by Mia Caldwell
"And do what?"
"I don't know, look like a superhero or something."
He struck a pose with his arms outstretched. "Am I doing it right?"
I laughed and snapped a few shots. "Perfect, now how about we try something else?"
"Ooh, can be an animal? How about a bear?" He lifted his arms, curling his hands into claws and snarled at me. I was laughing like an idiot as he ran through the whole zoo, until I finally stopped him breathlessly. "My editor's going to kill me when he sees these... I need serious now."
"You want pensive, rugged cowboy?" he sighed.
Yes...
"Not me," I snapped, too quickly.
He feigned insult. "That hurt, Miss Williams. You hurt my feelings."
I was enjoying. "Oh poor, pensive, rugged cowboy, how can I make it up to you?"
"Kiss it all better," he pouted.
It was a flippant remark, but it hung in the air, reverberating like he had struck a gong. The silence of the hills swelled up around us. My pulse was all over the place. I kept inhaling, ready to say something, then gasping in mute frustration when the words wouldn't come. I was going to start hyperventilating in a moment, maybe faint dead away and fall off of my horse. The thought of Tanner Brock having to give me mouth to mouth did nothing to slow my pulse.
The way he licked his lips, like the idea appealed to him sent another rush through me and suddenly I was angry again. "Strictly business," I seethed icily, throwing his words from yesterday back at him, lobbing them like a fastball.
They hit him square and true. His face dissolved from hopeful desire to hurt, with a smattering of pissed-offedness in there to boot. I wished he'd toss it back to me and we could keep our little back and forth going on, but his silence stretched on for miles. Finally, desperate, I asked another stupid question. "So, er, where is your favorite spot, here?"
He heaved a sigh. "This is going to make me sound crazy."
Chapter Ten
Tanner
I am Tanner fucking Brock. I sang "Everwild," the number one country song for nearly the whole of 2014. I've had panties flung at me in over fifty cities and I've had my pick of women in even more. I'm a pro. I've got game. I have swagger.
So where the fuck did that all go?
Kiss it better? That was the best I could do? She had every right to shoot me down the way she did. I sounded like a junior high Casanova, all sweaty with hormones.
I was embarrassing myself and clearly she was embarrassed for me, because she shot me down brutally and mercifully changed the subject.
And unwittingly opened the door for me to make a fool of myself yet again.
My favorite spot on the ranch. I should have lied. But I was already so far gone into embarrassment that one more stupid blunder shouldn't have made a difference. So I told her the truth.
"This is going to make me sound crazy," I began.
"Too late," she smiled, giving me much deserved shit.
I nodded, accepting it as my due. "But my favorite place is up that a'way." I turned my horse and beckoned her to follow me. I hoped that showing her, rather than telling her would make me seem less crazy.
A narrow creek wound through the property, bouncing energetically among the smooth boulders that tried to stand in its way. It flowed right through the center of the ranch, bisecting it into a natural two parts; the lower, where we were now, and the upper where we were headed. We forded it at the narrowest point, coming up on the other, rockier, higher side.
This was the "Highlands," and though the difference in elevation was miniscule, it was enough to feel like a whole different world when I was a kid. We kept the goats up here, letting them crop the grasses that jutted up out of the rocky ground. It was wilder, without the gentle feel of the rolling grasses below us. Up here, it was mainly scrub, the wind scouring the earth clean and revealing its red underbelly. It made a high, keening sound as it blew between the gullies, sounding like how my heart would sound if you hooked it up to a speaker...
We rode in silence for a while, letting the horses do the work of carefully picking their way along the rocky ground. I could feel Monique's curiosity rising off of her in waves, but to my surprise, she kept silent. I heard the occasional click and whir of her fancy camera, but I didn't bother to look back. I figured whatever shots she needed, she'd let me know. And besides, now that we were up here, I was focused on something else.
"Careful now," I called back as the ground began to fall off sharply. This part was tricky even on foot, a steep descent when you came in at this angle. If I had my wits about me, I would have circled around north and taken the far gentler slope, but I was feeling so unsettled that I found I needed the peace of this place. I couldn't wait any longer.
Once we were at the bottom of the slope, the wind fell away, and we were sheltered in the lee. The silence that reigned up here was a living thing, and I knew that Monique felt it too because her camera was clicking and whirring rapidly. When she stopped suddenly, I knew she had realized where we were.
The gravestones stood straight and tall. Two stones pressing together, too new and shining to really look at home with the rest yet. The other stones had been there long enough to seem part of the landscape, but the place that marked my parents' shared gravesite was still a new addition.
"Is that...?" Monique sounded
"Family plot," I nodded. I wasn't sure where the lump in my throat had come from. Except the knowledge of how long it had been since I was last here. I slid from the saddle and walked over to where my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents rested in eternity.
"All of these graves?" Monique sounded mystified. "They're all related to you?"
“I’m the last of my name,” I said quietly, resting my hand on my mother's stone with a friendly pat hello before looking back at Monique. Her expression was one of complete confusion. If I was being honest, I'd say she wanted to bolt right the hell out of there. "You okay?" I furrowed my brow. "Wait, are you squeamish or something?"
"This is your favorite place?" she asked.
I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. "You asked me and I told you the truth. What's the problem?"
Instead of answering, she stalked over to where my Grandpa Sam was buried and crouched down, tracing her finger along the carved stone. Then she moved to my Granny Sue's, then over to my Great-Uncle Abel. Her mouth twisted and I could practically see the thoughts that were racing through her brain, I just couldn't figure out what the hell they were.
At once, she stood up and shook her head, then said something that nearly knocked me out of my boots. "I'm sorry," she said sincerely. "I guess I just...got jealous."
Chapter Eleven
Monique
The words were coming thick and fast all of a sudden. I wasn't sure what it was about him that made me feel so vulnerable and open. Those blue eyes of his bored into me like he could see all my secrets anyway, so there was no use trying to hide behind lies.
I touched the sunwarmed gravestone, needing to ground myself somehow. He was waiting for me to speak, not rushing me. For a fleeting second, I let myself marvel at how different he was from most celebrities I had met. And then I took a deep breath.
"My father moved us around," I began. "Constantly." I flinched as I heard the pain in my voice. There was no use bringing up old sadness, it only made you sad all over again. But the words kept coming in spite of my mind screaming at me to shut up. "I don't think we stayed in a single place more than two years, three years at the most."
He strode a little closer and leaned against one of the weather gravestones, so at home here with his memories and his history. "That must have been hard," he said, neutrally.
I swallowed and nodded. "When I was little I thought he didn't want me to make friends. Any time I made a friend, I had to pack up again. Or that's what it felt like." The wind through the trees sounded exactly like my sigh. "But when we moved to Holcum, that was supposed to be different. We were supposed to stay forever."
For a moment my fists balled on their own. Old hot anger flashed through me, but with nowhere to go, and nowhere to direct it, it settled into an ache in my stomach. I didn't want to be telling this story to a complete stranger, much worse a complete stranger who was also a rich white cowboy country singer, beautiful blue eyes or no. I decided to keep it light. "We had land that my grandparents had worked. When they passed, they willed it to my dad. He told us things were different, that he wouldn't move us any more. That we'd get to stay." The words caught in my throat and I closed my mouth before I could spill out the whole, sorry story.
Dad led away in handcuffs, shouting promises over his shoulder. Mom standing on the porch, eyes glittering with angry tears of betrayal, but refusing to let them fall. He told her to stay and wait, but we didn't.
We left in the night. That night. And moved on.
Again.
I stared down at the ground. "But...he didn't keep his promise. And then my family kind of...fell apart." I squeezed my eyes shut to catch the angry tears. "Having these kind of ties to a place...shit..." my ability to form sentences suddenly failed me...
And then just as suddenly, he was right there. I nearly jumped out of my skin when his hand brushed my shoulder, but he didn't shy away. His fingers trailed down my arm, just letting me know he was there. The brush of his fingertips left trails of electricity in their wake, my skin seared by the heat of him. I was certain he had scarred me forever with his touch. My breath caught in my throat and I looked up at him.
His face was right there, the strong angle of the sun carving his beautiful profile into a stunning mélange of highlights and shadows. He was so beautiful...but that was the wrong word for something so ruggedly handsome too. His features looked carved by the hand of a master sculptor who poured all of their genius into each stroke of the chisel. Without meaning too, I found myself moving closer, intent on studying the structure of his face. My artist's eye wanted to divide him into sections of light and color, the better to paint him with my mind.
But the hunger in his eyes insisted I do nothing of the sort.
"I'm here," he said, simply.
"I know," I replied.
The magic of this place was evident all around us. The wind died down, allowing our words to hang in the air, all the promise of what was left unsaid ringing in our ears. He was there, it was a simple statement. It was up to me what I wanted to do with his presence.
My hands made the decision for me.
I reached out and pressed my palms against his rock hard chest. First one hand, then the other. I was half holding him back, half eagerly seeking.
His breath caught slightly when I touched him, but he didn't move. I was afraid to look back up and see the hunger in his face, so I concentrated on my own hands as they slid downward, sliding along the rippling landscape of his torso. The fabric of his T-shirt bunched a little as I stroked back upward, lifting to reveal a small sliver of tanned skin above his Wranglers.
Seeing that sliver made my heart skip and my stomach splash into my core. His abs contracted as I brushed my finger under his shirt. It was like my hands belonged to someone else, moving without input from my brain. They were on a mission to touch as much of his skin as that little sliver of lifted hem would allow. And I would have gone on forever like that, in a mindless stupor, drugged by his nearness and the sighing of the wind.
Until I realized that the ragged noise I was hearing had nothing to do with the wind. It was coming from deep within Tanner.
"Monique," he growled, catching my wayward hands with his. He hesitated, "Fucking hell."
I looked up at him, startled by his coarse words.
And then his lips covered mine.
Chapter Twelve
Tanner
She kissed me back. I have that much to hold on to, even if she changed her damn mind again. She fucking kissed me back. Hard.
She flung her arms around my neck and pulled me to her, pressing her long body into a sinuous curve against mine. Her lips were just as soft as I had hoped, made for kissing and sucking and biting.
I was just finding my stride, delving deeper with my tongue, on a quest to make her moan those little soft moans again, when she pulled roughly away.
"Tanner," she panted.
My hands were still molded into the shape of her ass. "What?" I demanded. I wanted that luscious rear under my fingers again.
"We can't."
"And why the fuck not?" I growled. I wanted her. Bad. My tongue stumbled and I growled again. Desire was making me bad with words.
She narrowed her eyes. "Strictly business, remember?"
"What?!" I exploded. This woman was going to give me whiplash. "You were kissing me just as hard as I kissed you. Don't be pretendin' it didn't happen that way."
"I'm not pretendin'," she snapped in a vicious imitation of my drawl. "I'm remindin'. We went over this already." Her voice took on this placating, consoling tone that made me want to fight something. "This whole...thing? We can't do this. You leave on tour in two weeks."
"Two weeks and five days," I reminded her.
Her eyebrows slammed together. "And I've got a job, and a life I have to get back to. We're being stupid, right now. This isn't anything."
My legs were moving before my mind was. I had her by the hair, wrapping her ponytail in my fist and forcing her to look up at me. She gasped, showing that same vulnerability that had driven me to kiss her in the first place. "Dammit," I swore and kissed her again.
This time it was like a battle for dominance. Our tongues met and sparred. Her hands battered and clutched at my chest, fighting me and pulling me closer as I drove her backwards into a tree. When I had her pinned against me, I pulled back and looked into her wild, furious eyes. "This isn't anything, huh?" I panted. My cock was as hard as a diamond and her eyes widened when she felt me press it against her. "Absolutely nothing, to you?"
For a moment, she hesitated. I brushed her lips with mine, softly, gently. I would take as much time with this woman as humanly possible. I would break down all her hesitation until she was nothing but a quivering mass of pleasure and enjoy every second of it. The thought of her body shivering under mine, watching the flush rise underneath her ebony cheeks....fuck, I would take forever if need be.
Then she pressed her lips tightly together. "We can't, Tanner."
I took a step back, unable to contain my own feelings and unwilling to look at her. The sound of her camera capturing the moment only made things worse.
Chapter Thirteen
Monique
The whole, silent, ride back to the main house, I wrestled with myself. This was the right thing, right? I was doing the right thing. Never mind that my body was screaming at me to press against him again, his chest crushing into my breasts, my skin alive under his touch. My lips were begging to kiss him again, rough and hot then slow and sweet. He seemed like the kind of guy who would kiss me for hours, just the way I liked it. Was I fucking crazy here?
In desperation, I took out my camera again. Behind the lens, I was safe. I let the distance between us grow. Clouds were sweeping in from the west, and high, boiling thunderheads began to fill the sky. I caught a shot of Tanner Brock, disappearing into the horizon on horseback, his back straight and defiant, and knew that was the picture I had come here to take.
But the cost to get it in the first place...was it worth it?
When the car pulled up to get me, I waited for him to say goodbye. I stood in his drive and stared at the huge, rambling house that now was forever entwined with his kisses in my brain. The sun had dipped below the black clouds on the horizon and the wind was picking up.
His silhouette moved past the kitchen window. I couldn't tell if he was watching me, until he raised his hand in silent farewell. Then walked away.
"Dammit," I whispered into the wind.
I slid into the back seat of the car and slumped down as low as I felt. I clutched my upper a
rms tightly, feeling the places where his touch still seared me. Never in my life had I felt such an intense, and instant desire for a man. It would figure he would be someone I could never have.
As if I didn't feel worse enough, the rain began to batter the roof of the car the minute we passed the sign heralding our entrance into Holcum. I recognized the road of course, and slumped even lower in my seat. But there was still no way to avoid seeing it.
The house was empty. No one lived there, that was clear from the over grown grass. Someone had systematically broken all of the windows...bored teenagers most likely. It looked like it had been standing there, unloved and uncared for, since the night we left.