by Maisey Yates
“My father left when I was five,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, blinking, clearly shocked. “I’m sorry.”
“It was the best thing that had happened to me in all five years of my life, Hayley. The very best thing. He was a violent bastard. He hit my mother. He hit me. The day he left... I was a kid, but I knew even then that life was going to be better. I was right. When I was seven, my mom had another kid. And she was the best thing. So cute. Tiny and loud as hell, but my mother wasn’t all that interested in me, and my new sister was. Plus she gave me, I don’t know...a feeling of importance. I had someone to look after, and that mattered. Made me feel like maybe I mattered.”
“Rebecca,” Hayley said.
“Yeah,” he replied. “Then, when Rebecca was a teenager, she was badly injured in a car accident. Needed a lot of surgeries, skin grafts. All of it was paid for by the family responsible for the accident, in exchange for keeping everything quiet. Of course, it’s kind of an open secret now that Gage West was the one who caused the accident.”
Hayley blinked. “Gage. Isn’t she... Aren’t they... Engaged?”
Familiar irritation surged through him. “For now. We’ll see how long that lasts. I don’t have a very high opinion of that family.”
“Well, you know my brother is married into that family.”
He shrugged. “All right, maybe I’ll rephrase that. I don’t have anything against Colton, or Sierra, or Maddy. But I don’t trust Gage or his father one bit. I certainly don’t trust him with my sister, any more now than I did then. But if things fall apart, if he ends up breaking off the engagement, or leaves her ten years into the marriage... I’ll have a place for her. I’ve always got a place for her.”
Hayley frowned. “That’s a very cynical take. If Rebecca can love the man who caused her accident, there must be something pretty exceptional about him.”
“More likely, my sister doesn’t really know what love looks like,” he said, his voice hard, the words giving voice to the thing he feared most. “I have to backtrack a little. A few months after the accident, my mom took the cash payout Nathan West gave her and took off. Left me with Rebecca. Left Rebecca without a mother, when she needed her mother the most. My mom just couldn’t handle it. So I had to. And I was a piss-poor replacement for parents. An older brother with a crappy construction job and not a lot of patience.” He shook his head. “Every damn person in my life who was supposed to be there for me bailed. Everyone who was supposed to be there for Rebecca.”
“And now you’re mad at her, too. For not doing what you thought she should.”
Guilt stabbed him right in the chest. Yeah, he was angry at his sister. And he felt like he had no damn right to be angry. Shouldn’t she be allowed to be happy? Hadn’t that been the entire point of taking care of her for all those years? So she could get out from under the cloud of their family?
So she’d done it. In a huge, spectacular way. She’d ended up with the man she’d been bitter about for years. She had let go of the past. She had embraced it, and in a pretty damned literal way.
But Jonathan couldn’t. He didn’t trust in sudden changes of heart or professions of love. He didn’t trust much of anything.
“I’ll be mad if she gets hurt,” he said finally. “But that’s my default. I assume it’s going to end badly because I’ve only ever seen these things end badly. I worked my ass off to keep the two of us off the streets. To make sure we had a roof over our heads, as much food in our stomachs as I could manage. I protected her.” He shook his head. “And there’s no protecting somebody if you aren’t always looking out for what might go wrong. For what might hurt them.”
“I guess I can’t blame you for not trusting the good in people. You haven’t seen it very many times.”
He snorted. “Understatement of the century.” He straightened, undoing the girth and taking the saddle off the bay in a fluid movement, then draping it over the fence. “But my cynicism has served me just fine. Look at where I am now. I started out in a single-wide trailer, and I spent years working just to keep that much. I didn’t advance to this place by letting down my guard, by stopping for even one minute.” He shook his head again. “I probably owe my father a thank-you note. My mother, too, come to that. They taught me that I couldn’t trust anyone but myself. And so far that lesson’s served me pretty well.”
Hayley was looking at him like she was sad for him, and he wanted to tell her to stop it. Contempt, disgust and distrust were what he was used to getting from people. And he had come to revel in that reaction, to draw strength from it.
Pity had been in short supply. And if it was ever tossed in his general direction, it was mostly directed at Rebecca. He wasn’t comfortable receiving it himself.
“Don’t look at me like I’m a sad puppy,” he said.
“I’m not,” she returned.
He untied the horse and began to walk back into the barn. “You are. I didn’t ask for your pity.” He unhooked the lead rope and urged the gelding into his stall. “Don’t go feeling things for me, Hayley. I don’t deserve it. In fact, what you should have done this morning was walked out and slapped me in the face, not given me a cup of coffee.”
“Why?”
“Because I took advantage of you last night. And you should be upset about that.”
She frowned. “I should be?” She blinked. “I’m not. I thought about it. And I’m not.”
“I don’t know what you’re imagining this is. I don’t know what you think might happen next...”
She jumped down from the fence and set her coffee cup on the ground. Then she took one quick step forward. She hooked an arm around his neck and pushed herself onto her tiptoes, pressing her lips to his.
He was too stunned to react. But only for a moment. He wrapped an arm around her waist, pressing his forefinger beneath her chin and urging the kiss deeper.
She didn’t have a lot of skill. That had been apparent the first and second times they’d kissed. And when they had come together last night. But he didn’t need skill, he just needed her.
Even though it was wrong, he consumed her, sated his hunger on her mouth.
She whimpered, a sweet little sound that only fueled the driving hunger roaring in his gut. He grabbed her hair, tilting her head back farther, abandoning her mouth to scrape his teeth over her chin and down her neck, where he kissed her again, deep and hard.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling like this before. Couldn’t remember ever wanting a woman so much it was beyond the need for air. Sure, he liked sex. He was a man, after all. But the need had never been this specific. Had never been for one woman in particular.
But what he was feeling wasn’t about sex, or about lust or desire. It was about her. About Hayley. The sweet little sounds she made when he kissed the tender skin on her neck, when he licked his way back up to her lips. The way she trembled with her need for him. The way she had felt last night, soft and slick and made only for him.
This was beyond anything he had ever experienced before. And he was a man who had experienced a hell of a lot.
That’s what it was, he thought dimly as he scraped his teeth along her lower lip. And that said awful things about him, but then so did a lot of choices in his life.
He had conducted business with hard, ruthless precision, and he had kept his personal life free of any kind of connection beyond Rebecca—who he was loyal to above anyone else.
So maybe that was the problem. Now that he’d arrived at this place in life, he was collecting those things he had always denied himself. The comfortable home, the expansive mountains and a sweet woman.
Maybe this was some kind of latent urge. He had the homestead, now he wanted to put a woman in it.
He shook off that thought and all the rest. He didn’t want to think right now. He just wanted to feel. Wanted to embrace the heat firing through his vei
ns, the need stoking the flame low in his gut, which burned even more with each pass of her tongue against his.
She pulled away from him, breathing hard, her pupils dilated, her lips swollen and rounded into a perfect O. “That,” she said, breathlessly, “was what I was thinking might happen next. And that we might... Take me back to bed, please.”
“I can’t think of a single reason to refuse,” he said—a lie, as a litany of reasons cycled through his mind.
But he wasn’t going to listen to them. He was going to take her, for as long as she was on offer. And when it ended, he could only hope he hadn’t damaged her too much. Could only hope he hadn’t broken her beyond repair.
Because there were a couple things he knew for sure. It would end; everything always did. And he would be the one who destroyed it.
He just hoped he didn’t destroy her, too.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS LATE in the afternoon when Hayley and Jonathan finally got back out of bed. Hayley felt... Well, she didn’t know quite what she felt. Good. Satisfied. Jonathan was... Well, if she’d ever had insecurities about whether or not she might be desirable to a man, he had done away with those completely. He had also taught her things about herself—about pleasure, about her own body—that she’d never in her wildest dreams conceived of.
She didn’t know what would happen next, though. She had fallen asleep after their last time together, and when she’d awoken he was gone again. This morning, she had looked for him. She wasn’t sure if she should do that twice.
Still, before she could even allow herself to ponder making the decision, she got out of bed, grabbed his T-shirt from the floor and pulled it over her head. Then she padded down the hallway, hoping he didn’t have any surprise visitors. That would be a nightmare. Getting caught wearing only a T-shirt in her boss’s hallway. There would be a lot of questions about what they had just spent the last few hours doing, that was for sure.
She wondered if Jonathan might be outside again, but she decided to check his office first. And was rewarded when she saw him sitting at the computer, his head lowered over the keyboard, some of his dark hair falling over his face after coming loose from the braid he normally kept it in.
Her heart clenched painfully, and it disturbed her that her heart was the first part of her body to tighten. The rest of her followed shortly thereafter, but she really wished her reaction was more about her body than her feelings. She couldn’t afford to have feelings for him. She wasn’t staying in Copper Ridge. And even if she were, he wouldn’t want her long-term, anyway.
She took a deep breath, trying to dispel the strange, constricted feeling that had overtaken her lungs. “I thought I might find you here,” she said.
He looked up, his expression betraying absolutely no surprise. He sneaked up on her all the time, but of course, as always, Jonathan was unflappable. “I just had a few schematics to check over.” He pushed the chair away from the desk and stood, reaching over his head to stretch.
She was held captive by the sight of him. Even fully dressed, he was a beautiful thing.
His shoulders and chest were broad and muscular, his waist trim. His face like sculpted rock, or hardened bronze, uncompromising. But she knew the secret way to make those lips soften. Only for her.
No, not only for you. He does this all the time. They are just softening for you right now.
It was good for her to remember that.
“I’m finished now,” he said, treating her to a smile that made her feel like melting ice cream on a hot day.
“Good,” she said, not quite sure why she said it, because it wasn’t like they had made plans. She wondered when he would ask her to leave. Or maybe he wanted her to leave, but didn’t want to tell her. “It’s late,” she said. “I could go.”
“Do you need to go?”
“No,” she said, a little too quickly.
“Then don’t.”
Relief washed over her, and she did her best not to show him just how pleased she was by that statement. “Okay,” she said, “then I won’t go.”
“I was thinking. About your list.”
She blinked. “My list?”
“Yeah, your list. You had dancing on there. Pretty sure you had a kiss. And whether or not it was on the list...you did lose your virginity. Since I helped you with those items, I figured I might help you with some of the others.”
A deep sense of pleasure and something that felt a lot like delight washed through her. “Really?”
“Yes,” he said, “really. I figure we started all of this, so we might as well keep going.”
“I don’t have an official list.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous. If you’re going to do this thing, you have to do it right.” He grabbed a sheet of paper out of the printer and settled back down in the office chair. “Let’s make a list.”
He picked up a pen and started writing.
“What are you doing? I didn’t tell you what I wanted yet.”
“I’m writing down what we already did so you have the satisfaction of checking those off.”
Her stomach turned over. “Don’t write down all of it.”
“Oh,” he said, “I am. All of it. In detail.”
“No!” She crossed the space between them and stood behind him, wrapping her arms around his broad shoulders as if she might restrain him. He kept on writing. She peered around his head, then slapped the pen out of his hand when she saw him writing a very dirty word. “Stop it. If anybody finds that list I could be...incriminated.”
He laughed and swiveled the chair to the side. He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her onto his lap. “Oh no. We would hate for you to be incriminated. But on the other hand, the world would know you spent the afternoon with a very firm grip on my—”
“No!”
He looked at her and defiantly put a checkmark by what he had just written. She huffed, but settled into his hold. She liked this too much. Him smiling, him holding her when they had clothes on as if he just wanted to hold her.
It was nice to have him want her in bed. Very nice. But this was something else, and it was nice, too.
“Okay, so we have dancing, kissing, sex, and all of the many achievements beneath the sex,” he said, ignoring her small noises of protest. “So what else?”
“I want to go to a place where I need a passport,” she said.
“We could drive to Canada.”
She laughed. “I was thinking more like Europe. But... Could we really drive to Canada?”
“Well,” he said, “maybe not today, since I have to be back here by Monday.”
“That’s fine. I was thinking more Paris than Vancouver.”
“Hey, they speak French in Canada.”
“Just write it down,” she said, poking his shoulder.
“Fine. What next?”
“I feel like I should try alcohol,” she said slowly. “Just so I know.”
“Fair enough.” He wrote get hammered.
“That is not what I said.”
“Sorry. I got so excited about the idea of getting you drunk. Lowering your inhibitions.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m already more uninhibited with you than I’ve ever been with anyone else.” It was true, she realized, as soon as she said it. She was more herself with Jonathan than she had ever been with anyone, including her family, who had known her for her entire life.
Maybe it was the fact that, in a town full of people who were familiar with her, at least by reputation, he was someone she hadn’t known at all until a couple weeks ago.
Maybe it was the fact that he had no expectations of her beyond what they’d shared. Whatever the case, around him she felt none of the pressure that she felt around other people in the community.
No need to censor herself, or hide; no need to be respectable
or serene when she felt like being disreputable and wild.
“I want to kiss in the rain,” she said.
“Given weather patterns,” he said slowly, “we should be able to accomplish that, too.”
She was ridiculously pleased he wanted to be a part of that, pleased that he hadn’t said anything about her finding a guy to kiss in the rain in Paris. She shouldn’t be happy he was assuming he would be the person to help her fulfill these things. She should be annoyed. She should feel like he was inserting himself into her independence, but she didn’t. Mostly because he made her independence seem...well, like more.
“You’re very useful, aren’t you?”
He looked at her, putting his hand on her cheek, his dark gaze serious as it met hers. “I’m glad I can be useful to you.”
She felt him getting hard beneath her backside, and that pleased her, too. “Parts of you are very useful,” she said, reaching behind her and slowly stroking his length.
The light in his eyes changed, turning much more intense. “Hayley Thompson,” he said, “I would say that’s shocking behavior.”
“I would say you’re responsible, Jonathan Bear.”
He shook his head. “No, princess, you’re responsible for this. For all of this. This is you. It’s what you want, right? The things on your list that you don’t even want to write down. It’s part of you. You don’t get to blame it all on me.”
She felt strangely empowered by his words. By the idea that this was her, and not just him leading her somewhere.
“That’s very... Well, that’s very... I like it.” She furthered her exploration of him, increasing the pressure of her touch. “At least, I like it with you.”
“I’m not complaining.”
“That’s good,” she said softly, continuing to stroke him through the fabric of his pants.
She looked down, watched herself touching him. It was...well, now that she had started, she didn’t want to stop.
“I would be careful if I were you,” he said, his tone laced with warning, “because you’re about to start something, and it’s very likely you need to take a break from all that.”