Riding the Storm

by Julie Miller

  “Idiot.”

  Jolene wrapped up the leftover stew and placed it in an ice chest. She’d insisted on cleaning up, since Nate had cooked. It was only fair. Besides, if he wasn’t in the mood to say much, she wasn’t in the mood for listening to silence.

  Now he was washing up in the bathroom, sponging himself off with the basin of water they’d set aside for bathing. He was probably in there naked. Naked and gorgeous from the front or the back and counting the dings and bruises on his body that she was directly or indirectly responsible for. Washing her scent off his body and planning the next home-repair project that would keep him busy and away from her dangerous, overenthusiastic, unwanted attentions.

  Sex was one thing.

  Commitment was something else.

  Nate Kellison lived in California. He had family he loved there. He had an important job.

  She was a small-town Texas girl with a baby on the way. She had a legacy to rebuild and maintain for her son. She had a single father who needed her. This was where she had to stay.

  California. Texas.

  Nate. Jolene.

  Big trouble.

  He was going to leave her.

  Gripping the edge of the table, Jolene held on as fearful anticipation buffeted through her. She hugged her baby and blinked back the sting of tears. “Oh, Dad. I wish I could talk to you right now.”

  She needed Mitch Kannon’s patient ear and fatherly hug and hopeful reminder that not everyone she loved left her.

  But once the flood waters receded, once the state of emergency had been terminated, Nate would have no reason to stay. A few long talks and some amazing sex couldn’t erase all the arguments, or the injuries, or the impulsive mistakes, or the lack of experience with men that made her more of a project than a helpmate.

  Wait a minute.

  “Dad?” A new thought popped into Jolene’s head, momentarily putting the brakes on the downward spiral of her emotions. Could Nate think that he’d broken his promise to her father? That he’d stepped beyond the boundaries of taking care of her?

  Was it possible that Nate’s polite withdrawal had more to do with the value of his word than with her?

  He could be plain old tired.

  He might feel guilty.

  Things might be moving way too quickly for a thoughtful guy like Nate.

  Or…she could be the problem.

  Suffused with renewed energy, Jolene picked up the lantern and patted her tummy. “Let’s go find out.”

  Hurrying through the familiar rooms in her bare feet, Jolene entered the master bedroom and crossed straight to the bathroom door. She had her fist raised to knock when she heard him moving around inside, knocking something over, muttering beneath his breath.

  Maybe she’d better let him finish his business before she demanded answers. She pulled her hand back to her side and turned off the lantern. Patience really wasn’t her strong suit, but for this, she could wait.

  Padding back across the carpet, she climbed up onto the blue and white quilt that covered her four-poster bed, leaned against one of the polished oak posts and planned what she wanted to say.

  Her eyes had adjusted to the moonlit darkness by the time the bathroom door opened.

  She popped up off the bed the instant Nate appeared.

  “Can we talk about what happened in the barn?”

  “Talk?” He froze in the doorway.

  She stood close enough to see that he’d shaved. The two-day growth of beard was gone, along with a couple of nicks of skin. Apparently, he’d braved the cold water, disposable shaver route. But she didn’t ask if he’d found the shaving cream stored beneath the sink or borrowed some lotion to smooth the burn.

  She looked straight into those whiskey-brown eyes. “Even if I don’t like your answers, I need to hear them.”

  “I’m not dressed.”

  Jolene followed his gaze as he glanced down at the white towel wrapped around his hips and held together with his fist.

  She swallowed hard, feeling light-headed from a rush of heat. Wow, there was a lot of man showing there. And it all seemed to be leanly sculpted around one very fit body.

  She took in the mean red cut on his shoulder and the neat white stitching that held it together. She noted the flat stomach and the indented belly button two or more inches above the edge of that terry cloth. And though his most vulnerable parts were covered, the towel slit apart and revealed a long, muscular thigh, misshapen knee and length of leg covered in a patchwork of shiny scars that caught and reflected the moonlight.

  Jolene felt her heart clutch at the marks of so much suffering, even as it quickened at the sight of all that muscle and skin. “I didn’t see these this afternoon.” She reached out to touch one wound, to offer comfort. “Oh, Nate. I’m so sorry.”

  “Whoa.” He put out his hand to ward hers off and jumped back a step. “Can’t we put this off for a little while? You know, get a good night’s sleep and talk in the morning?”

  What? Jolene shifted her gaze back to the firm warning in his eyes. He didn’t want her to touch him. Fine. She could live with that.

  No, she couldn’t.

  She shook her head, clearing her thoughts and reminding herself of the reason she was here in the first place. “I need to do this now. There are a couple of things that are making me crazy.” Like the fact he was standing in front of her nearly naked, but she wasn’t allowed to touch. She shrugged, apologizing for her lousy timing. “Besides, you can’t get dressed. I rinsed out your clothes and hung them up to dry. I’m sure they’re still damp.”

  He glanced up at the ceiling and inhaled a deep breath before nailing her with a conversation-closed look. “Jolene, a man likes to have his pants on when he’s having a serious discussion.”

  “So you do think that what happened between us is serious?”

  Nate plopped his hand on her shoulder and scooted her out of the way before crossing to the foot of the bed, where he had room to turn around. “Of course, I do. I’m not a guy who sleeps with that many woman.”

  She whirled around to face him. “So you were just lonely for a woman to sleep with?”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  “Explain why I made love to you?”

  Made love. At least that sounded as if it hadn’t been a completely awful or embarrassing experience for him.

  Jolene moved closer and hugged her arm around the bedpost. He didn’t retreat. Another good sign? Or was he getting angry? “You haven’t said much of anything about it.”

  “I’m not a guy who talks about—”

  “I know I came on pretty strong. And then maybe I didn’t follow through and make it good enough for you.”

  “That’s not—”

  “We haven’t known each other for very long. But like you said, I feel I know you better than some people I’ve known my whole life.”

  “I know,” he agreed. “I feel that, too. But—”

  “I thought maybe it had something to do with promising Dad to take care of me. But I’m twenty-eight years old. A grown woman. I’m responsible for my own choices. I can take care of myself.”

  “What are you say—?”

  “Do you regret having sex?”

  “It wasn’t just sex. Jolene, you’re not the kind of a woman that a man—”

  “If it isn’t me, is there some other reason why you don’t want to talk about what happened between—”

  “If you want me to talk, let me talk.”

  His voice was sharp, his expression sharper.

  Their coyote friend howled in the silence that followed.

  Jolene gnawed on her lip for one nervous moment, then quietly answered. “Okay.”

  Nate opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated, as if waiting to be interrupted again. Jolene dutifully kept her mouth shut.

  “First…” He held up one finger, then seemed to decide it might be wiser to keep both hands on the towel. “I do not r
egret what happened in the loft. It might not have been the smartest move I’ve ever made—and yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about being your first and whether or not that was the smartest move you could have made. But I wanted to be with you.”

  “I wanted to be with you, too.” Her soft whisper seemed to soothe his patience.

  “Second. You were temptation itself, standing there with that shiny red apple and big blue eyes. I’d been working my butt off all day, trying to get you out of my system. After all that talk about liking my ass and being a whole man, I knew I had to keep my distance or I’d do something stupid. But there you were. I wanted you and I couldn’t resist.” He came a step closer, risked his grip on the towel, and raised one finger to brush the hair off her forehead. “I still can’t resist.”

  “Do you think you’d ever…want to do it again?” She caught his hand when he would have pulled away. “With me?”

  Turning his hand, he laced their fingers together and stroked his thumb along the back of her knuckles. “Is that another invitation?”

  Jolene pressed her lips together and tried to focus on his eyes instead of the top of that towel and the slight protrusion she could see tenting beneath it. “Would you say yes?”

  He raked his gaze over her, staring long enough to make her nipples bead up into tight knots and thrust against the T-shirt she wore. “I’m trying to do the right thing here, angel. It’s too soon for you. Even with the procedures you must have had to create that baby, after your first time, things are probably a little tender. We should wait.”

  “Is that your medical opinion? Or a polite way of putting me off?”

  Instead of answering, he dropped his hand to her belly and splayed his fingers there. “How’s the baby? I don’t want to hurt him, either.”

  She pressed her hand over his, guiding him to little Joaquin’s responsive flutters. “We’re both fine.”

  Nate’s fingers trembled with a gentle convulsion against her. He closed his eyes, but Jolene had already seen his pain. “He’s so tiny. Helpless. I want him to be strong. Grow tall. Learn how to ride a horse and play some baseball. If something happened to him, I couldn’t…”

  A glimmer of understanding pushed aside her own quest for answers. He was holding something back because she was pregnant.

  And that terrified him as much as it fascinated him.

  Loosing her hold on him and the bed, Jolene reached up to frame his face between her hands. His skin was smooth to the touch now, though the muscles beneath were clenched tight. “Tell me about the baby, Nate.”

  She didn’t have to explain which baby she was talking about. Clearly there was a little one somewhere in the world who haunted him. Moonlight sparkled in the tears he blinked away.

  “I lost a little girl,” he announced starkly, snatching his hand away from her womb.

  “Lost?”

  He tapped his hands against her shoulders, then rubbed them up and down her arms, as if he wasn’t sure whether to latch on or move away. At last he took her wrists and pulled her hands from his face. “I couldn’t save her. There was hardly a mark on her. But she’d been thrown so far from the car. There was too much head and neck trauma. She wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t get her to breathe.”

  A tear fell from the corner of his eye and steamed across his angry expression. “We worked that wreck for hours. If we’d gotten the call sooner…If she’d cried out…If we’d known we had to look for her…”

  “I’m so sorry.” Answering tears burned in Jolene’s eyes. “But, Nate, the nature of your job as a paramedic…Sometimes…” She held back her own sorrow, vowing to be strong for him. “Sometimes, there’s one you can’t save.”

  He released her on a bitter sigh and paced the room. “This one got to me. I didn’t even know she was there. She was still in her car seat, just over the edge of the ditch, out of sight. We were working on her mom. She just quietly died by the side of the road. All alone. I was too late to resuscitate her.” He shook his bowed head. “I was too damn late.”

  Jolene crossed the room behind him. “You can’t blame yourself for her death. It was an accident.”

  “I can’t get her face out of my mind—even when I close my eyes, it’s always there.”

  She laid her hand against his back. He flinched, but she used the motion to slip in front of him and silently demand that he look her in the eye and see her faith in him.

  “You saved my dad and my home by coming here in the first place. You saved Lily and Amber Browning. You saved Deacon Tate and Cindy and Wes. You nearly got yourself killed saving that stupid bull. Those are memories you should think about, too.” She brushed her fingers along the cut side of his jaw. “You saved me and my baby. More than once. Count the miracles, Nate.”

  “I can’t.” He grabbed her hand and turned to press a kiss into her palm. Then, with a tug, he gathered her up in his arms and crushed her to his chest. “It’s the one who gets away that eats you up inside.”

  He pulled her ponytail loose and sifted her hair through his fingers. He smelled of clean soap and honest emotion as he rubbed his cheek against hers. With nothing but the towel to cover himself, his arousal bobbed against her belly, thrilling her with his desire, frightening her with the depth of his need. Jolene hugged him tight around the waist and offered whatever she could give.

  He dipped his mouth and nuzzled the juncture of her neck and shoulder, melting her bones into putty. His hands slid underneath her shirt, roughly scorching her skin. “It’s that one failure that makes me think that the next time, when it counts the most, I won’t be able to get the job done. I won’t be able to save you.”

  Jolene frowned. “Save me?” When it counts the most? Was it wrong to feel a little frisson of hope? Did she count to him? “Nate. I don’t need saving.”

  She tried to push some space between them so she could read his expression. But he’d picked her up and was stumbling backward. She held on so she wouldn’t trip him and fall. She’d done enough damage to him already.

  “Don’t you?” He sank onto the edge of the bed as if the grave responsibility he carried with him was suddenly too much to bear. He fell back across the bed, bringing her down with him. “You’re so busy taking care of everybody else—including me—that you don’t take care of yourself. You came in here wanting to talk about making love for the first time. And now we’re dealing with my crap.”

  His hands slid beneath the hem of her shirt and he asked, “Was it good for me? Yes.” He worked the shirt up over her head and tossed it aside. “Were you any good? Incredible.” Her bra disappeared next and his hungry mouth teased her heated flesh. “Did it change anything between us? Probably. It made me believe this was the way things could be between us. That this was real.”

  Soon there was nothing but the towel between them. A moment later, not even that. Jolene opened herself to his desperate need. She opened her heart and gave him everything.

  “I want us, Nate. It doesn’t make any sense, but I want there to be an us.”

  He didn’t answer her with words, but his body told her how much he needed her. How much he wanted to be with her. She didn’t question herself or him or the moment.

  Nate cried out his release deep inside her. Carried her to her own climax. Whispered thanks and praises against her ear as they panted for breath afterward. He pulled her with him under the covers and held her and the baby within the sure grasp of his hands.

  Jolene fell asleep knowing that, for tonight at least, she’d been everything he needed.

  She’d been enough.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HE WAS LEAVING.

  The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the floods were receding. And he was leaving.

  Give her a hurricane any day.

  Jolene rubbed her stomach to squelch a nervous sense of dread as she watched Nate saddle up Checker and tie the food and supplies she’d packed for him behind the big bay’s saddle.

  Technically this wasn’t the dramatic w
ave from the shiny BMW when April Kannon had flipped her blond hair and told her stoic husband and weeping little girl that she just couldn’t do this anymore. Sorry.

  Nor was it the heart-wrenching quiet of holding Joaquin’s cold fingers after his breathing machine had been disconnected and the doctor called his time of death.

  Nate was working again. He intended to ride out to check how far the creeks and sloughs had receded to the south to see if he could get through to the Brownings’ Rock-a-Bye ranch and make contact with her father and the rest of the outside world.

  But it still felt like leaving.

  Jolene tried to put on a game face and pretend that surviving forty-eight hours through heaven and hell with this man hadn’t changed her life. They knew each other’s secrets, their fears, their needs. She knew how much he liked to have his face touched and nuzzled; he knew she had a thing for his butt. She knew he was a talented cook and he knew that her appetite—at least for the next four months or so—was a bottomless pit.

  He knew she could be a pretty good listener, despite the way her mouth ran on at times.

  And she knew that she loved him.

  “Why can’t I go with you?” she asked for the umpteenth time since he’d announced his plan over their breakfast of grilled toaster pastries and bacon.

  His shoulders rose and fell beneath the snug white T-shirt he wore. When he turned to face her, his voice was patient, his expression kind. “We talked about this. We don’t know what conditions are like out there. I’m not thrilled with the idea of you being on a horse over good terrain. What’s out there now is anything but good. If we hit a mudslide or washout, or the river’s still impassable—or we find another one of Rocky’s kinsmen from another ranch running loose—it wouldn’t be safe.”

  “If it gets too tough, I could turn around and come back.”

  He shook his head. “Then you’d be riding alone, and that would make me crazy, too. I need you and the baby to be safe so that I can concentrate on my bearings and find a way out of here. The milk’s gone, the well’s flooded and we’re running out of fresh water. We’ve still got no phone line or electricity. We need help, Jolene. I’m going to go find it. We can’t live like this forever.”