Passion's Dream (The Doms of Passion Lake Book 1)

by Julie Shelton

  “Oh?” Leah’s eyebrows hiked upward, giving her a haughty expression as she played along. “And just how often, pray, do you feel such inspections might be warranted?”

  “Hard to say. Although, in the beginning, perhaps as many as two, possibly even three times a day. Maybe more.”

  Leah just laughed. “Then you’d better finish up the rest of those ribs, cowboy. You’re going to need to build up your stamina.”

  Katie returned with a pitcher of iced tea to refill their glasses, but Leah shook her head. Clay drained the rest of the tea out of his glass and held it out for a refill. “Katie, can you pack up some pulled pork with baked beans and mac and cheese for me to take to the boys?”

  “Sure thing, Clay. I’ll have it up at the register. Enough for twelve?”

  “Yeah. And throw some fries and cornbread in with that, too.”

  “You have twelve ranch hands?” Leah asked, impressed.

  “Naw, five. They just eat like twelve.” He grinned and she found herself just grinning back. She liked this man more with every passing second, and that was the problem. She couldn’t afford to like him. She had a life back in San Francisco, a career she loved. She couldn’t hide here forever, waiting for Richard to make his move. She had no business getting into any emotional entanglements, especially not with a horse rancher who lived in the middle of Nowhere, Virginia. Not even if that horse rancher was the sexiest thing on two legs.

  But even as she made the argument, she knew it was too late. She more than liked Clay “Raven” Nighthorse. She was very close to being in love with him and the thought scared her to death. If he were ever to reject her, she didn’t think she’d survive the devastation to her heart. She looked up to find him watching her over the rim of his iced tea glass, his expression as solemn as the sudden turn of her thoughts.

  “Where did you just go?” Nowhere good, from the looks of it.

  She just smiled and shook her head with a shrug of one shoulder.

  He set his empty glass down with a thunk. “Ready to leave?”

  “Yes.” She slid out of the booth before he could offer his hand, walking ahead of him and hovering near the door while he paid and picked up the humongous box containing his take-out order. He beeped the locks and she got in while he put the food on the back seat. Then he slid into the driver’s seat, started the car and backed out into the street. “I’ve decided not to stop for groceries.” he said as he drove past the gas station and mini-mart. “The food’ll get too cold. We’ll make a list when we get home and I’ll send one of the boys over to Marshall’s Creek to a real grocery store. They’ll probably have a fist fight to determine who gets to drive this car.” His smile faded. “Where did you go?” he asked again.

  “What? When?”

  “Just now. You disappeared. And judging from the look on your face, you didn’t like where you found yourself.”

  “I was just thinking…about Richard,” she hedged. “What happens if he never comes here looking for me? I mean, I can’t stay here forever.”

  “You could,” Clay suggested. “I think the town of Passion Lake could support an art gallery or a boutique featuring your exquisite, one-of-a-kind clothing designs. And when you factor in internet sales, you would have a thriving business.”

  “How do you know how exquisite my clothing designs are?”

  “Burke sent me photos of them. If they are all as wonderful as the ones I saw, Leah, then they’re just the thing to lend a bit of class and elegance to our little town. The Bed and Breakfast is nearly completely booked through October, and they’re planning to offer a Thanksgiving special. With Jesse and Adam’s BDSM club just up the road and the boutique shopping mall they’re creating out of the old, Civil War-era cotton mill, the high-end clientele they attract will flock to your gallery. We already have people driving here from Richmond, Petersburg and Williamsburg, and we expect Passion Lake’s particular brand of whimsy will go over bigtime in D.C. Caleb’s brother Ash has been working on two brochures which will go in all the Visitor Welcome Centers and Tourist Information Centers, not just in Virginia, but in all the neighboring states as well. They’ll also go in hotels, motels, and restaurants.”

  “Wow.”

  Clay smiled. “Yeah, wow. Passion Lake is not a normal town with a mayor and town council. It’s a corporation with a CEO, a Board of Directors, and stockholders. Caleb’s official title isn’t Sheriff, it’s Chief of Security. The original investors are the board members and we hold sixty per cent of the shares. Any new investor would have to be approved by the Board of Directors, but I can pretty much guarantee you’d be a shoo-in.”

  Leah turned her head to look out the window. Yeah, but where would I live? If it’s not with you, I don’t think I would want to stay.

  “The Passion Lake Lodge is down that road,” Clay pointed out as they passed the carved wooden sign advertising the place. “Like I said, it’s owned by Nik Rostov and Jay Gillespie. Nik is Russian, six feet eight, and very intimidating, but he’s really a teddy bear, especially with women. He loves women. He was wonderful with all the hostages our SEAL team rescued, getting them to talk about their ordeal when no one else could get through to them.”

  “What’s a Russian doing on a SEAL team?” Leah asked, curious.

  “He was a member of the Russian Special Forces. He suspected his superior officer of corruption and taking bribes, nothing unusual in the Russian army, and true to form his commanding officers told him to leave it alone. But he couldn’t leave it alone. So, when he caught his captain in the act, he turned him in. Unfortunately, no action was taken except to move Nik to a post in Siberia. This roused his suspicions, so he conducted an unauthorized undercover investigation into all of the officers. The information he compiled on the entire chain of command nearly brought down the Russian Special Forces. They all faced court martial, including Nik for disobeying direct orders. But he had planned for just such a contingency and sneaked out of the country, carrying a flash drive with all the incriminating information on it. When he walked into the Naval Air Base in San Diego and demanded to speak to the base commander, he turned over the flash drive and was placed on our team less than a month later.”

  “I can’t wait to meet him,” Leah said. ‘He sounds fascinating.”

  “I figured we’d have dinner at his bar tomorrow night, so you can meet both of them. And quite possibly most of the rest of my former teammates. We’re a pretty close-knit group.”

  They quickly left the town behind, and began to climb through a pine forest. Off in the distance, through the trees, Leah caught occasional glimpses of blue water. A road to the left led, according to the sign, to the Passion Lake Airfield. Then they emerged from the cover of the trees into rolling farm land, until they came to white-fenced paddocks with several horses grazing placidly. The sign over the entrance proclaimed it to be Nighthorse Ranch. Some of the horses looked up disinterestedly as Clay turned into the driveway, rattling over the metal grate designed to keep the animals from leaving the property.

  “This isn’t the most direct route to the house,” Clay was saying as the driveway meandered between enormous oak trees whose branches met across the road, providing a leafy canopy overhead. ‘But it’s the most scenic, so that’s what I went with.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Leah acknowledged, taking it all in.

  “There are very few places in Virginia that aren’t beautiful,” Clay confided, reaching up with his right hand to rub the back of his neck. As tired as he was, he was eager to get home and show Leah around. The woods opened out into rolling green meadows watered by a wide stream that was so shallow they didn’t even need a bridge to cross it. They just drove right through it. As they rounded one last turn, the house came into view. It was a large, traditional, two-story Colonial style house, painted a pale, buttery yellow with black shutters, white trim, and a wide, columned porch that swept around both sides. “The porch goes all the way around the house,” Clay said as he pulled up to the fron
t steps and parked. “That way you can either seek the sun or avoid it, depending on the time of day.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Leah whispered. “And not at all the one-story, stucco ranch house I pictured you in.”

  “My grandmother’s house looked like this,” he confided, bending forward and craning his neck to admire his house. “It was the only place I felt safe growing up. My Dad wasn’t around much and my mother was a drunken nightmare, so I would escape to shiichoo’s house. Rosemary usually came with me. Shiichoo had a big, sunny kitchen with an old farm table in the middle of it covered with a lace table cloth that reached to the floor. She would give us cookies or a brownie or a butterscotch bar—whatever she was baking at the time—and Rosemary and I would crawl under that table to eat them. Then we’d just sit cross-legged on the floor and talk quietly about what we wanted to be when we grew up. Rosemary wanted to be a princess rescued from the evil troll by a handsome prince and carried off to his castle. I guess she saw Everett Burke as an acceptable substitute for her handsome prince. And I now know that her brother Franklin was the real evil troll in her life.”

  “And what did you want to be?” Leah asked.

  “A warrior,” he said simply, opening his door and unfolding himself from the car seat. On the way around to open Leah’s door, he popped the trunk. She accepted his hand-up from the low-slung seat and got the large box of food from Katie’s BBQ out of the back seat as he retrieved the luggage from the trunk. Geez, it’s still hot! And even though she had just eaten, the mouthwatering aroma of Katie’s sweet and spicy barbecue sauce made her tummy rumble. She followed him up the wide wooden steps onto the shady porch, looking around while he unlocked the front door.

  Off to the right of the house, across the driveway, was a white-fenced paddock with five horses standing around grazing quietly. A little farther up the driveway was a neat white barn with a wide central aisle. Through the open doors, Leah could see a long row of empty horse stalls. Beyond the barn was an even bigger two-story house, also with a wide porch and a long row of rocking chairs.

  “Who lives there?” Leah asked.

  “That’s the bunkhouse.” He chuckled. “See those men standing around in front of the barn pretending to be busy?”

  She turned to look and four of the five men hastily turned their heads away, all of them suddenly intensely interested in doing various things—coiling a piece of rope, repositioning a bale of hay a couple of inches, scraping imaginary mud off their jeans, inspecting their fingernails. The fifth man, caught ogling Leah, merely gave her an unabashed grin and a wink.

  Clay and Leah both laughed. “Come and get it!” Clay yelled as he hefted the luggage and pushed the door open with his foot. “Katie’s!” Leah followed him into the cool interior of the house, chuckling at the whoops and hollers of joy from the hands as they came running toward the house. Clay had to yank Leah back behind him to keep her from being trampled by the men, who stopped so abruptly, they crashed into each other.

  “Beg pardon, ma’am,” they muttered, removing their hats and shuffling their feet awkwardly. “Here, ma’am, let me take that.” One of them put his hat back on and stepped forward. “It’s much too heavy for you to carry.”

  “Oh, but—” Leah started to protest, then thought better of it. “Thank you,” she said, studying him as he took the box from her arms. He was quite handsome, with the broad chest, thick neck, and powerful arm and shoulder muscles of a linebacker. He had rich mahogany brown hair, hazel eyes, a snub nose, and a smile that revealed even, white teeth.

  “Leah, that’s Mark Austin. He’s my foreman here at Nighthorse Ranch,” Clay said. “Mark, this is Leah Stanhope. Doctor Leah Stanhope.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Doc,” Mark Austin said with a wide grin. “Got anything for a rash?”

  Leah laughed. “I’m not that kind of doctor.”

  “No problem,” he said as he turned and walked the food toward the kitchen. “You brought Katie’s pulled pork. For that you can be any kind of doctor you want.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Leah,” Clay said, lifting his hand to indicate the first man to Leah’s left, “this is Ray Sadler, Mitch Thompkins, Al Eaglefeather, and Rusty Madison.”

  “Ray. Mitch.” She shook each man’s hand in turn, murmuring his name as she did so. “Al. Rusty. It’s lovely to meet you all.”

  “Same here, ma’am,” they said in unison.

  “Please, call me Leah. Or Doc, if you want to. Anything but ma’am.”

  “Sure, ma’am,” “Whatever you say, ma’am,” “Of course, ma’am,” they all chorused at once.

  Leah just laughed.

  “Glad we got that straightened out,” Clay said wryly. “C’mon, let’s go eat. We can get everyone introduced over lunch.” He led the way into the kitchen, where Mark Austin was busy unpacking the food and setting paper plates, plastic forks, and napkins on the butcher block table in front of each chair. The men all slapped their dusty hats against their thighs and hung them up on a hat rack just inside the kitchen door. Then they washed their hands at the sink. But their boots were still dusty. Hay clung to their clothes and they all had serious hat hair, matted and damp with sweat. They smelled like leather and hay, dust and horses.

  “Oh, none for me, please,” Leah protested when she saw seven places set. “We’ve already eaten and I can’t eat another bite. Really.” She added at Mark’s quirked eyebrow. “I’m stuffed.”

  “I’ll have some,” Clay called out as he walked toward a stainless steel door. “Leah, could you grab a soda while I get the beers?” She followed him to the refrigerator, holding the door open and reaching around him for a cola while he grabbed a case of Bud. “The cola’s for Ray,” he said as he plunked the carton down at the far end of the table and ripped it open, grabbing two cans and putting one at his place at the head of the table and the other at Leah’s place just to his right.

  She watched in total astonishment as he proceeded to load his plate with pulled pork, French fries and Cole slaw. “Excuse me, aren’t you the same man who just demolished five slabs of ribs and a mountain of fries? How can you even think of eating all that?”

  Clay grinned. “It’s fuel to keep up my energy. I’ve been told I’m going to need all the energy I can get.”

  Leah looked around at all the men seated at the table. “Do you guys all eat all your meals together?” she asked.

  Clay chuckled. “Don’t worry, baby, you won’t be expected to cook for these guys. Or clean up after them when they’re done. I have a couple, Hector and Grace. Hector was a cook on the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, until he retired. He does all the cooking and cleaning for the boys, while Grace looks after me. They’re on vacation this week, but Hector stocked the freezer with enough frozen casseroles to feed everybody for the next five days. You’ll meet them on Monday.”

  While the ranchers were all busy wolfing down Katie’s delicious food, Leah sipped her beer and took advantage of the opportunity to study them. Ray Sadler was sitting directly opposite her.

  Noticing the direction of her gaze, Clay said, “Ray just started with us this month. His dad was a member of our SEAL team. He was killed six years ago in Afghanistan. We’ve all just kind of adopted him. Ray only works week-ends right now, because his Mama insists he keep his grades up and get his chores done before he can work at any outside job. He wants to learn the horse breeding business from the ground up so that when he gets his own spread he’ll know how to make it work.” Clay sounded as proud of Ray as if he were his own son.

  It figured Ray Sadler was still in high school. He didn’t look a day over sixteen. He was around five-eleven and bean-pole thin, with hands and feet that were much too big for the rest of his body. He still had at least one more major growth spurt that would allow him to catch up. And then, ladies, you’d better watch out. He’s going to be a heartbreaker. When he spoke, which wasn’t often, his words came out in a deep, southern drawl. He had a baby face and was trying, without much
success, to grow a beard. A thick lock of his long brown hair drooped over his forehead, partially obscuring his brown eyes. And even though the other men teased him enough to make him blush, he was pretty good at holding his own.

  “Mitch Thompkins is a former Green Beret, ex rodeo champ, and our resident Romeo,” Clay continued, moving on to the man who had been eyeing her so unabashedly. Mitch was perhaps in his mid-thirties, with dirty blond, chin-length hair and light blue eyes. His smile revealed the deepest dimples Leah had ever seen. Most women probably thought he was the sexiest thing on two legs with that two-day growth of stubble, the twinkling mischief in those eyes, his cocky attitude and the swaggering arrogance of his walk. And they would be right, Leah though. He had every reason to be smug and arrogant. He was handsome as hell with charm and charisma up the wazoo. As a rodeo star, he’d probably had to fight women off in droves.

  “Do you miss the excitement of the rodeo?” Leah asked.

  Mitch just grinned. “I miss the ridin’,” he confessed around a bite of pulled pork. “Don’t miss the fallin’.” He shook his head, chewing thoughtfully, before going in for another bite. “Definitely don’t miss the fallin’.”

  “Mitch was a real crowd pleaser,” Clay said. “A real favorite with the buckle bunnies.”

  “Buckle bunnies?”

  “The women who follow the rodeo circuit,” Mark said, “and, ahem”—he cleared his throat—“make themselves available to their favorite stars.’

  “For sex,” Rusty chimed in.

  “Watch your language,” Mitch chided, reaching over and covering Ray’s ears with his hands. “There are children present.”

  Ray shrugged the hands away, swatting at them like they were particularly annoying mosquitos. “I’m not a child,” he retorted, his face turning beet red. “And I know what sex is,” he added beneath his breath, “In theory, at any rate.”