Branded: You Own Me & The Virgin's Night Out

by Walker, Shiloh

  “Does she look like you?”

  Sloane jerked her head up at that, staring into Boone’s pale eyes. “Um…” She tried to shrug nonchalantly and wished she could lie worth a damn. “No, not really.”

  Dani didn’t look like her. Although she still had that baby plumpness, her chin showed the promise of being sharper, almost pointed and her cute little nose turned up more than Sloane’s. And her eyes…

  She blew out a steadying breath.

  She had her father’s eyes. The blue of a newborn baby had shifted over the past couple of weeks and was even more noticeable now. Danielle had pale, pale blue eyes and if a person really looked, they might even notice the similarity between the gazes of the small baby and the big, quiet man sitting a few feet away.

  I need to tell him, she thought. Despair and desperation were hot on the heels of that thought.

  How did she tell a man who couldn’t remember her that he’d helped her bring a new life into the world? That wasn’t exactly something you could blurt out over after dinner coffee.

  She’d brush the idea aside entirely, except…the way he watched her. How he’d look at the baby. Something acute and dark burned in his eyes as he watched them—something that was akin to greed.

  Sloane understand that.

  She was greedy.

  Greedy for him, greedy for more, greedy for the promise of a family that had eluded her from the very first breath she’d taken. Her mother had been a good mom, she knew that. Georgia Redding had tried, raising three kids on her own, struggling to keep the Redding farm going even when it was clear the end was near. She’d tried, but too often, it had been Tyler or Pierce to cook supper, to help Sloane get ready for bed and as she’d gotten older, it had been the twins who’d been there to help with homework or the secret little miseries that too often happened to a young, gawky girl who was too smart for her age.

  A family—a real one—was all Sloane had ever wanted.

  And the way he watched her tore jagged claws into wounds she’d hope to bury.

  “He’s crazy, you know.”

  Sloane jerked her head up as Boone rose from his chair.

  “Who? What?”

  Boone shrugged, the motion almost awkward. “Whoever he is—the dad. He should be here with you. I can’t get why he wouldn’t want…” He made an abstract gesture that seemed to encompass Sloane’s entire world—the baby, the farm, her home. “This.”

  Then he left, walking away as a knot formed in Sloane’s throat.

  • • •

  “I have to tell him.”

  Ellen sipped from her glass of wine. “I agree.”

  “Good. Okay. I’ll…”

  Realizing that Ellen was still watching her, too intently, Sloane stopped. “What?”

  Ellen looked down, pondering her glass with a scrutiny that seemed almost out of place. “I do think you should tell him. I just…” She stopped and looked away. “Is now the right time? He still isn’t remembering much.”

  “You think telling him would make it worse?” Sloane asked hesitantly.

  “I don’t know.” Ellen frowned, still pondering her wine. “I don’t know anything about what happened to him, his injury, what made him forget. Or what happened to him over the past year.”

  Sloane didn’t want to know any of those things—or maybe she did, but at the same time, she wanted to pretend nothing had happened. She knew he had gone through something awful. He had new scars, including a nick on his chin and a thin, narrow slice that bisected his left eyebrow. The worst one, though, was on his neck. His voice was rougher, too, likely from that scar on his neck. How badly had he been injured? Just thinking about it made her heart hurt.

  Now more uncertain than ever, she sat down at the table and dropped her head into her hands. Tyler had Dani out in the backyard, relaxing at the end of a long workday. They only had a small percentage of the land they’d had growing up, but owning—and running—a farm was a lot of work. He had a couple of good hands around to help him, but Tyler, being Tyler, jumped right in, taking up the reins of running the place as if he’d never been gone.

  From the window, she could see her brother, watching as he rocked with Dani on the heavy wooden swing that hung under a fat, towering oak. He looked completely content, a smile lighting his face as he spoke to the baby.

  Even from here, Sloane could see how the small child watched her uncle, as if she understood every word.

  “He’s happy here,” she said quietly.

  Ellen followed her gaze and in the next moment, she smiled. The smile was so heartfelt, it turned her from beautiful to absolutely breathtaking. “Yes. He is. We are,” Ellen said.

  “I’d worried…” Sloane trailed off, shrugging.

  “I know.”

  Sliding her sister-in-law a sidelong look, she waited.

  Ellen pushed up from the table and moved to the window, staring outside at her husband. She rested a hand on the window, as though that alone might close the distance between them. “I’d worried, too. After the military, the job with DDX, how was he going to adjust to life on a farm?” She laughed and looked back at Sloane, her eyes glinting. “I worried about the same thing. You know I grew up on a farm.”

  Sloane nodded. Ellen had lived on a farm with her parents up until her mom divorced her father and took off to Nashville—with her fourteen year old daughter—because she needed to find herself. Ellen had hated the city, at first.

  But then she’d acclimated and became a self-professed city girl.

  “It looks like you both found what you were looking for.” Envy curled through her, a sly, slippery little beast and she smashed it.

  “We weren’t looking…and found each other anyway.” Ellen turned back to the table, a pleased smile on her face. “Yeah, I’d worried. This place, it’s so calm, so different from the life he’d had

  before we got married.”

  “I guess that’s what he wanted. This life…you.” Flicking her gaze to her brother, Sloane studied him with the baby. “Now I just wonder how long it will take for him to start talking to you about kids. He’s heads over heels for mine.”

  “Um…”

  Catching the humor in the other woman’s voice,

  Sloane glanced at her. “You’re not…”

  “No.” Ellen grinned. “Not yet. But…yeah. We’re trying. We’d talked about it off and on since you told us you were expecting, and then Dani comes along and…well. We need to have one of our own before we steal yours.”

  Sloane arched a brow. “Try it.”

  A figure passed in front of the window and she groaned as the sight of Boone dragged her thoughts from her family, to the little problem of their stolen night.

  She watched as he strode to her brother. He seemed to hesitate before sitting down and a second later, Tyler pushed the baby into his arms.

  Sloane caught her breath.

  “Oh, my.”

  She echoed Ellen’s soft words in her own head and swallowed around the knot that had wedged itself into her throat.

  Boone. Holding his daughter.

  Spinning away, she closed her eyes.

  “I have to tell him—”

  She cut the words short when the door swung open.

  Panic locked her throat and she turned, eying her brother as he paused in the doorway. “Tell me what?” he asked, clearly having heard her.

  “Nothing.” She spoke too quickly and immediately cursed herself as Tyler’s eyes narrowed slightly.

  “Don’t give me that look,” she said sourly. “It’s not you—it’s none of your business.”

  “What’s wrong?” Tyler asked softly.

  Without blinking an eye, Sloane smiled at him and lied. “Not a thing.”

  • • •

  The military could have trained him as a sniper. Boone could take out a target at two thousand yards in the dead of night and he could defuse a live bomb—he could, and had.

  He knew these things because Tyler had told
him—and it all felt right. He knew he could kill, and he had done it once or twice down in the hell of that Mexican prison. It was a kill or be killed sort of world and he hadn’t wanted to die in the misery.

  Threats of death and dismemberment didn’t make him sweat.

  But the small baby in his arms left his hands all shaky.

  Little Danielle Redding blinked big blue eyes up at him and then opened her mouth in a huge yawn. The tiny little noise she made reminded him of a bleating sheep. Although Boone had no idea how he knew what sort of sound a sheep made.

  The sound of the door had him looking up and he met Tyler’s steady gaze.

  “You shouldn’t leave her out here with me alone,” he said scowling, although some part of him already wanted to cuddle the small child closer. “I could drop her.”

  Tyler rolled his eyes. “You’ve disarmed live explosives—I think you can handle a baby who barely weighs ten pounds.”

  Terror grabbed him by the throat. “Ten pounds? Is she not eating?” Even as he thought that, he felt like an idiot, because he saw the little girl eating all the time. Or close to it, at least. But…ten pounds?

  Tyler laughed. “Relax. She’s just little. Sloane was the same way.”

  At the mention of her name, Boone flicked his eyes to the house. The baby squirmed and made a disgruntled noise in her throat and instinctively, he lifted her to his shoulder, the same way he’d seen Sloane or Ellen or Tyler doing. She curled right into him and he closed his eyes, felt something in his heart twist just a little.

  She was so small.

  “Want to feed her?”

  His eyes flew open. “I don’t see how that’s going to work,” he said after a moment.

  Tyler tossed him a bottle. Boone snatched it out of the air and stared at it. “Ah…I thought she only nursed.”

  “Nope. Sloane…” Face reddening, Tyler jerked a shoulder in a shrug. “She pumps some.”

  Pumps…mystified, Boone looked down at the bottle and then shifted his hold on the baby. “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “You pop the bottle in her mouth. She does the rest.” Tyler hunkered down in front of him and held out his arms, pantomimed holding the baby. “Hold her like this.”

  It took a moment or two to get the baby settled and Boone wouldn’t tell a single soul how natural it felt, once he had her tucked up against him. He held up the bottle and with all the caution he would have used had he actually been defusing a live bomb, he guided the bottle to Dani’s little mouth.

  She made a loud squawking sort of noise and he started chuckling as she brought up tiny fists, bracketing the bottle with her hands as though she feared he’d pull the bottle away. “Have at it, babydoll,” he murmured.

  Something in his heart tugged.

  But he ignored it.

  In a few more weeks, he’d be out of this place—hopefully back to his life.

  And both Dani and Sloane would continue on with theirs.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Here, let me help you with that.”

  Sloane looked up, shielding the light from the sun with one hand. She shouldn’t have wasted the time. In the few seconds it had taken her to focus sun-dazzled eyes on Boone’s face, he’d taken the basket from her and settled it on his hip.

  His gaze flicked around and landed on the baby snoozing on the porch. Sloane had brought the swing out so she could listen for Dani while she picked tomatoes from the small kitchen garden just off the back of the house.

  “You must like tomatoes,” he said after a lingering glance at the still sleeping baby.

  “I’m making spaghetti for dinner. Using those for the sauce.”

  Boone blinked at her and then looked down at the tomatoes. “You make it from tomatoes?”

  She laughed. “Well, that’s typically the number one ingredient in marinara.”

  “I always figured the number one ingredient was the jar it came in.”

  Sloane shrugged. “I’ll eat sauce from a jar if I have to, but if I can make it myself, why bother?” Then, before silence could form, she cut around him. “You can just dump the basket on the counter. I’ll be in to wash them after I get the baby inside.”

  She took her time unbuckling Dani, checking the diaper, hoping to kill enough time that Boone got bored and moved off to do something else. He was stronger—she could see that on his face and he didn’t look as haggard as he had when he’d first arrived at the farm.

  She wondered how much longer he’d be here, and she wondered how to work up to what she had to tell him.

  Brooding over it as she carried Dani into the house, she tried, yet again, to piece together the right words.

  Putting Dani down in the playpen she kept on hand, she turned around, intent on heading outside.

  Boone was coming through the door with the swing, already

  folded flat. She watched as in silence as he tucked it into the little niche between the fridge and counter and then turned to the sink.

  “Thank you.” She swallowed. “You didn’t need to do that.”

  “Not like I’ve got much else to do,” he said, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “Tyler doesn’t seem to trust me to help him out on the farm—doing whatever farmers do. Probably a good thing. I’ve got a black thumb.”

  “I doubt that. You just didn’t grow up on a farm.”

  His eyes came to hers. “No.”

  She went to ask him where he did grow up, only to stop, because he still wasn’t remembering much.

  “In the city.”

  She shot him a look and then had to swallow when she realized that she’d closed the distance between them without even realizing it. Unnerved, she turned on the sink and washed her hands. She finished and went to turn off the water, but Boone shoved his hands under the faucet and did the same. She hurriedly backed away, needing distance between them before he realized how very little distance she actually wanted between them.

  “Can I help?”

  She went to tell him no, but made the mistake of looking up at him.

  He looked…

  She cut the thought off before it could finish, although deep inside she knew exactly what it was that she didn’t want to think about.

  Lonely. Boone looked lonely.

  “Sure.” She managed a casual shrug as she turned away. “Although there’s nothing too fascinating about dicing up tomatoes.”

  She went to pick up the basket, turning back to the sink even as her hand closed around the wicker handle.

  Boone bumped into her, in the process of doing the same thing—getting the basket of tomatoes. Their hands brushed and she sucked in a breath, pulling away. He did the same and somehow, she ended up tangling her feet in her hurry to get some space between

  them.

  Off-balance, she swayed backward.

  Strong, hard hands steadied her.

  Dazed, she looked up at Boone.

  He was looking down at her.

  She didn’t know which one of them moved first, whether she kissed him or he kissed her.

  She just knew that his mouth was on hers—finally.

  Finally.

  Over the past few weeks, Boone had driven himself slowly insane, wondering how she’d taste. He’d suspected she’d taste spicy, and slightly sweet, and he groaned when she opened her mouth for him, letting him discover for himself just how on target he’d been.

  She moved closer and he wrapped one arm around her narrow waist, pulling her completely against him.

  It was a fit.

  Even as he tangled a hand in her long hair, Boone couldn’t help but notice just how well they fit.

  Her tongue flicked against his and the hunger inside him exploded. Spinning them around, he backed her up against the counter. Her arms came around his neck and she arched against him. He slid his hands up her waist—so slim and delicate—and then cupped one plump little breast in his hand.

  An image flashed through his head—him holding her, like this. Her naked bre
asts in his hands, small and sweet and perfect.

  He circled the nipple with his thumb. That would make her—

  She cried out.

  Déjà vu tripped through him and he stilled, focusing on the fading memory, trying to grab him.

  Sloane moved against him again, a hungry little sound in her throat.

  Screw the memories—or the fantasy.

  Yeah, had to be fantasy.

  This was better.

  Mindless, he kissed his way down her throat, brushing her hair

  out of the way as he continued his trek down her body. He freed one button, then another—

  A door slammed.

  “What the…”

  He jerked away as if he’d been scalded.

  At the sound of her brother’s voice, Sloane went red.

  Boone turned to face Tyler. From the corner of his eye, he could see the way she reached up, clutching the neck of her shirt closed, although he’d only freed the top two buttons.

  Tyler was gaping at them.

  That was the only way to describe the way he stood there, mouth open, eyes wide. “You…” he waved a hand between them and then turned away, bringing that same hand up to cover his eyes. “You…okay, I’m turning around and leaving the room. When I come back in here, I don’t want to see…that.”

  Boone went to apologize, although the words tripped up even before he could say them, because the hell was he sorry.

  Sloane’s laugh, though, nervous and shaky, cut him off before he managed to find the words. “Gee, will that make you feel better, Tyler?” she asked, her question directed at the retreating back of her brother.

  “I’m hoping so.”

  Thirty seconds passed before Tyler come back into the room, a pained expression on his face. “Man, you’re still standing too close. Why you gotta stand so close?”

  Sloane’s answer was lost to the blood roaring in Boone’s ears. He wanted to push the other man out of the room—or better yet, just pick up Sloane and take her somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  A baby’s fretful cry interrupted his thoughts and as though drawn by strings, he found himself moving to stand next to the playpen. Without thinking about it, he bent over and scooped the fussing infant up.