by Cat Schield
But when his tongue drew damp patterns on her belly, she tensed, guessing his destination. His mouth found her without the preliminaries he usually observed. This time he wasn’t here to seduce, only to push her over the edge hard.
Her body bowed as he lapped at her. A moan of intense pleasure ripped from her throat. The sound pierced him and drove his own passion higher. In the last week he’d learned what she liked and leveraged every bit of knowledge to wring his name from her lips over and over.
With her body still shaking in the aftermath of her climax, she directed him to her nightstand and an unopened box of condoms. The sight of it made him smile. She’d been planning to invite him to her room. This meant that her walls were crumbling, if only a little. Was he close to winning their bet?
The thought chilled him. If she fell in love with him and he took away the ranch that meant so much to her, would she ever be able to forgive him?
He slid on the condom and kissed his way up her body. She clung to him as he settled between her thighs and brought his lips to hers for a deep, hot kiss. Her foot skimmed up the back of his leg as she met his gaze. Then she opened herself for his possession. He thrust into her, his heart expanding at the vulnerability in her expression.
She pumped her hips, taking him all the way in, and he hissed through his teeth as her muscles contracted around him. For a long second he held still, breathing raggedly. Then he began to move, sliding out of her slowly, savoring every bit of friction.
“Let’s go, Delgado,” she urged, her nails digging into his back. She wrapped her leg around his hip, making his penetration a little deeper, and rocked to urge him on.
“You feel amazing.” At the end of another slow thrust, he lightly bit her shoulder and she moaned. “I could go like this all night.” He was lying.
Already he could feel pleasure tightening in his groin. He was climbing too fast toward orgasm. He surged into her, his strokes steady and deep, then quickening as he felt her body tighten around him. She was gasping for air, hands clamped down hard on his biceps as they began to climax nearly at the same moment. He’d discovered timing his orgasm to hers required very little attention on his part. It was as if some instinct allowed their bodies to sync.
But tonight Shane grit his teeth and held off so he could watch Brandee come. It was a perfect moment, and in a lightning flash of clarity, he realized that he’d gone and done it. He’d fallen for her. Hard. Caught off guard by the shock of it, Shane’s orgasm overcame him, and as his whole body clenched with it, pleasure bursting inside him, a shift occurred in his perception.
This was no longer a woman climaxing beneath him, but his woman. He couldn’t imagine his life without her in it. He wanted her in his bed. Riding beside him on a horse. Laughing, teasing, working. Yes, even working. He wanted to be with her all the time.
Stunned by what he’d just admitted to himself, Shane lay on his back and stared at the ceiling while Brandee settled against his side, her arm draped over his chest, her breath puffing against his neck. Contentment saturated bone, muscle and sinew, rendering him incapable of movement, but his brain continued to whirl.
Brandee was already asleep, her deep, regular breathing dragging him toward slumber. Yet, despite his exhaustion, something nagged at him. As perfect as their lovemaking had been, there was a final piece of unfinished business that lay between them.
Leaving Brandee slumbering, Shane eased out of bed. He needed to do this while his thoughts were clear. He suspected doubts would muddy his motivation all too soon.
The first night he’d arrived, she’d shown him the two contracts. He’d taken both copies to his lawyer to make sure there was nothing tricky buried in the language. Turned out, it had been straightforward. If he signed the paperwork, he agreed to give up all claim to the land. If she signed, she agreed to sell him the land for ten million.
Several times in the last two weeks, she’d reminded him that his contract awaited his signature in her office. He headed there now. Turning on the desk light, he found a pen and set his signature to the document with a flourish.
As he added the date, it occurred to him he was declaring that he’d fallen for her. Opening himself up to rejection like this wasn’t something he did. Usually he was the one making a break for it as soon as the woman he was dating started getting ideas.
Except Brandee wasn’t like the women he usually went for. She was more like him. Fiercely independent. Relentlessly self-protective. And stubborn as all get-out.
Shane reached across the desk and turned off the lamp. A second after Brandee’s office plunged back into darkness, her cell phone lit up. The text message caught his eye.
Pay up tomorrow or Delgado gets your land back.
Shane stared at the message in confusion. “Your land back”? Those three words made no sense. And what was this about “pay up tomorrow”? As far as Shane knew, Brandee owned the land outright. Could there be a lien on the property he didn’t know about? Shane was still puzzling about the text as he sat down in Brandee’s chair, once again turned on the lamp and pulled open her file drawer.
Her organizational skills betrayed her. A hanging file bearing his name hung in alphabetical order among files for property taxes, credit card and bank statements, as well as sketches for her upcoming clothing line. Shane pulled out his file and spread the pages across the desk.
His heart stopped when he saw the birth certificates going back several generations. He reviewed the copy of Jasper Crowley’s legal document that made the Hope Springs Ranch land his daughter’s dowry. After reading through the newspaper clippings and retracing his ancestry, Shane understood. Brandee intended to cheat him out of the land that should belong to his family.
Leaving everything behind, he returned to the bedroom to wake Brandee and demand answers. But when he got to the room, he stopped dead and stared at her sleeping form. He loved her. That was why he’d signed the document.
Not one thing his father had ever said to him had hurt as much as finding out he’d fallen in love with a woman who was using him.
Torn between confronting her and getting the hell away before he did something else he’d regret, Shane snatched his clothes off the floor and headed for the back door. He slid his feet into his boots, grabbed his coat with his truck keys and went out into the night.
* * *
Brandee woke to a sense of well-being and the pleasant ache of worn muscles. She lay on her side, tucked into a warm cocoon of sheets and quilts. Her bedroom was still dark. The time on her alarm clock was 5:43 a.m.
The room’s emptiness struck her. There was no warm, rugged male snoring softly beside her. She didn’t need to reach out her hand to know Shane’s side of the bed was cool and unoccupied. After the night they’d shared, she didn’t blame him for bolting before sunrise. The sex had been amazing. They’d dropped their guards after the difficult calf birthing, permitting a deeper connection than they’d yet experienced.
Part of her wanted to jump out of bed and run to find him. She longed to see the same soul-stirring emotion she’d glimpsed in his eyes last night. But would it be there? In her gut, she knew he felt something for her. No doubt he was as uncomfortable at being momentarily exposed as she’d been.
As much as she’d grown accustomed to having him around and had put aside her fierce independence to let him help, she was terrified to admit, even to herself, that she craved his companionship as much as his passionate lovemaking. But was it worth losing her ranch?
Brandee threw off the covers and went to shower. Fifteen minutes later, dressed in jeans and a loose-fitting sweater, she headed for the kitchen, hoping the lure of freshly made coffee would entice Shane.
And she’d decided to come clean about Maverick, Hope Springs Ranch and the blackmail.
Over a hearty breakfast, she would explain her fear of losing the ranch and see if he
would agree to letting her keep it for now as long as she agreed to leave it to him in her will.
While she waited for the coffee to brew, Brandee headed to her office to get the document Maverick had sent to her as well as the ones she’d found during her research. Dawn was breaking and Brandee could see her desk well enough to spy the papers strewn across it. She approached and her heart jerked painfully as she realized what she was staring at.
With her stomach twisted into knots, Brandee raced from the room and headed straight for her guest suite. The room was empty. Next she dashed to the back door. Shane’s coat and boots were gone. So was his truck. Her knees were shaking so badly she had to sit down on the bench in the mudroom to catch her breath.
No wonder he’d left so abruptly during the night. He knew. Everything. She’d failed to save her ranch. She’d hurt the man she loved.
It took almost ten minutes for Brandee to recover sufficiently to return to her office and confront the damning documents. How had he known to go into her filing cabinet and look for the file she’d made on him? Had he suspected something was wrong? Or had Maverick tipped him off early?
The answer was on her phone. A text message from Maverick warning her time was almost up. But how had Shane seen it? She gathered the research materials together and returned them to the file. It was then that she noticed Shane’s signature on the document revoking his claim to her land.
She’d won.
It didn’t matter if Shane knew. Legally he couldn’t take her ranch away from her.
But morally, he had every right to it.
Brandee picked up the document. While the disclosure she’d been about to make was no longer necessary, the solution she’d intended to propose was still a valid one.
Brandee grabbed the document and her coat and headed for her truck. As she drove to Bullseye, the clawing anxiety of her upcoming confrontation warred with her determination to fix the situation. It might be more difficult now that he’d discovered she’d been lying to him all along before she had a chance to confess, but Shane was a businessman. He’d understand the value of her compromise and weigh it against an expensive court battle.
Yet, as she stood in the chilly morning air on his front steps, her optimism took a nosedive. Shane left her waiting so long before answering his doorbell that she wondered if he was going to refuse to see her. When he opened the door, he was showered and dressed in a tailored business suit, a stony expression on his face.
She held up the document he’d signed and ignored the anxious twisting of her stomach. “We need to talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. You won. I signed. You get to keep the ranch.”
Brandee floundered. On the way over, she hadn’t dwelled on how Shane might be hurt by her actions. She’d been thinking about how to convince him of her plan so they both got what they wanted.
“I didn’t win. And there’s plenty more to talk about. I know what you must think of me—”
He interrupted, “I highly doubt that.”
“You think I tricked you. You’d be right. But if I lose the ranch, I lose everything.” Immediately she saw this tack wasn’t going to be effective. So, maybe she could give him some idea of what she was up against. “Look, I was being blackmailed, okay? Somebody named Maverick sent me the Jasper Crowley document.”
“That’s your story?” Shane obviously didn’t believe her. “You’re being blackmailed?”
“Maverick wanted fifty thousand dollars and for me to resign from the Texas Cattleman’s Club.” To Brandee’s ears the whole thing sounded ridiculous. She couldn’t imagine what would convince Shane she was telling the truth. “I should’ve done as I was asked, but I really thought it was...”
Telling him that she suspected Cecelia, Simone and Naomi wasn’t going to make her story sound any more sympathetic. Shane liked those women. Brandee would only come off as petty and insecure if she accused them of blackmail without a shred of proof.
“Look,” she continued, “I should’ve come clean in the beginning. Maybe we could’ve worked something out.” She took a step closer, willing him to understand how afraid she’d been. “But when I proposed the wager, I didn’t know anything about you except that for years you’ve been after me to sell. I didn’t think I could trust you.”
“Were you ever going to tell me the truth?”
The fear of opening herself up to rejection and ridicule once again clamped its ruthless fingers around her throat. “Last night...” She needed to say more, but the words wouldn’t come.
“What about last night?”
“It was great,” she said in a small voice, barely able to gather enough breath to make herself heard.
“You say that after I signed away my rights to my family’s land.”
Why had he? He could have torn up the agreement after finding out he owned the land, but he hadn’t. He’d left it for her to find. Why would he do that?
“Not because of that,” she said, reaching deep for the strength to say what was in her heart. “I say it because I think I might have fallen in love with you.”
His face remained impassive, except at the corner of his eyes where the muscles twitched. “Is this the part where I say I’m not going to pursue legal action against you?”
She floundered, wondering if that was what he intended. “No, this is me talking to you without this between us.” She tore the document he’d signed down the middle, lined the pieces back up and tore them again.
“Is that supposed to impress me? Do you think that document would’ve stood up in court?”
Brandee hung her head. “It was never supposed to get that far.”
“I imagine you were pretty confident you could get away with cheating me,” Shane said, the icy bite of his voice making her flinch.
“I wasn’t confident at all. And I wasn’t happy about it. But the ranch is everything to me. Not just financially, but also it’s my father’s legacy. And the camp could have done so much good.” Brandee ached with all she’d lost. “But I am truly sorry about the way I handled things. I didn’t do it to hurt you.”
He stared at her in silence for several heartbeats before stepping back.
“You didn’t.”
And then the door swung shut in her face.
Twelve
Five days and four long, empty, aching nights after Shane slammed the door in Brandee’s face, he slid onto the open bar stool beside Gabe at the Texas Cattleman’s Club and ordered a cup of coffee.
Ignoring the bartender’s surprise, he growled at his friend, “Okay, you got me here. What’s so damned important?”
Gabe nodded toward a table in the corner. A familiar blonde sat by herself, hunched over an empty glass. Brandee’s long hair fell loosely about her face, hiding her expression, but there was no misreading her body language. She was as blue as a girl could be.
“Yeah, so?” Shane wasn’t feeling particularly charitable at the moment and didn’t have time to be dragged away from The Bellamy. He had his own problems to contend with.
“You don’t think there’s something wrong with that picture?” Gabe nodded his head in Brandee’s direction.
There was a lot of something wrong, but it wasn’t Shane’s problem.
“Tell me that’s not why you dragged me here. Because if it is, you’ve just wasted an hour of my time.”
Gabe’s eyes widened at Shane’s tone. “I think you should talk to her.”
“As I explained yesterday and the day before and the day before that, I’m done talking about what happened. She screwed me over.”
“In order to keep her ranch,” Gabe replied, his quiet, calm voice in marked contrast to Shane’s sharp tone. “She stood to lose everything. How would you have behaved if the situation was reversed and you were about to lose Bulls
eye?”
It wasn’t a fair comparison.
“I’d say good riddance.” Shane sipped his coffee and stared at the bottles arranged behind the bar. “I would’ve sold it years ago if I thought it wouldn’t upset my mom.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
Or he mostly did. Ranching had been in his father’s blood and Shane associated Bullseye with being bullied and criticized. Every memory of his father came with an accompanying ache. He’d never be the rancher his father wanted. In some ways it had been a relief when Landon had died. There, he’d admitted it. But by admitting it, he’d lived up to his father’s poor opinion of him. He was a bad son. Guilt sharpened the pain until it felt like spikes were being driven into his head.
“I’ve never seen you like this.” Gabe leaned back in his seat as if he needed to take a better look at his friend. “You’re really upset.”
“You’re damned right,” Shane said. “She intended to cheat me out of what belongs to my family.”
“But you said the land was unclaimed...”
“And what really gets me—” Shane was a boulder rolling down a steep grade “—is the way she went about it.”
She’d made him fall in love with her. There. He’d admitted that, too. He was in love with Brandee Lawless, the liar and cheat.
Shane signaled the bartender. Maybe something strong was in order. “Give me a shot of Patrón Silver.”
She’d ruined scotch for him. He couldn’t even smell the stuff without remembering the way she’d tasted of it the first night they’d made love. Or her delight when he’d introduced her to the proper way to drink it. And his surprise when she’d poured a shot of it over him and lapped up every drop.
Shane downed the tequila shot and signaled for another.
“Are you planning on going head down on the table, too?” Gabe’s tone had a mild bite.
“Maybe.” But instead of drinking the second shot, Shane stared at it. “You gonna sit around and watch me do it, or are you going to make sure she gets home safe?”