The Ranch Stud

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  “I don’t know,” Patience replied cavalierly, tilting her chin at him. “What sounds fair?” she asked sweetly. “Seventeen years? Or shall we go for twice that?” Just to make sure he had suffered the way she had! And all for no reason, because she would have gone with him if only he had asked. Or never mind that, if he had simply told her he was in trouble!

  “Patience—”

  She glared at him, but her pique had absolutely no effect on him. He came toward her and held out his arms to her. She avoided him by stepping deftly around the sofa again, so it was still between them. As she faced off with him, her heart thudded with a telltale heaviness.

  “Give me a break here, Patience. Give us both a break.”

  “You can’t actually believe I would forgive you for something like this, can you?” she demanded, aware she was beginning to feel warm all over, whether from the potent Irish whiskey she had so swiftly imbibed or his increasingly audacious manner, she didn’t know. She just knew he expected her to forgive him quickly and to make love now, and she had no intention of doing so.

  Josh paused, a muscle working convulsively in his jaw. “I told you the truth!”

  Careful to stay on the opposite side of the sofa from him, Patience resumed her pacing. “You did that because it was the only way to stop me from asking questions about Alec. If I hadn’t been so curious, you never would have told me. Would you?”

  Josh lifted his broad shoulders in an indolent shrug. To her frustration, he didn’t deny it. “I admit I would have preferred to protect you,” he said, as if keeping her in the dark and breaking her heart in the process were a completely laudable deed.

  “And in the meantime do all my thinking, make all my decisions for me and completely shut me out of the process we call living a life!” Patience snapped back furiously.

  Once again, he was silent, offering no defense except that he had loved her, then and now.

  Drawing a ragged breath, Patience pushed on in a low voice barely above a whisper. “I’m a person, Josh. Alec…whoever you are. Flesh and blood. I have feelings, and a brain, and I want to be treated like the potential partner for life that I am, not just some…some ornamental child who needs your constant guidance and protection.” She wanted him to need her the way she needed him.

  Reaching over the back of the sofa, he grabbed her arm and hauled her toward him. “Do you think I wanted it this way?” Still hanging on to her tenaciously, he circled around the couch and caught her against him, length to length. “Damn it, Patience, I sacrificed my own happiness to protect you.”

  “And mine,” she stormed, struggling unsuccessfully to be free of him. “And you know what hurts the most?” Giving in to her feelings, she pounded on his chest with her fists. “The fact you didn’t even trust me enough to ask me what I wanted in all this. That you just decided for me.” Just as Uncle Max had decided she shouldn’t get married then, when she had wanted to, and that she should get married now, when she hadn’t wanted to. She was so tired of people running her life for her.

  He caught her wrists in a steely grip and kept them motionless against his chest. “I won’t apologize for protecting you,” Josh retorted stonily. “I did what I did to save your life. The mob would not have hesitated to go after you to get to me, Patience,” he pointed out hoarsely.

  “And now? What about now?” Patience demanded as the tears she had been holding back streamed down her face. “Are you in danger now that the thugs who killed your father are in jail?”

  Josh softened his grip on her wrists but did not let her go. “I’ll always be looking over my shoulder, I’ll always be in danger. It’s just a question of how much. As long as I’m Josh Colter, ranch veterinarian, as long as no one else connects me with Alec, I’m probably as safe as I’ll ever be, right here and right now.”

  The thought of him in any kind of danger was enough to make her heart stop. And yet her anger, her hurt, remained at a completely unmanageable level. “So what are you saying?” Patience asked bitterly. “That had you only trusted me enough you could have told me who you were when I arrived at the ranch forty-some hours ago and we knew Max wanted us to be married?”

  She waited for his answer, but it never came.

  Instead, Josh said simply, “Would you have forgiven me if I had?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Dear Patience,

  There’s no denying it! I am unlucky in love. What is a surefire way to change my luck?

  Sincerely,

  Gamblin’ Gal

  Dear Gamblin’ Gal,

  There is no such thing as being unlucky in love or in life. People make their own luck. Get out there and fix whatever’s wrong, then try again.

  Hopin’ You Will Lasso Yourself Some Lovin’,

  Patience

  That, Patience thought, was a hell of a question. “After seventeen long years of second-guessing myself and lamenting all we could have had and lost when you walked out on me, probably not,” she said honestly.

  Josh shrugged. “I rest my case.”

  Patience studied him. “You think I’m being unreasonable, don’t you?”

  Josh’s glance narrowed derisively. “If the shoe fits…”

  “You think I should just accept that you knew best then, just like you know best now, not just for you but for the both of us, and let that be the end of it?” she demanded hotly.

  “Yes. I do.”

  She folded her arms in front of her and regarded him stormily. “Well, I don’t.” Spinning away from him, she started for the front hall.

  Josh was hard on her heels. “Where are you going?”

  Lifting the hem of her robe, Patience took the stairs rapidly. “As far away from you as possible.” Once on the second floor, she stormed into their bedroom. By the time Josh got there, she already had her suitcase open.

  “Wait just a minute.” Josh yanked a handful of filmy lingerie from her fist and tossed it aside.

  Patience gasped in protest as he laid a hand on her shoulder and hauled her back to his side.

  “There is no sense in you losing your inheritance in a fit of temper,” he said grimly.

  “You think that’s all this is, my temper?” Patience wrested herself from his grip, picked up a boot and sent it sailing at his head.

  “Yes.”

  She followed it with another. “Well, once again you are wrong.”

  One minute they were standing apart, the next he was drawing her close.

  He gripped her shoulders loosely. “Don’t you think you should at least think about this first, before you call the whole thing off?”

  Patience wiggled free. “Not in this instance, no.”

  Giving up without warning, he dropped back onto the bed. He sat with his back against the headboard. His feet crossed at the ankle, his hands folded casually on his washboard-flat stomach, he couldn’t have looked more relaxed.

  “You can’t give up on us,” he continued confidently.

  Patience tossed back her head and gave a short, incredulous laugh. The heck she couldn’t. “Why not?” she retorted feistily. “You did.”

  “That,” Josh pointed out sternly, “was different.”

  I’d like to know how, Patience thought furiously as she unbelted her robe. “Right. Then only one of us knew what was really going on. Now both of us do.”

  “I beg to differ with you there, too.” He watched with thinly veiled appreciation as she slipped off her robe and tugged on a red cotton shirt that buttoned up the front. Realizing too late that she had pulled her top on inside out, Patience stripped it off again. “Once again, you are deriding my ability to make decisions.”

  Josh watched as she tugged on her jeans. “When you calm down, and you will calm down, you will see things differently.”

  She grabbed her suitcase, the clothes falling out of it every which way, and hurried down the stairs. “Don’t bet on it.”

  7:41

  “OKAY, SO I COULDN’T LEAVE, so sue me,” Patience told Tweed
les several hours later, after she had sort of slept on the sofa. She stroked her Persian cat behind her ears, watching as Tweedles’s six newborn kittens nursed contentedly at their mama’s side in their basket in the utility room. “I had an obligation to stay and see Trace and Cody get married. Assuming, of course, that their situations have gone better than mine. It would have been wrong of me to leave the Silver Spur before the day is out, knowing, as I do, that their nuptials are going to occur late this afternoon.”

  Footsteps sounded in the adjacent kitchen. Patience tensed as Josh strode in carrying a denim dress shirt, brown tweed sport jacket and tie. “Unfortunately, this is it,” he announced, holding them up for her perusal.

  Patience brought her knees up to her chest and sat back against the washer. Without electricity, the house seemed dead and quiet. With the exception of the occasional purring of the kittens—or snores from Goldie, Josh’s retriever, who was sleeping soundly in the kitchen—there was no other noise. It would get even quieter when Josh left. But she didn’t want to think about that any more than she wanted to think about the clothes he was holding in front of her.

  Aware he wasn’t going to go away unless she said something, Patience retorted calmly, “What do you mean, this is it?” She regarded him with exasperation. “‘It’ what?”

  He hung the shirt, coat and tie on the hook above the washer. “The extent of the formal clothing I own.”

  Patience stayed where she was, curled up into a little ball. “And your point is—?”

  Still lingering in the doorway, he gave her an exasperated glance. “The wedding is in less than eight hours.”

  “So?” Feeling trapped in the small utility room, Patience stood and brushed by him.

  “Have you given any thought to what we’re going to wear?” Josh asked as she marched by, her fists clenched tightly at her sides.

  Patience spun around, unable to help but rise to the bait. “You can’t seriously think I am going to go through with this!”

  Josh shrugged. He came toward her. Before she knew what he was up to, he had trapped her against the counter, one hand braced firmly on either side of her. “It’s what Max wanted. Until you knew who I was,” he emphasized softly, “it was what we both wanted.”

  Patience tried to step past him. To her dismay, he countered by coming even closer, until their bodies brushed seductively from chest to knee. “I never said that.”

  “No. You didn’t.” He stopped her gasp of protest with a hard, firm kiss that swiftly had her quivering from head to toe. He bent his head and nuzzled her neck, leaned against her and held her tightly. “But you showed it to me in a hundred different ways.” He kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, her mouth. “You showed it to me in the way you kissed me and touched me—”

  Patience moaned and turned her head away. She had sworn to herself that she would not give in to him, but her heart was already melting, her body quickening at just the sight and smell and touch of him. “Stop it.” Much more and she really would end up wrapped in his arms once again, making love to him with every fiber of her being.

  He buried his face in her hair and held her close. “The truth painful, is it?”

  Very, Patience thought. Because whether she wanted to admit it or not, it was going to kill her to let him go. Hand on his chest, she shoved until he leaned back. Looking up into the ruggedly handsome contours of his face, she told him what she had already regretfully concluded. “What we have had the past forty hours, twenty-two minutes and—” she glanced at her watch “—twenty-seven seconds was sex, and a little romance, built on dishonesty. Fortunately—” she dragged in a ragged breath, doing her best to control her skyrocketing emotions “—in the last hour or so I have recognized the error of my ways, or maybe I should say your ways—”

  “How about our ways?” he cut in, a facetious twinkle in his gray eyes.

  “—and come to my senses!” Patience concluded, trying hard not to appreciate his warmth and solid male presence.

  He grinned drolly, apparently appreciating the flare of her temper even as he remained loath to let her go. “Well, now we know how you feel,” he teased gently.

  “We certainly do!” Patience fumed as her heartbeat accelerated even more.

  A long moment passed as he regarded her with all the tenderness and understanding of the man he’d been, and the courage and determination of the man he’d become.

  “Isn’t it time we learned how I feel?” he prompted, brushing a light kiss on her forehead.

  Her skin tingling, Patience admitted reluctantly, “I suppose it’s only fair.”

  Hands on her waist, he lifted her onto the kitchen counter. “When I held you in my arms, when I sheathed my body in yours, when we very possibly made a baby, it felt like more than sex to me, it felt like the kind of love that comes only once in a lifetime,” he said huskily.

  Patience had felt that way, too. But she was also confused and hurt, so much so that she didn’t trust herself to think rationally. She pushed him aside and jumped down, very much afraid if she rushed into anything, as Max and Josh both obviously wanted her to, she would make another heartrending mistake. “Well, you’re wrong!” she said agitatedly.

  He stepped back and threw his hands up in the air. “Here we go again.”

  Her attention caught by his scowl of displeasure, Patience stared at him in surprise. “What do you mean by that?” she asked suspiciously.

  He leveled a lecturing finger her way. “I mean this was precisely what was wrong with our relationship the first time! You deciding on a stand—in this case, telling Max we were getting married on Valentine’s Day no matter what anyone else thought or did—and then taking it for both of us.”

  As she studied his face and realized he meant what he said with all his heart, the hurt Patience felt was staggering. “You told me you wanted to get married,” she protested.

  “I did.” His expression gentling, Josh took her in his arms again. His face was inches from hers. “But I would have been just as happy waiting a while longer. You were the one who was in the rush.”

  Patience turned her back to him, knowing everything he had just said was true. “Well, that’s not the case now,” she continued defiantly.

  “And it should be.” Josh came up behind her and wrapped his hands around her waist. He buried his face in her hair and spoke into her ear. “Damn it, Patience, we have the chance to be together again. We have a chance to have a baby together.” Hands on her shoulders, he turned her to face him. “Hell, we may have already made a child together!” he reminded her emotionally, still holding her close. His eyes searched hers. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  Tears stung her eyes as she thought of all that they stood to lose if they didn’t somehow find a way to work this out. “Of course it does.”

  “Then-?”

  Swallowing hard against the ache in her throat, she pressed a hand to her heart. “Don’t you think I want to be reckless, to just say the heck with common sense and do what I want to do at this very moment? But I can’t, Josh,” she said in a low, anguished voice. I can’t risk being hurt like that again. She lifted her brimming eyes to his. “I’m not a crazy kid anymore. I have to act responsibly. And so do you. Getting married now… knowing who you are…what you’ve done in not telling me or taking me with you…Don’t you understand that the way you hurt me and kept on hurting me changes everything?” Which was, she thought wearily, a part of her already jumping to his defense, exactly why he hadn’t told her everything to begin with.

  Josh nodded solemnly. His eyes met hers in a way that made her heart pound. He slipped his hands into her hair and, ever so tenderly, brought her face close to his. “I know you need a little time to figure things out. And I’m willing to give it to you. It’s only right, after all.” His lips touched hers, once, and then again. “So if you want to put off the marriage until you feel you can trust me again, I won’t fight you on it. But I still can’t leave without kissing you j
ust one more time.”

  JOSH KNEW, even as he swept Patience into his arms and carried her up the stairs to the privacy of their bedroom, that he was taking unfair advantage. He couldn’t help it. He had to have her. Had to let her know how he felt and try to change her mind. Now, while the opportunity to do so was still there. He took heart in the fact she made not a sound or gesture of protest but simply waited, her eyes wide with wonder and desire, for him to make his next move.

  He set her gently down on the floor next to the bed, so she was standing once again, wrapped in the warm cradle of his arms. She let out a tremulous breath. “I should have known you were trouble the first moment I laid eyes on you again,” she said, unable to completely suppress a grin as she wreathed both arms around his neck.

  Josh returned her rueful smile with one of his own as he tugged the hem of her shirt from the waistband of her jeans. Clearly, as bleak as the future looked to her at that moment, as angry with him as she still was for not taking her with him into danger, there was a part of her that couldn’t let go. Which meant she did not want their time to end any more than he did. He took solace in that as he unbuttoned her blouse. “Well, you know now. We both do. ‘Cause you’re right,” he drawled softly as he parted the edge of her blouse, revealing first the lacy white camisole and soft white curves of her breasts. “I have changed. And so have you. And we’re just going to have to reconcile ourselves to that.” Just as they were going to have to reconcile themselves to the fact that there would never ever be anyone else for either of them.

  Tears shimmered in her eyes as she reached for the buckle on his belt and the zipper of his jeans. “You’re asking me to forget and forgive?”

  “Just forgive, Patience,” Josh corrected softly, kissing her with the reverence she deserved. “Never, ever forget. Everything that’s happened has made us who we are today. Everything that’s happened has led us to this chance.” And it was a chance he was not going to blow. Not if he could help it.