by Ginny Glass
She turned back in time to see Tom’s eyes light at the mention of his crush. The thing about small towns was that everyone knew who was courting, who was cheating and who was getting their heart broken.
As Tom grabbed a pair of work gloves from his truck’s tool box, Merrit silently wished that she wouldn’t have to relive that last one all over again.
*
“Thanks for coming to help me.”
Merrit nodded, secretly thrilled that Sam had asked for her help. The evening was mild, small gusts of wind picking up bits of dirt and leaves and twirling them across the gravel road in front of them. The thrill turned to light-headedness when, as they neared the barn, Sam reached out and grabbed her hand. A buzzing awareness suffused her.
She noticed several things at once. One, Sam was not in his usual faded-jeans-and-T-shirt uniform, the one he wore when there was work on the ranch. He was dressed in a pressed pair of khakis and a button-up checkered shirt the same startling blue as his eyes. He didn’t have boots on, but wore instead a pair of leather dress shoes that looked just shined. The overall effect was not one of a man headed for ranch work, but of a man headed for Sunday service.
The second thing that Merrit noticed was that dusk was rapidly falling over the Broken Bow. If Sam expected to get any work done in the barn, which was only lit by two hanging bulbs, he would have brought at least a work light, and he would have driven the truck right up to the barn doors instead of parking a ways away like he had.
She didn’t question it; she just let him curl her fingers in his as they approached the double doors at the front of the barn. He opened the heavy cast latch and swung one of the doors open, just enough to urge her through and into the dark, following right behind her. He didn’t let go of her hand.
She turned, her chest tightening as he closed the door behind them. She reached out her free hand for him, whispering, despite the fact that she knew they were alone.
“Sam, turn on the li—”
He kissed her. It was dark, and of course he had to find his way by feel, so their contact was, at first, fumbled and awkward, but Samuel Thrasher’s lips were on hers, and both of his hands were sliding over her hips.
Oh, dear Lord.
After a few shocked seconds, they stopped bumping noses and the kiss became a kiss. Merrit had been kissed before, but it had been by boys. This was Sam, and his firm sureness made her forget all of the adolescents before him. Sam’s lips slid hypnotically over hers, back and forth, and he eased a hand into her hair, tilting her head back and slipping the tip of his tongue just past her teeth. When she darted her own forward, he retreated, laughing low.
Merrit had dreamed of being kissed by Sam for years. His mouth was always smiling, laughing, snapping with some sarcastic jab that would have her in a fit of laughter. His lips had many, many times been her focus when he hadn’t even known it.
“Mer.” His voice had a low, husky strain to it that made Merrit’s stomach clench, made an alien ache settle low. “I want you.”
“We can’t. Your dad—my dad, they would kill us.”
It was true. The elder Thrasher was a cold, serious man who took his drink as hard as he did his day’s work. Sam and his father fought rows that sometimes had Sam barreling out of the main house to come climbing in her window late at night. She didn’t want to enrage the Broken Bow’s owner any more than she wanted to see the disapproval on her own father’s face. In his mind, she was still a child, even though she’d had a birthday just a month earlier, and she and Sam were both legally adults.
Adult was what she felt when Sam took her hand again, leading her through the barn to the ladder that led to the hayloft. He pushed her against the roughhewn rungs and lowered his mouth to her neck, laying a trail of hot, suckling kisses up to her ear that had her forgetting that their fathers even existed. She didn’t know what had prompted this—her best friend, her confidant, her life-long secret love, suddenly putting his hands all over her like she was the only thing he wanted against his fingertips. She writhed closer to him, lifting her ankle to wrap it around his, her hands spearing into his hair.
Sam was hard. It was a shock, a compliment, a physical fact that made Merrit incinerate on the inside. He was a man, she was a woman, and yes, she had wanted him for too long. She pulled his shirt from his waistband, got her fingertips under his shirt, onto hot, bare skin.
“I’ve never—” As feverishly as she responded, she needed him to know that she might not measure up to the girls he’d had before.
“Me either. Up the ladder.” This was against her ear, in a shaky rush of breath that gave away Sam’s own urgency.
Merrit turned, needing no further provocation to make short work of the ladder’s six rungs. He was right behind her, and when they spilled into the hayloft, he was beside her, tumbling her onto her back in the scattered alfalfa.
He didn’t confine his mouth to hers. His lips smoothed over her collarbone; his hands rolled up the hem of her worn T-shirt and yanked down the cups of her bra. Merrit heard cloth rip, but the scalding seal of Sam’s mouth over one of her nipples was plenty to make her not care.
He moaned like a starving man given bread, his tongue flattening her nipple to the roof of his mouth, rolling her skin like he was truly tasting her. After a few deep, suckling pulls, moves that made Merrit whimper and clutch at his head, Sam moved to her other breast and did the same thing, until both sides matched in a throbbing, foreign ache.
“Sam, please.” She didn’t know what she was asking for. She knew basically how things worked, but not how the act was supposed to satisfy the seemingly bottomless pool of need that was whirling inside her.
He wrenched away from her, his handsome face taut with focus. His hands went to the buttons of his own shirt, and he undid them rapidly.
“Take off your jeans,” he ordered, and undid his own belt, shucking off his pants and boxers and kicking them off into the dusty darkness. She was faster with her button and zipper than she could ever remember being. Wiggling out of the constrictions of her bunched shirt and bra, she didn’t have time to be self-conscious about her nakedness—Sam was over her seconds after her shirt had joined her jeans in the heap of their clothing.
His skin was hot, and the smoothly muscled planes of him drew her fingertips. He wasn’t touching her in return, he was fumbling with something, and Merrit heard the tear of a wrapper. His hips arched away from her and her face heated when she realized what he was doing.
After a long, silent moment, Sam reached for her panties with trembling fingers. “Lift up.”
Merrit complied, her heart racing, an acid panic rising in the back of her throat. Sam settled between her thighs. She gripped his biceps. “Don’t hurt me.”
It was a stupid thing to say, and she mentally kicked herself. Her voice sounded small and frightened, not sultry or seductive like the moment called for.
Sam smoothed her hair back. Those eyes searched her face, the same eyes she’d loved for all these years. “I’m going to try not to, darlin’.”
Then he was moving forward, nudging inside her the barest fraction. Merrit tensed, and Sam seemed to lose some measure of control, moaning low and gripping her shoulders before thrusting, once, his hips forcefully flush with hers.
The pain, what there was of it, was sharp but fleeting, and Merrit let out a single cry against it, which Sam captured in a kiss. There was a moment of stillness before Sam became a wild thing. He writhed on top of her, and she clung to him, excited by his abandon but lost when it came to the pleasure that he was so obviously experiencing.
“Merrit, oh, God, baby…”
The endearment, the feeling of his broad, muscled back rippling with effort, the simple fact that it was Sam that she was doing this with, it all combined to make her eyes flutter closed, to make her hang on and go along for the ride. This was Sam above her, this was Sam inside her.
It didn’t last long. Sam levered down so that they touched along the length of their bodi
es, and his rhythmic strokes shorted, intensified. She opened her eyes to find his wide and unseeing. His breaths were choppy, and she’d not heard anything as animalistic as his voice as he was suddenly racked with shudders, crying out her name.
He collapsed above her. She smoothed her hands over his shoulders, his back, up to the sweat-damp hair at his nape.
“I’m sorry, Mer, God, I—that was too fast.”
“Shhhhh.” Merrit’s sense of disappointment in the aftermath was not that she hadn’t seen the mythical fireworks that were supposed to happen during sex, but that she’d only had such a short time to be a partner to Sam’s pleasure.
“You didn’t—I should have—”
“Sam.”
“What?” He was still breathing hard, still draped over her.
“Don’t you think it takes longer than this to fix a ladder?”
His expression was blank, uncomprehending.
“I’m saying, cowboy, that you aren’t getting away that easy.”
His grin was slow and wicked and he pulled his hips from hers, kissing her when she winced. “You ever know me to shy away from a good day’s work?”
She shook her head.
“Tonight’s no different.”
She rose up on her elbows to meet his next kiss, determined that whatever happened tonight, she was going to remember it for a long time.
*
Sam had no idea what the hell he was doing. He took the highway away from town, catching his breath at the landscape as he drove toward his childhood home. Fields stretched out on either side of the asphalt, running on as far as the eye could see. Square bales dotted them here and there, a few cows grazed drowsily.
The sky, a crisp, pure blue, blanketed darkly dappled mountains, which rose sharply up in the distance. Sam remembered Merrit saying to him once—
“You were born in Montana so that God could have a color reference for your eyes.” It had made him blush at the time—what had he been, fourteen?
Driving up the familiar curves of the gravel road that led to the Broken Bow, Sam’s stomach was in knots. If he was smart, he would go book that hotel room and try and get all of this done over the phone from Great Falls.
Get with Hoss Hightower and figure out how to run the Broken Bow without your dad.
Cyrus’s advice was sound, especially if Sam wanted to get back to his practice in California and not have to worry about the ranch. Despite the wisdom of it, a powwow with Merrit’s father was not exactly going to be a comfortable situation. Still, he directed the sedan unerringly. The quicker they got things settled, the quicker he could be on a plane out of Montana.
*
“I have to go, Mer.”
She looked at him, still smiling. His face was still lit with the beatific glow of sexual satisfaction; the only ambient light came from the full orange moon, spilling in through the hayloft’s partially ajar door.
She didn’t need light to know the steady handsomeness of his face, his body—she’d learned it over and over in the heat of the past few hours.
Sam ran his fingertips down her damp shoulder, tracing the faint outline that his teeth had left there. She arched under his touch. She hadn’t ever, not in a million years, imagined that his ploy to get her out to the barn would end up like this.
“You don’t have to go. Stay here.” He was probably right, though, they would be missed soon at the main house. He rolled toward her. God, those eyes of his. Her whole world was created, evolved, multiplied in their endless blue depths.
“No, not just—not just tonight. I’m leaving Montana. For good.”
She frowned and sat up. He scrambled, pulling the faded sheet that was draped across his waist closer.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Her stomach clenched in panic.
“I wasn’t going to tell you. We were just supposed to have tonight, and then…”
“You were going to leave? The ranch? Your dad?”
“I’m going to California. The vet program there is one of the best in the country, you know he’d never let me, and besides, what am I supposed to do, hang around here until he drinks himself stupid enough to not work the ranch anymore?”
“And me. You were going to—after we—you were just going to leave?”
His face said it all. She couldn’t even fathom letting him go. They had grown up together, her father foreman on his father’s ranch since they were both in diapers. She’d seen countless girls fawn over him, never dreamed that he would choose her. Now she knew—he hadn’t.
He stammered something else in the way of explanation, but she heard nothing as she jammed her legs back into her jeans, hastily rebuttoned her shirt.
He called after her when she scrambled down the loft ladder, skipping the last step, which was still broken. She ignored his cries all the way across the open expanse of pasture between the barn and the tree line, ran until the moonlight dimmed, filtered by the dense forest.
She stayed in the woods until morning, when the rising sun brought her back to the small white house that sat a few hundred yards away from the calving barn. The foreman’s quarters, where her mother was waiting on the wide front porch.
Merrit went into her mother’s arms, and her father came out from inside, briefly, before returning to the living room to phone the main house.
“He’s gone,” he mother said, hugging her tightly, “left a note for Richard at the main house, lit out before the sun was even up.”
There was nothing Merrit could say. She was lost, bereft. Her world had never been one without Sam in it. He had been here, on the ranch, for as long as Merrit had memories. And she had thought that last night was an assurance that he would be there with her to make many, many more. She felt stupid, empty, but most of all—angry. He would be back someday, and she was going to make damned sure that she didn’t love him anymore by then.
*
He turned into the drive, ignoring a pang of homesickness at the sight of the house he’d grown up in—the wraparound porch, the blue shutters. The drive merged into several well-worn dirt roads that spoked out to various parts of the ranch. Sam took the one that followed the tree line to the main house’s left side, past where it curved around through the woods, until he came out the other side into a wide expanse of pasture.
He slowed to a stop in front of the house that he’d always though of as Hoss and Hattie’s—Horace and Harriet Hightower had always inhabited the foreman’s quarters. The front door opened and Sam’s breath caught.
But it was Hattie, not her daughter, who stepped out into the yard. Sam relaxed, opening the car door and taking long strides to meet her before she reached the car.
“Sam! Oh, look at you!”
Sam’s heart swelled at the sight of her. She had been a strong, fine woman he’d always considered handsome in his youth, and even now that her hair was silver and her face much softer, her wide and welcoming smile was still the same. He scooped her up in a bear hug, and she laughed, swatting at him.
“Put me down! Time was, I could have whupped you for hauling me around like this. Take off those sunglasses, let me see you.”
Sam set her back on her feet and tucked his sunglasses away in the inner pocket of his suit jacket.
“Even more handsome than I remember.” Hattie flanked his cheeks with her hands, eyes misting. “I’m sorry about your dad. He was a good man.”
There was a long moment of silence, and Sam reached up to pat Hattie’s hand.
“Sometimes he was. Hoss around?”
Hattie shook her head. “Nope, went into town to see about some feed. Should be back in about an hour. I was just about to go get set up for lunch at the bunkhouse.”
She motioned for him to follow her as she made her way back into the house. Inside, it looked exactly as he remembered it. The same well-worn hardwood, the same white wainscoting.
Sam closed the screen door behind them. “Cy said I should sit down with him, discuss what he needs to keep the Bro
ken Bow running.”
“It was a blessing that your father left him part of the ranch. I can’t tell you what it means to us.”
Sam felt an acid burn at the back of his throat, fought the sensation, determined not to let the sentimentality of the situation make him cry. Strong. He should be strong and stoic and keep his shit together. “I can’t think of anyone else I’d want to run it.”
Hattie grasped for Sam’s hands. Her tone was cautious. “Seen Merrit yet?”
Sam swallowed thickly, shook his head. “I was hoping to get my business done with Hoss and not involve anyone else, if it was possible.”
Hattie clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “Samuel Thrasher, I told myself all those years ago, that morning when my daughter came bawling out of the woods with her shirt buttoned wrong—” she gave him a pointed stare, which made him avert his own eyes, “—that you would wise up. That one day you would come back here after you’d figured out what you’d left behind. You ought to at least talk to her. She never said how much she pined when you left, but she never married, didn’t much take up with anyone, either.”
Funny how he felt just like the awkward teen he once was, standing in the same foyer he’d waited in a thousand times. Sam’s voice broke on his reply. “Hattie, you know I can’t.”
“You can, you just won’t.”
“Won’t what?” The voice wasn’t Hattie’s, and Sam hadn’t spoken. The creak of the screen door behind him and the look on Hattie’s face said it all. He’d never really been a man prone to dramatics, but as he turned, her entrance seemed to have some crazy slow-motion special effect.
She was thinner as an adult than she had been as a teen, her face more angular than he remembered. Her hair was the same fall of heavy, dark silk, and his breath shortened at the memory of it spilling over his skin.
“Merrit.” Her name felt rusty on his tongue—these past years he had treasured it quietly in his head, and the sound of it aloud startled him. A name that felt too good on his lips, a sweet antique against the heat of the Montana summer.