Willing her body to calm, Alexis turned to face Ryder. “I’ll go get some towels,” she said, finding him only inches away from her. Anything further she might have said slid away, lost. Alexis stared into his eyes. Green. His eyes were green. She’d wondered, back at the bar. Wondered what color the eyes that drew her deep into their depths were. In all of her twenty-eight years, she couldn’t remember ever being so enthralled by a man’s face—with the strong jaw now forming a shadow of a dark beard, the scar slashed across his right brow, the sensual line of his mouth.
Damp hair fell over her face, jolting her back to reality. Alexis shook herself inwardly and shoved the wayward strands behind her ears. “Let me get those towels.”
With those words, she sidestepped around him and started to depart, intent on escape to pull herself together. Instantly, his hand gently shackled her arm, his palm branding her with wicked heat that slid up her arm, and somehow managed to spread across her chest, her breasts aching with sudden awareness.
They were shoulder to shoulder, the air charged with attraction. She lifted her gaze to his, a question in her eyes. Why did she want him so much? What was he doing to her?
“Alexis,” he said softly, an intimate rasp to his tone that promised he had more to say.
Her name, one word, that was all he said, yet that word hung in the air with a silky promise of something important to follow, a promise she found herself silently willing him to speak. Because for some inconceivable, completely irrational reason, this moment felt as if it might have a profound impact on her life. That this man, a complete stranger, held some secret she desperately needed to have revealed.
Chapter Four
Alone in the hallway of Big W’s ranch house, Ryder and Alexis stared into one another’s eyes, heat swirled around them, blanketing them in awareness, in desire. Ryder wanted so many things in those moments. He wanted to kiss Alexis, to taste her, to touch her. He wanted to bury himself deep inside her body and claim her as his own. To tell her everything he was, everything he had been, to simply wipe away the secrets that would make protecting her a difficult task. And he wanted his sword.
But were the things he wanted the right choices?
Seconds ticked as they stared at one another, the moment of decision upon him. What would he do? What would he say?
“Oh. Ah, hi.”
Kelly’s voice came from behind Ryder, her presence bursting through the spell woven around Alexis and him. Regret tore through Ryder, the loss of opportunity, of choice, gone with the intrusion.
Ryder quickly noted the flush of embarrassment coloring Alexis’s ivory skin. He immediately let go of her arm, but he had to wonder why Alexis would react in such a way to Kelly finding them together. He pivoted to face Kelly, assessing her with a newfound interest about how she affected Alexis. She wore white sweats and a pink T-shirt, her blonde hair piled on top of her head. She was a pretty woman, perhaps midthirties, slender, curvy, nice facial features. But she lacked confidence. He could see it in her eyes, in the way she carried herself. Which explained why she put up with Hector’s abuse.
“Sorry,” Kelly said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, as if the scrutiny made her antsy. “I…” She looked at Alexis, indicating the mop in her hands before resting it against the wall. “I was going to clean up the mess on the floor before you did.” Her gaze swept Alexis and Ryder again, taking in their wet clothing. “Let me get some towels for you two.” She rushed away, leaving no time for response.
“Thanks,” Alexis murmured, sounding a bit baffled.
Before he could ask why, Ryder’s text-message alert went off on his cell phone. He yanked his Nokia 8800 off his belt, surprised it still worked considering it was wet, and punched the receive button. His gaze lifted to Alexis. “My references are on your fax,” he said, his voice lowering. “So you know you can trust me.”
Her gaze caught his. “Your boss really went out of his way in the middle of the night.”
“We take care of our own,” he said, and added silently, and now you are one of us. Or at least destiny said she was. But even if she would have him, if she would walk away from her life to accommodate his pledge to the Knights, would the other Knights resent her presence, resent his reward of a mate?
“Here you go,” Kelly said, reappearing in the doorway. She tossed Ryder a towel and then Alexis. “I’ll mop up the floor.”
Alexis rubbed the towel through her hair and then studied Kelly with a thoughtful expression. “Thank you, Kell. I know you’d prefer to be in a hot bath right now.”
Kelly nodded, her eyes clouding over. “It’s the least I can do, considering everything.” Her lips lifted a bit. “And you have Ryder to attend to.”
Ryder scrubbed his head with the towel, and bit back laughter at the obvious inference that they were attending to personal matters, not business. Alexis frowned, her brows dipping in an adorable way a second before she turned to him. “Let’s go look at those references.”
He smiled. “Lead the way,” he said, following her to the end of the hall. To his left was a huge sunken living room, with wood paneling and brown carpeting. To the right, double wooden doors that she pushed open and walked through. Ryder found himself in the center of a den with an aged wooden desk in the far right-hand corner; books lined the walls.
“This reminds me of back home,” he said.
Alexis draped her towel over an empty file folder rack before walking behind the desk to a credenza where the fax machine rested. She lifted the faxed pages, glancing across the desk at Ryder. “How so?” she asked.
“Jag’s office looks a lot like this,” Ryder said, tossing the towel he held over his shoulder and walking to one of the bookshelves. One war title after the next, fiction and nonfiction, lined the shelves. Humans were obsessed with war and fighting each other, when the real dangers lurked in shadows, hoping for their destruction. “He’s a history buff.”
“So was my father,” she said, and looked up from reading the fax. “Jag,” she repeated. “As in your boss, Jag?”
He nodded. “Right,” he said. “You got the fax, I take it?”
“I did,” she said, setting the papers back down on the fax machine and walking to the desk. “Your credentials are, well…they’re amazing. You don’t need to be here, helping me. Why would you?”
“Why do my reasons matter?”
She didn’t answer his question; instead she inhaled deeply, seemed to battle within herself a moment before exhaling again. “Someone with your experience could go somewhere else and be paid a lot of money. Why come here instead?”
“I don’t need the money,” he said, which was true. He didn’t have as much as the older Knights, but he’d done well enough. Like the other Knights, he was given an allowance and expected to spend little to nothing himself. He’d invested; he’d saved his money.
She laughed, the sound laced with disbelief. “Everyone needs money.” Her pain lanced the air and ripped through his heart.
His hand still resting on one of the books on the shelf, afraid to say the wrong thing, his next words were a gentle prod. “How long has your father been gone?” he asked.
“Six months,” she said, surprising him with the quick answer. “Massive heart attack. No warning.”
His heart squeezed. “I’m sorry.”
Her chin lifted. “I’m dealing with it.”
Ryder crossed the room until he stood at the opposite side of the desk from her. “I can see that,” he said, but he knew she wasn’t as tough as she wanted the world to believe. He could see the pain in her eyes, feel it in the room, almost taste it in the air. His voice was low. “I’m sure his death impacted the ranch. That can’t be easy to manage.”
Her head turned to the side, her gaze going to the wall, then flickering back. “The ranch is fine.”
He reached for common ground, a way to let her know he understood what she was living. “Were you familiar with Wild Rose Ranch?” he asked, referring to his
family’s ranch, certain she would remember it. Just as Big W’s was remotely familiar to him. Ranching within close proximity brought familiarity and often friendship.
“The Evans place,” she said, her brows dipping in thought. “BJ Evans, right? Or was it Ivans?”
“Evans,” Ryder offered.
“I remotely remember it but it was sold off when I was a kid.”
Sold five years after their son, Chris Evans, went missing—that son had been him. But she wouldn’t know that. She’d been too young to remember much. Clearly, she barely remembered his family name. A sda thought. His past was gone, lost. “I was one of the Evans boys,” he said quietly, inferring there had been a son other than Chris when there had not been. “BJ was my father,” he said quietly.
She swallowed hard. “Was?”
He nodded. “He died ten years ago,” Ryder said, remembering the funeral as if it was yesterday, remembered standing in the shadows, a ghost who didn’t exist. “Lung cancer. My mother passed not long after.” Broken heart. Lost her son. Lost her husband. Ryder ground his teeth and pressed past the painful memories, more determined than ever to win Alexis over. He rounded the desk, willing her to turn and face him.
He waited until she did, waited for the confirmation that she welcomed his nearness. Slowly, she turned, her eyes seeking his, compassion overflowing from their depths. Raw pain that she’d masked before now glistened in her eyes. A shared loss, a mutual understanding. “The place that replaced your family ranch, they breed horses. Is that what your family did?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You learned about horses from your father?”
Ryder gave a quick nod. “He was a good man,” he said. “And Wild Rose was a small ranch like this one. A family business where everyone mattered. So in answer to your question—why would I work here rather than somewhere else? The answer is simple. This ranch is as close to going home as I am going to get. And right now, I really needed to come home.” There was a deep-felt truth behind those words he hadn’t recognized until he spoke them. He did need to be here. He needed to deal with the past. And he was meant to find her.
Suddenly, though, he realized how much he needed what was forming between them to feel real, not just some fated matchup. That meant going slow, that meant earning trust through actions rather than a supernatural bond. “The ball is in your court, Alexis. Tell me to stay and I will. Tell me to leave and I’m gone.”
Chapter Five
Alexis replayed Ryder’s words in her head. Tell me to go and I’ll go. She inhaled the spicy male scent of him and felt her body heat. Space. She needed space before she did something insane, like tell him to stay, or…kiss him.
“Stay or go?” he urged softly, his voice a velvety caress along her nerve endings, creating deliciously provocative thoughts of what might happen between them if she allowed it to.
Tell him to go. “Stay,” Alexis said, ignoring the voice in her head. The one that said an affair was a distraction she couldn’t afford. So was depending on someone who would be gone in a short while—it would weaken her. Ryder was an emotional liability. He had a way of seeing past her walls, of unraveling little sections of the tightly spun ball that had become her life, and with little or no effort. And she wasn’t sure she had the emotional fortitude to fall for him and then say goodbye. Not now. Not with everything she was going through.
But as surely as she warned herself of these things, she saw Ryder’s eyes flicker with relief and knew that his desire to be here, to explore whatever was going on between them, matched her own. She studied him, her eyes searching his, finding pain and loneliness. He had some healing to do as well. Healing they might do together. Yes. It made sense. He was the Evans’s boy; he’d lived a life much like her own, experienced loss as she had. Her stomach fluttered with this knowledge, and confidence filled her. This was the right choice.
She acted before she could change her mind. “Follow me,” she said, stepping around him, her arm brushing his. A jolt of reaction made her lashes flutter, her steps falter for a flash of a moment. She willed her heart to calm as she continued forward. When had she reacted like this to a man? Not for years. Maybe not ever.
With Ryder on her heels, awareness oozing from her every pore, Alexis crossed the living room and entered the box-style, outdated, yellow-toned kitchen, then opened the door leading to the basement. She flipped on the light and started down the stairs, her knees ridiculously weak. Every step came with excruciating, exciting awareness—of how she moved, of how close he was to her.
At the bottom of the stairs she pushed open yet another door, this one to a bedroom. She swallowed hard as she flipped on the light and stepped inside the room and to the left. Ryder joined her, his overpoweringly male presence shrinking the rather large room to small and intimate. For an instant their eyes connected, electricity zapping her limbs, a sweet ache low in her belly, tight across her chest.
At the same moment, they surveyed the room. Her gaze swept the rose-colored decor, taking in what he, too, was seeing. A floral bedspread lay perfectly smoothed across a queen-size bed. Floral pictures were well-placed on the walls in gold-colored frames. A pink lampshade softened the lighting, its shadows playing on the the bedside table of vintage, stained-white wood.
“This was my housekeeper’s room until a month ago,” Alexis explained. “She married and moved about a mile down the road.” She laughed. “Married my foreman.” His brow inched upward in surprise, and she continued, “None of us had any idea. They’d known each other for years. The room is a little feminine.” And small. Really small. “I thought you could stay here rather than in the bunkhouse with the other men. You’ll be more comfortable. Well, as long as roses don’t bother you.”
His lashes lowered, lifted, eyes half-veiled. The bed. The room. Electricity charged the air. “It’s perfect,” he finally said, a husky quality to his voice that caressed her every nerve ending with excruciating perfection.
It was time to go—before she didn’t. “There’s a shower on the other side of the basement,” she said, hesitating. “I’ll get you towels. I guess your bag is in the truck?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll weather the storm and go get it.”
“I hate that you have to do that,” she said, thinking of how bad it was outside. “But there’s a side door to the basement around back if you want to pull around. I can show you.” She started for the door, and suddenly his hand was around her arm, her body pulled tight against his long, muscular frame. Her hands on that broad, perfect chest.
“I swore I wouldn’t touch you,” he said softly. “Not tonight, not yet.” He inhaled. “You smell like heaven. Tell me to let you go. Tell me not to kiss you. Tell me and I won’t.”
For once, she didn’t want to decide, she didn’t want that weight on her shoulders. Damn it, it made her mad that he’d put this on her. “Fine. Don’t. Let go.” Then she melted into him. God, he felt good.
“That’s not fair,” he whispered.
“Life isn’t fair,” she answered, a moment before his lips came down on hers.
She tasted as good as she smelled, like salvation with sweet honey flavoring. Ryder’s tongue slid past her teeth in a deep, passionate caress. His vow to go slow with Alexis had faded quickly the minute he’d entered that bedroom, diminishing to damn near zero with lightning speed. He told himself this was only a kiss, a sample of what pleasure they could share together. But the softness of her hands somehow ended up under his shirt, heating his skin. He barely remembered her pulling the shirt from his pants. He deepened his kiss, hungry now with the caress of her hand. She didn’t resist; in fact, her tongue challenged his, seeking, stroking. The Beast in him, the primal side, clawed to life in a way he didn’t remember ever feeling before now. It burned to have him pull her down on the bed, to take her, to claim her.
And somehow they were closer to that bed now, his legs hitting the mattress. He fell backward and took her with him, his hand on her backside, his
lips hungrily moving over hers. His other hand slid into her hair. His teeth nipped her lips. They were on fire, hungry, needy. Both touching, exploring. His shirt was open, her hands on his chest. God, he wanted her shirt off. Black, V-neck—a skimpy shirt he couldn’t wait to see removed. He pictured it in his mind. He wanted all of her. No barriers.
As if she sensed his thoughts, she suddenly pulled back and looked at him. Her fingers drew his gaze to the hem of her shirt, and she started to pull it over her head. But her eyes caught his, her eyes filled with passion and…trust. God. Reality and guilt slammed into him, lancing the will of his inner Beast. His hands went to hers, stilling her actions. He wanted to deserve that trust. He needed that for reasons he couldn’t explain. Needed something real in his life beyond a sword.
“Alexis,” he whispered. “I don’t want you to regret this tomorrow. This isn’t why I’m here.”
She shook her head. “This is about now.” She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his before whispering. “Don’t make me think about tomorrow.”
With a low growl born of his struggle for control, Ryder rolled her onto her back. He slipped his legs over hers, rather than allowing himself inside the V of her body where he really wanted to be. His cock was thick, heavy with arousal, yet he would not give in to his desire. She was vulnerable right now, more so because of their mating bond. A bond she didn’t even know existed. But he did. He knew, and he couldn’t ignore the implications. Forever was a long time to begin with regrets.
He leaned his weight on his elbows. “You have to think about tomorrow, because I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here then, just as I am now.”
She shook her head. “Sometimes tomorrow just doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “You have to know that.”
There was raw emotion in her voice, an ache he wanted to erase. “Tomorrow matters,” he said, and he kissed her—her need too much for him to ignore. It reached inside him, stroked him with emotion, fired him with desire. Desire to please her, to make love to her, to show her tomorrow mattered in ways she had yet to understand.
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