A little while later after she was gone, I went over to one of the boxes of things I still had to unpack. I knew what I was looking for. There was a smaller box inside where I kept some mementos from when I was younger, and there I found the wallet sized photo of Alex and I that was taken at our prom. We looked so young like heartache had never touched either of us before. Somewhere in my eyes, I could see a hint of something though. I knew that things were going badly and that night was going to be tough. My mother was sick, and there was a sadness in my gaze as I smiled at the camera.
I looked at where my 18-year-old hand rested on his chest and thought about where it hand landed when I had crashed into him just a few hours ago—at exactly the same place. His chest was still as firm and as solid as it had been when he was 18, maybe even more so now. He was broader, and his hair was still black, combed back away from his face. His eyes were a coal gray and his gaze steady and unnerving as he regarded me at that moment, clearly as shocked to see me as I was to see him. And although I had run away, I had to admit there was a part of me that wanted to stay…to stand and look at Alex Killarny for the first time in ten years and get a good look at his gorgeous face, the lines of it, to see how the contours had changed and how the line of his jaw was still the very same as it had been the night of our prom when the stubble there had tickled my stomach as he brought his face between my legs and showed me what an orgasm felt like.
I pressed my thighs together as I thought about what it had been like to be with him back then. We were still very young, and I had been with men since, but none quite like Alex. No one that held me with the tenderness he had. No one that had the kind of command over my body, the way he insisted that I come multiple times before he ever thought about himself. But then when he was inside me, the insistent drive and his insatiable need for me.
I was wet just thinking about it, and I put the photo away, regretting that I had stirred up those long dead feelings, and desperately needing release at the same time. I stripped down and headed to my shower, intent on getting exactly that.
Chapter 3
Alex
I was too stunned to move as quickly as she did and Maddy was out of the hardware store before I made it to the counter. For a moment I simply stood there at the end of the aisle trying to catch my breath and understand what had happened. What the hell was Maddy doing back in town and of all places for her to be…right here in the middle of the hardware store? It was a head scratcher for sure, but I didn’t want to stick around any longer. Seeing her was such a shock to my system that I just wanted to pay for what I had come to the hardware store for and get out of there and back to the ranch.
I could tell from the look on Charlie McCall’s face that he was recalling who Madison Graston and I had once been to one another and was wondering if there was going to be a scene. When she and I had dated during high school, she did a little work on the side for Doc Halloran and was often in the hardware store running errands for the old man. Charlie knew both of us and knew that at one time we had meant something to each other. And now we didn’t.
“Anything else I can help you with there, Alex?” The older man asked politely, raising a brow.
I shook my head and put the can of WD-40 down on the countertop, pulling a few crisp bills from my wallet and waiting for the change. “That’s all I need, thanks.”
He slid a couple of quarters and a dime across the counter, and I pocketed it as I stepped back outside, grateful for the fresh air that seemed to fill my lungs in a way that the air in the store had failed to. Being near her was like losing my breath, and I hated that she had any kind of effect on me. It was ridiculous to think it was anything though. We hadn’t seen each other in ten years so of course running into her unexpectedly would rattle my nerves.
I tried to shake it off as I headed to my truck, glancing up and down the street to see if I could catch a glimpse of her. Wherever she had gone, she was already inside, and I was in no mood to run into her again. I started my truck and made a u-turn in the middle of the street, moving back in the direction of the ranch.
It wasn’t until I was more than halfway back to Killarny Estate that I realized I had forgotten to go to the vet’s office. Oh well, I would just have to leave a note with Pete’s secretary to make a call. Pete never gave her enough to do anyway, and she would be grateful for some more work. Plus it saved me having to turn around and go back into town and risk running into Maddy again.
My jaw was tight, and I could feel my teeth grinding against each other like the stones in a gristmill, some deep anxiety starting to rear its ugly head. I tried to chalk it up to the time, and the distance spent apart, but if I was honest with myself, it was more than that. Seeing her again had reminded me of the way the girl had always made me feel. I wanted to grab her, like the primitive part of my brain was taking over and my animal instincts were overriding any kind of propriety my mom had taught me. I wanted to grab Maddy and pull her close like she had been when she crashed into me in the back of the store. The collision was so unexpected, and I had jumped away like she was something on fire. That’s the way she felt to me—blazing like a bonfire, her red hair, the licking flame that beckoned me to her like a moth.
I shook my head. That was some real shit, and I didn’t have time to start having fantasies about…who? A girl I had fucked a few times in high school. That’s what it had amounted to in the end, hadn’t it? Sure back when we were teenagers, we had talked about getting married, but there was no way in hell that was going to happen. Not after everything that had happened between our fathers. Not after her mother…
But my God, had Madison Graston ever turned out to be so damn gorgeous. God damn fucking beautiful, even dressed like she had stepped right off a farm. It was all I could do not to put my hands around that little waist and pull her hips close to mine and let her know exactly what she did to me, still, after all that time had passed. She looked different than she had in high school in some ways, something about her was softer. She still had the same tight, toned little figure she had when we were young, but in those seconds that I was able to look at her there at McCall’s I could see that her hips had rounded out slightly, her breasts were a little larger, and her eyes were bright and clear. She looked fucking amazing, and even better with her hair all piled up on top of her head, dressed like she had work to do.
What the hell was she doing in an old pair of overalls? Sure, that was the Maddy I had known back in the day, but I doubted that whatever line of work she had ended up in dictated that she wear overalls regularly. And picking up paint? Maybe she was doing something over at her father’s place, but I hadn’t heard of anything of the sort. I’d have to ask Pete if he knew of anything going on over at the Graston place.
Just about that time, I realized I had been daydreaming, thinking too much about my encounter with Maddy, and I almost missed the turn for the ranch. I put my foot on the brake and turned in, continuing down the road to the main house.
I wasted no time when I pulled up in front of the house, hopping out and heading back inside to Pete’s office where I had left him earlier. He was still there, and for all, I knew he was working on the same thing I had left him doing earlier.
“Here’s the receipt for this,” I said as I showed him the can and slid the piece of paper across his desk. “You really don’t have to reimburse me for that stuff.”
Pete shook his head. “Tax purposes. You’ll thank me in the end.” He looked up at me, and his expression changed. “You okay?”
I shook my head and sat down in the chair across from his desk in a heap.
“Hell no, I’m not. I just saw Madison Graston at McCall’s Hardware. Jesus, Pete. I haven’t seen the girl in ten years, and there she is, practically on our doorstep. I ran right into her…literally, right smack dab into her.”
“As I recall, that was a regular occurrence for the two of you back in the day.”
I shot him a look. “Go to hell. I just don’t have a clue what
she’s doing back in town. I never thought I’d see her again.”
Pete shrugged absently. “Well, her dad does just live a few miles away. It’s a wonder you haven’t seen her at all. I’m sure she’s home around the holidays.”
I was certain she was as well. There had been plenty of times that I had seen a car I didn’t recognize parked at the Graston place and I had assumed it was either her or her sister there, but I hadn’t dared to get close enough to find out. As far as I was concerned the girl was a chapter in my life that was completely closed. She had made the decision long ago.
“So, did the two of you make up or did you run away with your tail tucked between your legs?”
“She was out of there before I got a chance to say anything,” I said.
“Not that you were going to say anything, right?”
I shrugged my shoulders and looked down at my hands, dirty from working in the barn that morning. “Never have been much of a talker. And it seems like a waste of breath to try to make up with her. It was a long time ago, and it wasn’t anything that I did.”
Pete drew in a deep breath. He knew well enough what it was like to draw the ire of a woman because of something our father was involved with, although I had to think that in my situation it was a little more severe. The man had taken almost everything that Maddy’s father owned and left the man nearly destitute, forcing him to rent land from us if he wanted to continue using it for his cattle.
“Is there anything we could do about that?” I asked out of the blue. My father wasn’t around, and Pete had much more of a heart than the old man did. If Pete was making the decisions and there was something that could be done to restore George Graston to what he once was then Pete would be the one to make it happen.
He shook his head solemnly. “I’d have to talk to the attorney. I think it’s pretty tied up. If I recall, Dad has it pretty secured and bound to some other land in his will. I think it would require his permission to do anything with it and you know that there’s no way that’s ever going to happen.”
I did know. Our father had dug the heels of his boots into the ground on this matter a decade ago and as far as I knew they were still firmly planted.
“Okay, well. I got a little distracted in town and failed to stop by the vet’s office. Which is a damn shame because in this state I’m sure I would have made a fine impression on whoever the new lady is.”
Pete chuckled. “Maybe you should ask her out on a date.”
I rolled my eyes. “You think you could have your secretary call in tomorrow and give the vet the count I have of the mares that need to be checked? I just want whoever it is to be prepared for the numbers we have this year.”
My older brother nodded, and I wrote down the count for him.
“So what are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“About Madison Graston being in town. You two were practically engaged the last time you saw her. You aren’t going to talk about it?”
I shook my head. “Water under the bridge. And for all I know, she’s just here for a few days to help her dad with something. It’s not as if she moved back into town. That wouldn’t be like her. She was always more suited to city life. I didn’t really think the country had much to offer her.”
“You never know. People change.”
I got up and left Pete’s office, needing a breath of fresh air again. Being inside, cooped up in the house was too much for me right now. I hated that a thirty-second run-in with a girl I had dated in high school was getting to me in this way. What I wanted was to go back to the way things were before, forgetting that Maddy even existed. I had gone such a long time without even thinking her name. Not that it didn’t pop into my mind every once in a while. I thought about her every time I went to the cemetery to put new flowers on my mother’s grave. Her mother’s headstone was within my line of sight, and I always walked over to see how fresh the flowers were. I knew that her father sometimes came by and placed a bunch of the roses that grew around their place in the spring. I had seen him there a few times doing just that. The man never paid me any mind, not since everything that had happened between him and my father. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting anything to do with us. In fact, so used was I to being shunned by George Graston, that seeing Maddy and having her speak to me was shocking in itself.
I could apologize for what my father had done, but there was nothing I could do to take back the impact his actions had on their family. And if that meant never speaking to Maddy again, well…I had gone this long, and I could go longer.
I walked along the road down to the barn to check on a few of the horses that looked like they might need some attention paid to their hooves, but all along the way my thoughts stayed on Maddy, and I wondered why she was back in town.
A part of her must have still been a little bit of the girl I had known, but it was clear she had matured into a woman. And no matter what I thought about her or her family or any chance I had of speaking to her again, I couldn’t help but think how much I wanted her. Maddy had been my first back when we were teenagers. God, to think how dumb and impulsive I had been then, and how patient she must have been with me in retrospect. I laughed a little at that thought, knowing I had learned a little along the way and that my level of experience had certainly gone up since the last time I was with her, and I wished that somehow I could get the chance to show her that.
She was so fucking beautiful, and nothing about that had changed. I remembered the way her body looked in the moonlight the first time we were together, in the most country kid way possible like something out of a song—in the bed of my truck. It was the only privacy we could find, outside of sneaking out to the barn and I had a little more class than that. Maddy was a stunner, and she was going to go places. Neither of us were truly country kids at heart, at least not in the redneck way like so many of our peers were. I had wanted to give her so much more, but as a kid not even out of high school there wasn’t much I could manage.
But now that I was out on my own, with a place and good, solid work—plus the aforementioned added experience thanks to my exploits with a few of the older women around town—I felt pretty confident that at the very least I could offer Madison Graston a good time if she wanted it.
Avoidance was probably my best bet if I was going, to be honest with myself about the situation. Maddy didn’t want anything to do with me, and I could tell that from the speed at which she had exited the hardware store. But maybe for old times sake, she would like to have a little fun. I stuck that idea in my back pocket, thinking I might look up her best friend Lorna who still lived in town. Lorna’s boyfriend played pool down at the roadhouse fairly regularly, and that might be the place to go if I wanted to try to catch a glimpse of Maddy again while she was in town. A couple of drinks together and some reminiscing and I might be able to talk her into reliving some of our glory days. I had upgraded to a bigger, better truck and there was nothing I would enjoy more than getting all grown up Maddy Graston into the cab of that thing, spreading her out and breathing in the delicious scent of her again, my hands splayed in her curly red hair, kissing that statuesque white neck of hers and getting her to scream.
I remembered what it had been like to be with her when we were younger and wondered how it would be the same—or possibly new and different—now that we were older.
Being so close to her again was like standing next to a lit campfire. There was something blazing in me I had almost forgotten, and the thought that Madison still had that kind of power was irritating and beguiling.
She had always been a noisy one, and so the back pasture had worked best for us. She wasn’t your typical country girl though, and I felt pretty bad taking her out there like that, but she wanted it just as badly as I did. We were two combustible materials and when you got us together back then—bam. Off we went. I had tried to make the situation as comfortable as possible, not wanting her to be completely put off by the idea of having sex in the bed of
a truck, but there was only so much a teenage boy could do. My mother eventually realized why I was stockpiling quilts. Instead of chastising me though she gave me a talk about responsibility and safety and that was that. It wasn’t the sort of thing Sean Killarny stuck his oar in about.
I thought about how grateful I was that my mother had been around because goodness knew exactly how my brothers and I would have turned out without her. Probably ‘perfectly heathen’ as my grandmother used to say. But I didn’t really want to let my thoughts dwell on my mother at the moment.
Maddy was back. The girl that I had loved as a teenager. The woman I wanted now. No matter how much she might try to deny it, I knew that deep down she still wanted me, too.
Our last time together had been good, great even. I didn’t like to think about the argument that had followed, but instead my hands squeezing her breasts, rubbing her nipples into hardened points and hearing her mewling cries as I probed her gently with my tongue. I could still remember the taste of her and the way she shuddered and screamed as I sucked her clit, begging me not to stop. I had licked her cleaned before sliding inside her, moving slow and gentle with her at first. That wasn’t what I wanted now though. I wanted, hard and fast, filling her up and then doing it all over again.
God, that had been an amazing night. It had been a forgone conclusion that the two of us would end up together, married and with children as soon as we were done with college. But neither of us had been the type to stick around and live that small town life. And now…look at where we stood. Right back here with her in Ashland and me working on the ranch.
I was hard just thinking about her and the possibilities there. The reality of the matter was that she probably didn’t want to be in the same room with me, but I knew enough about myself and was pretty confident that if I could get her in the same room and under just the right circumstances, that I could make sure she never wanted to leave again.
Alex (Killarny Brothers Book 2) Page 3