by Natasha Deen
“You’re fiercely loyal, independent—bordering on stubborn. You love your family and friends, and you’ll do anything to protect them.”
Aya snorted. “That a fortune cookie reading—it describes ninety percent of the people in the world.”
“This ranch was owned by your parents, who died three years ago in a terrible car accident. You keep hanging on to this land—despite its losing propositions—because you think selling it betrays the memory of your family.”
If he’d taken out a gun and shot her, the pain in her heart couldn’t have been sharper, hotter, or more piercing.
“Little Bear’s got more than a big mouth, he’s got a job security issue.” The words hissed through tight lips. She kneed Patches in the haunches, but before the horse could move, Nate grasped the reins.
“Just because it’s gossip, doesn’t make it untrue,” he said. “Talk to me, Aya, let me help.”
“I don’t even know you.”
“I’m thirty-five and work hard.”
She snorted.
“My father applied for a job on your farm years ago.”
She cocked her head toward him. “Did we hire him?”
“No.”
Lines furrowed her brow. “Why not?”
He didn’t say anything for a while. As she opened her mouth to prompt him to speak, he said, “The short version is this: we got to the farm, but as he walked around, looking for a foreman...he fell in love with the land.” His mouth twisted. “Dad told me to get back into the car. When I asked him why, he said that land was like a woman. The same way you should never be around a woman you can never be with, you don’t work on property you can never own.” He glared at her, as though the confession cost him more than he could afford and he was angry at her exacting the price. “Denis sent me here to help, Pops trusts me, why don’t you?”
Because it wasn’t him she didn’t trust. It was herself. The dry, empty, brittle places of her—long forgotten by time and obligation—sprung to life under his gaze, turned lush and vibrant with his concern. And those spaces, fragile and feminine, needed to remain empty. If not for her own sake, for her son’s, who’d already been heartbroken by one man.
“Aya?”
“I’m not prepared to have an intimate, financial discussion with a man I’ve known for less than twenty-four hours—and I don’t care who sent or trusts him.”
“But I can help.”
Sweet words, softly spoken, rattled the foundations of her reservations.
“How? By helping me, or by taking my grandfather’s side and pressuring me to sell?”
He said nothing, and his silence shouted his response. Her support pillars ceased shaking, and the hope that had vibrated with his words trembled and slowed into nothingness.
Loneliness and desolation flanked her, their presence made stronger and more ugly by the brief wish that she’d found an ally. She wanted to cry; she wanted to wail. Three years of being a lone soldier, fighting to save her land, warring a losing, endless battle and she was running short of strength and will.
“I’m not stupid or naïve, despite what my grandfather and Denis would have you believe.” Honor lifted her chin. “They’ve been best friends longer than I’ve been alive. Now, you mysteriously show up, offering help and using their trust as your reference. Who are you really, Nate? A lackey for Mason St. John?”
The skin of his face tightened. “I’m no one’s lackey, and I speak only for myself.”
“Fine. You want to help me, and I don’t want it. Anything else you need to say?”
He watched her, a mixed expression of kindness, frustration, and sadness in his face. She forced herself to look away, before desperation broke free of her white-knuckled restraint and had her crying in front of him.
“I believe we’ve said all that needs to be said.” Nate nodded toward the wire and wood fence, tipped his hat, and rode away.
Chapter Four
The afternoon slipped by Mason in a haze of fences, losing hope, and fantasies. As the sun began its descent to the horizon, he and Painter sauntered to the paddock. He slid off the horse, and taking the reins in his hands, led the gypsy cob into the stable. The wooden walls and roof blocked most of the afternoon light, casting the stalls into dim shadows and gray shapes. He blinked, and as his eyes adjusted to the shaded environment, he saw Aya’s grandfather.
Moving toward Jim, Mason tapped him on the shoulder and said, “If your plans were a ship, they’d be the Titanic.”
The older man squatted beside a palomino, and cleaning mud out from the mare’s shoes, grunted his disagreement. “There’s nothing wrong with my plans. It must be your execution.”
“If I’m not careful, there’ll be an execution all right. Mine. And your granddaughter will be holding the gun.”
Jim jerked back and laughed, though the glint in his eyes said that possibility existed.
Mason’s boots sent pluming tufts of brown-red dust puffing into the air as he turned and led Painter to a stall. The smell of hay and horses mixed with the memories of time’s past—afternoons spent with his father and evenings gazing at stars. He paused, inhaling the warm spring breeze, and for a fleeting moment, allowed himself the remembrance. The soft zephyr of memory teased the emotion in his heart, turning it from a vague, fuzzy image into a sharp, heavy ache.
He shook himself free of the sentimental longing. His fingers made quick work of Painter’s reins, saddle, and bridle. After hanging the fastenings on the wall, he grabbed a brush and began to rub down the horse. Painter chuffed happily, and head-butted Mason in appreciation. The horse snuffled through his clothing. Hot, equine breath moistened the shirt and warmed his skin.
“Glutton,” he said playfully. “Didn’t I give you enough sugar cubes at the fence?”
Painter’s wet inspection of his pockets answered in the negative. Mason chuckled, and reached into the front pocket of his denim shirt to pull out a white brick. “Don’t say I’m not good to you.”
While the horse munched on his treat, Mason pulled his cell phone from his back pocket and checked its messages. There was only one, a text from his father which simply said, Tired today. Always proud of you, Dad.
A thick lump of despair rose in Mason’s chest and lodged itself in his throat. He reminded himself he had arranged for his father to have the very best treatment, and the staff knew what they were doing. Still, the suffocating sense of helplessness twisted around him, strangled any sense of power and left him alone with his frustrations and anger.
Painter’s snout drove into Mason’s chest as he hunted for more sugar cubes. The bump of horseflesh against his ribs jolted him from his dark imaginings, and he began to brush the animal.
“How stubborn was my granddaughter?” Jim’s question bounced off the wooden planks of the dusty stable.
“She could give lessons to a mule.”
He paused mid-stroke. The brush hovered in the air, a tangible extension of his indecision with Aya. Plans, obstacles—the now-familiar war between familial loyalty and masculine urges—pulled and tugged, each seeking to be the victor. Mason, caught in the middle of his conflicting wants and desires, careened from wishes to obligations, and back.
Painter snorted and bumped Mason’s shoulder. He resumed grooming, his movements, like his mind, slow, awkward.
The fact was, if he pushed and prodded Aya, she would pull away. Based on what he’d seen of her personality thus far, she was likely to do something rash and foolhardy in an effort to prove her competence. Logic and planning said to take it slow. Instinct, however, urged him to run from her, as fast as possible. More time with Aya equaled more conflict for him.
He could pretend to be tough and unyielding, but he couldn’t deny truth nor could he lie about his background. His father had fallen from grace, endured a life of quiet despair, because of love. If Mason didn’t get himself from Aya—and fast—he’d repeat his father’s cycle.
His sense of self-protection prickled, but he said, �
��I know you want this resolved, quickly. I do, too. God knows how much longer my dad has. But the more we push, the more she’s going to dig in her heels.”
“What do you suggest?” Jim walked around the stall, wiping his hands on a towel.
“I don’t know, yet, but a frontal assault doesn’t work. She’s already accused me of working on your side—”
“Does she suspect?” Anxiety knotted his silver eyebrows.
“My true identity? No, but she’s suspicious, and smart enough to know you and Denis plotted my entrance into her life.”
“Between the two of us, we’ll keep her in the dark.” He laid a hand on Mason’s shoulder. “This isn’t an easy position for you, and I appreciate the effort.” He hesitated, then pulled away. Jim leaned against the stall’s planks. The brim of his cowboy hat obscured his features from view as he kicked at the dirt. When he raised his gaze once again, worry highlighted every wrinkle on his face, and spotlighted the love that motivated his deceit. “Thank you—again—for doing this.” His voice went gruff with gratitude. “I don’t want to see her ruined, just saved from herself.”
“It’s fine.”
A sudden welling of unnamed, unidentified emotions filled Mason’s chest and cut short his words. His brain probed the feelings, labeled the sensations—regret, pleasure, shame, hope. They flashed by him in a riot of both vibrant and dark colors. The shades were too intense, too pure for his emotion-weak senses, and he pushed them aside, shoved them down before they could undo him. Jim said nothing in return, just gave an awkward nod and left the barn.
Mason’s heart gasped at the intense workout of racing from apathy to devotion and left him feeling exposed. He wrestled his weakness into submission and turned all his focus to wooing Aya from her land.
Thirty minutes, four sugar cubes, and one clean horse later, his plans still remained wispy and ungrounded. He left the barn to find Aya, hoping the sight of her would jolt his brain into action. Just the thought of her, however, and his palms grew clammy, sweaty while his brain turned into a synaptic puddle of goo.
Catching sight of Patches wandering unharnessed in the fields, he made for the ranch house. The wooden steps of the porch creaked under his weight, but the front door swung open without noise. Aya’s voice—harsh and angry—skidded with contempt as it sped from the office and smashed into his eardrums.
“What do you mean it’s not a good time? He’s your child, Daniel. You don’t get to pick him up and put him down like a damn toy!” Silence. Then, “Are you kidding me?” Her voice’s octave rocketed upwards as it soared on the ascending notes of her rage. “You’re dumping your son so you can take your grad student to North Dakota for the weekend?”
Mason crept closer, cringing with guilt as the floors squeaked and revealed his eavesdropping. He halted, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, and waited to see if she’d heard.
“How the hell can you afford to do that, and still be behind on your alimony and child support?”
A sigh of relief mixed with the painful contraction of frustrated, chronic rage. Mason leaned against the doorjamb of the study, closed his eyes, and in the span of a breath, raced twenty-nine years into his past. Instead of hearing Aya’s pleas for her ex-husband to step up to the plate and be a father, he heard the tortured rasp of his dad, begging his mother to come home, and be a presence in her child’s life.
The sound of Aya slamming the phone into its base jarred Mason from his dark reverie. He jerked away from the wall, blinking his eyes and shaking his head, trying to clear the fog of his childhood from his mind. His fingers pressed against the spot in between his eyebrows, eased his headache, but did nothing for the pain in his heart.
“Nate?”
He shut his eyes, squeezed them tight, but the image of Spencer and the memory of his own childhood wouldn’t be erased. They wove together, unraveling his loosely threaded plans for taking the land. Empathy and protection, sympathy for his adversary and his pint-sized doppelganger buried landmines in his composure, emotional bombs that would go off without a moment’s notice and destroy all he thought he knew of himself and his priorities.
“Nate.”
Aya’s hand was on his arm and shaking him. His shirt prevented skin to skin contact, but her touch was like the woman herself: full of action, passion, and impossible to ignore. He dropped his hands, opened his eyes, and lost himself.
Their gazes met, and for reasons still making themselves tangible in his mind, the possibility of living the rest of his life as Nate Love, inexperienced ranch-hand and target for horses with a sugar fetish, suddenly seemed attractive.
“Are you okay?” Aya asked.
“Yes, I’m fine.” He blinked, squinted into the recent past, and reminded himself of his reasons for being on the farm.
She cocked her head. “What are you doing here—I thought you’d still be out with Pops, fixing the boundaries.”
“It was important that I come back to do some fence-mending—the friendship kind.”
Shadows painted their way across the smooth, olive canvas of her face. She glanced at the office door, then looked at him. A contrite, penitent expression colored her smile with embarrassment and acknowledgment.
“No,” she said. “The apology is mine to offer.” Aya sighed. “Things just aren’t as simple as selling the farm and getting on with life. I—it’s complicated, but I had no right to pull a temper tantrum. Pops, Denis—you—I know you’re all just trying to help.”
He smiled, and unable to resist the impulse, touched his fingers to her jaw. She jerked back as though he’d burned her. But the yearning—the longing in her eyes—betrayed the comfort she found in their contact. She closed her eyes, and seeming unable to resist, leaned into him.
Everything about her was a contradiction of terms: hard and soft, warm and cold, logical yet passionate. In the midst of all the riddles and dichotomies, there was one quality she exuded above all: feminine. Beautiful, fierce, sensual, and utterly irresistible—his warrior princess with the lover’s heart.
“Apology accepted.”
His fingers moved to trace the outline of her mouth. Her eyes closed, her body relaxed into his touch. She was so warm, pliant, giving. How easy it would be to forget his life and its obligations, to give himself over to this new existence.
The sharp knife blade of logic sliced through his fantasy. Cold, precise, and ruthless, it reminded him of his motivation for being on the farm, and of the deceit he perpetrated on Aya.
Mason wrenched his hand away. He took a step back, offering her a small smile. She blinked, frowned, shaking her head as if her thoughts and feelings—like his—were confused and muddled.
In the ensuing pause while he tried to collect his broken thoughts, Jekyll urged him to get Aya talking about the farm, use logic and reason to get her to sell. Hyde counseled Mason to use the moment, take her. Damn. Both sides wanted him to take her to bed, to slowly undress her, lay her naked body on the cool cotton sheets and—damn.
He shifted, trying to quell the ache, trying to quiet the warring voice. Yanked one way, then hauled another, he mentally twisted and turned, and struggled with his inner-demons.
The porch steps creaked. He turned to see Spencer. The rigid, tense way he held himself slackened the rope of Mason’s internal war, dropped it into the dirt. Not moving from the threshold of the doorway, the child’s gaze locked on to his mother. The lines of Aya’s face were frozen, tight. He stared at her, unblinking.
“Dad’s not coming, is he?” His expressionless face and monotone voice robbed the question of casual air.
Aya’s pain, so sharp and palatable it left tiny razor marks along Mason’s skin, cut dark shadows on her face.
She swallowed, her jaw clenched and unclenched. “No, honey. I’m sorry.”
The stiff-shouldered, jerky walk of disappointment which pushed Spencer in the door like a brittle, broken leaf caught by the breeze, said everything he did not. He paused a few feet from his mother, h
is stance unbending, his mouth and the skin around his nose pinched into tight, rigid forms.
Spencer’s pain shredded Mason’s heart. Yet, even as his desire to comfort the child blossomed within his chest, the key to gaining the land ripped altruism out by its roots. Lit by the floodlights of seeing his childhood conversations reincarnated in Aya and Spencer, he knew exactly how to twist the deadbeat-dad angle and persuade her to give up the farm. To do so, however, he would have to drag her through the pain of heartbreak and loss, bend her ego, fears, and hopes to his will.
Mysticism and metaphysics touched the situation. It seemed as though the past and present had collided, as if he would break not just her will, but somehow reach into history, and break his father’s, as well. To gain the farm, to win by corrupting everything his dad had taught him to be, revolted him.
“I know you’re disappointed, sweetheart, and I’m sorry.” She said it quietly, lovingly, in the same soft, compassionate tone Mason’s father had used when speaking of his ex-wife.
Spencer shook his head, the motion short, jerky, and said, “You’re transferring your feelings to me.”
A small smile tugged at the edges of Aya’s mouth. “I can’t be. What I feel isn’t disappointment, it’s rage. What do you feel?”
“Nothing.”
Aya glanced at Mason, the silent request for help made itself known in the short, upward gesture she made with her hand.
“I don’t believe you.” He crossed the foyer to stand in front of the child. “You’re far too smart to repress your emotions.”
Spencer shrugged, his gaze burrowing into the floor. “You don’t know my dad. He’s a jerk—he’s not worth the effort of feeling anything.”
“His behavior is jerky, but he’s your father, and he’s not a total loss.” Aya’s statement came out as a plea for understanding and mercy.
Flash and fire sparked in his eyes and proved his heart took after his mother. “Why do you defend him? He’s a big jerk.” His voice rose with confusion and hurt. “I hate everything about him, and I hate him!” He flung his backpack against the wall and ran past her, heading for the stairs.