by Maisey Yates
What it looked like when a man wanted to eat you alive.
But, just as soon as that heat in Wyatt’s eyes had appeared, it cooled.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” Wyatt said, his tone casual.
“I left a message,” Lindy responded.
“I didn’t confirm.” Wyatt leaned against the door frame, the muscles on his forearms shifting as he crossed them over his broad chest.
“I didn’t wait for you to confirm,” Lindy said, breezing past both Olivia and Wyatt and heading into the hall with her box of wine. “This is heavy,” she said, moving toward one of the large picnic-bench-type tables and setting it down in the center. “I brought you wine and cheese.”
“Lucky me,” Wyatt said. “As you can see and have probably guessed, I’m a big fan of having a glass of wine and a delicate cheese in the middle of my day spent shoveling shit.”
Olivia sneaked in past Wyatt and he followed behind.
“Everybody likes wine and cheese, Wyatt.” Lindy straightened, her blond hair flipping back over her shoulder. “It’s what makes shoveling shit bearable.”
The clash between the two of them was almost electric, and Olivia was caught up in it enough that she almost didn’t notice when the door opened again and Luke came walking in. Almost. Because whatever electricity was arcing between Wyatt and Lindy, it was nothing compared to what she felt as soon as she saw Luke.
The breath rushed out of her lungs, and her whole body went tingly.
“Hi,” she said, her voice sounding dangerously girlish.
She was not good at this.
“Good morning,” Luke said, making the decision to cross the space and come close to her, not kissing her, but touching her hand. “How are you today?”
It wasn’t a casual ask. But one laden with meaning. How was she today, specifically, the morning after they’d first slept together.
“Good,” she said, smiling shyly.
She realized then that they had attracted the attention of Wyatt and Lindy, who had stopped sparring long enough to watch their interaction.
Wyatt turned away quick enough, but Lindy kept her eyes on them.
Olivia took a deep breath and set her own box down on the table. “We brought samples. In case you want to stock wine here for the guests. And arrange vineyard tours and things.”
“Sure, sounds good,” Luke said. “Though I probably won’t be here anymore.”
“I know,” Olivia said. “Have you talked to my dad yet?”
“No,” Luke answered, keeping his voice low. “But soon. I will soon.”
“Good.” She took a deep breath. “I’m still going to vouch for your character.”
“I would think at this point you’re well aware that it’s disreputable.”
“That’s kind of what I like about it,” she said.
A slow smile spread across his face. “Are you flirting with me?”
“I might be.”
“Make your sales pitch, ladies,” Wyatt interrupted, looking from Olivia to Lindy. “I have work to do.”
“Shoveling,” Lindy said. “I’m aware. All right, you want a sales pitch, Dodge, a sales pitch you’ll get. I’m willing to give you a deep discount on the wine, the Donnelly brothers are willing to give a large discount on cheese—friends and family discount, seeing as they are now almost family to me, or close enough by marriage. I would also like to arrange for tours. And I know that you have been doing trail riding expeditions. If you’d like to, I’m willing to arrange for rides through the vineyard. That would be a nice thing to put on your website, don’t you think?”
“It would be,” Wyatt answered, “considering wine tourism is a big deal now.”
“Oh, I’m well aware,” Lindy said. “And I’m doing everything in my power to make Grassroots Winery the most successful in the area. Damien was cautious, and he didn’t want to expand. The only PR vision he had was for the rodeo, Wyatt, and wine isn’t a bull. I have a vision for how all this is going to work. We have the tasting room down in Copper Ridge, as well, so that will help direct some business from there to you. We have a long reach. We’re a more established business than Get Out of Dodge is at this point, more synonymous with tourists. Of course, we will return the favor by putting brochures about the ranch in our shop.”
“Sounds like a good deal to me,” Wyatt said, clearly surprising Lindy with his easy acquiescence. “But let me taste what you brought, and get together some figures on pricing and let you know.”
“Good,” Lindy said. “Very good. We’ll be in touch then.”
“I expect we will,” Wyatt said. “See you around.” He tipped his hat and walked out of the mess hall, leaving Olivia and Lindy there with Luke.
“Well, I guess our work here is done.” Lindy looked between Luke and Olivia. “I’ll return her to you later,” she said to Luke.
Olivia blushed. “I’m not his lost sweater. You do not need to return me to him.”
“I would appreciate it,” Luke said, smiling wickedly.
Olivia rolled her eyes. “God save me from alpha males.” She looked at Lindy. “And meddling bosses.”
“Yeah, well,” Lindy said, “this meddling boss is going to wait out in the truck so that you can say goodbye to each other.”
She waved slightly, and then walked out of the mess hall, leaving Olivia alone with Luke, who promptly took the opportunity to pull her into his arms and kissed her so hard it made her dizzy.
When they parted, she sighed happily.
“It feels like I haven’t seen you in forever,” she said, immediately embarrassed to have said that, because it was incredibly revealing if nothing else. Both to her and to him.
“It does,” he agreed, immediately putting her at ease.
“So, you talked to Wyatt about leaving?”
“Yes. And nearly got hit by Bennett, but that’s to be expected. He doesn’t like the idea of me being with you.”
She waited for there to be any kind of thrill over that. For her to feel anything at all. She did, but it was mostly just irritation.
“Too bad for him,” she said.
Luke chuckled and slung his arm around her, kissing her on top of the head. “I expect you have to go back to work,” he said, his tone sounding resigned.
“I do.”
“See you tonight?” he asked.
She wasn’t sure how to answer that. If she spent the night with him too often, her mother was going to notice. It wasn’t like she was ashamed of what was happening with Luke, she just didn’t know if she wanted to offer explanations to her mother right now.
It was different now that it was real. Because it felt fragile and fresh, because it felt personal. Like something she wanted to hold against her chest and examine all on her own without anyone else’s opinion or eyes on it at all.
“If it’s that difficult of a question to answer,” Luke said, “I can wait till it’s easy.”
She shook her head. “No. I’ll come over.”
She was resolute. She was going to have this on her own terms. And while that meant everybody and their mom would know about it, it also meant that she couldn’t do or not do what she wanted just because of what someone else might see or not.
In that, she was determined.
“All right then,” he said, “I’ll see you tonight.”
* * *
LUKE DIDN’T HAVE any experience talking to the father of a girl he was sleeping with. Hell, he hadn’t had entanglements with women that were serious enough for it to ever get there. And that wasn’t the reason he was having a conversation with Olivia’s father, either.
Still, he felt like he was going to ask for her hand in marriage or some kind of old-fashioned nonsense. Instead of going to talk about a business matter. He felt like I took you daughter’s virginity was stamped on his fore
head. Ideally, he would have met with Cole Logan a little later than twenty-four hours after that event, but the man had said he’d see him today, so Luke didn’t want to reschedule the appointment simply because of that kind of discomfort.
Cole Logan was a tall man, age not doing a thing to diminish his presence and his appearance of strength. If anything, he was probably more authoritative now than he had been in his youth, and that only made him look more intimidating.
He invited Luke into the house, and took him back to his home office, which resembled a hunting lodge more than it did an office.
It had natural wood paneling and ducks mounted on the wall, frozen in midflight.
Luke had the strong feeling that he could easily find himself nailed to the wall if the older man ever found out what he had done to his daughter.
He figured it was best not to think about that.
“I hear that you’re interested in the property just outside of town?” Cole said, sitting back and regarding Luke with a critical eye.
“I am,” Luke said. “And I know that you’ve been hanging on to it for a long time out of interest for what happens to it. I understand that you didn’t want there to be any major developments or anything like that made on the property. And I appreciate the way that you’ve worked to preserve the community.”
“Is that so?” Cole laughed. “Luke, I know that Quinn Dodge has a high opinion of you. In fact, after you got in touch with me, I gave him a call and mentioned that you were interested in the place. He told me that there wouldn’t be a harder worker for the land. That’s why I’ve held on to it all this time. It’s part of my family history. I don’t need it, I can’t put it to use. So I don’t want it sitting there forever unused. If I kept on owning it, it would just be for the sake of that. But if I sell it to somebody who doesn’t have a sense for this place, for this town and the county, then I felt like it would lose its integrity. You want to have a ranch on it—is that correct?”
“Yes,” Luke said. “I intend to do a cattle ranch. It’s the work I enjoyed best at Get Out of Dodge. And, now that Wyatt is taking it more in the dude ranch direction again, I’m not as interested. I have money from a...” Luke cleared his throat. “A settlement. I’m more than able to pay a fair price.”
Cole regarded him closely. “I wasn’t worried about that. I figured that you knew your finances.”
“Well, I wanted to make it clear I’m not even waiting for financing. I’m able to pay cash.”
Cole nodded in approval. “That’s a point in your favor.”
“I thought it might be.”
“You’ve lived in Gold Valley for a long time,” Cole said. “And you put a lot of work into Quinn’s place. He said that you work as hard as his own sons on that land, if not harder.”
“Harder,” Luke said, nodding in confirmation. “Just a fact. I haven’t had any other vocation. I’ve poured everything I have, everything I am into that place. But now I want a place that carries my name.”
“Make sense to me,” Cole said.
He named his asking price and Luke agreed to it easily, finding it more than fair for his plans. It struck him, right then, that this had been so much easier than he had imagined. That Cole Logan was willing to give this to him based on his merit. Based on the work he had done on the ranch, work that he was beginning to think had gone unnoticed.
“Now,” Cole said, “a bit of unofficial business. I hear you were out with my daughter the other night.”
He should have figured that was going to come up. He’d thought he might have dodged it.
“That is true,” Luke said, speaking slowly.
“You know she was pretty hung up on Bennett Dodge,” Cole commented.
“Yeah,” Luke said, “I know. She also knows that you talked to Bennett about dating her,” Luke said, wondering if his honesty was a little bit too much, but he had always been honest about the things he chose to talk about, so it was too late for him to change that now. “She wasn’t too happy about that.”
“Things get a little bit frantic when you’re staring down your mortality,” Cole said. “I don’t know if you know, but I had a heart attack, and I was worried about Olivia. Worried that she wouldn’t have anyone to take care of her. You know, my other daughter has gone down a very bad road. And Olivia has always been...responsible. Responsible but sheltered, and sometimes that is scary in its own way. We were hard on her. Strict. More so than we should have been sometimes, I think. And I just don’t want anything to happen to her. So, I made the best decision I could at the time, and when the two of them did start dating it seemed to me that it might all work out.”
“You like him,” Luke commented.
“I do,” Cole said. And then he fixed his brown eyes, very similar in color and determination to his daughter’s, on Luke. “I like Olivia’s happiness more than I like any one person. Just so we’re clear.”
Luke nodded. “Her happiness matters to me, too.”
“As I said before,” Cole said, “Quinn Dodge said you were a good man. Quinn Dodge doesn’t hand out compliments easy. And you have to do a hell of a lot more than smile nice to impress him. I trust that what he says is true.”
“All right then,” Luke said.
“You know what else I like about you?” Cole said. “You’re honest.
Not that the whole thing with Olivia had started out with honesty, but then, the attraction between them sure had. There were no lies between them in the bedroom. None at all. “I aim to be.”
“And you aim to put down roots.”
“I do,” Luke said. “This was the place I always wanted to be. I came to Gold Valley because it seemed like the promised land, and it’s turned out to be that for me. I want to make it permanent.”
“Glad to help with that.”
But as Luke left, he couldn’t help but ponder the fact that all this was a bit convenient for Cole, if he thought that Luke and Olivia might have a future together. To keep her here, to keep her close.
And that was a tricky situation. A minefield. He and Olivia had been pretty honest with each other about the situation, such as it was, but he was afraid that it would ultimately look like he hadn’t been completely honest with her father.
Like he had been manipulating the situation in order to get the land.
He wasn’t sure why he cared. Olivia knew better. Olivia knew that he wanted her, and that the land had come up separately. But he really didn’t want that kind of a rumor circulating around town. That Olivia Logan had compromised herself with Luke Hollister so he could get her father’s land.
Now that he thought about it, he knew that he would be suspicious of himself if he were an observer.
Dammit.
He needed to talk to Olivia. He just needed to make sure that she understood. And that she didn’t need to talk to her father. Yeah, that would be the last thing he needed. Her talking to her father and compounding everything.
It had been one thing when it was fake. But now that there was actually something happening between them...
It was different. It was just a hell of a lot different.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
APPARENTLY, CHOOSING LINGERIE was harder than choosing an outfit the whole world was going to see.
It had always been a whole production to choose an outfit to go out with Bennett, but at least she hadn’t had to worry about what she was wearing underneath her clothes, too.
Now she felt supremely worried about it. Did she need sexier lingerie? Should it match? What cut did Luke prefer?
These were questions that she felt she needed answers to. But she also didn’t want to ask the questions.
Truly, it was concerning.
But she had a few hours to deal with it. At least, that was what she thought. Until there was a knock on her door.
Her mom? Bennett?
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She didn’t really want to deal with either of them.
No, it couldn’t be her mother because her mother had just been texting her from the doctor, while she was waiting for her routine physical, and there was no way that she would be done with that so quickly.
That was a whole thing. Texting her mother while pondering the underwear she was going to wear to seduce her...
What was Luke to her?
He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was...
Her lover. She supposed. Which sounded very mature and worldly. Descriptors she did not tend to apply to herself.
She didn’t want it to be Bennett, either. She didn’t want to have another fight with him. Luke had mentioned that Bennett had been irritated earlier that day. But as difficult as it had been to face him down prior to her sleeping with Luke, it would be almost impossible today.
She crossed her fingers before she jerked the door open.
Luke.
It was Luke. Relief, excitement and just a bit of apprehension wound through her.
Did he expect to have sex in the middle of the day? That seemed indulgent. Like a cinnamon roll. A cinnamon roll that you ate when you weren’t even hungry.
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
She let out a slow breath, trying to dispel the tension in her stomach. “I didn’t expect to see you,” she said.
“I just went and talked to your dad.”
Just like that, any remaining air in her body rushed out, leaving her deflated. “You did?”
“He sold me the land. He’s going to draw up an agreement. He accepted my offer.”
“Luke!” She flung her arms around his neck. “That’s great.”
Then she took a step back, but he grabbed her arm and held her steady, kissed her on the lips. Then he released his hold on her.
“It is,” he said. “He knows that we’re...seeing each other.”
Olivia went warm all over, little pinpricks dotting the back of her neck. “Does he?”
“Well, I should say that he knows we were seen together the other night, and I told him that was true. I just don’t want him getting the wrong idea.”