“Christ, Victoria, don’t you know better than to sneak up on a horse?” Eli’s eyebrows knit together as if she were the one making a mistake.
“Get. Him. Down.”
Eli stared at her for a moment as if to argue, and because anger was making her wild, she wanted him to argue, so she could smack him.
“Mom,” Jacob said as Eli lifted him from the horse. “It was my idea.”
“I’m sure it was.” Her mother’s gaze ran over him, her hands following, checking for injuries, seen and unseen.
All she saw was fear, hers and her son’s. She turned back to Eli, because while she knew she was scaring Jacob, this was all Eli’s fault, and he stared back at her as if he had his doubts about that. “Go inside, I’ll talk to you later,” she ordered her son.
“Mom, it was fun. I’m fine. Patience is—”
“Go. Inside.” She didn’t even look at him.
“The hospital was practically a year ago—”
“Hospital?” Eli asked.
“Jacob.” It was her lethal-mommy voice. The one that meant business, that might—if pushed—lead to a grounding, the taking away of his toys. If he didn’t leave now, she was scared down to her core that she might spank him, out of fear and worry and anger. “Please go.”
He ran away and she turned herself into a blade, pointed right at Eli Turnbull. His strength, his virility, the beauty of his lips and eyes only sharpened her rage. What did he know of worry? What did he know of sickness and hospitals? What did he know of bedside vigils?
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“He wanted to ride.” The shrug made her crazy. Insane with anger. “I didn’t see the harm in it.”
Of course he didn’t.
“He was never in any danger,” he said. “I was here the whole time. You’re on a ranch, for crying out loud, Victoria.”
“My son has allergies, asthma. Eight months ago he was in the hospital with pneumonia from H1N1.”
He blinked, stunned into silence. “I didn’t know.”
“They thought he was going to die. They told me that. To prepare for the worst.” Tears burned in her eyes at the memory of that night, of hugging him close, whispering in his ear not to leave her. Eli’s face blurred and doubled.
“I … I didn’t know.” He had the good grace to sound ashamed, but it was too late.
“You knew I wouldn’t like it, didn’t you? You put him on that horse because it would make me mad. To get back at me for leasing that land?”
After a long moment, he nodded, his eyes never leaving hers, and she didn’t bother to hide the pain. The gasp of shock that this was how low he’d go.
She blinked and the tears ran down her cheeks, clearing her vision, and she saw suddenly what needed to happen.
“You’re fired, Eli.”
chapter
6
Eli couldn’t believe her. Didn’t believe her. But that hard look in her eyes, unearthed by the two tears making tracks down her face, brooked no argument. Panic was a cold snake down his spine.
“Come on, Victoria, don’t you think you’re overreacting?”
“About Jacob on that horse? Maybe. But you involved my son in this …” she waved her hand between them, her lips curled in distaste, “thing between us. And I can’t … I can’t forgive that, Eli.”
“Victoria.” He caught her hand, panic making him reckless. His instincts told him to stop, but this was too much to lose; he needed the barn. The ultrasounds and chute were equipment he couldn’t start his business without.
Her hand shook in his. He pressed his thumb to the center of her palm and reflexively her fingers spread out wide. Her soft skin felt like velvet and he traced the lines of her palm from finger to wrist.
Time was nailed to the floor and he absorbed the pleasure of touching her. The shock of her softness, her stunned compliance.
She watched dumbstruck and he held his breath, waiting. Wondering.
Her eyes were wide, her pink lips open, a blush burned onto her cheeks. She was so beautiful in her surprise and his body reacted, his heart pounding.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. Whether he was sorry for what he’d done, or what he was about to do, he couldn’t say. Without thinking, he leaned forward to taste those pink lips, the sweetness of her amazement.
The smack never came; it was as if she were a fly in a web and he was the terrible spider who had caught her. He pressed his lips to hers. She jumped as if shocked, her mouth opening, and he fought himself not to take advantage. Not to push this strange moment into shattering. He kept the kiss tender, her chapped lips all but breaking his heart.
Carefully, as if she were a horse that might spook, he touched her cheek with his fingertips, and when she didn’t shy away he slid those fingers around her neck, cupping the heat of her skin, the pounding of her heartbeat in his palm.
There was a vibration in her throat and he felt it in his mouth, in his hand, and he knew she was moaning. Crying slightly, because she hated herself right now, hated that she couldn’t resist him. And the devil in him loved that. Lived for that.
He should have done this earlier, cut through all the bullshit negotiation and bullshit communication, and gotten right to this.
Because sex he understood. A woman’s soft groan reverberating against his tongue was all the communication he needed.
He stepped closer, caution be damned. She wanted him, he’d known that about her for a while, and if he couldn’t win the honest way, he’d win like this.
Now he took advantage of those parted lips and his tongue swept inside as he pulled her closer, flush against him. His body, hard and tense and tortured by his own stupidity, cheered at her nearness. Those hard edges he’d expected weren’t that hard and she melted against him with a sigh, revealing curves and sweetness that he would never have expected from her tiny, rigid body. It was as if his touch had transformed her.
Her hand clutched at his wrist, her fingernails biting into the skin, and lust coiled in his gut.
That messy knot of hair on top of her head toppled without much convincing, and the silk of it ran through his fingers as he clutched it in his hands.
She was panting in his arms like a quarter horse coming off the track and he stroked her, tried to gentle her, calm her into obedience. But the more he touched her, the more his kisses coaxed her into kissing him back, the more agitated she got. She wanted him and hated him at the same time and the combination was a terrible turn-on, an evil aphrodisiac. His pulse pounded beneath his zipper, and he wanted to strip off that ugly cardigan sweater and that ridiculous frilly shirt and find the woman behind the old-lady clothes.
His hands, the calluses catching on the silk, ran up from her waist to her small breasts and she jerked against him, crying low in her throat.
But then he realized that jerk was actually her pushing against him.
She was saying no.
Sickened by himself, horrified at what he was doing, but even more horrified by what would happen when he let her go, he pulled her tighter. Closer. Kissed her harder. Ignored her every sign of distress.
He needed this job. Needed this place. He couldn’t let her get rid of him.
“You want this,” he breathed against her mouth, sucking at her lips. He lifted her like she was nothing and arched against her, pressing the erection that pounded in time with his heartbeat against her core. “Don’t fight me.”
The crack of her palm against his cheek spun him sideways. Her face was flushed, her hair tousled by his hands, her lips damp and stung by his mouth. She was gorgeous and furious. Turned on and pissed off.
“Get the hell off my land, you bastard.”
She spun on her heel, running for the door, but he caught her hand, expecting it to slip, like sand, like this whole situation, right through his fingers.
Shame, that old companion, settled around his neck, strangling him. “I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I’ve never—”
�
�No, you’re not.” Her eyes snapped with anger, her cheeks flushed red with all her hate. Loathing him brought her to life. When she shook her head, the black curls slid across her shoulders, catching the light. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Ah. The million-dollar question. He didn’t have an answer for that one, never had—not for his father when he was a kid, not for the women who wanted more than he could dream of offering them. And absolutely not for her.
“You’re not welcome on the Crooked Creek anymore,” she said and walked away, head high, shoulders back. The stupid bow on her shirt fluttering over her shoulder like a battle flag.
What’s wrong with you? Victoria laughed and poured herself some more wine. It sloshed a little in the glass, spilling across her father’s desk. She used the sleeve of her sweater and part of a land contract to sop it up.
What the hell is wrong with me? That’s the real question.
She didn’t have answers. Inside her head was a mess—a storm with lightning, tornadoes, wicked witches on broomsticks.
Was she so easy to disregard? Was she so insubstantial a person that Eli could simply roll right over her?
Well, the answer was clearly yes. Every man in her life had done that. Her father. Her husband. That was old damage.
But that kiss, devastating and wonderful all at once, had torn her in two, and what was worse than Eli ignoring her protests was that she had ignored them too, letting him kiss her. Letting him touch her. Letting him bring her dead body back to life.
The bottle, nearly empty, scraped against the desk when she set it down.
The door to the office swung open and Ruby stood dripping in the doorway, wearing galoshes and pink polka-dotted rain gear. “You need to get Eli up here. He’s not answering his phone.”
“Why?” Victoria stood, grabbing hold of the desk when the office sloshed to the left. Oops. More drunk than I thought.
“We got mud sliding down over the verandah. It’s coming in under the door into the kitchen and I can’t shovel fast enough.”
“I’ll help.”
Ruby sniffed.
“What?”
“You’re drunk.”
“Hardly.”
Victoria held her chin up high. “I can handle a shovel, Ruby. Despite what the world thinks, I’m not totally useless.”
“All right,” Ruby sighed. “We got gear in the closet and I’ll go find another shovel.”
As soon as she was dressed like the fisherman on those fish stick boxes, Victoria went into the kitchen and saw the mud pooling on the floor.
Victoria had spent the last ten years of her life in penthouse apartments. This mud slide seemed dangerous. She liked her nature at a distance, and watching it soak the rug under the kitchen table made her feel very poor. Very third world.
Jacob appeared on the other side of the door, his face pressed to the glass. His very muddy, happy face.
“Come on, Mom!” he cried.
Ruby jerked the door open an inch and more mud squeezed through. “Get yourself out here if you’re going to help!” she barked.
“Goodness,” Celeste said, appearing at Victoria’s elbow with an empty mug. “What’s happening here?”
“The rain is causing a mud slide.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Celeste eyed her yellow slicker as if Victoria had put on a superhero suit and declared her intentions to save mankind.
“Shovel. Want to help?”
“Lord no! Don’t we have men around here to fix this sort of thing?”
Not anymore. If Victoria weren’t drunk she probably would have felt bad, but the bottle of wine in her blood had convinced her she had been right to kick Eli off of the ranch. Mud or no mud.
“Suit yourself.” She found the shovel by the front door and ducked out into the rain that was coming down in sheets. It was falling so hard that her exposed skin felt pierced.
Ruby was scraping and shoveling mud off the concrete verandah, and Jacob was trying his hardest to hold the mud away from the sliding glass doors with a squeegee.
Ruby pointed to the place where the edge of the cement pad was usually visible and Victoria hunkered down, scooping up a heavy, wet pile of mud. And looked around at the sea of mud for a good place to put it.
Immediately she knew she wasn’t up to the task. She was drunk, for crying out loud. And the mud was heavy. With nowhere else to put it, she heaved it as far past the hill as she could, only to watch it slide right back down at her.
The rain poured down the gaping tops of her boots and made the shovel handle slippery. Wind blew back her hood, tossing her hair into her face, where it got wet and stuck across her eyes.
But she kept shoveling and throwing the same damn mud.
She slipped. Fell right on her butt. Mud squished between her hands.
“You okay, Mom?”
“What are you doing out here? It’s dangerous.” The mud sucked at her feet and hands, her butt, making it impossible for her to stand on her own.
“It’s just rain, Victoria,” Ruby yelled over the sound of the rain.
Just rain. Just mud. Just a ranch she didn’t know how to run. Just another man pushing her aside, treating her like she didn’t matter.
“Right,” she yelled, and grabbed the timber post and heaved herself to her feet. When she shook it off her hands, mud splattered her face, her hair, even Jacob.
“Isn’t this fun, Mom?”
Fun? No. Nothing about this was fun. It felt like the rain was laughing at her, enjoying the never-ending downward spiral of her life. Surely Eli had to be the bottom. That kiss had to be her low point. Things could not get worse.
“It’s great,” she said as she grabbed her shovel from the muck and tried to keep working.
The rain was not helping her body lose the feel of Eli’s touch. Like a shadow it lingered on her skin, everywhere he had touched her—her neck, her lips, her breasts.
She felt like a candle someone had forgotten to blow out. Burning, for no good reason.
The memory of that kiss in the arena, that colossal failure of hers, was sore to the touch, so she turned away from it. Because examining it would only hurt. Her loneliness, her neediness—they were bombs waiting to blow up in her face. Like this summer with Dennis. She’d been so desperate for any kind of attention that she’d believed him—a con artist and liar, who was only using her for money.
And she’d played right into his hands because she didn’t know who she was without a man. She had no identity of her own.
The memory burned through her, adding to her self-hate.
She felt so stupid. So foolish, so fucking weak when she was trying so damn hard to be smart and strong. But who was she kidding, really? She wasn’t strong. She wasn’t smart.
She stepped sideways to catch a giant river of mud gathering force down the small hill to her left, only to lose one of her boots. She tried to put her foot back into the opening, but it fell sideways and when she tried to use her hand to right it, she fell sideways too, right back into the mud.
The last string holding her together snapped.
Pushing herself back up on her knees, she grabbed her shovel and started beating the living hell out of the mud.
“I hate this place!” she screamed while rain and mud splattered up over her face and hair. Her hood fell off and she didn’t care. “I hate Eli! I hate men! I hate rain! I hate my life!”
Her arms gave out and she curled over her stomach, crushing her pain, cradling it in her hands as if she could just rip it free.
How could she possibly expect to love her life when every single thing she did was in reaction to something some man did to her? Her father, Joel, Dennis, Eli—all of them acted and she just reacted.
She hadn’t had a plan—hell, an original idea—in years. She was just one of those mice they put in lab mazes, running around, hitting dead ends, frantically searching for a new path, and then when she found it, clinging to it as if it were a divine gift. Until
another wall got in her way.
No more.
She sat back on her heels, panting. Suddenly, as if the mud had cleared, she saw what needed to be done.
“Mom?” Jacob gaped at her. “You okay?”
“No!” Ruby yelled, her sarcasm undiminished in the rain. “Your mom’s lost it. Totally loca.”
“We’re not doing this right!” She ignored Ruby, getting to her hands and knees.
“Yeah, and what do you know about it?”
“We’re reacting to the mud now instead of stopping it.” She jabbed her foot into its boot and forced herself upright. She looked around at the hills, the stone fence that had caved to her left, letting in the worst of the mud. If they could shore up that fence …
“Jacob!” she yelled and her son jerked, unused to seeing so much wild emotion from her in one day. “Let’s go to the barn and get some hay.”
“Hay?” Ruby was skeptical. Ruby was always skeptical.
Victoria pointed to the fence, and after a moment the doubt washed away from Ruby’s face and she set down her shovel.
“Let’s give it a shot.”
Victoria helped Ruby carry two bales of hay, her fingers burning under the plastic twine, from the arena to the back verandah. Her back ached, her arms were numb. Her hair made it impossible to see anything, but the mud made the landscape homogenous anyway. All they had to do was slog along until Jacob told them to stop.
“You’re at the fence!” he yelled.
With groans Victoria and Ruby dropped the hay, ignoring the splash of mud that surged up over their coats and legs. What was more mud at this point? Victoria slid down the hill toward the shovel she had left by the sliding glass door and then clawed her way back up.
She used the shovel to clear a trench in front of the wall and then kicked the hay bales into the trench before the mud had a chance to fill her little moat. Ruby took the shovel and used the bottom edge as a knife to separate the bales, spreading them out. Jacob jumped on them, pounding them into the hole.
Can't Hurry Love Page 6