by Vanessa Vale
“Where are we headed?” she asked as Riley drove out of the lot and onto the highway headed west.
“Steele Ranch. Your new home.”
Not for long. If we had our way, she’d be in our beds, in our house instead. She might have inherited a sizeable chunk of Montana history, but she was still ours.
2
KADY
Oh. My. God.
This was insane! Where had my perfectly unexciting life gone? How had it become this crazy, in just a month? The list of changes was long.
Inherited a ranch from a father I’d never known existed. Check.
Inherited four half-sisters to add to the one I already had. Check.
Traveled halfway across the country. Never done that. Check.
When I’d first received a certified letter from a lawyer in Montana, I’d been stunned by what it revealed. When I spoke with him on the phone, I’d been reassured. And coming here, I’d been excited.
But now?
Sitting in a huge-ass pickup truck with two unbelievably handsome men, I was beyond freaked. They must have pheromone cologne or something because the second I laid eyes on Cord Connolly in baggage claim, my heart had stopped. Yeah, he’d scared me for a moment, but I’d never seen a guy so virile, so rugged. I’d heard about that feeling, the one where your heart lurches, your palms get sweaty and your brain literally stops functioning in front of a guy.
It had never happened to me. Ever. Until now.
Cord Connolly had made my brain go haywire, my nipples go hard and my panties get damp all between one breath and the next.
He was big. God, I’d blurted that out and made a fool of myself. As if Cord didn’t know he was super-sized. A football linebacker, but without the excess flab. An Australian rugby player. That was it. I’d seen a game on satellite TV once and those guys were big. Dense. Solid. Mouthwatering.
Those athletes hit every single one of my hot buttons, and so did Cord Connolly. Even some I’d never even known I had.
Cord was no Australian. No, he was all flipping Montana cowboy. From his big five-gallon hat to the tips of his tough leather boots. Yet he was a gentleman, too.
Except for the way he looked at me. That wasn’t gentlemanly at all. And for some strange reason, I was perfectly fine with that. I wanted him to look at me with dirty thoughts floating around in that gorgeous head of his.
Because I was having very dirty thoughts about him, too.
Gah!
I slid my damp palms over my thighs, smoothing out non-existent wrinkles from my dress. I was two-thousand miles away from home, riding off to god-knew-where with two gorgeous cowboys. “If my fellow teachers could see me now,” I murmured, reaching up to tuck my wild hair back behind my ear.
“Too much wind?” Riley asked. “I can shut the windows.”
I glanced at him, shook my head. “No, the breeze feels nice. I can’t believe how beautiful it is here.”
There were only a few random trees to get in the way of the gorgeous view. Nothing but flat green prairie split in half by the straight two-lane road now that we’d exited the highway. In the distance were snowcapped mountains. Purple against the bright blue sky. And all of it seemed to go on and on and on.
“You teach second grade?” Riley asked.
I had a feeling he knew that already—they knew so much about me because they’d had to track me down—while I hardly knew a thing about them. But, he was trying to make small talk and I appreciated it.
“Yes. School ended last week for the summer. I get eight weeks off. I thought I’d be spending it tutoring out of my house, not in Montana.” I turned my head to look at Riley’s profile. “But you knew all that since you arranged my travel.”
He took his eyes off the road for just a second, and that pale blue gaze had me sucking in a breath. Blond, blue eyed. Tan. Laugh lines around his mouth and his eyes. I guessed him to be around thirty. Not the sixty-five with white bushy eyebrows as I’d expected. We’d exchanged emails, phone calls, but I’d imagined him to be more the fatherly-type than the fantasy-type. How could he make me all flushed and flustered if I was attracted to Cord? How could I find them both to be so different and yet equally appealing? How could I want both of them?
I wasn’t here to get it on with my lawyer and his friend. I was here because of the ranch, the one that was—holy crap!—now mine, at least part of it. Along with a big chunk of money. From what Riley had said, if I maintained a reasonable lifestyle and was smart with my inheritance, I never had to work again. No more tutoring multiplication tables or parent-teacher conferences at the fancy private school. I could work with kids who needed it, in school districts whose budgets only paid their teachers a pittance.
“Tell us about yourself,” Riley suggested after we’d driven about twenty minutes.
I shifted in my seat to face him directly, and with a turn of my head, could see Cord as well. “You’re the private investigator,” I said to Cord. “You know everything about me.” I glanced down at my lap, a little worried that was the truth. “Probably what kind of toothpaste I use.”
“Brand? No, but I take you for a gel kind of gal.” Cord’s grin accompanied his words, and I had to smile and catch my breath. He was still rough around the edges, but that smile softened him in a way that had my ovaries jumping for joy. And that was just a smile. If he kissed me, I’d—
“I run a security company,” he continued. “We deal with corporate and personal protection. When your father died—”
“Michael Parks,” I said, cutting him off. “My father was Michael Parks, not Aiden Steele.”
He studied me for a moment with those dark eyes. “That’s true. Let me see if I have it correct. Your mother married Michael Parks when you were two and he adopted you and gave you his name. He was your real father. Aiden Parks had just been a sperm donor.”
I was so glad he understood that tears sprang to my eyes. I blinked and willed them back. I was not going to cry now, not in front of these two. “Yes, that’s all correct,” I finally said.
“When Aiden Steele died, your—and your half-sisters’—existence was brought to light. It seems Aiden knew about you, kept track of you, but didn’t get involved. Only put you all in his will. As the estate’s lawyer, Riley needed to notify all of you as his next-of-kin, as the only heirs to his fortune, his land. He had me look into tracking all of you down. With five of you, I hired investigators. The one you met, Johnson, was just a contractor.”
“Right,” I said, tucking my hair back again. While the red curls were never tame, they were flying about all wild from the breeze. “Still, he sent you reports. You’ve been on target about me so far, including the toothpaste.”
He gave a slight shrug, prompting me to look at the thick bulk of his muscles. “I like to learn about a woman’s toothpaste preference a different way.”
Heat flared in my cheeks at the thought of Cord standing in my bathroom first thing in the morning, squeezing out gel toothpaste, wearing just a pair of boxer shorts. Or nothing at all. Because that meant he’d spent the night and done all kinds of dark and dirty things to me.
The grin hadn’t slipped. He was riling me up on purpose. No, not riling. Flirting. And it was working, dammit.
“As for the rest of your story, I’d like to hear it from you,” he said, eyeing me levelly. “You aren’t words on a piece of paper any more. You’re all gorgeous hair and pale skin. Green eyes and a little bit of fire.”
I glanced away again. After those words, I couldn’t look at him any longer. “I-I was born in Philadelphia. My birth certificate has Aiden Steele listed as the father even though my last name at birth was Seymour, my mother’s maiden name. I’m sure that made it easy for you to find me.”
“It did.”
Riley stopped at a light, winked.
They were both charmers.
“My mom married when I was two and she had my sister, well, my half-sister, Beth, three years later.” I shrugged. “I had a normal childhood
, except I never knew my dad really wasn’t my dad. Dinner at six. Band practice and braces. Vacation at the beach every Labor Day weekend.” I paused, felt the ache that never really went away. “When I was twenty-three, my parents were killed. Car crash. My sister eighteen.”
“I’m sorry for that,” Riley said, reaching out and gently sliding his fingers down my arm before putting them back on the wheel. The light changed and he turned, heading west and into the sunshine. “That must have been—still is—hard.”
I missed them every day, but the sharp pain of it was gone. I missed the hugs, the love, the sense of family. Belonging. “Yes. I…adapted. My sister struggled worse than me.”
“The report said drugs.”
I pressed my lips into a thin line. I had no idea why I’d even mentioned Beth. If Cord knew about her drug use, then Riley probably did, too. Still, they didn’t need to know about my burdens; we’d just met. And Beth was a burden.
But they both remained quiet as we drove, patient. I knew they were waiting for me to talk, to tell them about her. I sighed.
“Yes. When my parents died, I’d just started teaching. The job was lined up because I did my assistant teaching work at the school. The new job, that kept me busy. Focused. Beth had just started her freshman year at college and my parents were driving to see her for parent weekend. After…she dropped out. She couldn’t stay at the school. She blames herself for their deaths. I told her it wasn’t her fault over and over, but she wouldn’t believe me. See, they wanted her to go the state school, but she decided to go to a place in Florida, wanting the warm weather. If she hadn’t gone there, they wouldn’t have been killed.”
“It was an unfortunate accident,” Riley murmured. I realized then that his hand was stroking over my arm. Gently. Soothing. I looked up at him, nodded.
“I know that. But nothing made her feel better. Except drugs. They took over her life. I’ve tried to help.”
I sighed again, thinking of the help groups we’d joined together, the counselors, the drug treatment centers. None of it had worked, only given me false hope. After three years, I’d pretty much known there was no way I’d get the old Beth back. Just like my parents, that Beth was gone forever.
The most recent incident, the hospital had called me at three in the morning. Beth’s neighbor had found her in their apartment complex hallway, and after she’d been stabilized, Beth had agreed to go into a rehab center. Again. A four month stay. Only two months ago, I’d taken a second mortgage on the house to pay for it. This trip, the news that I’d come into some money, was timely. I needed a break from Philly, and I needed to pay the extra mortgage. But I didn’t say all that to them. It was too depressing. Too personal. So completely unsexy. I might as well wear a burlap sack and have a huge wart on my nose for all the interest these two would have in me after hearing all that unpleasantness. I didn’t want to talk about Beth, about my sad past. So I pushed it down into an imaginary box and shut the lid.
“Tell me about you two,” I said, pasting on a big, fake smile.
Cord was looking at me with his piercing dark gaze. It was almost unnerving the way he paid attention to me as if nothing else was going on around him. To him, there wasn’t any beautiful scenery to look at. Only me. With his hat in his lap, I could see his dark hair was cut short, neatly styled. A crease ran in a ring around his head caused by his hat. Total cowboy.
With a strong brow, his eyes were even more intense. His nose had a crook to it as if it had been broken a few too many times. Football or bar brawl? His face was wide, his jaw strong. Dark stubble covered his cheeks and strong chin. He was the kind of man who probably needed to shave twice a day. And his size!
He was so big. Like he could smoosh me big. And his hands. Dinner plates. And yet when he watched me with his quiet, intense patience, I sensed a gentleness about him. A gentle giant, although I doubted he let anyone see that. Why I could sense it, I had no idea.
I wanted to run my fingers over his face, over his broad shoulders, feel the differences between us. I had muscles, but they were hidden beneath a layer of womanly curves that wouldn’t go away no matter how many spin classes I took or yoga poses I did.
Riley put on his blinker and took another turn. Each road went on for as far as I could see, straight and even. After an hour of driving, I still had no idea where we were or where we were headed besides Steele Ranch. But his easy confidence as he drove set me at ease. No, Riley set me at ease. He didn’t hold himself with the stiff bearing of a military man like Cord did. His hands were relaxed on the wheel, and he gave me a quick glance and an even quicker smile. But that casual attitude didn’t show his smart mind or complex career as a lawyer.
While my online searches for Cord hadn’t turned up much—as a security guy he could easily hide any details of his life or the complexity of his business—Riley had been easier to find. His law firm’s website shared his resume, his schooling at Harvard and Denver University Law School. His successes on cases relating to water rights and dealing with big oil. He was impressive on paper. But words on paper weren’t everything, just as Cord had said.
“I followed in my father’s footsteps,” Riley finally shared. “He was a lawyer in Louisiana for twenty years before my mother died of cancer. He moved here with me when I was in seventh grade. Change of pace for both of us. That’s when I met that behemoth.” He angled his head toward the back seat, winked again. “After law school, I joined my dad at his firm and then took over when he died. You could say I inherited Aiden Steele as a client.”
“I saw the papers, signed them, but what does all this mean?” I asked as we turned beneath a wooden archway.
Two thick vertical logs flanked a wide dirt driveway. Spanning them was a third and centered on it was a metal sign. Steele Ranch. It wasn’t fancy, but it was impressive and screamed Old West. There was no house that I could see. Nothing but the road we turned off and perpendicular to it, the driveway. The land rolled, but was still covered in the tall grass that waved in the breeze. Mountains were bigger here and the snowy peaks seemed taller, craggy and even more impressive.
We drove for a minute then Riley pointed out the windshield. “There’s the main house. Off to the side are the stables. Barn. Bunkhouse and small cabins for those who live here. Steele Ranch employs fifteen people full-time.”
The driveway curved to the right and down. In the valley, I could see the various buildings he mentioned and a house in the distance. Wow. The main residence wasn’t mansion big, but it was as formidable as the entrance. I looked back and all I could see was dust that had been kicked up by the truck.
As we drove closer, I took in the house I’d inherited. Well, one-fifth of it. Two story, full wraparound porch. Balanced windows, a dark wood front door at the center. It appeared old, as if built decades before Aiden Steele was even born. If I had to guess the size, five or six bedrooms on the second floor.
“Did my… fa—did Aiden start the ranch?” I wasn’t ready to call the man my father, even though he’d recognized me, at least in death, as his daughter.
Riley shook his head, slowing the truck as we went over the metal slats of a cattle guard. “His grandfather. It’s one of the original homesteads in the area, but your grandfather added on a large parcel to the property back in the thirties, then again in the fifties. Your father, even though he was a pain in the ass, was a smart businessman.”
It was the first mention of Aiden being a difficult man, but I had to imagine it since he left women pregnant all across the country. Charming, certainly, to get them that way—including my mother—but difficult if none of the women wanted him around long after conception.
“How big is the property?” I wondered, not too interested in thinking about my father’s long string of lovers.
“The road we were on is the south property line.” Riley thumbed over his shoulder. “There’s over sixty-thousand acres.”
My mouth fell open as I did the math quietly to myself. “Forty-three thousan
d five-hundred sixty square feet times sixty-thousand.”
Riley laughed as he pulled up in front of the house. The dirt driveway formed a circle, with an extension that went off toward the white buildings I could see in the distance.
“I see you know your math. No need to worry about trespassing on neighbors. Everything you see is Steele property.”
The grass was mowed down in front of the house with smooth pavers as a path to the steps, but it wasn’t a high maintenance place. No fancy flowerbeds, only hanging pots along the porch. No manicured lawn, only prairie that belonged to me as far as the eye could see. Well, a fifth of it. Just as Riley said.
It was beautiful. Peaceful. But very, very remote.
“We’ll get you settled inside and you can explore your new house,” Cord said. He’d been quiet for a while now and his deep voice slid over me, gave me goose bumps. “Rest. This place is yours now.”
They both hopped from the truck. Before I could even get the door open, Cord was there, reaching across to undo my seatbelt for me. His big hands were on my waist again to help me out.
“Is there anyone else here?” I asked as I slid down his body. Yes, Cord slid me down his front so I could feel every hard inch of him. My breasts tingled at the contact, the heat of him. And when he set me on my feet, he didn’t let go of my waist. I couldn’t do anything but stare into his dark eyes.
“No one else. Just you.”
“Oh,” I replied. In Philadelphia, I lived in the suburbs in a neighborhood with houses close enough to know a little of each other’s business. I often waved to the older man across the street, got his paper when it was too cold for him to go outside. The kids next door frequently woke me up early on Saturday mornings with their antics in the back yard. But here?
I had no neighbors. No houses for what seemed like miles. And a grocery store? It had to be back in the last small town we went through, twenty-minutes down the road. The empty road.
“There’s a housekeeper, Mrs. Potts, who used to come every day when Aiden was alive. She’s only been coming once a week since his funeral, but was in yesterday. Stocked the fridge for you with some things so you wouldn’t starve while you got settled. But now, it’s really up to you if you want her help or not.”