Wyoming Christmas Ransom

by Nicole Helm

  “Possibly.”

  “Hell. But what’s it all got to do with me?”

  “You knew Paula,” Will said firmly. “You were friendly with her. Maybe you knew, if not who she was having an affair with, someone who might have known something. A mention of someone that seemed off. Something.”

  “That was years ago, man. And only when I was on leave. I don’t know...”

  “It’s a long shot, but if you think of anything, I’d appreciate—”

  “Bent County Sheriff’s Department would appreciate the information,” Laurel finished for Will.

  Ty rubbed a hand over his beard. “I don’t know. But Kayleigh might. Kayleigh Gentry. I don’t know how close they were at the end there, but they were really good friends as kids. The three of us would always get a drink when I was in town.”

  The twisted web of feud nonsense just got more complicated. “Kayleigh is Jesse Carson’s daughter,” Gracie murmured gravely.

  Ty nodded at Gracie. “Yeah.”

  She shared a look with Will. She’d thought any connection to the feud had to be a reach when Will had first suggested it, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  “If I think of anything else I’ll let you know,” Ty said, nodding toward Will.

  “You’ll let me know,” Laurel said firmly.

  Ty flashed a grin and gave her a little shrug. “Guess we’ll see.”

  Laurel grunted and whirled on a heel to leave the stables, Cam, Will and Gracie following. Once they were outside the stables, heading toward their vehicles, Laurel whirled on Will.

  “If he says anything to you, I want your word you’ll immediately share it with the police.”

  “We came here to work with you guys. That’s what we’re going to do.”

  Laurel didn’t exactly seem thrilled with that answer, and Gracie had to admit it filled her with a certain kind of trepidation considering Will hadn’t given his word at all. But Laurel marched for her cruiser, and Gracie followed at the same slow speed Will did.

  “You’re not lying, are you?” Gracie said in a low voice she hoped Laurel couldn’t hear.

  Will gave her an enigmatic look, then simply shrugged.

  * * *

  WILL HAD NO desire to be cooped up at the Delaney Ranch, no matter how comfortable it was, but both Cam and Laurel had insisted they spend the night there. Gracie hadn’t put up a fight, either.

  He wanted to hunt down Kayleigh Gentry, not wait around for Laurel to decide when it was appropriate. Not spend the night in the same house as Gracie’s uncle.

  “I thought we’d be working with them, not be their prisoners,” he grumbled as Gracie showed him to his room.

  Gracie laughed, a pretty, bright sound as she pushed open a door. It seemed every room in this monstrosity of a house was magazine perfect and decorated for Christmas.

  “I probably should have warned you neither Laurel nor Cam are very good at compromise. But you’re in luck.”

  “I am?” He tried to focus on what she was about to say, but there was a very big bed in the middle of the room, and as much as they’d traveled here, there and everywhere all day, he hadn’t been able to put that kiss out of his mind. Every time he looked at her, he could only think to that one perfect moment where he’d felt her mouth under his, where he’d suddenly, glaringly remembered that there were things in the real world that were worth engaging in.

  “I may have a few get-around-Laurel tricks up my sleeve,” she continued, clearly clueless to what he was thinking about.

  She looked so pleased with herself and they were finally really alone for the first time since their drive to Bent and—

  And on the chase for a potential murderer, that she might not believe was the man who owned this house, but Will had some suspicions.

  But she looked so happy, and he’d forgotten that happy could be a thing. For years he’d existed in something else and the more he’d isolated himself, both before and after Paula’s death, the less there’d been any of this. He hadn’t realized he’d missed it till it was here, gorgeous and irresistible right in front of him.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, smoothing an almost shaky hand over her hair.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” She wrinkled her nose. “Usually it’s more like looking through me, but that’s... I...”

  “I never looked through you.” No, she’d always been twin sides of a coin existing in one person. A lightness he’d wanted but had been afraid to look too hard at. “I purposefully ignored you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been in a bad place for a lot of years.”

  “You were getting better, you know,” she interrupted, stepping toward him, always ready to go to bat for him. “Maybe not with the whole going-to-town thing, but your art pieces, getting back into that, was a big step and—”

  “You don’t need to defend me to me, Gracie. You’re right. Something was changing and I tried to shy away from that, too, but you were always there. You’ve been the...” He was crap at words. Always had been. Even knowing she deserved them, he really couldn’t come up with anything.

  So he closed the small distance between them and reached out to touch her cheek. Unlike that kiss from this afternoon that had exploded out of nowhere, he took his time. To feel the soft texture of her cheek, to move closer inch by inch and actually watch the pinkish color rise to her cheeks.

  He let himself forget everything and just exist in this moment. There was something so completely life changing in breathing this in, letting things go, and giving in to everything that Gracie had ever been to him these past few years.

  But before he actually got the chance to sink into all that, someone knocked on the door.

  Gracie squeezed her eyes shut, a soft groan escaping her mouth. “Oh, right.” She stepped away and gave her head a little shake. “Jen. Jen knows Kayleigh and was going to get me her number. So, that’s...”

  “Jen,” he finished for her, finding some amusement in how flustered she seemed. He’d been such a mess for years, flustering anyone felt like a kind of power.

  “Yes. My cousin Jen.”

  “Jeez, how many cousins do you have?”

  “Oh, lots. Lots. Delaneys never leave for long. I should answer the door. I should answer it,” she stuttered.

  “You might want to stop blushing.”

  She opened her mouth, something like outrage threading through her features. “You know you have absolutely no room to poke fun at me, Mr. Hermit.”

  He grinned. “That so?”

  She made a little huffing noise then moved to her tiptoes and in a smooth move she pressed her mouth to his, quick and not nearly enough, before giving him a sassy little look. “That’s so,” she muttered, walking to the door.

  She opened it for yet another Delaney. Will tried not to sigh. It was a strange change in his life to finally want to be done with this. He didn’t want the puzzle anymore. He wanted after the puzzle.

  “So, I got you that phone number,” Jen said, handing Gracie a sheet of paper. Then she turned and smiled at him. “Hi, Will.”

  “Jen.” He vaguely knew her as the woman who ran the Delaney General Store, though he wasn’t sure why he’d never put together she was also Gracie’s cousin. There were just too many people in that damn family to keep track of.

  “How much is Laurel going to hate me for letting you have this?” she asked, smiling at Gracie.

  “Depends on what we get out of it.”

  Jen grinned at that. “Noted. Well, I’ll let you two get to it. I know it’s late, but if you want some dinner, I left some chili in the Crock-Pot for Dad.”

  “Is it just going to be us and him tonight?”

  Jen pulled a face. “Cam will be around, but he’s out front working on some kind of video monitor to put
at the entrance.” Jen rolled her eyes. “You want me to stay and play buffer?”

  “No, no. Don’t go through any trouble on my account.”

  “It’s not any trouble. I can talk spreadsheets and profit margins with Dad and give him the thrill of his Saturday night. I’ll keep him in his office so you don’t have to deal if you want to go eat.” Jen patted her pocket. “I’ve got my phone on me, so text if you need something you don’t want to risk running into Dad for.” She squeezed Gracie’s arm, then gave Will a wink and disappeared out the door.

  Gracie looked down at the paper in her hand. “So, do you want to call her, or should I?”

  Will stared at the paper, too. Thought about Laurel wanting to work together. Thought about all Gracie had done for him these past two years. The fact she was staying here in this place that made her uncomfortable and avoiding her uncle, all for him, when he hadn’t done a thing in two years to deserve it.

  But she’d seen beneath the bitterness and the shell. She’d been the support he’d needed to pull himself out of something dark, and in this moment he didn’t care about the case, about murderers or his broken arm or Paula’s death.

  “I think we should wait.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Wait? Wait for what?” Gracie asked. He was staring at her so intently and she didn’t get it. They had a lead and he wanted to wait? This was not the Will Cooper she knew. Oh. His injuries. “Is your arm bothering you? Did you want some ibuprofen? Maybe some sleep would—”

  “No.”

  He touched her cheek again, just as he had before Jen had knocked. As though he was touching something beautiful and precious and Gracie hadn’t a clue what to do with that. Yes, she’d had an unfortunate crush on Will for most of the past two years so there’d been a certain level of fantasy about him touching her, kissing her.

  But somehow all those silly fantasies didn’t match this. She didn’t have people in her life who looked at her like she was a marvel, who touched her like she was precious. She had protectors in Laurel and Jen and Cam, but no one had ever focused on her exactly like this.

  “Gracie, I want to start living my life.” He said it so earnestly, and still those blue eyes were focused on her. Not through her, not on anything else but her. Will Cooper was staring at her like she was the center of his world.

  It wasn’t about the case, or his dead wife or anything else. That might be why they were here, but that wasn’t why he was talking about his life. She was why he was talking about living. She’d gotten that out of him.

  “I want that, too. For you. You have a lot of life left to live, and I think you’d be good at it if you gave it a shot.”

  He laughed, a low rumble of a chuckle that drifted across her temple. “What on earth from the past two years makes you think I’d be any good at it?”

  She looked up at him, trying to speak past the way his fingers drifting down her neck backed up the breath in her lungs. “You’re good at going after the truth, and you make beautiful things out of metal. You could make beautiful things out of life, you just have to want to.”

  He kissed her then, and she couldn’t understand how it could be softer, sweeter, while still filling her with all the same things she’d felt up on the mountain earlier. Fire and heat and need. There was a sharpness to it all, no matter how gentle he was. The jagged, painful rightness of finding a new beginning in the midst of something bleak and ugly.

  His good arm held her tight against the hard length of his body, and his mouth explored hers with a kind of studied leisure that had warmth pooling through her. Her knees felt weak—her heart felt too big for her chest.

  Though it was gentle to begin with, everything softened second by second. Well, except him. His body seemed harder and harder and more this pillar of stone and strength and she wanted all of that more than she’d ever wanted anything.

  She raked her fingers through his hair. She arched against him, chasing this edgy, desperate need she’d never felt with anyone else. Not like this. It had always been Will. The one man she’d ever wanted to give herself to.

  There was a bed. There was time. She could finally have this thing she wanted and nothing else had to matter. Nothing else. Just for a little while.

  “Gracie?”

  She didn’t know what he was asking, but it didn’t matter. “Yes.”

  Then heat didn’t begin to describe what exploded between them. It was so much more, so much bigger than anything. He kissed her everywhere and she slid her hands under his shirt, taking care to be gentle against his broken arm—the hard cast the only reminder he was even hurt at all.

  His hand slid over her breast, and even through the fabric of her shirt and bra, he found her nipple with his thumb, brushing against it even as he kissed her mouth, with something like hunger.

  “I’d take off your shirt but I’m sadly one-armed these days, so you’re going to have to help me with the whole clothing removal.”

  She had her shirt off in seconds, no matter how her heart jittered. “Now let me help you.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and she moved to stand in between his legs as she carefully peeled the shirt off him without jarring his broken arm.

  She let the shirt fall, standing in between his legs as he looked the short distance up at her small frame. He looked at her like she was a gift or a prize or something wonderful and for one horrible second she was so afraid. Because it didn’t make any sense that anyone could look at her that way.

  “Are you sure... Are you sure I’m not just convenient?” she whispered.

  He laughed, a full-on grin she’d never seen on him as he curled his hand around her hip and drew her even closer. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m not sure anything about you is convenient. Convenient would be spending the rest of my life holed up in a cabin ignoring the world. Convenient would be letting whoever is after me finish the job.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “I’m just saying there isn’t anything about wanting to get back out there that’s easy or convenient, but it’s what I want. You’re what I want. A life with you in it. A real one, too, not one centered on a mystery or the past.”

  “I used to think I should say something, or let you know that I... I mean, I’ve...”

  “You’re attracted to me.”

  She had no idea why that cocky glint to his blue eyes made her feel that much more like Jell-O but it did.

  “God knows why,” he muttered.

  It was that hint of bafflement that soothed some of those nerves, some of that insecurity. “I’m attracted to you and I like you, Will. Because even at your worst, you’re a good man. But you weren’t ready to hear any of those things.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  She cleared her throat, trying to focus on what she wanted to say more than the nerves fluttering around in her stomach. “Are you ready now?”

  “To know you think I’m a good man, no. To try to be that man, yes. To act on this attraction, hell yes. Part of me thinks we should figure everything out first. Who might have tried to hurt us both. It’s such a big, all-encompassing thing. But my life for the past two years has been trying to figure it out. Shutting everyone and everything down until my life was only finding out who did this. We’re so close to something, when I haven’t been close to anything in years.”

  Her hope and giddiness sank a little. “Right.”

  “But you were right back there at the wreckage of my cabin. It’s all life. Finding it out. Exploring this thing with you. You don’t know what kind of time you have. You don’t know what’s going to happen or not, and if you’re not moving forward toward the things you want, you’re likely to never get it.”

  She threaded her fingers through her hair, holding his head at an angle that kept his gaze on hers. “What do you want? I mean specifically out of life?”

  “I’m not
sure quite yet. I like what I do metalworking wise, so more of that. And I like you. I want more of you.” He drew her as close as he could stand to him. “What do you want?”

  She blinked at him, trying to reconcile a million things, most of all that he was asking what she wanted and waiting for an answer.

  “Don’t you know?” he asked, cocking his head.

  “Yes, I know, but you’ve never stopped to wonder what I want before. I’m still getting used to this new you.”

  His mouth quirked—more and more, she was getting that reaction out of him. “Just because I didn’t ask didn’t mean I didn’t wonder. This me isn’t new. It’s just been hidden under a lot of ugly things. You’re the only thing I’ve wanted to crawl out of it for.”

  She sucked in a breath.

  “I’m probably a bad bet,” he murmured.

  She leaned down, smiling. “I’ll take it anyway,” she offered before pressing her mouth to his.

  * * *

  WILL CURSED HIS broken arm. He could deal with not having both hands to peel off her pants. Watching her shimmy out of them, or help him with his, well, no one could complain about that. Naked except for her underwear, she was gorgeous. And even though the pale hue of her skin gave an aura of delicateness to her, the strength of all Gracie was emanated from those dark eyes, all certainty and heat.

  He wanted to be on top of her—he wanted to be able to move. He wanted this moment in time to be the best, most explosive thing she’d ever experienced.

  And he had one functional arm and a million bruises to ignore. He only had one hand to touch her. One hand to use to explore the gorgeous curve of her breast, the soft, sumptuous skin of every part of her. The way her skin was as soft as velvet, but the muscles under all that skin were the truth of her.

  Of course, he also had a mouth. He used both as best he could, until she was panting, saying his name like a prayer. Until he was so hard it hurt and all he could think about was losing himself in everything Gracie had always been to him.

  He managed to sprawl out and maneuver her on top of him, though he had to hide a wince at the tinge of pain that went through his broken arm. “You’re going have to help me out here,” he managed to grind out. But it wasn’t the pain of his arm that had his voice scraping against the sweet, heavy need of the room. It was clawing frustration thinking he couldn’t give her everything she needed.