By the time she finally got her palms down into his briefs and started easing them over his hips, he was breathing hard. And when she was on her hands and knees pulling everything gently over his feet, being so careful of his knee… well, he was grateful, but he was also looking at her in the mirror, and… damn. Dakota’s ass…
“Darlin’,” he said, his voice coming out hoarse, as she got him free of his clothes, “just stay like that one second. Just let me look for one minute.”
She looked up at him, startled, and he should be looking at her or saying something nice, but he had to watch the mirror.
Did she look shocked? No, she didn’t. She smiled at him, and then she gave him that wild side. She leaned slowly forward, put her elbows on the carpet and her forehead on her hands, and showed herself to him.
That was just about it right there. If his knee hadn’t been so messed up, he knew exactly what he’d have been doing. As it was, his hand went down to touch himself. Somebody had to do it.
She was straightening up, though, and taking his hand away. “Oh, no,” she told him. “This is my job. You get yourself fixed up, and you’ll get that. You’ll get it any way you want it. But tonight… I get you.”
She did, too. She showed him what she could do, and then she showed him some more, and he watched every sweet, slow minute of it.
The sight of Dakota, naked and beautiful, on her knees, taking him in, her hands working on him… if she hadn’t teased as much as she did, it would have been over too soon. She made it last, though. She drew it out. She got him moaning, panting, and then she slowed down until he was groaning, “Dakota, please. Please do it. Please finish it.”
And when she did? When he was sliding all the way down her throat, and he was watching it all happen? One moment, he was sweating, shaking. The next, that magic button had been pushed, and there was no stopping it. He was groaning, and then he was swearing. He was pumping into her, his head and fists were banging against the wall, and Dakota…
Dakota drank him down.
Dakota slept well that night. And she didn’t think Blake had any nightmares.
When she’d helped him into bed, gotten him a new ice pack and put a pillow under his foot, pulled the covers up around them, turned out the bedside lights, and snuggled up close, he’d said, “You know, sometimes ‘Thanks’ doesn’t quite cut it.”
She’d smiled in the dark. “Just because I’ve got a thing for the wild side.”
His hand, which had been running slowly over her side, stopped. “What?”
“Oh, like that’s news to you?” She’d kissed his shoulder gently. “You show me your wild side, and I’ll show you mine.”
“Darlin’,” he’d said with a sigh, “I think you already did. That thing you did in the mirror… I thought my heart would stop. Though on the other hand, that’s pure torture, with my knee all messed up like this. Here you are, too, and I haven’t done a single solitary thing for you.”
“Is your knee going to be messed up forever?”
His soft laugh had made her smile in the dark. “Nope.”
She’d kissed his shoulder again. “Shut up and go to sleep, then. Get better.”
He wasn’t in bed when she woke the next morning. She could hear the faint rumble of male voices, though, and it was a comforting sound. She sat up, did some coughing, drank some water, got dressed, and went to find those voices. Two men, sitting at the kitchen table, perfectly comfortable together, like they’d done it dozens of times.
It was a nice sight.
“Hi,” she said, pouring herself a cup of coffee and sitting down beside Blake. “Let me guess. You handicapping the football season?”
“Nope,” Blake said. “Talking fishing.”
Russell got to his feet. “Breakfast.”
“How you feeling?” Blake asked. “You did some coughing in the night.”
“Not too bad. Still a little tired. How’s your knee?”
“Aw, still tender.” He had it up on a chair again. “I’ll baby it today, and it’ll be better tomorrow. This is a sprain.”
“How can you tell?”
“Hurts too much to be anything bad.”
“That makes no sense, but all right. You aren’t even going to get it checked?”
“I will if it isn’t better in a couple days. You could say I’m a veteran. But this is a boring conversation. Let’s have a better one. The doctor said you’re supposed to be taking it easy.”
She eyed him sidelong from over her coffee cup. “I can’t wait to hear what comes next. Has anybody told you that you’re overly authoritative?”
“Maybe a hundred times. But with you? Only because I know you’ll push back, and I do enjoy a contest. You ready to hear my idea?”
“Shoot.”
“I need to take a couple days Monday and Tuesday and check in over in Portland. I think you should come with me. You’ve got a stack of flowers done in that workroom of yours, and Russell says you haven’t figured out what to do with them. Now, Portland… it’s got a pretty sweet art scene, and they surely do like Western artists.”
“You know this how?”
He put a hand over his heart. “You wound me. I’ve got houses, darlin’. Houses need stuff on the walls. Why do you think I bought all those pieces from you?”
She eyed him, and he grinned and said, “Yeah. That too. But that wasn’t the only reason.”
“I think you should go,” Russ said. He put a pan of scrambled eggs in the middle of the table and tossed a piece of toast each onto three plates. Plating, Russell-style. “Blake thinks you ought to be in higher-end galleries. I think so too. If he thinks Portland’s a good spot for it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t try.”
“I already did,” Dakota said. It wasn’t fun to admit, but it was the truth. “I know which galleries would be best, but they don’t want stained glass. It’s not considered art.”
“Who says?” Blake asked.
“Well, let’s see. The owners?”
“Uh-huh. What did you show them? How long ago?”
“Is this an inquisition?”
“Nope.” Blake spread jam on his toast. “It’s a temporary obstacle, and the way to get over it is to figure out why it didn’t work, fix that, and try again. So I’m going to ask the next question. Did you show them those flowers?”
“Well, no. I hadn’t done the flowers yet.”
“How about the shells?”
“I told you. The shell was experimental.”
“That’s right. Experimental.” He took a bite of toast, then said, “You should eat your breakfast. Most important meal of the day.”
“I am.” She dished herself up some scrambled eggs. “But not because you say so.”
He grinned, and she had to laugh. “All right,” she admitted, “that was fairly childish.”
“Starting over,” Blake said. “What’s the best gallery? What’s your dream?”
“In Portland? Elizabeth Fischer. That’s the big one for Western artists.”
“You tried them?”
“Of course. She said no. Very scary lady.” She didn’t want to talk about that anymore, so she asked, “ How can you leave, though? Don’t you have to do… things… at the resort? Especially checking into all those possibilities we talked about last night?”
Blake’s jaw was covered with dark stubble now, after two mornings of not shaving. She got sidetracked for a moment by that. He hadn’t even kissed her this morning, and that stubble would feel… interesting.
He said, “CEO, baby,” and she had to think to remember what they’d been talking about. “That means you don’t have to get down in the weeds. You’d just get in the way. I’ve got a resort manager. He gets to sweat it. I already passed it all along to Jennifer. And not that this isn’t fascinating, but we were talking about you.”
“I have a job. I have a deadline, and I’m already behind.”
“Deadline just got extended.”
“I thought you said you’d have gues
ts before the opening. When is that, in ten days? I haven’t even started the downstairs.”
“Yep. My mom and dad. They’re finicky, it’s true, but I think they can put up with my whole house not being painted. Good thing I paid you that rush fee, too,” he added when she’d have said something else. “And that I heard that doctor say, ‘Take it easy for the next few days, especially with your lungs.’ Climbing up and down ladders and breathing those fumes isn’t taking it easy in any way, shape, or form.”
He shut up, then, and looked at her.
She was rattled. It was true that she needed to try again with the galleries. And if everything in her shrank from the idea of rejection—well, she had to get over that. She could at least try.
“I got to say,” Russell said, working his way through his breakfast, “if somebody told me, ‘Come get on my fancy private jet and take a vacation, and let’s see if we can get your career moving,’ I wouldn’t be putting up a great big fight.”
“Whose side are you on?” Dakota asked.
“Yours,” he said. “That’s the point. So,” he asked Blake, “what does she need to do?”
Dakota lifted both hands in resignation, then dropped them as Blake said, “She needs to decide if that’s what she wants to do.”
All right, that was fairly sensitive, she had to admit. He went on to say, “If she does, she makes a list of the places she wants to try and gives it to me so I can get her there. She packs up a couple pieces to show them what she’s got. If I’m buying, I want to see the real deal. I don’t want to see a picture. Her two very best flowers, that’s what I’d say. Then she comes over to my house and gets my eagle and my shell and my iris, because I’ve got a damn good eye, and I got the best. That makes five, and five’s plenty. She leaves all those with me, and she packs her suitcase and waits for me to come get her in the morning, and I take her to Portland and show her a good time and let her lungs heal up. And we sell us some glass.”
“I’m trying my best to be cool here and pretend this is my norm,” Dakota said the next morning, when she was walking up a set of steps onto a sleek white business jet of a type she’d only seen in the movies.
No security checks, just Blake driving right up to the plane and being met by a couple of his security guys from the resort, who’d taken care of the transfer of the glass pieces she’d packed up yesterday. The guys had taken care of the luggage, too, and then Blake had tossed them the car keys and said, “Let’s go, wild thing.”
Now, he made his own stiff-legged way up the stairs, said, “Hey, Joe,” to somebody who must be the pilot, and told Dakota, “Have a seat.”
“No safety video?” She was going for casual here, even as she sat in something that would have qualified as “luxury leather recliner” in her world. “No explanation of where I’ll find my life vest?”
“We’re flying over the Canyonlands, darlin’. I don’t think your life vest is going to do you a lot of good. And don’t ask Joe. You’ll hurt his feelings. For the record, though, it’s under your seat.”
She spent the extremely brief flight, while Blake worked at his laptop, looking out the window and trying to calm herself down. She’d decided on “artist” for her look, and now, she was second-guessing it. Jeans, her best cowboy boots, a tangerine top, and a silk chocolate-brown tapestry jacket she’d found in a consignment shop. Her hair was loose and artfully mussed, and she was wearing her most daring, dangly earrings, an Indian design intricately beaded in shades of orange and brown. Now, though, she wondered if she should’ve tried to look more upscale. Of course, she didn’t really have “upscale,” but maybe she should have worn a dress, or…
Blake looked across at her. “All right?”
“What? Sure.”
“Uh-huh. Now, see, if I was guessing, I’d say you were worrying. Stop worrying, baby. You’ve got this.”
“Right. I’m just going to walk in, unwrap a couple pieces, and blow them away.”
“Yep. You’re doing them a favor. You’re giving them the first shot. If they can meet your terms. Just like we talked over yesterday.”
She took a breath. “OK. I’m trying. Positive thoughts.”
“That’s my girl,” he said, and went back to his laptop.
Another airport, then, another big, dark SUV, and another guy loading her glass carefully into the back. Blake climbed into the back of the SUV with her and said, “We’ll drop you off at the Fischer place with the hand truck, and then Conrad here will take me to the office and come back for you when you call. He’ll take you on to the next one, too.” He sat back as the driver made his way onto the main road. “So what else do you want to do while you’re out here? Want to buy some more glass or anything? I’m guessing that’d be your first choice. There are some good places around, I hear.”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “I’d love to do that, if you can loan me the car. How would you know whether Portland has glass supplies?”
“I’ve got my sources. Which is a mysterious way of saying that Jennifer did some research for me. How about tomorrow? I’ve got some meetings. You can go on and do that shopping, and whatever else you feel like. For today, do your visits, and then have Conrad take you back to the house if you get tired. Go to lunch. I won’t be home until after five, but we can go out to dinner, do it up good.”
“This must be what it’s like to be rich.”
He laughed. “Pretty much. It’s not too horrible.”
“So how come you’re so… normal, relatively speaking, in Wild Horse? You have a nice boat and a nice house, sure, but why aren’t you… I don’t know, relaxing in a yacht on the French Riviera?”
“Because I’d expire of boredom?”
“Well,” she admitted, “there’s that.”
She got quiet again, because she was nervous. But when they’d pulled up near the expanse of sleek storefront that was the Elizabeth Fischer Gallery and she had her hand truck loaded, she stopped outside the car door where he was still sitting, his leg stretched out in front of him, and said, “This is nuts. You realize this is nuts.”
“Nope. And by the way. If I show up, act natural.”
And then he shut the car door, Conrad drove away, and Dakota snapped her mouth shut and thought, What? But after that, she took a breath of Portland air and refocused.
She wasn’t in Wild Horse. She was in Portland, people her age were walking by in skinny pants and hipster sneakers and funky haircuts and piercings that made hers look tame, and there was an energy in the air she could nearly touch.
She was here. She was home. And she had a shot. She wheeled her hand truck around and headed right through the door. Elizabeth Fischer, here she came.
The confidence lasted about two minutes. As long as it took for an assistant to ask her, “May I help you?” for Dakota to say, “I’d like to see Ms. Fischer, please,” and for the assistant to eye her dubiously.
How about faking it a little more, darlin’? It was like she heard Blake’s voice, right there in her head. She raised her chin, put her shoulders back, stared the assistant down, and said, “She’s expecting me. Dakota Savage.” Sure, it was a lie, but it might get her two more minutes, and walking out the door wouldn’t.
“One minute, please,” the assistant said, and left her to cool her heels.
It wasn’t one minute. It was more like ten. At first, Dakota stood at the discreetly situated desk and looked around her. In one corner of the room, a fairly amazing silver mobile stretched from floor to ceiling and made her wonder how big a house you’d have to have to display it. On the opposite wall, three enormous wooden kayaks hung lengthwise, side by side, all inlaid wood and geometric designs. Now, that was wall art. Not exactly a painting over the couch.
She had a moment of wanting to run. And then she had a different moment.
Twenty-four hours ago, she’d almost drowned. If Blake hadn’t found her, she’d have died at the bottom of the lake. All it would have taken was another few minutes, and she’d have been g
one. All her problems would have been over, and Russell would have been planning another funeral.
Except she hadn’t died. She’d lived. And that made every single day, every single minute from here on out a gift. It meant there was nothing left to lose. She was still here living her one and only life, so she’d better start doing it like she meant it. It could end at any time, but it hadn’t ended yet. She was still standing.
The winner’s the one who gets up the most times, and we’ll always get up. We’re always going to be the last two standing. That means we’ll always win.
She could have sworn that the dove tattooed on her back throbbed. Stand up, her brother told her. Stand up now.
Which was why, when Elizabeth Fischer walked down the enormous spiral staircase from the second floor, all black turtleneck, gray trousers, black glasses, and coal-black hair, Dakota wasn’t running. She was standing.
She’d also unpacked her five pieces of glass and set them against the wall, right under the wooden kayaks. Her eagle and her iris. Blake’s shell, and two flower pieces from her stash. Her best.
She didn’t say what she’d said the last time, either. She didn’t say, “I know I don’t have an appointment, but…” She turned around and said, “I’m Dakota Savage. This is my glass.”
“Hmm.” Elizabeth was eyeing it, walking along the row of framed pieces, then crouching down to study it more closely. Looking at the shell, and then the eagle.
Dakota didn’t say anything. This time, it was Blake she heard. Don’t think about what’s wrong with your work, why you really can’t charge that much.
Elizabeth stood up, looked Dakota over from earrings to boots, and asked, “Are you Native American?”
“Why? Does that matter?”
Elizabeth smiled, the barest movement of her thin lips. “Darling, in marketing, everything matters. Every piece has to tell a story. Like it or not, the artist is part of the story.”
“I am Lakota.”
The words hung there. And they had power.
Elizabeth looked at her for another long moment, then at the glass. “It’s good. But it’s stained glass.”
Silver-Tongued Devil (Portland Devils Book 1) Page 28