by Maisey Yates
“God help the man that wants more from you.”
“Oh, please, that’s not fair.” She wiggled, luxuriating in the hard feel of him between her thighs. He wanted her again already. “I pity the woman that falls for you, Sam McCormack.”
A shadow passed over his face. “So do I.”
Then, as quickly as they had appeared, those clouds cleared and he was smiling again, that wicked, intense smile that let her know he was about ready to take her to heaven again.
“It’s a good thing both of us only want a weekend.”
Five
“How did the art retreat go?”
Sam gritted his teeth against his younger brother’s questioning as Chase walked into their workshop. “Fine,” he returned.
“Fine?” Chase leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms, looking a little too much like Sam for his own comfort. Because he was a bastard, and he didn’t want to see his bastard face looking back at him. “I thought you were going to get inspiration. To come up with the ideas that will keep the McCormack Ranch flush for the next several years.”
“I’m not a machine,” Sam said, keeping his tone hard. “You can’t force art.”
He said things like that, in that tone, because he knew that no one would believe that cliché phrase, even if it was true. He didn’t like that it was true.
But there wasn’t much he was willing to do about it either.
“Sure. And I feel a slight amount of guilt over pressuring you, but since I do a lot of managing of your career, I consider it a part of my job.”
“Stick to pounding iron, Chase—that’s where your talents lie.”
“I don’t have talent,” Chase said. “I have business sense. Which you don’t have. So you should be thankful for me.”
“You say that. You say it a lot. I think mostly because you know that I actually shouldn’t be all that thankful for your meddling.”
He was being irritable, and he knew it. But he didn’t want Chase asking how the weekend was. He didn’t want to explain the way he had spent his time. And he really didn’t want to get into why the only thing he was inspired to do was start painting nudes.
Of one woman in particular.
Because the only kind of grand inspirational moments he’d had were when he was inside Maddy. Yeah, he wasn’t going to explain that to his younger brother. He was never going to tell anybody. And he had to get his shit together.
“Seriously, though, everything is going okay? Anna is worried about you.”
“Your wife is meddlesome. I liked her better when she was just your friend and all she did was come by for pizza a couple times a week. And she didn’t worry too much about what I was doing or whether or not I was happy.”
“Yeah, sadly for you she has decided she loves me. And by extension she has decided she loves you, which means her getting up in your business. I don’t think she knows another way to be.”
“Tell her to go pull apart a tractor and stop digging around in my life.”
“No, thanks, I like my balls where they are. Which means I will not be telling Anna what to do. Ever.”
“I liked it better when you were miserable and alone.”
Chase laughed. “Why, because you’re miserable and alone?”
“No, that would imply that I’m uncomfortable with the state of things. I myself am quite dedicated to my solitude and my misery.”
“They say misery loves company,” Chase said.
“Only true if you aren’t a hermit.”
“I suppose that’s true.” His brother looked at him, his gaze far too perceptive for Sam’s liking. “You didn’t used to be this terrible.”
“I have been for a while.” But worse with Maddy. She pushed at him. At things and needs and desires that were best left in the past.
He gritted his teeth. She pushed at him because he turned her on and that made her mad. He... Well, it was complicated.
“Yes,” Chase said. “For a while.”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me. Maybe it’s a crazy artist thing. Dad always said that it would make me a pussy.”
“You aren’t a pussy. You’re a jerk.”
“Six of one, half dozen of the other. Either way, I have issues.”
Chase shook his head. “Well, deal with them on your own time. You have to be over at the West Ranch in less than an hour.” Chase shook his head. “Pretty soon we’ll be released from the contract. But you know until then we could always hire somebody else to go. You don’t have to do horseshoes if you don’t want. We’re kind of beyond that now.”
Sam gritted his teeth. For the first time he was actually tempted to take his brother up on the offer. To replace his position with someone else. Mostly because the idea of seeing Madison again filled him with the kind of reckless tension that he knew he wouldn’t be able to do anything about once he saw her again.
Oh, not because of her. Not because of anything to do with her moral code or protestations. He could demolish those easily enough. It was because he couldn’t afford to waste any more time thinking about her. Because he couldn’t afford to get in any deeper. What had happened over the past weekend had been good. Damn good. But he had to leave it there.
Normally, he relished the idea of getting in there and doing grunt work. There was something about it that fulfilled him. Chase might not understand that.
But Sam wasn’t a paperwork man. He wasn’t a business mind. He needed physical exertion to keep himself going.
His lips twitched as he thought about the kind of physical exertion he had indulged in with Maddy. Yeah, it kind of all made sense. Why he had thrown himself into the blacksmithing thing during his celibacy. He needed to pound something, one way or another. And since he had been so intent on denying himself female companionship, he had picked up a hammer instead.
He was tempted to back out. To make sure he kept his distance from Maddy. He wouldn’t, because he was also far too tempted to go. Too tempted to test his control and see if there was a weak link. If he might end up with her underneath him again.
It would be the better thing to send Chase. Or to call in and say they would have to reschedule, then hire somebody else to take over that kind of work. They could more than afford it. But as much as he wanted to avoid Maddy, he wanted to see her again.
Just because.
His body began to harden just thinking about it.
“It’s fine. I’m going to head over. You know that I like physical labor.”
“I just don’t understand why,” Chase said, looking genuinely mystified.
But hell, Chase had a life. A wife. Things that Sam was never going to have. Chase had worked through his stuff and made them both a hell of a lot of money, and Sam was happy for him. As happy as he ever got.
“You don’t need to understand me. You just have to keep me organized so that I don’t end up out on the street.”
“You would never end up out on the streets of Copper Ridge. Mostly because if you stood out there with a cardboard sign, some well-meaning elderly woman would wrap you in a blanket and take you back to her house for casserole. And you would rather die. We both know that.”
That made Sam smile reluctantly. “True enough.”
“So, I guess you better keep working, then.”
Sam thought about Maddy again, about her sweet, supple curves. About how seeing her again was going to test him in the best way possible. Perhaps that was why he should go. Just so he could test himself. Push up against his control. Yeah, maybe that was what he needed.
Yeah, that justification worked well. And it meant he would see her again.
It wasn’t feelings. It was just sex. And he was starting to think just sex might be what he needed.
“I plan on it.”
* * *
Maddy took a deep breath of clean salt air and arena dirt. There was
something comforting about it. Familiar. Whenever things had gone wrong in her life, this was what she could count on. The familiar sights and sounds of the ranch, her horses. Herself.
She never felt stronger than when she was on the back of a horse, working in time with the animal to move from a trot to a walk, a walk to a halt. She never felt more understood.
A funny thing. Because, while she knew she was an excellent trainer and she had full confidence in her ability to keep control over the animal, she knew that she would never have absolute control. Animals were unpredictable. Always.
One day, they could simply decide they didn’t want to deal with you and buck you off. It was the risk that every person who worked with large beasts took. And they took it on gladly.
She liked that juxtaposition. The control, the danger. The fact that though she achieved a certain level of mastery with each horse she worked with, they could still decide they weren’t going to behave on a given day.
She had never felt much of that in the rest of her life. Often she felt like she was fighting against so much. Having something like this, something that made her feel both small and powerful had been essential to her well-being. Especially during all that crap that had happened ten years ago. She had been thinking more about it lately. Honestly, it had all started because of Christopher, because she had been considering breaking her celibacy. And it had only gotten worse after she actually had. After Sam.
Mostly because she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Mostly because she felt like one weekend could never be enough. And she needed it to be. She badly needed it to be. She needed to be able to have sex with a guy without having lingering feelings for him. David had really done a number on her, and she did not want another number done on her.
It was for the best if she never saw Sam again. She knew that was unlikely, but it would be better. She let out a deep breath, walking into the barn, her riding boots making a strident sound on the hardpacked dirt as she walked in. Then she saw movement toward the end of the barn, someone coming out of one of the stalls.
She froze. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be other people around. Her family employed a full staff to keep the ranch running smoothly, but for some reason this felt different. And a couple of seconds later, as the person came into view, she realized why.
Black cowboy hat, broad shoulders, muscular forearms. That lean waist and hips. That built, muscular physique that she was intimately acquainted with.
Dear Lord. Sam McCormack was here.
She had known that there would be some compromise on the never-seeing-him-again thing; she had just hoped that it wouldn’t be seeing him now.
“Sam,” she said, because she would be damned if she appeared like she had been caught unawares. “I didn’t expect you to be here.”
“Your father wanted to make sure that all of the horses were in good shape before the holidays, since it was going to delay my next visit.”
Maddy gritted her teeth. Christmas was in a couple of weeks, which meant her family would be having their annual party. The festivities had started to become a bit threadbare and brittle in recent years. Now that everybody knew Nathan West had been forced to sell off all of his properties downtown. Now that everyone knew he had a bastard son, Jack Monaghan, whose existence Nathan had tried to deny for more than thirty years. Yes, now that everybody had seen the cracks in the gleaming West family foundation, it all seemed farcical to Maddy.
But then, seeing as she had been one of the first major cracks in the foundation, she supposed that she wasn’t really entitled to be too judgmental about it. However, she was starting to feel a bit exhausted.
“Right,” she returned, knowing that her voice sounded dull.
“Have you seen Christopher?”
His question caught her off guard, as did his tone, which sounded a bit hard and possessive. It was funny, because this taciturn man in front of her was more what she had considered Sam to be before they had spent those days in the cabin together. Those days—where they had mostly been naked—had been a lot easier. Quieter. He had smiled more. But then, she supposed that any man receiving an endless supply of orgasms was prone to smiling more. They had barely gotten out of bed.
They had both been more than a little bit insatiable, and Maddy hadn’t minded that at all. But this was a harsh slap back to reality. To a time that could almost have been before their little rendezvous but clearly wasn’t, because his line of questioning was tinged with jealousy.
“No. As you guessed, I lied to him and didn’t call him.”
“And he call you?”
Maddy lifted her fingernail and began to chew on it, grimacing when she realized she had just ruined her manicure. “He did call,” she said, her face heating slightly. “And I changed his name in my phone book to Don’t Answer.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Obviously you can’t delete somebody from your phone book when you don’t want to talk to them, Sam. You have to make sure that you know who’s calling. But I like the reminder that I’m not speaking to him. Because then my phone rings and the screen says Don’t Answer, and then I go, ‘Okay.’”
“I really do pity the man who ends up wanting to chase after you.”
“Good thing you don’t. Except, oh wait, you’re here.”
She regretted that as soon as she said it. His gaze darkened, his eyes sweeping over her figure. Why did she want to push him?
Why did she always want to push him?
“You know why I’m here.”
“Yes, because my daddy pays you to be here.” She didn’t know why she said that. To reinforce the difference between them? To remind him she was Lady of the Manor, and that regardless of his bank balance he was socially beneath her? To make herself look like a stupid rich girl he wouldn’t want to mess around with anyway. Honestly, these days it was difficult for her to guess at her own motives.
“Is this all part of your fantasy? You want to be...taken by the stable boy or something? I mean, it’s a nice one, Maddy, and I didn’t really mind acting it out with you last weekend, but we both know that I’m not exactly the stable boy and you’re not exactly the breathless virgin.”
Heat streaked through her face, rage pooling in her stomach. “Right. Because I’m not some pure, snow-white virgin, my fantasies are somehow wrong?” It was too close to that wound. The one she wished wasn’t there. The one she couldn’t ignore, no matter how much she tried.
“That wasn’t the point I was making. And anyway, when your whole fantasy about a man centers around him being bad for you, I’m not exactly sure where you get off trying to take the moral-outrage route.”
“I will be as morally outraged as I please,” she snapped, turning to walk away from him.
He reached out, grabbing hold of her arm and turning her back to face him, taking hold of her other arm and pulling her forward. “Everything was supposed to stay back up at those cabins,” he said, his voice rough.
“So why aren’t you letting it?” she spat. Reckless. Shaky. She was a hypocrite. Because she wasn’t letting it rest either.
“Because you walked in in those tight pants and it made it a lot harder for me to think.”
“My breeches,” she said, keeping the words sharp and crisp as a green apple, “are not typically the sort of garment that inspire men to fits of uncontrollable lust.” Except she was drowning in a fit of uncontrollable lust. His gaze was hot, his hands on her arms even hotter. She wanted to arch against him, to press her breasts against his chest as she had done more times than she could count when they had been together. She wanted... She wanted the impossible. She wanted more. More of him. More of everything they had shared together, even though they had agreed that would be a bad idea.
Even though she knew it was something she shouldn’t even want.
“Your pretty little ass in anything would make a man l
ose his mind. Don’t tell me those breeches put any man off, or I’m gonna have to call you a liar.”
“It isn’t my breeches that put them off. That’s just my personality.”
“If some man can’t handle you being a little bit hard, then he’s no kind of man. I can take you, baby. I can take all of you. And that’s good, since we both know you can take all of me.”
“Are you just going to be a tease, Sam?” she asked, echoing back a phrase that had been uttered to her by many men over the years. “Or is this leading somewhere?”
“You don’t want it to lead anywhere, you said so yourself.” He released his hold on her, taking a step back.
“You’re contrary, Sam McCormack—do you know that?”
He laughed. “That’s about the only thing anyone calls me. We both know what I am. The only thing that confuses me is exactly why you seem surprised by it now.”
She was kind of stumped by that question. Because really, the only answer was sex. That she had imagined that the two of them being together, that the man he had been during that time, meant something.
Which proved that she really hadn’t learned anything about sexual relationships, in spite of the fact that she had been so badly wounded by one in the past. She had always known that she had a hard head, but really, this was ridiculous.
But it wasn’t just her head that was hard. She had hardened up a considerable amount in the years since her relationship with David. Because she’d had to. Because within the equestrian community, she had spent the years following that affair known as the skank who had seriously jeopardized the marriage of an upright member of the community. Never mind that she had been his student. Never mind that she had been seventeen years old, a virgin who had believed every word that had come out of the esteemed older man’s mouth. Who had believed that his marriage really was over and that he wanted a life and a future with her.
It was laughable to her now. Any man nearing his forties who found himself able to relate to a seventeen-year-old on an emotional level was a little bit suspect. A married one, in a position of power, was even worse. She knew all of that. She knew it down to her bones. Believing it was another thing.