Rancher's Wild Secret & Hold Me, Cowboy (Gold Valley Vineyards Book 1)

by Maisey Yates

  Pot roast was an extremely nonsalacious food.

  “Great,” he said, looking very much like he didn’t actually care that much.

  “I just have to get it out of the microwave.” She treated him to an exaggerated wink.

  That earned her an uneasy laugh. “Great,” he said.

  “Come on,” she said, gesturing for him to follow her. She moved into the kitchen, grabbed the pan that contained the meat and the vegetables out of the microwave and set it on the table, where the place settings were already laid out and the salad was already waiting.

  “I promise I’m not trying to Stepford-wife you,” she said as they both took their seats.

  “I didn’t think that,” he said, but his blank expression betrayed the fact that he was lying.

  “You did,” she said. “You thought that I was trying to become your creepy robot wife.”

  “No, but I did wonder exactly why dinner was so important.”

  She looked down. It wasn’t as if David were a secret. In fact, the affair was basically open information. “Do you really want to know?”

  Judging by the expression on his face, he didn’t. “There isn’t really a good way to answer that question.”

  “True. Honesty is probably not the best policy. I’ll think you’re uninterested in me.”

  “On the contrary, I’m very interested in you.”

  “Being interested in my boobs is not the same thing.”

  He laughed, taking a portion of pot roast out of the dish in the center of the table. “I’m going to eat. If you want to tell me...well, go ahead. But I don’t think you’re trying to ensnare me.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Honestly, Maddy, nobody would want me for that long.”

  Those words were spoken with a bit of humor, but they made her sad. “I’m sure that’s not true,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure of any such thing. He was grumpy. And he wasn’t the most adept emotionally. Still, it didn’t seem like a very kind thing for a person to think about themselves.

  “It is,” he said. “Chase is only with me because he’s stuck with me. He feels some kind of loyalty to our parents.”

  “I thought your parents...”

  “They’re dead,” he responded, his tone flat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  Silence fell between them after that, and she knew the only way to break it was to go ahead and get it out. “The first guy...the one ten years ago, we were having a physical-only affair. Except I didn’t know it.”

  “Ouch,” Sam said.

  “Very. I mean, trust me, there were plenty of signs. And even though he was outright lying to me about his intentions, if I had been a little bit older or more experienced, I would have known. It’s a terrible thing to find out you’re a cliché. I imagine you wouldn’t know what that’s like.”

  “No, not exactly. Artist-cowboy-blacksmith is not really a well-worn template.”

  She laughed and took a sip of her wine. “No, I guess not.” Then she took another sip. She needed something to fortify her. Anything.

  “But other woman that actually believes he’ll leave his wife for you, that is.” She swallowed hard, waiting for his face to change, waiting for him to call her a name, to get disgusted and walk out.

  It occurred to her just then that that was why she was telling him all of this. Because she needed him to know. She needed him to know, and she needed to see what he would think. If he would still want her. Or if he would think that she was guilty beyond forgiving.

  There were a lot of people who did.

  But he didn’t say anything. And his face didn’t change. So they just sat in silence for a moment.

  “When we got involved, he told me that he was done with her. That their marriage was a mess and they were already starting divorce proceedings. He said that he just wore his wedding ring to avoid awkward questions from their friends. The dressage community around here is pretty small, and he said that he and his wife were waiting until they could tell people themselves, personally, so that there were no rumors flying around.” She laughed, almost because she was unable to help it. It was so ridiculous. She wanted to go back and shake seventeen-year-old her. For being such an idiot. For caring so much.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “he said he wanted to protect me. You know, because of how unkind people can be.”

  “He was married,” Sam said.

  She braced herself. “Yes,” she returned, unflinching.

  “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Almost forty.”

  Sam cursed. “He should have been arrested.”

  “Maybe,” she said, “except I did want him.”

  She had loved the attention he had given her. Had loved feeling special. It had been more than lust. It had been neediness. For all the approval she hadn’t gotten in her life. Classic daddy issues, basically. But, as messed up as a man his age had to be for wanting to fool around with a teenager, the teenager had to be pretty screwed up too.

  “How did you know him?”

  “He was my... He was my trainer.”

  “Right, so some jackass in a position of power. Very surprising.”

  Warmth bloomed in her chest and spread outward, a strange, completely unfamiliar sensation. There were only a few people on earth who defended her when the subject came up. And mostly, they kept it from coming up. Sierra, her younger sister, knew about it only from the perspective of someone who had been younger at the time. Maddy had shared a little bit about it, about the breakup and how much it had messed with her, when Sierra was having difficulty in her own love life.

  And then there were her brothers, Colton and Gage. Who would both have cheerfully killed David if they had ever been able to get their hands on him. But Sam was the first person she had ever told the whole story to. And he was the first person who wasn’t one of her siblings who had jumped to her defense immediately.

  There had been no interrogation about what kinds of clothes she’d worn to her lessons. About how she had behaved. Part of her wanted to revel in it. Another part of her wanted to push back at it.

  “Well, I wore those breeches around him. I know they made you act a little bit crazy. Maybe it was my fault.”

  “Is this why you got mad about what I said earlier?”

  She lifted a shoulder. “Well, that and it was mean.”

  “I didn’t realize this had happened to you,” he said, his voice not exactly tender but full of a whole lot more sympathy than she had ever imagined getting from him. “I’m sorry.”

  “The worst part was losing all my friends,” she said, looking up at him. “Everybody really liked him. He was their favorite instructor. As far as dressage instructors go, he was young and cool, trust me.”

  “So you bore the brunt of it because he turned out to be human garbage and nobody wanted to face it?”

  The way he phrased that, so matter-of-fact and real, made a bubble of humor well up inside her chest. “I guess so.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “It really doesn’t.”

  “So that’s why you had to feed me dinner, huh? So I didn’t remind you of that guy?”

  “Well, you’re nothing like him. For starters, he was...much more diminutive.”

  Sam laughed. “You make it sound like you had an affair with a leprechaun.”

  “Jockeys aren’t brawny, Sam.”

  He only laughed harder. “That’s true. I suppose that causes trouble with wind resistance and things.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You are terrible. Obviously he had some appeal.” Though, she had a feeling it wasn’t entirely physical. Seeing as she had basically been seeking attention and approval and a thousand other
things besides orgasms.

  “Obviously. It was his breeches,” Sam said.

  “A good-looking man in breeches is a thing.”

  “I believe you.”

  “But a good-looking man in Wranglers is better.” At least, that was her way of thinking right at the moment.

  “Good to know.”

  “But you can see. Why I don’t really want to advertise this. It has nothing to do with what you do or who you are or who I am. Well, I guess it is all to do with who I am. What people already think about me. I’ve been completely defined by a sex life I barely have. And that was... It was the smallest part of that betrayal. At least for me. I loved him. And he was just using me.”

  “I hope his life was hell after.”

  “No. His wife forgave him. He went on to compete in the Olympics. He won a silver medal.”

  “That’s kind of a karmic letdown.”

  “You’re telling me. Meanwhile, I’ve basically lived like a nun and continued giving riding lessons here on the family ranch. I didn’t go on to do any of the competing that I wanted to, because I couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a judge who was going to be angry with me for my involvement with David.”

  “In my opinion,” Sam said, his expression turning dark, focused, “people are far too concerned with who women sleep with and not near enough as concerned as they should be about whether or not the man does it well. Was he good?”

  She felt her face heat. “Not like you.”

  “I don’t care who you had sex with, how many times or who he was. What I do care is that I am the best you’ve ever had. I’m going to aim to make sure that’s the case.”

  He reached across the table, grabbing hold of her hand. “I’m ready for dessert,” he said.

  “Me too,” she said, pushing her plate back and moving to her feet. “Upstairs?”

  He nodded once, the slow burn in his dark eyes searing through her. “Upstairs.”

  Seven

  “Well, it looks like everything is coming together for Dad’s Christmas party,” Sierra said brightly, looking down at the car seat next to her that contained a sleeping newborn. “Gage will be there, kind of a triumphant return, coming-out kind of thing.”

  Maddy’s older brother shifted in his seat, his arms crossed over his broad chest. “You make me sound like a debutante having a coming-out ball.”

  “That would be a surprise,” his girlfriend, Rebecca Bear, said, putting her hand over his.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Sierra said, smiling, her slightly rounder post-childbirth cheeks making her look even younger than she usually did.

  Maddy was having a difficult time concentrating. She had met her siblings early at The Grind, the most popular coffee shop in Copper Ridge, so that they could all get on the same page about the big West family soiree that would be thrown on Christmas Eve.

  Maddy was ambivalent about it. Mostly she wanted to crawl back under the covers with Sam and burrow until winter passed. But they had agreed that it would go on only until Christmas. Which meant that not only was she dreading the party, it also marked the end of their blissful affair.

  By the time Sam had left last night, it had been the next morning, just very early, the sun still inky black as he’d walked out of her house and to his truck.

  She had wanted him to stay the entire night, and that was dangerous. She didn’t need all that. Didn’t need to be held by him, didn’t need to wake up in his arms.

  “Madison.” The sound of her full name jerked her out of her fantasy. She looked up, to see that Colton had been addressing her.

  “What?” she asked. “I zoned out for a minute. I haven’t had all the caffeine I need yet.” Mostly because she had barely slept. She had expected to go out like a light after Sam had left her, but that had not been the case. She had just sort of lay there feeling a little bit achy and lonely and wishing that she didn’t.

  “Just wondering how you were feeling about Jack coming. You know, now that the whole town knows that he’s our half brother, it really is for the best if he comes. I’ve already talked to Dad about it, and he agrees.”

  “Great,” she said, “and what about Mom?”

  “I expect she’ll go along with it. She always does. Anyway, Jack is a thirty-five-year-old sin. There’s not much use holding it against him now.”

  “There never was,” Maddy said, staring fixedly at her disposable coffee cup, allowing the warm liquid inside to heat her fingertips. She felt like a hypocrite saying that. Mostly because there was something about Jack that was difficult for her.

  Well, she knew what it was. The fact that he was evidence of an affair her father had had. The fact that her father was the sort of man who cheated on his wife.

  That her father was the sort of man more able to identify with the man who had broken Maddy’s heart than he was able to identify with Maddy herself.

  But Jack had nothing to do with that. Not really. She knew that logically. He was a good man, married to a great woman, with an adorable baby she really did want in her life. It was just that sometimes it needled at her. Got under her skin.

  “True enough,” Colton said. If he noticed her unease, he certainly didn’t betray that he did.

  The idea of trying to survive through another West family party just about made her jump up from the coffee shop, run down Main Street and scamper under a rock. She just didn’t know if she could do it. Stand there in a pretty dress trying to pretend that she was something the entire town knew she wasn’t. Trying to pretend that she was anything other than a disappointment. That her whole family was anything other than tarnished.

  Sam didn’t feel that way. Not about her. Suddenly, she thought about standing there with him. Sam in a tux, warm and solid next to her...

  She blinked, cutting off that line of thinking. There was no reason to be having those fantasies. What she and Sam had was not that. Whatever it was, it wasn’t that.

  “Then it’s settled,” Maddy said, a little bit too brightly. “Jack and his family will come to the party.”

  That sentence made another strange, hollow sensation echo through her. Jack would be there with his family. Sierra and Ace would be there together with their baby. Colton would be there with his wife, Lydia, and while they hadn’t made it official yet, Gage and Rebecca were rarely anywhere without each other, and it was plain to anyone who had eyes that Rebecca had changed Gage in a profound way. That she was his support and he was hers.

  It was just another way in which Maddy stood alone.

  Wow, what a whiny, tragic thought. It wasn’t like she wanted her siblings to have nothing. It wasn’t like she wanted them to spend their lives alone. Of course she wanted them to have significant others. Maybe she would get around to having one too, eventually.

  But it wouldn’t be Sam. So she needed to stop having fantasies about him in that role. Naked fantasies. That was all she was allowed.

  “Great,” Sierra said, lifting up her coffee cup. “I’m going to go order a coffee for Ace and head back home. He’s probably just now getting up. He worked closing at the bar last night and then got up to feed the baby. I owe him caffeine and my eternal devotion. But he will want me to lead with the caffeine.” She waved and picked up the bucket seat, heading toward the counter.

  “I have to go too,” Colton said, leaning forward and kissing Maddy on the cheek. “See you later.”

  Gage nodded slowly, his dark gaze on Rebecca. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and stood up. “I’m going to grab a refill,” she said, making her way to the counter.

  As soon as she was out of earshot, Gage turned his focus to her, and Maddy knew that the refill was only a decoy.

  “Are you okay?”

  This question, coming from the brother she knew the least, the brother who had been out of her life for seventeen years before coming back into tow
n almost two months ago, was strange. And yet in some ways it wasn’t. She had felt, from the moment he had returned, that there was something similar in the two of them.

  Something broken and strong that maybe the rest of them couldn’t understand.

  Since then, she had learned more about the circumstances behind his leaving. The accident that he had been involved in that had left Rebecca Bear scarred as a child. Much to Maddy’s surprise, they now seemed to be in love.

  Which, while she was happy for him, was also a little annoying. Rebecca was the woman he had damaged—however accidentally—and she could love him, while Maddy seemed to be some kind of remote island no one wanted to connect with.

  If she took the Gage approach, she could throw hot coffee on the nearest handsome guy, wait a decade and a half and see if his feelings changed for her over time. However, she imagined that was somewhat unrealistic.

  “I’m fine,” she said brightly. “Always fine.”

  “Right. Except I’m used to you sounding dry with notes of sarcasm and today you’ve been overly peppy and sparkly like a Christmas angel, and I think we both know that isn’t real.”

  “Well, the alternative is me complaining about how this time of year gets me a little bit down, and given the general mood around the table, that didn’t seem to be the best idea.”

  “Right. Why don’t you like this time of year?”

  “I don’t know, Gage. Think back to all the years you spent in solitude on the road. Then tell me how you felt about Christmas.”

  “At best, it didn’t seem to matter much. At worst, it reminded me of when I was happy. When I was home with all of you. And when home felt like a happy place. That was the hardest part, Maddy. Being away and longing for a home I couldn’t go back to. Because it didn’t exist. Not really. After everything I found out about Dad, I knew it wouldn’t ever feel the same.”

  Her throat tightened, emotion swamping her. She had always known that Gage was the one who would understand her. She had been right. Because no one had ever said quite so perfectly exactly what she felt inside, what she had felt ever since news of her dalliance with her dressage trainer had made its way back to Nathan West’s ears.