Forever Wild: A Camden Ranch Novel

by Jillian Neal

  He’d known it all those years ago. He just hadn’t known then how to fill the abyss with his love. Now, he knew. He could be everything she’d ever need, show her how much she meant to him, prove that he loved her just the way she was. When she wanted to storm, he’d love her in her rage and be her steady anchor. When she wanted to be quiet, he’d hold her close in his arms and be the ease that would make her want to stay. And when she wanted to burn, when she needed to blaze in her passion, he would provide the constant friction and heat that would reduce them both to embers, until like a phoenix they could fly again.

  Another memory flashed through his mind. Standing at the doorway to his dorm room holding that damned ring, both crying while she tried to explain why she couldn’t stay, why she had to leave, how she never wanted to hurt him, but couldn’t marry him because she wasn’t good enough, and that he just wasn’t wild enough for her in a confusing jumble of words that had robbed the breath from his lungs.

  He should’ve been the man she needed, the lover that made her every wild fantasy come true, the arms that would be her strength when she just couldn’t fight the whole damn world alone any longer. The thing was, at that time, he was only a boy. Nothing more than a ploughboy thinking he knew how to be a real man, a real cowboy. Thinking what she needed was stability that he’d stupidly believed a ring would somehow provide. Back then, he was full of shit.

  Now, he could prove himself, show her exactly how she needed to be loved, keep her sated, show her badly he wanted her, how fucking beautiful she is, and that he’d fight with her, for her. Whatever it took, he’d prove what they could be together.

  He’d show her he was all man, all vestiges of the boy she’d left long gone. He knew what he wanted, knew how he wanted it, and how to go about getting it. If she’d give him half a chance, he’d sure as hell make up for the way he’d been before and show her that he knew exactly how to keep a woman begging for more of him. Come hell or high water, he was going to prove himself now.

  “Slide!” J.J. pointed to the long metal slide all of the Camden kids had flown down at one time or another. Chuckling, Luke lifted him up to the top and guided him down to keep him from landing on his head at the bottom.

  Ten minutes into the sliding and begging Luke to chase him around the playground, the hair on the back of Luke’s neck stood. His spine stiffened and his cock stirred. His eyes frantically tracked the crimson red Camaro Z28 she’d restored a couple of years ago as it pulled into view, and there she was … his Indie.

  Having sworn on her custom hex keys and her ratchets that she’d meet her sisters at Saddleback’s at sundown, she’d flown out of her mother’s fancy-ass house and took to the road.

  Indie’s mouth hung open. The car seemed to slow of its own accord. Her heart refused her another beat and the breeze whipping through the windows took her breath away. There he was. She’d had no idea why she’d driven this way. She was heading away from her daddy’s farm. The ghosts of her past had escorted her down the winding road that ran parallel to the train tracks in her hometown.

  Luke Camden was holding a little boy. They were playing on the old elementary school playground. The same one she’d played on as a little girl. Her chin trembled. She swallowed back liquid emotion. Grant’s expression when she’d stupidly admitted that she wanted to see Luke flashed in the few tears she trapped on her long eyelashes. Someone else clearly held his heart now. Someone that wasn’t her. Someone that would never be her.

  “Unka Wuke,” the little boy bellowed loudly. Her heart jerked back to a sprint in a second flat. “Unka Wuke, slide,” he repeated.

  Uncle Luke. Wow. So that was one of his brother’s or sister’s little boys. She tried to wonder which one of his siblings had finally settled down. She tried to care, but a heated tidal wave of thankfulness overwhelmed her. It wasn’t his kid. The way her heart had stalled when she thought it was terrified her.

  Her eyes keenly traced down his muscular physique to those well-worn Wranglers that always made her entire body long to strip him naked. For one split second, she tried to convince herself she could run fast enough down the hill to him to make the past fifteen years disappear. She could fly into his arms. He could make it all go away. She could tell him how sorry she was that she kept running away and about the book her mother had the audacity to give her. He could tell her how beautiful he thought she was and make every insecurity disappear with one of his sizzling glances laced with pure unadulterated intention. She swallowed down raw regret.

  His hand lifted from the little boy’s, and he waved. She shook herself. Clearly, he’d seen her. She should get out and go talk to him, but instead she called herself a chicken, forced her gaze back to the road, returned the wave, and got the hell out of there. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she talk to him in the daylight? Tell him how she’d been feeling? There was so much more to them than late night trysts once, maybe twice a year. Wasn’t there?

  Haunted memories rose up from the dusty dirt under her tires.

  ‘Heard what your whore of a mama has been doing with the mayor, Indie. Bet that makes you proud.’ Cindy Spann’s sneering taunt ricocheted through her mind. ‘Better watch out Luke. Like mama, like daughter, you know. When Indie starts cheating on you like the fat ho she is, give me a call.’ That bitch, Megan Morgan, the captain of the cheerleading squad, had shoved her number into Luke’s hand right in front of Indie. He’d crumpled it and tossed it in the trash, but that didn’t change anything about what had happened.

  Since her eleventh birthday, she’d been harassed mercilessly for the size of her breasts. She’d begged her parents to let her have the reduction surgery. At eighteen, just a month after graduation, they’d finally allowed it. Her father had worked endlessly to afford the elective surgery. The entire town thought the mayor had paid for it. She’d been on the cover of the gazette, still bound in wrapping and gauze, under the headline, ‘Is this what our taxes are paying for?’

  Luke had held her hand as she sat in the surgery prep room and swore that he loved all of her no matter what bra size she was, that he’d loved her right then, and he’d love her the very same when she got out of the operating room. What eighteen-year-old kid makes vows like that? Luke Camden.

  Her mind continued to review her painful childhood. She recalled the terrorizing pain in her father’s eyes when the story of the affair had broken in the paper. His tearful gaze as he’d pulled her into his arms and held her tight stabbed through her gut all over again. Bile-soaked remembrances singed her throat.

  “Since you’re over fifteen you get to choose which parent you’d like to live with, Indieanna.” The stupid judge’s question dripped with disdain over the entire thing. The whole fucking town knew, and most of them loved nothing more than to offer her pity while they talked about her family out the other side of their mouths.

  “I’m living with my daddy. I never want to see my mother again,” she’d vowed readily to anyone who’d listen. Luke had been right there, right beside her the entire time. He’d skipped school and waited outside the courthouse on her. They’d taken off in his truck and hadn’t looked back. He’d held her for hours when she finally broke down in hysterical sobs. She’d spent the week at his parent’s house on the ranch. She was certain the entire Camden family knew she hadn’t stayed in the guest bedroom where his sweet mama had put her things.

  Her daddy never said a word about it. She’d finally bolted out of Chemistry class that Friday when she realized she’d left her father, her hero, all alone on what had to be the worst week of his life, too.

  Her mother had been the mayor’s secretary. Indie had been too young and too stupid to wonder why her mother seemed to be working longer and longer hours. God, the clichés ate at her soul. Back then, all she’d cared about was spending every waking moment with Luke, riding her horses, and helping her daddy work on cars. If her mother wasn’t around, she had free rein to do all of that.

  “I was such an idiot.” That fact added
to her gall. She rolled her eyes as she turned the car around a few miles outside of town and headed back to her daddy’s.

  It was so incredibly thoughtful of her mother to wait four whole weeks before she up and married the mayor. From that moment on, Indie had slowly but surely lost every single thing she’d ever believed in. Everything she’d ever understood had dissolved around her.

  It had taken her two additional years to finally push Luke away, too. She’d existed in a hazy reality caught somewhere between the girl she’d known her whole life and a haunted replica of herself that couldn’t see her way out of the confusion that consumed her. He’d given her a ring and the only thing that had made sense to her was to run away. She’d been trying to save him — and them — from the pain she’d seen in her father’s eyes. Nothing lasted forever. She couldn’t hurt Luke the way her mother had wounded her father.

  Passing back by the school yard, Luke and his nephew had left. Her heart faltered again. It had been fifteen years, and she couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t forgive the hateful comments she’d endured, the pitying stares cast in her direction every place she went. Couldn’t forgive her mother for making her father feel unloved and incapable of keeping a woman happy. Couldn’t find it in herself to let it all go because it had cost her everything.

  Unable to believe in love at all if her own mother couldn’t love someone as good as her daddy, Indie had lost the only man that had ever had a chance of taming her wild heart.

  And until her dying day, she would continue to punish her mother and the mayor for what they’d done. The vengeance was necessary to her very survival. She knew no other way to exist. The vengeance had driven her out of his dorm room where she’d spewed forth pure lies about him not being wild enough for her, right into her car, and had her flying down the road until she was far enough away no one had ever heard her mother’s name and she’d located a mechanic shop with a help wanted sign.

  Why the hell had she wanted to come back here in the first place? She should have known the whole thing would never give her peace. Not even Luke could make this place bearable. This entire tiny town would never be anything more than an effigy of horrifying recollections. Coming home was always a bad idea. How could she actually have been excited about this? Apparently, she was still an idiot.

  Chapter Three

  By the time Indie pulled into her father’s gravel driveway it was a little easier to remember why she’d been anxious to arrive in Pleasant Glen a few hours before. The small, red-brick, one-story home that had raised her stood steady and safe in the distance, painted in the endless colors of the setting sun.

  The lights in her father’s three bay garage near the road were all on, beckoning her home, and there he was: her daddy, Ben Harper, the absolute salt of the earth. Dressed in his dirty coveralls, leaning against a late model Mercury he must’ve been fixing for someone and wiping his hands on a shop rag, he beamed at Indie like she was the very thing he’d been waiting to arrive his entire life.

  She leapt from her car and raced towards him.

  “Well, if it ain’t my beautiful baby girl finally coming to see her daddy. Thought you’d forgotten your old man.” He winked at her as he reached and pulled her into his solid and substantial embrace. She buried her face against the warm cotton coveralls and inhaled the scent of oil, gasoline, brake fluid, and Old Spice. Contentment flowed through her veins, immediately soothing the insanity of her day. She was safe. She was home.

  “Let me look at’cha, Indie Jane. Lord knows I don’t get to see you near enough.” Keeping his strong hands on her shoulders he stepped back and grinned. “Prettier every single time. You didn’t bring some guy I’m gonna hate home with ya, did you?”

  Indie laughed. “No, Daddy. Every man in Oklahoma City gets mad when I can out-wrench them and they get bitchy about it. I can’t deal with ‘em. All they ever want to do is play X-Box all day anyway. Drives me crazy.”

  Chuckling, her father grinned. “There’s my girl. Always knew it was gonna take a real cowboy to ever keep up with you.” He studied her hazel eyes long enough for her to blink and glance away, uncomfortable by what he might find there. “Been to see your mama I’m guessing, and might’a run into someone else that upset my baby girl. There somebody out in town that I need to go speak with?”

  “How the hell do you do that?” she sighed.

  Laughing again, he shook his head. “I know my girls like I know the back of my own hands, darlin’. Tell me what pissed you off then tell me what made you cry.”

  “I didn’t cry, but Mama pissed me off. We’re like gasoline and a match. You know that. She gave me a book about losing weight before the reunion. Pissed me off something good. Why does she do that?”

  Sighing, her father bent back over the Mercury. “Your mama’s always worrying about what she looks like. Never saw her own beauty. You get that from her. Speaking of needing a cowboy, I can think of only one man that ever had you convinced you were beautiful, and you didn’t let that ride for very long. Your mama probably called herself trying to be helpful. She can’t ever just let you girls be yourselves. Always wanting to spit and polish you clean. She gets everything so damn screwed up.” He shrugged. “If she realized how little other people think about her, she’d be a helluva lot happier. Reminds me of someone else I know.”

  He shot her a pointed glance and then grabbed a QuikSteel epoxy to repair the cracked manifold.

  “I don’t give a damn what other people think about me, and you’re gonna have to sand that first.” Indie pointed to the visible crack.

  Her father smirked. “You don’t say.” With a quick eye roll he added, “You ain’t out-wrenched your daddy yet, so why don’t you grab some sandpaper and take out your irritation with your mama on that manifold. For now, I’ll let you keep feeding yourself that line of pure shit about not caring what other people think. God knows you ain’t gonna tell anyone else they might’ve been right, even me. But when you start choking on it, I’ll try not to laugh at’cha outright.”

  Rolling her eyes, Indie scoured the crack with a small piece of sandpaper she located on top of her daddy’s rolling toolkits. Being back in the shop with her father almost made up for the hell she’d endured at her mother’s house, but he was awfully keen to bring up Luke at every available opportunity. What was that all about?

  “You left out half of the story, Indie Jane.”

  “No, I didn’t. She gave me that book. I threw it on the counter. Oh, I also tried to scalp the mayor, got into it with Tucker Kilroy, who I cannot believe Mel is marrying, and had to put on a dress. That alone should earn me my bad mood.”

  “Well, alrighty then, you go right on and be in a bad mood. I love ya anyway, but I also want to know what made my little girl cry.”

  “Nothing made me cry. I wouldn’t give Mama the satisfaction. Dust must’ve gotten in my eyes or something. But you know how I get coming back here. I think I hate it, but then I’m here with you in the shop and I love it again. Maybe I have multiple personalities or something. I should probably see a shrink.”

  “If I know my girl, and I do, I’d say you saw … Mr. Camden, maybe?”

  Indie scrubbed the sandpaper over the engine with more vigor.

  “Mmm hmm, wondered when the two of you would run into one another.”

  “I didn’t see him, see him. I saw him on the elementary school playground. He was with a little boy.”

  Her father’s face fell. Empathy warmed his hazel eyes. “Oh baby girl, that what got you upset? I ‘spect that was Austin’s stepson, J.J. Austin got married last December after he won the PBR buckle. His wife had another baby back in March.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if Luke is his daddy. None of my business. I don’t care.”

  “You are good at a helluva lot of things, Indie Jane. Lying sure as heck ain’t one of ‘um.”

  She felt her face heat as she worked her jaw. Her daddy had always been able to see right through her anyway. No use in arguing. That thought
struck her as odd. She loved to argue with most anyone, her mother being her favorite target. Maybe she wanted to argue until she felt like her mother understood her, accepted her … loved her the way her daddy did.

  “So, it does matter. Matters to my girl. Matters to Luke, and you care a mighty lot. What I can’t quite figure is why the two of you fight so hard to stay apart ‘til you just can’t stand it anymore, and then you go flying into his bed, but you won’t admit to the other that it still matters more than anything else.”

  Tossing the sandpaper away, she dusted off her hands. “How do you know it still matters to him?”

  “Same way I know sun’s gonna rise early tomorrow mornin’. Same way I know Nebraskan winds gonna keep right on blowin’. Way I know when a storm’s riding in on that same wind. Same way I know you’re gonna have no fewer than a half dozen blow-ups with your mama and the mayor ‘bout this blessed wedding. Same way I know you’re pissed about Melony taking up with Tuck Kilroy because of the way he acted in high school, and you can’t quite admit to yourself that all of ya have grown up a little bit between now and then. And the very same way I know some things are meant to be and that me saying that is gonna make you huffy.”

  “I ain’t huffy, and why are Mama and I gonna keep fighting about the wedding?”

  “Your mother thinks Melony ought to ask me if it’d be okay if the mayor walked her down the aisle.”