Blazing Bedtime Stories, Volume VIII: The Cowboy Who Never Grew UpHooked

by Kimberly Raye

  “Why not? You can’t say you haven’t missed me.”

  “I haven’t missed you.”

  The muscle in his chin twitched.

  “Liar.”

  “Don’t do this, Allie.”

  “What? Offer you a taste of what you haven’t had in a ridiculously long time?”

  “Is that what you think you’re doing? I don’t know what you’ve heard, Allie, but I’m making out just fine.”

  “Making out? With who? Connie Parker? She’s a prude. If she’s putting out, it’s just until she gets a ring on her finger and then she’ll cut you off. Or maybe Lynette Swank? I hear she’s always anxious to do the deed, but comes so easy that a guy just has to wiggle a little finger in her direction and the fun’s over. I’m not like that, am I, Hook? I’m a challenge—one you were always up to the task of facing. And now I’m back for who knows how long, acting like a fool in some crazy hope that we can put things right between us.”

  “Crazy is the word,” he muttered.

  “Crazy. Determined. Take your pick. But either way, I’m not giving up. Once I set my mind to something, I’m unstoppable—and you know it. I’m going to be your shadow, dogging your every step, until you give me what I want.”

  “What do you really want, Allie, forgiveness? Hell, woman. I told you. I already gave you that. Years ago. Let it go, already.”

  “That’s not what I want. Not anymore.”

  “What do you want, then? Tell me and I swear to God, I’ll give it to you in a heartbeat if it means you’ll leave me the hell alone.”

  “Promise?”

  He crossed his heart with his finger.

  “Okay,” she said, deciding to call his bluff. She slid sideways along the running board, flipped open his door and climbed in like she used to, settling on his lap. “I want a baby.”

  2

  JAMES DIDN’T KNOW what shocked him more—the feel of Allie’s sweet body contouring to his or the fact that she’d just asked for the one thing he knew she didn’t want, or need.

  “You don’t mean that,” he said.

  “H-how do you know what I mean?”

  She was shaking, damn her. Every emotion rippling through her body was injected into him. Fear. Shock. Regret.

  Attraction.

  From the first minute he’d stolen a kiss on her daddy’s back porch, he’d known that her chemistry and his worked together like fire and sulfur. Every patient fiber in his teenage body had been tested as they’d progressed from the sweet pressing of lips to tongue-tangling French kisses to sneaking touches beneath her T-shirt and beyond, culminating in the triumphant moment when he’d finally coaxed her to slide her hand down the waistband of his jeans.

  That had been the night they’d first made love. As if holding his hard sex had broken the last barriers of her resistance, she’d wanted him inside her—and once there, he’d discovered a silky piece of heaven that even today, after all that had happened, he wanted to explore again.

  But he wasn’t a hormone-driven kid anymore. He was a man who knew that messing around with Allie would lead to nothing good for either of them.

  “You don’t want a baby,” he said. “Least of all with me.”

  “Why not with you? Wasn’t that our plan for all those years? Wasn’t that what almost happened? We were so close. If only I hadn’t—”

  Mustering the full breadth of his self-control, James eased Allie off of his lap and onto the passenger seat, cutting her off before she talked about things that didn’t need to be rehashed. She’d gotten pregnant with his child. She’d lost the baby to a miscarriage. Didn’t mean they had any business trying again.

  He shoved the truck into Park and turned off the ignition. It was a hot night, but even the soft hum of the engine sounded like a bluegrass band jangling in his ears. Living in the past—even thinking about those old fantasies or painful disappointments—dug up a septic tank’s worth of a deep, dark rage he preferred to flush away, along with his aspirations at rodeo titles, endless glory and endorsement deals.

  Shit happened. Riders got hurt—sometimes so bad, there was no means of recovery. He’d come to terms with his new ambitions a long time ago. But Allie, she held fast to those old dreams like one of his dogs might to a side of beef. When he’d spied Allie at the Gunners’ shindig, he’d had a vague idea that at some point during the night, he’d have to either elude her or deal yet again with her unshakeable desire to rekindle a relationship that had gone south a long time ago.

  But never in a million years had he dreamed they’d be talking like this—about the very heart of the tragedy that had ripped them apart.

  “Plans change,” he said, and in a moment of pure spite, he raised his right hand.

  The fingers worked. Barely. His joints ached all the damned time. His knuckles resembled the coins he used to feed into a machine at the fair that stamped scenes from the Alamo onto the squashed copper, only the impressions on his crushed bones were the leftover scars from the hooves of a two-thousand-pound bull.

  Allie scooted away from him. The light from the nearby streetlamp streamed into the cab of the truck, catching the glossy sheen in her eyes. Damn. He dropped his hand into the shadows, then turned to reach toward her with his left.

  “Allie, don’t.”

  She shoved his good hand aside. “Don’t what? Don’t feel bad that I caused you so much pain? Wrecked your career?”

  “You didn’t wreck my career. A bull named Hell’s Vengeance did that.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you about the baby right before you got on that bull. I should have waited.”

  “No, I shouldn’t have loaded into that chute when I didn’t have my head on straight. And I should have used better condoms.”

  He shifted so that he was facing forward, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw Allie’s hand drift to her belly. Earlier, when her lacy blouse had ridden up as she stretched across a buffet table to snag a handful of chips, he noticed the skin there was still flat and taut. He shouldn’t have been watching her that way—shouldn’t have let old memories of dipping his tongue into her belly button and below snake back into his brain. He shouldn’t have even noticed that she was among the hundreds who had paraded out to the Gunner place to celebrate Wade’s big day—but he had. Allie didn’t come around often, but when she did, he knew.

  Not because of the gossip around town. Not because of the way his father got grumpier or his sister got extra quiet. He knew because Allie’s heartbeat seemed connected to his so that he could hear it thrumming in his ears whenever she was within a ten-mile radius.

  And right now, it was beating like a bass drum.

  “See what I mean, Allie? We’re together less than ten minutes and I’m hurting you in a way that’s not right after all this time. I try to give you a wide berth when you come back home. But you keep hunting me down when you know it’s a bad idea.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” she said, a plea in her voice. “If we could just get beyond the hurt from the past, maybe we’ll find something new. I know it sounds desperate. Maybe even pathetic. But I can’t get you out of my mind whether I’m here or in Port Aransas or anywhere else I might go. I have to figure out why that is, Hook, and dammit, I can’t unless you let me in.”

  His chest constricted so tight, he felt as if he’d been roped around the middle. They had left a lot of things unsaid and unresolved. In his bid to put the past behind him, he had left too many wounds unhealed.

  Physically, both of them had bounced back. But what about the wounds underneath the skin and bone and muscle?

  “You don’t want something new with me, Allie. You want what we had before everything fell apart. Well, we can’t have that. Neither one of us. We aren’t. kids anymore.”

  “No, we aren’t. That’s the beauty of it. We’re adults. We know what we’re getting ourselves into. Know that in the end, things might not work out. But we also know that the risk might be worth it.”

  He didn’t know how s
he’d managed, but Allie had pushed all of the sadness out of her voice. She’d always had an amazing capacity to bounce back from disappointment, whether it was the time she’d lost her bid to be head cheerleader because her calculus grade had been below standards or when she’d been denied a shot at a summer internship at Sea World in Austin because her father didn’t want her living so far from home. Allie had always found a way to turn her tragedy into triumph.

  Hell, even losing him and his baby hadn’t stopped her from running off to college and getting her first degree a year ahead of schedule—a fact he remembered with a hell of a lot more resentment than he wanted to feel.

  Maybe he did have some residual emotions he needed to work out, but that was best done when she was far, far away.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “I got a meeting with my business partners tomorrow, and if I was a betting man, I’d expect that sometime in the middle of the night, Ginny is either going to show up at my door begging for sanctuary against my father’s tirades or I’m going to get an emergency call to go back home and break up their latest battle.”

  The tension ebbed as the subject changed to his suddenly feisty sibling. Allie grinned as if prouder than punch that Ginny had showed some gumption around blustery J. R. Hooker. “I can’t believe she stood up to him earlier.”

  James shook his head, a grin busting through at the thought that his usually meek little sister had finally shown a streak of Hooker strength. “Neither can I. That’s why I didn’t step in, to be truthful. Figured she was doing just fine on her own and it’s about time she learned to deal with our old man on her own terms.”

  “She’s growing up,” Allie said brightly. “Facing the rough stuff is what being an adult is about.”

  James groaned, but couldn’t suppress his smile. The woman was, in addition to still beautiful, stubborn and single-minded as hell.

  “First, you tell me you didn’t come back here specifically to get knocked up,” he insisted.

  Maybe he owed her a chance to work him out of her system—and vice versa. But that was his limit.

  “I didn’t,” she confessed. “I swear. Well, I mean, I do want a baby. Sooner rather than later. But I didn’t come home to get pregnant. I just want to move on with my life and I can’t seem to do that until you and I settle things. And it’s not going to happen in one brief conversation. We have too much history. Too much hurt. Too much leftover lust.”

  He wanted to deny the last part, but he couldn’t. Despite all his pent-up anger and resentment, she still made his heart race. If she asked if he still dreamed about the hot nights they’d spent in the back of his pickup, he’d be lying if he said no. The memories didn’t haunt him every night, but they disrupted his sleep often enough for him to accept that he wasn’t quite as over her as he wanted her to believe.

  “You staying at your dad’s?”

  She shook her head. “His new wife turned my old room into quilting-and-crafting central about a month after she moved in. Aunt Maylene gave me the keys to the apartment over the diner again. She decided renters were too much trouble and doesn’t do much with it now except save it for me when I visit. But to be honest, I kind of wanted to see your new place.”

  “Not much to see in the dead of night,” he countered.

  “There’s always the morning.”

  Gripping the steering wheel tightly with his good hand, James took a deep breath. This was almost like being on the back of a bull again. Around him, there was madness. Bright lights, loud noise, voices of his teammates shouting orders, trying to keep the bull at the right angle so that when the chute opened, he’d have a better chance at keeping his seat. But in that second before the pick-up man pulled open the gate, Hook had always tried to find the silence—the communal moment when no one but him and the bull existed. Man and beast. Life and death.

  Now, it was just him and Allie. The past snorted and scuffed and bucked beneath them and until they mastered the ride, neither of them would find any victory—or any peace.

  “You want to follow me out or leave your car?” he asked, resigned.

  She wiggled in her seat. “And let the whole town start speculating about where I disappeared to if I leave my car in the lot? No, thanks. I’ll follow you.”

  She popped out of the cab and jogged around the back, her sports car roaring to life seconds later. He turned the ignition and waited for her to back out before he threw the truck into Reverse. If she left her car in the parking lot of Marooner’s Rock, no one in Lost Gun would have to speculate about where she was. They’d all guess that she’d gone home with him—and for some reason that made absolutely no sense, that pleased him.

  More than it should have.

  * * *

  ALLIE DROVE IN A DAZE. Luckily, traversing the paved back roads around Lost Gun didn’t require much thought. As long as she kept her eyes focused on the bright red taillights of James’s pickup, she’d get where she was going.

  The question was—what was she going to do once she got there?

  She’d planned for this. She had an overnight bag in the backseat that she’d put together precisely for this contingency. She had makeup, her toothbrush, a supply of condoms, sexy lingerie, high-heeled, do-me-quick shoes and a change of clothes for the morning so that her walk of shame wouldn’t be quite so obvious to anyone who might be taking note of her comings and goings.

  But she hadn’t expected to open her heart so widely in order to get her here. A baby? Since when? Okay, so she was keenly aware that she wasn’t getting any younger. And since her breakup with James, no man in her life had come even close to sparking her need to nest and procreate. Less than ten minutes in his presence and the most innate, most basic needs that she’d suppressed for a decade had bubbled to the surface—or had they?

  All the times she’d pictured James and her finally hooking up again, it had been all about seduction, passion and undeniable need. She’d sashay past him at just the right moment, wearing a spritz of the perfume he’d liked back in high school and he’d drop all the drama from their past, sweep her into his arms and make wild love to her on the flatbed of his truck.

  That scenario might still play out—but not without a price.

  The price of confession.

  The price of repentance.

  The price of truth.

  Each separately, she might be able to afford. But together? All at once?

  She exhaled, not realizing she’d been holding her breath until her lungs had started to ache. Well, Allie Barrie, you started this. You’ve been after him for years, chasing him down like a shameless buckle bunny every time you came home from school. Now you’ve got him—what are you going to do? Run away from the very tempest you’ve stirred?

  No, she wouldn’t run. She had to do this—had either to find her way back into James Hooker’s heart or burn his imprint out of her own ticker for good. And the baby thing? She’d have to take her time on that one, figure out if she’d been covering up that need for a long time or if her desire to reconnect with James had short-circuited her brain.

  Her cell phone chirped. Very few people had her cell-phone number and since the timing was impeccable, she wasn’t surprised to see her best friend’s name flash on the screen.

  “Well?”

  “I found him,” Allie replied.

  “And?”

  “I’m following him now.”

  Samantha Gibson, the first college roommate who hadn’t driven her crazy by stealing her clothes or sneaking her boyfriend into their dorm room at two in the morning, clucked her tongue. “Do we need to have that little conversation about stalking again, sweetie? Because there’s a fine line between true love and crazy, bat-shit obsession.”

  Allie chuckled. Sam always did cut to the heart of the matter, even when it was damned inconvenient. It was one of the reasons they were so compatible and had stuck to rooming together since sophomore year. It helped that they’d ended up in the same course of study, both determined to save the worl
d by starting with the oceans.

  “Is it stalking if he knows I’m following him? I didn’t want to leave my car in the parking lot of the honky-tonk. People around here like to talk.”

  “What the hell else do they have to do with their time out in the middle of frickin’ nowhere?” Miami-born and bred, Sam considered any and all Texas towns as beneath her cosmopolitan tastes, except Austin, maybe, because of the overabundance of universities. Only her unshakeable interest in the preservation of marine life in the Gulf of Mexico kept her in Port Aransas—along with its relative proximity to Corpus Christi, which was city enough in a pinch. But she’d declined all of Allie’s invitations to join her in Lost Gun, somehow afraid that she’d lose her taste for mojitos and Jimmy Choos and would end up chugging beer out of a red plastic cup and wearing Wranglers.

  “Trust me, we have plenty of good stuff to do here in Lost Gun.”

  “Which is clearly why you’re following him home. You sure he’s leading you somewhere safe and not to some far-out pasture where we won’t find your body until next spring?”

  “James is a lover, not a fighter.”

  “I thought he was a bull rider.”

  “They ride the bulls, they don’t kill them. We’re going back to his place. To talk.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sam replied, her doubt coming through loud and clear in two muttered syllables.

  But Allie didn’t try to convince her otherwise. If one thing led to another and she ended up in James Hooker’s bed, she wasn’t going to fight it. Over the years, she couldn’t count the number of times she’d tried to get this far with him. He’d always eluded her. Sometimes, he went out of town. Sometimes, he only showed his face at crowded events where he had friends and family so close, they didn’t get a moment alone. A few times, he’d even clung to women who were totally wrong for him, knowing that Allie would never be so rude as to insert herself into his space if he was on a date.

  This time, however, she’d caught him alone and vulnerable. She wasn’t about to pass up this rare opportunity just because her best friend thought she’d lost her mind.