I had to focus because every time I thought of that man, I replayed the wedding episode in my head over and over and I couldn’t think straight. His rough hands on my body, inside me, were exquisite. The heat from his body at the wedding and the parking lot, left me with a longing so grand I didn’t know how to fill the gap. Being with him at dinner and getting to know the twins and Ryan, made me giddy inside. Did you do that for someone you simply wanted to sleep with? I didn’t think so but I was no expert in relationships, either intimate or familial.
I looked in the Lone Star Community Pages for Ryan’s address and wrote that down under his name. Water rights. What did I know about them? I jotted down the few things I thought I knew about them, which wasn’t much. Ryan owned rights to use the ground water which was part of his property. That meant no one else had claim to them. Or maybe a pond he had on the land. I knew there wasn’t a river because the river ran through town east and west and his property was just north of the railroad tracks. I’d never been on his property so I didn’t rule out the fact that there may be some kind of water source besides water underground.
I jotted down a few questions I wanted to ask him when my telephone rang. Setting down my pen I glanced at the clock on the wall, nearly nine, and frowned at who would be calling me at this hour.
“Hello?”
“Miranda.”
He said my name as a statement, not really a question, drawing out the ending, sending shivers down my spine and goose bumps along my arms.
“Ryan. What can I help you with?”
He chuckled into the receiver and my heart fluttered.
“What are you doing? You weren’t sleeping were you?”
“I’m twenty-eight, not fifty-eight. I was making some notes. What are you doing?”
He laughed again, “Thinking about what you wear to bed.”
“No you aren’t. You didn’t want to do this, remember?”
“Correction. I have always wanted to do this,” his voice hissed out the word this. “But you and I together aren’t a good idea. For many reasons.”
Was he actually going to tell me what those reasons were?
“Like what?”
He let out a breath, “Like, I’ve worked hard to get where I’m at and a lot of people in this town do not forgive and forget easily.”
He was referring to me on that last part. The town didn’t forgive and forget that a mere ten or twelve years ago I wasn’t that great of person. With his parents’ death, he’s had to become his parents in a sense and that had probably been difficult to do when you were just a young adult. Two little kids and a huge farm for a young person would be the most difficult thing to deal with. I couldn’t imagine. With this town, he’d become part of the In Crowd. The town loved him and disliked me. When his parents died, he had family and townsfolk to help him, whereas most of them wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole.
“No they don’t, do they? There isn’t anything I can do about that. I’ve changed. I’m not that same girl I was before.”
“I know that, but other people don’t. Look, I was calling to give you the name of the corporation I received the letter from. You got a pen handy?”
I wanted this conversation to continue but I could tell it was getting too personal for his liking. I glanced at my stack of colored pens and my open notepad with his name centered on the page. My amateur drawing of hearts and stars decorated around it.
“I have a pen. Go ahead.”
“It’s from High Plains Corporation.”
I wrote it down as he answered what I was going to ask next.
“No individual name. Nothing. Just a number to call with any questions.”
“What’s the number?”
He told it to me and I jotted the information down. “Have you tried calling?”
“Of course. Seems like a legitimate group. They claim to specialize in buying, selling and trading water rights. They almost act like the EPA: they buy it, test it, see what they can do to make it better. Their slogan is “Let us help you help make the world a better place.” Once they determine how the water is performing or what, if anything they can do to make it better, I guess they put it up to good standards and resell the rights to…whomever.”
“I had no idea a company like this existed. Did you?”
“No. I don’t even know anything about water rights or testing. They sounded legit but call me skeptical; what would anyone have to gain by doing a job like this? They must buy low, clean it up and sell high?”
“Maybe. Maybe they are the “green is clean” type of group and are just doing their good deed to society. I’ll start looking into it. What kind of water do you have exactly that they’re after? I have to be honest, I know nothing about water or water rights.”
“Truthfully, me either. I know a little but I have a well and a pond, but that’s not what they want.”
I closed my eyes allowing the tip of my pen to run ink onto my next line, “You’ve lost me, Ryan. I thought the letter specifies that they want your water rights?”
“They do. From a hell of a lot of generations of family and most recently, my parents, I own a thousand shares of some water stock. It’s worth a fair amount of money.”
Chapter Eight
Ryan
It’s strange and somewhat ironic how well Miranda and I got along and could discuss things. For never having a real conversation before the finger-fucking incident, we were pretty on-target with our thoughts. All the more reason I knew how good we’d be together. In bed, of course. Because it couldn’t be anything more.
“That’s an awful lot of shares. Why are you trusting me with this? So you can tell yourself you have a reason that you’re allowing yourself to fuck me?”
“Miranda, Miranda,” I ignored all of her questions, “Anything else you’d like to know before I let you go?”
I wanted to tell her I would be over there the second she beckoned me, giving her, and me, the one night of sinful sex I fucking needed. She better not think we’re sleeping at all that night we have together either. I plan to sink into her and stay there until the wee hours of the morning. Tasting and savoring every last drop of Miranda Phillips.
“Can you bring me the document so I can make a copy?”
“Sure. The kids have different things going on tomorrow after school and into the evening. I can stop by then.”
“Do you know where I live?”
Her voice was calm but I knew she had a storm brewing at the surface. She was passionate as hell and I couldn’t wait to have her. For one night, I reminded myself.
“The whole town knows. Goldie’s place.”
“I’ll be here anytime after four. What-”
She stopped and I knew she was going to ask about us. What this meant for us, when I would have the opportunity to meet, etcetera.
“Let’s talk tomorrow. We can figure everything out.”
“Okay.”
“See you tomorrow, Miranda.”
I hung up the phone. How could one woman create such a firestorm inside of me? Three months ago my life was…okay. I haven’t had sex in over six months, not even a blow job and after I’d run into her at the wedding, I’d regretted not letting her return the favor ever since. Aside from the absence of sex, my life had been full of work and the twins. Which it always had been but there had been no endless thoughts of a woman, no fantasies or desires I couldn’t stop myself from having – my mind had been quiet.
Since the night of that wedding, Miranda had taken up a permanent spot in my brain. No surprise. I was constantly thinking about how I wanted to sink deep inside her and feel her tighten around my cock as she rode me to the ends of the Earth. I shook the thoughts out of my head. Here I sat in my kitchen on the oldest piece of furniture I owned with a raging fucking hard-on and all I could think about was getting off. She did this to me.
When I received the letter in the mail, there was no doubt that she was the right person to call. There was this unspok
en bond between us and I knew she would keep this information on the down low and research it quietly. I could trust her and I knew she felt the same way about me.
If I were completely honest with myself, asking her to help me in exchange for one night of great sex, was the excuse I needed to allow myself to be okay with being with her. Just like she had said. And I was too much of a coward to admit it. When my parents died I was twenty-five, I had moved back home from college a few years prior and had worked with my dad’s brother at his auto body shop. Not working on cars but managing the books. Just before I turned twenty-six, my parents were killed driving home from the city. They’d spent the entire day there shopping; it had started pouring rain on their way home and a semi-truck had hit them head-on. Not wearing their seat belts, both had been killed instantly.
My aunt and uncle were too old for the twins to live with them. I couldn’t allow that. It wouldn’t have been fair to Brianna and Alex or Uncle Don and Aunt Stacy. They’d never had children of their own and I knew it wouldn’t be right to have my brother and sister move in with someone other than me. Once everything got straightened out with the courts, we’d inherited everything my parents had – including all of these water shares – and I moved onto the farm with the kids.
I grew up on the farm and I knew how it worked. There had been a bunch of shit I couldn’t remember and a bunch more shit I remembered, thus bringing back my memory on why I didn’t want to work a farm like my dad, but because of their untimely death and the young ages of Bri and Alex, I couldn’t let them down.
I held the letter from High Plains in my hand; the edges had begun to wilt, evidence that I’d continued to reread the document over and over. For about the thirtieth time since I picked it out of our mailbox, I reread it once again. The water stocks had been in my family since 1876. I don’t know all the details but the water shares were good for all the irrigation ditches and land that had been in the family at that point in time. All of the water run-off from the mountains was what farmers used for irrigation and you only got so much. Owning the section of land that I did, water was my only hope of survival to produce crops.
Sure, I could sell it at any time, in whole or in parts but how could I sell something my parents clearly had no intention of selling themselves? The private note they owed on the farm could have been paid off with a small fraction of these stock certificates any day of the week. But they’d held onto them, paying their mortgage every month and I simply wanted to follow their unspoken wishes. Until and only if I felt it necessary would I trust Miranda and tell her the actual value of these shares. Three million total. Roughly. As it were, I didn’t feel comfortable exposing such an intimate detail with the reporter of Lone Star, be that in a personal or professional capacity.
Of course with my mom working at the elementary school part-time, they had been able to make ends meet for them. I, on the other hand, struggled. I paid Cora Andrews the monthly mortgage. It was due each month by the fifth. I paid it on time…mostly. There have been a few times I was late but she never charged me a late fee and I tried my damnedest to be on time.
“Hey Ryan?”
Brianna’s voice carried me out of my thoughts. Her brown hair was braided, resting on her shoulder and she wore white pajamas with little bunnies plastered all over the tops and bottoms. She stood close enough that I could smell her minty toothpaste.
“Hey Brianna?”
She looked down at her matching bunny slippers. Oh shit, here it comes.
“I was wondering about that lady…um, Miranda. Is she your girlfriend or anything?”
“What? No. Nothing like that,” I lied. A half-lie as she wasn’t my girlfriend at all. But considering all of the ways I wanted to use her body, she was something.
“Are you sure? Because the way you looked at her, well sometimes Adam…he, uh, looks at me that way in math class and I just thought, well I was hoping actually that when a boy looks at you that way, it means he likes you.”
I closed my eyes, bowing my head, letting it fall into my cupped hands on the raggedy kitchen table. Seriously? This is the kind of crap I didn’t know how to deal with! I didn’t know what was going on with Miranda and me, except in exchange for information, we were going to give in to our urges and sleep together. Only once.
Yes, I was more attracted to Miranda than any other female I had ever come across, but that didn’t make her girlfriend material. How do I explain all of that to a thirteen-year-old girl? Besides, even though I had a strict no-dating rule for their young ages, I didn’t want to hurt Brianna’s feelings by allowing her to think the boy she was so infatuated with didn’t share her feelings. She was my sister and as cute as she was now, she was going to grow up and become a real heart-breaker. I was fucked.
What in the hell do I do? I lifted my head and asked her to sit down.
“Listen to me, okay? As you can see, Miranda is very beautiful. I’m a guy; I take notice in that because it’s natural so that’s why I look at her that way. Adam probably thinks you’re beautiful too because you are, okay?”
“Okay. But I need to know if he likes me!”
“You’re thirteen, Brianna! It doesn’t matter. Look, I’m sorry. Yes, okay. If he was looking at you the way I was looking at Miranda, then yes, he likes you.”
Somehow I’m going to regret this later.
“Soooo, you like Miranda, then? Is she going to be your girlfriend?”
Not much later. Was I seriously having this conversation with my thirteen-year-old sister?
“Things with Miranda and me are complicated, to say the least. I do like her but she isn’t going to be my girlfriend. What would good ole Mrs. Whitaker think of that? She would probably stop baking bread for us!”
Brianna just stood there silently, staring at me. Thank God, I think this is over.
“But Ryan?”
“What?”
“Why do you care what anyone thinks? Aren’t you always,” she rolled her eyes, “always harping on me and Alex to be ourselves and do the things that make us happy even if it isn’t the most popular decision amongst our friends? What happened to the whole talk about peer pressure? Why aren’t you following the same advice you give to us?”
As if it weren’t enough to have Miranda throwing my words back in my face, I now had Brianna doing it, too? Was I that big of a hypocrite? Was this a woman thing?
“Things are different when you get older, I guess. Besides, I have you two to worry about and I’m not going to do anything to make you guys look bad. Ever.”
“But Ryan, don’t you think it’s time you, well, you know? Find a girlfriend? Be someone’s husband or something? You are like, getting old.”
I was almost twenty years older than my siblings. Once I’d graduated high school my parents decided they wanted more children. And here I was, blessed with these two. Lucky for me. Studious Brianna whose only passion in life was to read and write. And Alex. Alex who thought football was the only American sport worth his time and wasn’t even sure which direction a book opened.
“What? I’m not that old! No. I have you guys, I don’t need a girlfriend or to be a husband.”
“Miranda seems really nice. I was hoping you would let me ask her if I could write an article for the newspaper about the consequences of not wearing a seat belt and the number of accidents that happen on rural roads versus interstates and the correlation between fatalities and the use of seat belts. Or not using them…from my perspective, of course.”
Impressive. It sounded like a great idea but I didn’t know anything about how the newspaper worked. Not only that, but I didn’t know if Miranda could help Brianna with an article like this or if she had any pull to get an article like this printed.
“Do you already have it written?”
“I’m almost finished,” she answered shyly.
“I’m seeing her tomorrow for something else,” I hold up my letter. “I’ll bring it up. See what she thinks.”
Brianna hugged me
tight, “Thank you so much, Ryan. So much!”
She turned to go back up to her room and had her foot on the first stair before she turned back to me, “Mom and Dad would not want you to be alone. They would want you happy. We want you happy.”
She blushed and took the stairs two at a time. I shook my head again. What was this? Was she insinuating I was becoming a grumpy old man? I shouldn’t be surprised by our talk as she had become quite the mature thirteen-year-old, as I guess must be the case when you grew up in a situation like ours.
But I was surprised. I was surprised considering how Brianna hadn’t seemed too interested in Miranda at dinner. Brianna had been a little moody and not as talkative as she normally was. I was betting that Brianna didn’t care for Miranda, because she too must hear rumors swirling around town about her. Hell, what did I know about women? I clearly had read that situation wrong.
Man, she was right about our whole talk regarding peer pressure though. About a month ago Alex’s good friend got into some trouble at school for skipping class. He’d taken off from their first period with an eighth grader. I had told both kids then that no matter what their friends may or may not be doing, they had to think for themselves. They couldn’t allow their friends to convince them to do anything that wasn’t perhaps in their best interests and they couldn’t worry about the consequences of what their friends might think about them after the fact.
I recall specifically mentioning something along the lines of telling them it was okay not to worry about what people thought about them, as long as they marched to the beat of their own drum. They held their destiny. I’d forgotten that little conversation up till now. Leave it to Brianna to bring it up. Sad part was how spot-on she was. Smart girl. It filled me with a sense of pride. To know my words were sinking into their brains and it wasn’t me totally wasting my breath, had me feeling a bit cocky.
Wet: A Small Town Romance (Love in Lone Star Book 1) Page 5