was really lucky Noah let her keep a stash of medical supplies at her house, in case she reached a call first where some minor interventions would make a difference. She ran her hands over the dog’s limbs feeling for breaks and sighing in relief when she felt none.
The dog thrashed, but Colt had wrapped the blanket around the dog’s limbs, and its struggles were weaker.
“Okay, cut her free,” she said.
Colt cut and slowly peeled back the fence, as Talon gently freed the dog’s lacerations. The dog thrashed more, tried to turn over and yelped, and Talon appreciated how Colt kept the wire free and didn’t freak out when the dog’s head crashed into his knee. A mouth full of sharp canines could be intimidating even with the cone restraint, but he didn’t even blink or try to jump out of the way.
“Thank you,” she said. “Can you pick her up, keeping her in the blanket?” she asked.
Yes, the dog was quite thin, but she was a large breed.
“Can,” he said, his voice had a touch of the same playful tone he’d shared at the platform. Talon caught her breath and looked up quickly, just to catch a glint of humor before he stood with the seventy to eighty pound dog as easily as if it were a Chihuahua.
“Where to?”
“That’s a lovely question for a woman to hear.” Talon grabbed her bag. “If you keep talking so sweetly and lifting heavy objects, I might have to keep you.”
“I’m on loan,” he said.
“And, bam, in walked reality,” Talon said, trying to stuff the disappointment back to where it had unexpectedly welled up from. She knew he was only here helping his coach. That he had a job and a life elsewhere. And probably a line of women around the block.
She tripped over her own feet. “You’re still being perfect,” she said.
“Haven’t started.”
“She seems pretty calm.” Talon noted. “Take her to the house please, Superman.”
“I always wanted a red cape,” he said, but Talon was curious why his tone had gone cool and curt. And his fabulous square jaw, the one with the cleft that made her stare and fantasize about licking it, was tighter than usual.
“You’d look good in red.” She teased, hoping to see that light in his eyes again.
“Can we keep her mom, can we keep her?”
“Let’s focus on seeing to her injuries and getting her fed,” Talon said, dragging her attention away from Colt and her flirty thoughts.
Really? Like she didn’t have anything else to do except lust after a man who was going to be gone in few weeks. And with her son present.
“You want to take the dog to the house, not the barn?” He fell into step with her, and she liked how his voice was curious, not critical.
“We’ll keep her in the mudroom for now. I don’t have clean straw, or wood to close up the space between the slats enough to keep her in one of the birthing pens.”
“Are you planning to keep her?” Again with the neutral voice, only soft, so Parker, running ahead, couldn’t hear their conversation.
Definitely a keeper.
“Heal her and see if we can find her ranch or her family.” She sighed and reached out to touch the dog through the blanket. She could feel the deep trembling. “Parker will want to keep her, of course, and I’d love to, but I’m not home enough for a dog with my shifts at the diner and interning with Noah, the vet in town.” She smiled. “But once I’m done with school and working in a vet practice, Parker and I will be able to have a dog and I’m hoping to take in other animals to have kind of an animal sanctuary where school kids or veterans could volunteer, and it could be a therapeutic experience for them. I think taking care of others, people and animals or a garden, is so important. So healing, don’t you think?”
His golden eyes swept over her, lingered. Then he nodded. She wished she could see into his mind right at that minute. What made him tick? What did he want?
“Do you like animals?” she asked.
“Haven’t thought about it.”
“Really?” she asked, walking into the house as Parker held open the door.
“As a child, I didn�
�t want to kill them.”
“Well, there’s a start.” She couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“Hunting,” he said. “I didn’t want to hunt. My uncle did. Common in this town. My aversion was not.”
She thought she heard him mutter “ironic”, but wasn’t sure what to make of that, and his tone was more than a red flag that he was done with this conversation, and Parker was dancing, one foot to the other, dragging more blankets out of the linen closet and sliding them across the floor to make a bed inside the storage bench. He’d already partially propped the lid open with a roll of duct tape.
“That’s smart thinking, Parker,” Talon said.
“It’s like a nest, mom, don’t you think?”
Talon braced for a sarcastic comment from Colt about how he was holding a dog, not a bird, but once again he surprised her.
“Looks good, Parker. Help me hand her in. I have her head.”
Talon whispered, “Thank you.”
“What do you need? Water? Towels?”
She did want water and cloths to clean the wounds and Parker ran around being helpful and enthusiastic, directing Colt where everything was and suggesting that maybe they’d all want some of his mother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. Colt took him up on that and when Talon looked back at them, leaning against the laundry sink as the mud room was also the utility/laundry room, both of them were munching a cookie and fisting two others each, her heart flipped in a crazy way.
Something so normal, like seeing Parker munching on a cookie looking up and smiling at a man and talking a mile a minute shouldn’t hurt. Shouldn’t make her feel sad. But Parker didn’t have a dad. And he might never have one. She deliberately kept all men at a long arm’s length. Between Parker, school, and work, she didn’t have time or the inclination. She was building their life. And it was safer that way. She didn’t want to bring men in and out of Parker’s life. But for the first time it hit her that by not even trying, she was ensuring that Parker would never have a dad. Or siblings. And that if something happened to her, he’d be in the foster system. Just like what had happened to her. And to his mom, Jenna.
Seducing the Bachelor (The Bachelor Auction Returns Book 3) Page 8