Nate had been in contact with a friend who worked for the USDA, and several months ago Nate had been told that a slaughterhouse the ranch used had been accused of selling sick cattle. Without the ranchers’ knowledge, the slaughterhouse had been investigated thoroughly, but no animals, including those that came from Wilde Ranch, had shown evidence of the fatal disease.
The matter had been dropped, only to resurface last month when several children had gotten sick from meat, thought to be infected with mad cow, they’d eaten at a fast-food restaurant.
Just the mention of mad cow, particularly after a devastating outbreak that had occurred several years ago, made the USDA know it would be a public-relations nightmare if the rumor leaked to the press.
From his friend, Nate had also learned that the allegation had been lodged directly against Wilde Ranch. Although the slaughterhouse they used had been cleared earlier, because of the fear of public outcry the decision had been made to investigate the meat coming from their ranch, pending an investigation.
“Let’s just be damn glad they didn’t quarantine us,” Shilah said, his tone grim.
“Exactly,” Nate replied, his tone just as somber. “All they have is a rumor and a helluva lot of speculation—”
“A damn lie, that’s what it is,” Holt barked, and Nate nodded his head.
“Yeah, a lie, but a lie that could have gone a long way toward shutting us down. At least we’re given the time to prove our innocence and that a lie is all this is.” He paused and took a deep breath. “And that’s where Ellie fits in,” he said. And at mention of her name, Shilah raised his eyes, narrowed them.
“She’s working as a subcontractor. She’ll be at the ranch, observing the animals for usual signs of the disease, as well as taking blood samples.”
“And how did she become involved?”
“This I don’t know. I’m only glad that she is, not because I expect any favors, but because she is someone we know, someone we trust. Someone we know isn’t in Rolling Hills’s back pocket,” Nate replied.
He went on to inform them that she would be on the ranch over the next several weeks, and that she would have their full cooperation.
“But…despite the fact that we consider her like family, we need to keep it business. Not interfere—no taint of interference can be on this investigation. This has to be legit, up front. This is the only way to squash all the bullshit rumors.”
After speaking, he glanced over at each of them, waiting for everyone’s consent. When his glance landed on Shilah, he saw his brother frown, a look crossing his face, before his gaze moved on.
Shilah pushed off the wall he’d been leaning against, feeling his body tense.
“We have to clear our ranch. Our name,” he finished, encompassing everyone in his statement.
Shilah’s glance slid around the room, going to each face. Tension and underlying fear was thick, palpable in the room. Yet, a steely look of determination was on both of his brothers’ faces, as well. The Wilde brothers wouldn’t go down easily.
“I guess you’re right. Ellie’s investigation will not turn up one damn thing wrong with our processing of the animals, or the animals themselves,” Holt said, walking over to Yasmine, looping his arm casually around her shoulders.
“I’ve asked her to come tomorrow and speak to the men. Explain what she’s doing here, and what her role is. I’ve also told the men to give her their full support. Anything she asks for, any help she needs is to be given. And of course we’ll do the same,” Nate finished, and everyone nodded their heads in agreement.
The birds chimed from the antique grandfather clock that stood in the corner of the room, indicating it was now past midnight.
Nate glanced toward the clock before rising, lifting Althea’s hand and facing his brothers. “That’s it, fam,” he started. “We go on with running the ranch, doing what we do—”
“And doing it damn good,” Holt interjected, a grin on his tired face.
“That’s the only way we Wildes know how to do it,” Shilah agreed, and the brothers all shared a look.
As they all began to disperse, Nate called out to him, asking to have a word with him before he left. Nate waited until they were alone before he began to speak.
“Shilah, we need to discuss something.” Nate approached, a worried frown pulling his brows together. Something told Shilah the discussion centered around Ellie.
Although carefully keeping his expression neutral, Shilah wracked his brain wondering how…if his brother had somehow found out about his involvement with Ellie.
He mentally cursed. Hell, talk about jumping the damn gun. He’d only had a one-hour conversation with her and here he was thinking, if only in his mind, that they were involved.
Nate stopped in front of him, crossing his arms over his chest, and stared at Shilah. With his brows together, the expression on his set face confirmed to Shilah that somehow his brother had figured out there was something going on between him and Ellie.
Even though Shilah himself hadn’t figured out exactly what that was, he was damned if he was going to allow anyone to stop him from finding out.
Shilah pushed away from the wall, feeling the muscles in his neck, his entire body, tense as he faced his brother.
“Listen, we need to talk about Ellie.”
Even if that meant going against his entire family.
Chapter 6
“Was there a reason you didn’t tell me you were in charge of the investigation against me and my brothers?”
Ellie jumped at hearing the deep voice and spun around to see Shilah Wilde lounging in her office doorway casually, his arms folded across his broad chest.
She clutched the file folder she held in her hand tighter, before turning back around and calmly placing it inside the drawer and closing it shut.
The sound of his voice sent a fizzle of awareness through her, unreasonable as it was sudden. Ellie drew in a deep breath to compose herself before she faced him.
“I wouldn’t call it that, Shilah,” she said calmly, despite the way her heart was beating out of control.
“Then what would you call it, Ellie?”
She grew uncomfortable beneath his stare. He simply stood in the doorway, his gaze raking over her as she stood next to her desk. She sighed, blowing out a breath.
“Come in, please,” she invited. After hesitating briefly, he pushed his large frame away from the doorway and moved to walk inside. “Close the door behind you, please.”
She glanced toward her computer, where she’d been in the middle of shooting off an email to her supervisor at Jasper and Brant, the firm that was subcontracted with the USDA, giving him an update of her status.
She subtly pressed a button on her console, sending her computer to sleep.
“I know I should have told you the reasons I was at the ranch when we were together a few days ago. I’m sorry that I didn’t.” The words were inadequate, Ellie knew, and offered no real explanation.
But she had no explanation herself. All she knew was that when she’d seen him again her reasons for being at the ranch had flown from her mind.
Ellie had chosen not to examine her reasons too closely. Her encounter with Shilah, although brief, had elicited old feelings, feelings she’d had as a child, about the ranch, her accident…and Shilah.
“I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you. I—I—” She stopped, sighing. “I’m sorry, Shilah.”
She saw his face lose some of its stiffness, and the tension in the room eased.
“I guess it just hit me out of the blue when I was told. I wasn’t expecting it. To be honest with you, it’s not your fault, not really. I got so caught up in just talking to you, was so excited to see you that I didn’t think to ask you myself.”
The minute he finished speaking, she saw his face slightly flush, as though he hadn’t meant to say what he had. She felt an answering blush on her own face.
“Anyway, I understand,” he continued. “The ranch ha
s been going through a lot…this investigation came out of nowhere for us. Had Nate not been tipped off…” When he paused this time, Ellie knew that whatever he’d been about to disclose was something she didn’t need to know about.
She raised a hand. “Hey, why don’t we put this out there now. I can’t discuss what’s going on, and neither can I know about any inner workings of the ranch.”
Shilah was shaking his head before she could finish. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m sure we have other…more interesting things we can talk about.”
He glanced around her office. He walked over to the wall near her desk, his gaze running over the display of her degrees and various recognition plaques, as well as a scattering of articles Ellie had written for a national vet magazine that adorned the walls.
“Dad calls that,” she said, pointing to the assortment of framed certificates, “my love-me wall,” she said with a small laugh.
She rose from her chair and walked toward him. “When I arrived he showed me my office and he already had it all set up. He and Mom have made duplicates of my every achievement,” she said with a small shake of her head.
When she saw him smile as he reached out and fingered a framed piece of her childhood artwork, she groaned, “Even the ones dating back to kindergarten. Sometimes they go a little overboard.”
He turned to face her, the familiar half smile tugging the corners of his sensual mouth up.
“They’re proud of you. They have every right to be, Ellie. You’re an amazing woman,” he said, and Ellie flushed at the compliment.
The look in his eyes made her eyes widen. She stuck out her tongue to moisten lips gone dry. The way his eyes centered on her tongue made her flush deepen, her heartbeat banging so loudly against her chest she knew he had to hear it.
He took a step closer to her, and without conscious thought, Ellie took steps toward him, until they stood less than a foot apart. He reached a hand out to move away a strand of hair that had escaped her tight chignon, placing it behind her ear.
“You always have been,” he finished, his voice low, the look in his eyes intense. As he held her gaze, Ellie searched his features, going over his strong nose, down to his sensual lips and back into his eyes. In their depths there was such a look of admiration…and something more, that Ellie turned away.
He placed a finger beneath her chin, forcing her to look up at him.
“I’ve missed you, Ellie Crandall,” he said, his voice deep and quiet. “More than I realized.”
When his head began to lower, Ellie felt her eyes begin to flutter closed.
When she felt his mouth, hard yet gentle, against the corner of her mouth, Ellie felt the tension ease from her body as the unexpected softness of his caress sent a subdued cry from her mouth.
Gently he placed a small series of kisses along the lower rim of her mouth, undemanding, soft and inquisitive.
Ellie’s hands rested on his chest, clenched, her eyes fully closed in reaction to the innocence of his kiss. Butterfly kisses turned to nibbling caresses along her lips, until with a soft moan of surrender, she eagerly rose on tiptoe to press her body closer to his.
Her action caused him to tug her closer to him, crushing her breasts against his hard chest and slanting his mouth over hers as their bodies pressed tightly together.
She inhaled a swift breath. There was nothing innocent about the feel of his shaft, hard, thick and unyielding as it pressed against her belly.
He dragged the full bottom rim of her lip into his mouth, and suckled it. Drawing lazy patterns with his tongue back and forth in the space between her lips and teeth, he wrought a deep moan from her as she arched her body fully into his chest. Slowly her hands unclenched and moved up, wrapping around his neck and drawing him closer.
His tongue moved to lave her lip and she eagerly opened her mouth wide, willingly giving him the access he was silently demanding.
When she felt his big hand, warm against her back as he lifted her sweater, running a path from up the line of her spine to the back closure of her bra, the hard ridge of his erection pressing even hotter against her stomach, warning bells rang. But Ellie chose to ignore them, too caught up in the unexpected pleasure of his mouth.
She felt him break away, and she groaned, lifting heavy eyes to look up at him.
He placed his palms against the sides of her face, staring down at her, his breathing labored. She felt a soft tremor in the big hands that framed her face.
“God, Ellie…you taste so good. Your mouth is like honey,” he told her with a catch in his voice. He bent back down to recapture her mouth, wrapping his hands around her waist, pulling her impossibly closer to his big, hard body.
Tugging her sweater away from her body, again she felt his hand against her skin, but this time he trailed a path toward her breasts. Keeping one hand on the back of her head, his lips firmly on hers, with the other hand he cupped one of her breasts. She moaned into his mouth when she felt him pinch her nipple, lightly, through the thin cotton of her bra.
Arching fully into him, her body on fire from his talented mouth, tongue and hands, Ellie tunneled her fingers through his hair, pulling him closer.
“Dr. Eleanor Crandall, you’re wanted at the front!”
The sound of her father’s voice, just outside her door, brought Ellie’s eyes wide-open.
Dear God in heaven, what had gotten into her, she thought, panicked as she shoved Shilah away. She practically ran to the other side of the room, frantically righting her clothing.
“I—” Her father walked inside and stopped. In one glance he took in the scene, and Ellie felt her entire face flush as she placed a nervous smile on her face, glancing over at Shilah.
In the short time between her father’s voice interrupting them and his opening the door, Shilah had swiftly straightened his clothes, yet Ellie saw the evidence of what they’d been doing on his mouth. Traces of her favorite princess-pink lipstick stained his lips.
Shilah must have realized what she was gaping at, as he casually turned away to wipe at his mouth.
Ellie walked toward her father, forcing a smile on her face. “Hey, Dad, I thought you had gone out to check on the Petersons,” she said, forcing into her voice a levity she was anything but feeling.
“Uh, no, princess. I thought I’d do that after dinner. Am I interrupting anything?” he asked, turning from her and pinning Shilah with a glance.
“No, of course not. We were, uh, just going over, uh…”
Shilah walked forward and stretched out his hand. “Hi, Dr. Crandall. I happened to be in town and dropped by to ask your opinion about something,” he said. “Nothing major, but since I happened to be in town, I thought I’d come by. You weren’t around, and I saw Ellie here. We haven’t really had the chance to catch up, so I was just in the process of trying to persuade her to go to a late lunch with me,” he finished, turning to Ellie.
When her father cast a dubious glance her way, again Ellie kept the tenacious smile firmly in place, shooting Shilah a look from the corner of her eyes.
Josiah Crandall’s glance went first to Ellie and then to Shilah, before he accepted Shilah’s handshake.
“Kinda late for lunch, isn’t it, baby girl?” he asked, the skepticism still in his voice.
Ellie was at a loss for words. She knew Shilah had thrown out the answer in an attempt to save the situation.
“She’s been so busy here I think she forgot to eat,” Shilah interjected, and again Ellie shot him an evil look.
At that, her father turned to her. “Now, I don’t want to hear your mother’s mouth if she finds out I’ve been keeping you too busy to work! Go on, I can take over from here.”
“Dad, I can’t. I’ve got way to much work to do! I—”
Her father fixed her with a stern glance. “Go. Now.”
With a sigh, Ellie lifted her hands in defeat. If for no other reason than to get her father and his scrutinizing stare out of her office, she had no choice but to go.
&
nbsp; “Okay, okay, Dad…I’m going. We’ll head out in a bit,” she said, desperate for her father to go.
Left alone with Shilah, Ellie turned and hurried toward her desk.
“I, uh, I do have a lot of work to do, like I told my dad, so…” She allowed the sentence to dangle, as she lifted folders from her desk and restacked them in the exact same order, doing anything to keep her hands busy and face averted from Shilah.
She grabbed the stack of folders and turned to her filing cabinet, taking more time than was needed to place them in their correct file.
Dear God in heaven, what had come over her to kiss him like that? she thought, embarrassed and feeling about as sophisticated as an adolescent caught necking in her parents’ house.
“Don’t you think we’d better get a move on?” he asked, and she spun around to face him.
“What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning and walking back to sit down at her desk, unconsciously massaging her knee.
Her day had started off with a bang. After coming into her father’s practice earlier that morning, she’d literally been on her feet the entire day. Between answering emails, assisting her father in inoculations, as well as beginning her preliminary report, it had been a hectic day for her.
Coupled with that, after leaving the clinic yesterday she’d gone out for a run, which wasn’t unusual for her. She’d began running as a teenager as a form of physical therapy for her knee. Told she would regain only seventy-five percent mobility of her leg at best, Ellie had attacked her physical therapy with a vengeance.
As well as the prescribed rehab she’d undergone, she’d begun to jog, slowly at first and only a short distance, but soon she’d pushed herself and her endurance until she was able to run three miles a day at a brisk pace. Her mind heavy with her new job, she’d pushed herself further and had run until her knee had throbbed and she’d had to ice it.
Her glance stole over to Shilah. Her new job hadn’t been the only thing that had been on her mind. And after the kiss they’d shared, she doubted that would change anytime soon.
To Desire a Wilde Page 4