She was my only focus, and that hadn’t changed. Which meant three years on, I hadn’t been on a single date or gone out for a single evening without my little girl. Now the opportunity was in front of me and I had no idea how to handle it.
My stress level didn’t decrease throughout the rest of the day, even after I finally settled on the outfit I was going to wear. Darcy lent me a blouse to wear over a skirt, and I added one of the very few pieces of jewelry I still had to my name, a simple initial necklace. My nerves were making it hard for me to put my makeup on. I looked over to where Gabby sat on the floor playing with her dolls. Darcy was perched on the edge of the bed beside her.
“Did I manage to get my eyeliner on without shaking it all over my eyelids?” I asked, tilting my face so she could look at it better.
“It looks fine,” Darcy said. “You look amazing. You’ve just got to calm down. This is going to be fun.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, scoffing slightly.
“You are getting a break and going out for dinner. That’s fun. Besides, when was the last time you got to go out with a stand-up guy like Clayton?”
I pretended I was thinking it through. “Um, that must have been right around never ago.”
“Exactly,” Darcy said.
“But here’s the thing. We don’t know if Clayton’s a stand-up guy for sure. We don’t even know him.”
Taking risks with men wasn’t something I thought I would ever do again and I was majorly questioning it now.
“Sometimes, you can tell,” Darcy insisted. “And sometimes, it’s worth stepping out of your comfort zone to find out. Besides, you deserve a bit of relaxation and fun, don’t you think?”
I couldn’t help but smile. I was so grateful for my best friend. She had never judged me, never looked down on me. No matter what I went through, she was there for me and I was just as loyal to her. I was blessed to have someone willing to accept me and help me every step of the way.
Soon, it was time for me to go down to the lobby and meet Clayton. I scooped Gabby up and cuddled her, giving her a flurry of kisses on her cheek and the side of her neck that made her laugh.
“You be a good girl tonight for Aunt Darcy. I love you.” I set her down and turned to Darcy. “Thank you for watching her and for encouraging me to do this.”
“Have a good time,” Darcy said.
I closed the door to the hotel room behind me and started down to the lobby, thinking this was crazy. But even more crazy was that my heart was urging me to go for it with Clayton.
Chapter 13
Clayton
“Are you going out on the ranch to camp tonight?” Cassidy asked, coming into the kitchen and opening the refrigerator as he eyed me suspiciously.
I stood at the butcher block table in the middle of the kitchen, packing food into a large wicker picnic basket set beside me. “No.”
I didn’t offer any other explanation, but that didn’t stop my brother from digging.
“Then are you just planning on needing a very large midnight snack later and are packing ahead of time?” he asked.
Closing a container of the simple pasta salad I had put together, I tucked it into the basket alongside cheese, sliced meats, and a container of marinated olives.
“Cassidy, why don’t you ask me the question you want to ask rather than beating around the bush and hoping a pigeon falls out?”
“All right,” he said. “If you’re going to be that way. Why are you packing a picnic on a Friday night?”
I finished off the basket with some home-baked bread Shannon’s mother made, a jar of preserves, and brownies. Closing the lid, I grabbed the handle and hauled the entire thing down.
“Have a good night,” I said, waving with my other hand.
Cassidy stared at me incredulously. “Seriously? You’re going to act all high and mighty about it, and then you aren’t even going to answer my question?”
“I said you should ask the question, not that I was going to answer it. Good night.”
I left the house and walked toward my truck, laughing under my breath. It wasn’t too often I was able to get one over on my brothers, so it was always of particular amusement when I did. Setting the picnic basket on the passenger seat beside me, I slid behind the wheel and headed over to the hotel.
As I drove, my eyes moved over to the basket a few times. When I first asked the girls out to dinner, I expected all of them to be coming along. That was fine with me. Darcy was a nice girl and fun to talk to, and I couldn’t get enough of adorable little Gabby. I was perfectly happy to have them along if it meant I got to spend time with Gia as well. When that was the plan, I thought I’d take them to my favorite restaurant in town, a steakhouse that offered up the best yeast rolls I’d ever tasted.
I never expected to get Gia all to myself. That was a delightful surprise, but it totally changed the plan I had for dinner. Bringing them all to a restaurant in town would have been fine. Plenty of people saw us out and about over the last couple of days. They would have just seen me continuing to welcome the visitors to town.
Seeing me just with Gia was a totally different thing. If I was going to have any time to enjoy with her and didn’t want to be the root of a host of rumors the next day, we needed to avoid going to a restaurant.
The thing about Green Valley was everybody knew everybody. It was just the way things were. It also meant everybody tended to have a strong sense of community and responsibility for everyone else. Which was just a really nice way of saying people in Green Valley were nosey as hell.
There was a sense of ownership that everybody, especially the older folks in the community, had over everybody else. They wanted to know what was going on at every second and felt they were absolutely entitled to it.
That went double for the Montgomery boys. Just like I had told Gia and Darcy when they asked about my seven brothers, we definitely weren’t alike. That didn’t mean we didn’t each have our own reputation. Some of us grew up a bit more on the wild side than the others and earned more of the scrutiny. But we were all on everybody’s radar. There was that curiosity about the eight of us. The Montgomery boys raised by a dedicated father who lost his wife far too young, the same father who then lost his own fight with age and dementia.
If I was seen out at a restaurant just with Gia, we’d be interrupted by other people every few minutes wanting to meet her and know what was going on between the two of us. Then the next day, it would be all around town that Clayton Montgomery got himself a girl. Or more accurately, that a girl managed to snatch up Clayton Montgomery. An outside girl at that. It wasn’t that I wanted to avoid any perception of us being on a date. I just thought that might be a little much for her right out of the gate.
I was interested in Gia in a way I had never been interested in another woman, drawn to her in an inexplicable manner. But that hesitation, that glimmer of fear in her eyes, made me well aware I needed to move slowly with her.
So I packed up a picnic, planning to bring her far away from the other people of Green Valley so we could just enjoy getting to know each other better.
“You look beautiful tonight,” I said when she walked out of the hotel.
“Thank you,” she said. “You look very handsome yourself.”
I looked down at my clean jeans and freshly pressed shirt. “Thank you.”
Gia turned like she was going to walk down the sidewalk and I touched her elbow to stop her.
“Aren’t we going to walk to the restaurant?” she asked. “I just assumed we were going to go somewhere here on Main Street.”
“Actually, I had something else in mind.”
She looked intrigued and let me guide her over to the truck. I opened the door for her, and she glimpsed the picnic basket. She glanced over at me but didn’t ask anything else. I helped her up into the truck and hurried around to the driver’s side. By the time we had driven out to the back part of the ranch property, the sun was going down.
“Where
we going?” she finally asked.
“I told you I wanted to show you around some more. Well, I’m going to bring you to dinner at one of my favorite places.”
Carrying the picnic basket in one hand, I used the other to help her navigate the uneven ground of the hill. We climbed up to the top and I brought her close to the edge so she could look out over the property. She gasped slightly.
“This is incredible,” she said.
“It’s my ranch,” I told her. “Well, mine and my brothers’. As far as you can see belongs to us.”
“I can’t even imagine something like that,” she said. “Just being able to stand somewhere with this much openness and beauty I knew was mine. It must be such an amazing feeling.”
“It’s all I’ve ever known,” I told her. “But it is. There are still moments when I stand here and look out over it, not really believing this is my life. It’s all I know, it’s all I’ve ever known, and it’s all I’ve ever wanted, but there are times when it just seems too good. Like there must be somebody up there who likes me an awful lot. It’s the only way I could get to wake up to the sunrise over this horizon. Then go to sleep every night under the most beautiful blanket in existence.”
Gia looked at me strangely and I smiled, tilting my face up to look at the sky. She looked up with me and her mouth opened, stunned at the stars showered densely across the inky blue sky.
I smoothed an old quilt out across the ground, and we sat down with the picnic basket. She watched as I unpacked everything, seeming impressed but also nervous.
“These olives are delicious,” she said a few minutes later as we ate.
“They come from the deli,” I told her. “The owner uses the same recipe his great-grandmother brought over from the old country. I love them. Not quite as much as my brother, Garrett. He could probably eat his weight in these things if somebody let him.”
She laughed. A musical sound that filled my soul.
“He would have a serious dehydration problem on his hands,” she said.
I laughed. “I like the way you look at things. I probably would have said something about the fat or eating so much of the same thing. But you went with dehydration. Your mind works in interesting ways.”
Gia blushed and glanced away. As we continued to eat and chat, she began to relax around me. We eased closer together on the blanket and I finally had the opportunity to indulge my urge to run my fingertips along the edge of her face and down her jawline. I brushed a piece of her hair back over her shoulder and she sighed, tilting her head to brush her cheek against my hand. My resolve to take everything slow disappeared. Her lips looked too sweet, too inviting, and I couldn’t resist. I leaned forward and touched a kiss to them.
It was just a gentle, cautious kiss at first. But it wasn’t enough. I needed more, and an instant later, I caught her lips again. She returned the kiss this time and we melted into each other. I wrapped an arm around her waist and slid her up into my lap, wanting her as close as I could get her.
The heat between us had grown to an unbearable level. I squeezed her tight and dipped my head in for a long, powerful kiss. The moment seemed to last forever, as if time froze and the only thing that kept going was the stars burning millions of miles away. I slid one hand up her thigh and she hitched a breath in as my fingers trailed toward her center.
Not wanting to take things too fast, I moved my hand up the side of her hip and rested it on her belly. Our lips were crushed against each other again, and her tongue danced inside my mouth with mine. My fingers found their way to the skin of her abdomen. Sliding my thumb up higher, I waited for her to object, but none came. Carefully, my hand moved up higher until it was just under the cup of her bra.
My cock pressed against my jeans and I knew she could feel it under her. Sliding around to mount me, she pressed her lips into mine hungrily, and her hands reached up to unhook the bra in the front center clasp. Even though it was under her shirt, I could feel the heft of her gloriously round and luscious breasts, and it drove my desire deeper. I rolled her to her side and trailed kisses down her neck until I reached the neckline of her shirt. Pushing it up, I revealed her beautiful, full breasts and took one nipple into my mouth, suckling on it as my hand trailed back down her center.
As my tongue twirled around her taut, perky nipple, I grazed my fingers up her thigh once more, and she separated her knees to invite my touch. Taking my time working my way up, I relished in her moan when my fingertips reached her core. She was hot and wet beneath her skirt, and I could feel the dampness under her lacy panties.
I pressed my fingers into her gently, not pushing away the panties just yet. She moaned deeply at my ear level and I released her breast to press my mouth against hers again. One of her hands reached down to move the panties away and then grasped my hand, pulling me to her. Her other hand slid down my front and clamped onto the bulge now threatening to burst from my jeans.
Gia laid one leg down, keeping the other propped up as I slid my middle finger through her folds and to her opening. When I slid inside her, she cried out softly, and I slid my thumb over her clit to rub it in small circular motions. I took the other breast into my mouth, mimicking the movement of my thumb on her clit with the attention I was paying her pink, supple nipple. Her hand grasped around my wrist as she suddenly bucked under my grip, and I crushed my mouth into hers, kissing her as she climaxed under my touch.
When her body relaxed again, I eased Gia down onto the blanket and stretched out beside her. We couldn’t stay there all night, as much as I wanted to, but I could savor her a little longer.
Chapter 14
Gia
I awoke in the soft, calm, and gentle way that comes after a truly deep, restful sleep when you have no immediate cares in the world. When the good things on your mind are enough to overshadow the negative ones and you can be truly at peace in those first moments of the day.
It was a feeling I wasn’t accustomed to but was definitely enjoying. The room was quiet, but I could hear birds chirping outside and see a sliver of sunlight coming under the curtains I had drawn across the window before going to bed the night before.
Smiling to myself, I stretched luxuriously across the bed. When I got back from my date with Clayton the night before, Darcy and Gabby were already asleep. But rather than my daughter being asleep in the bed we had been sharing since getting to Green Valley, she was in a new cot with railings tucked between the two full-sized beds. Gabby looked peaceful and I knew when she woke up, she would be excited to tell me all about her big-girl bed.
But for right now, she was still asleep. I was still alone with my thoughts. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was happy about that.
The thoughts filling my mind and the images dancing behind my eyes weren’t the terrifying ones I was used to. Instead, they were happy and made my heart flutter in my chest. Climbing carefully out of bed on the opposite side as the little cot with my daughter in it, I grabbed the extra blanket tossed at the end of the bed and wrapped it around my shoulders. The air conditioner cranked all day and all night here, creating a chill when I first woke up. It was far better than getting overheated and waking up feeling groggy and sweaty, but I was definitely glad for the blanket in the first few moments I was awake.
Crossing the room, I went to the window and opened the curtains just enough to look out. I didn’t want the sunlight to come in and wake up Darcy or Gabby. It was still fairly early, but outside, Main Street was already awake. People shuffled back and forth, opening up businesses and getting their day underway. Some clutched cups of coffee from the bakery while others walked with determination like they already had several hours under their belts. Considering what Clayton had told me about his work on the ranch the night before, that was entirely possible.
At just the thought of Clayton, my lips turned up into a smile and I felt a pleased flush cross my cheeks. Continuing to watch the day get started on the street beneath me, I let my mind wander back to the nigh
t before and how perfect everything was. It took my breath away that Clayton went to the trouble of packing a picnic for us. Of course, when he said he wanted to bring me to one of his favorite places for dinner, I assumed it was one of the restaurants on Main Street. He had pointed out several little places along the street and a couple of others in town while we were exploring. It just made sense we would end up at one of them before dinner. But finding out the favorite place he wanted to show me was a part of his family’s ranch was far better.
It felt like a privilege to be brought out onto his family’s land and get to see it through his eyes. And nibbling through the simple but delicious spread of food he prepared while we sat under the most incredible stars I’d ever seen was undeniably romantic. By the time we got to the dense, fudgy brownies and I saw him lick a crumb of chocolate from his bottom lip, I was done for. No amount of trying to convince myself this wasn’t a date or that I needed to keep myself distanced from him would lessen my intense attraction to Clayton. The fact that he kissed me first made it even better. It felt so good kissing him.
It was wonderful having his arms wrapped around me and his body pressed up close to mine. I felt beautiful and desirable. Most importantly, I felt safe. He cradled me close and made me feel protected, like I was something precious he wanted to guard from the world. That was something I never felt with Matteo. Something I never found with any man.
I couldn’t get enough of it. I couldn’t get enough of Clayton. I wanted to feel him hold me again. I wanted to kiss him again. And that meant something very significant. I couldn’t keep running. Leaving Sacramento was about getting away from my past and finding a life I wanted to have for myself and for my daughter. We were running away from the terror I put behind me. It was never supposed to be permanent.
His Dirty Hands (The Montgomery Boys Book 2) Page 8