“One round to go! Yee-haw!” He throws his head back to cheer and then drinks, the other ranch hands echoing him. When he’s done drinking he looks back at me. “So, tell us, Brooke. How’d you convince my brother to look like such a fool in front of the whole town?”
It feels like he’s prying, but I’m too buzzed off the beer and the win to care. “Reminded him what happened at the first round. He’s smart enough to see sense if it hits him in the face.”
“She slapped him, boys!” The other ranch hands around the bonfire, two of them with their own wives, chuckle. “Lassoed some sense right out of the air and looped it around my big brother here, who has never in his life seen—”
“Who’s that coming by?” Austin calls out, voice deep and clear. “Is that Julie May?”
Luke swivels around so fast his beer sloshes out of the can. “Julie!” He yells. “We’re over here.”
“That’s what I figured.” Julie comes out of the shadows with a book under her hand. The hood of her hoodie is pulled up over her blonde hair and she taps the book in her hand against her denim-clad hip. “You invited me to a bonfire. This seems like a bonfire, doesn’t it? Hi, guys.” She goes around and greets each of the ranch-hands by name. Miller. How you holding up?”
Holding up from what? The buzz recedes and curiosity takes its place. The betrayal he pulled to get this sweet gig? No, can’t be. It’s got to be something else. But why didn’t he tell me about it? My own part-time ranch hand. He’s basically been running Sweetwater for the last few days—what little of it there is to run. Basically he’s making sure the rest of the buildings don’t burn down. Good man. With secrets.
“Good.” He accepts Julie May’s pat on the shoulder. “How’s things with you?”
“Busy,” she sighs, and plops down next to him in an empty lawn chair. Their voices drop until I can’t hear them. But I don’t have to hear a thing to see the way Luke’s looking at her. He catches me watching and turns his gaze somewhere else, slapping on a big, broad smile.
This is one thing I didn’t expect—a celebration. For me and Austin. Luke put it together after we got our second medals. They’re cheap little things, the kind they give out at the end of fun runs, but I’m still treasuring the weight of the red ribbon around my neck. One step closer to that billboard. One step closer to a mystery cash prize, if Mrs. Howard is to be believed—and she always is. One step closer to...
...to freedom. To going back home. Yes. That’s freedom, isn’t it?
Luke and Julie are both here now, and Miller. Three other ranch hands from Bliss. Two of their wives, Megan and Serena, are cuddled up close by. This doesn’t seem like a gathering of people who hate their jobs and work for stuck-up, self-absorbed men who take it lightly to destroy other people’s lives.
It’s starting to dawn on me, embarrassingly late, that maybe my life wasn’t ruined by the Bliss family at large. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they did me any favors, but...
“Tell us the story,” pipes up Gordie, one of the ranch hands. He keeps his arm tight around his wife Megan’s shoulder. She leans into him, close and warm, and envy makes my throat ache. I clear it up with another long drink of beer. Gordie laughs out loud. “I want to hear it again. How’d you convince him to bring a goat to the cattle show?”
“Through the power of persuasion,” I tell him, and then—I don’t know why, I don’t know why—I throw in a wink.
“Persuasion?” echoes Luke. “What kind of persuasion?”
“She painted me a pretty picture,” says Austin. “Of our names up on a billboard. All we had to do was impress the panel. It’s not like 4-H.”
“A goat still isn’t a cow.” Luke chortles, and Julie May’s big eyes turn up toward him like it’s the prettiest sight she’s ever seen. “I ever tell all of you about the time I mixed up the liquor store and the gas station when I was applying for my first job?”
Austin groans. “Don’t bore us with that again.” He reaches into the cooler by his chair. “Here. Have another drink. It’ll make you more interesting.”
Luke catches the beer and uses it to salute Austin. “Nobody’s more interesting and mysterious than you. We all know that.”
I settle back in my seat and let their good-natured ribbing wash over me. I crack open another beer, which turns out to be some fruity thing Serena brought to put in the cooler. It’s not bad. And it’s making me feel so good, and so relaxed. I’m normally not a beer girl. I’m normally not a campfire girl. But all of Paulson has seen me being successful at something, so...maybe I can be good at this, too.
We’ll see.
Luke and Julie May are the first ones to disappear, at some point during a rowdy conversation about breeding prizewinning cows. One minute they’re next to the firepit with a cool foot between them. The next, they’re gone. Gordie and Megan are next. Miller fades into the darkness with a set to his shoulders I don’t recognize, except for the one other time I saw him like that. Something had gone wrong with the pumpkin crop and he couldn’t figure it out. It had been early, I remember that much. And now we don’t have any pumpkins for the farmer’s market.
A tiny voice inside says get up and go to your room. Go to sleep. Be reasonable. But a louder one points out how comfortable the chair is. How comfortable the heat of the fire is. How beautiful the flames look, licking up toward the sky. They don’t have as much power, contained in a fire pit. The fire in my house had too much. It sped through the old wiring and ate up the dry wood from the inside out. Even the storm that day couldn’t save it.
I put my head back against the back of the chair and look up through swirling, wispy clouds to the million stars above us.
“What’s on your mind?” The question from Austin is so soft and familiar that it might as well be coming from a bullhorn. The night sings all around us, crickets and frogs calling past one another, but he’s the only human left. Everyone else is gone.
We’re alone, and he wants to know what’s on my mind.
“When do you think Luke and Julie May will get together?”
He huffs a laugh. “I’ve been teasing him about the same thing. They’re not getting together. Those two have been friends since they were in diapers. She was in diapers, anyway. Luke would never keep the damn things on.”
“Sounds like his brother. Allergic to clothes.”
He points a finger at me around his beer. “You asked me to take off the clothes.”
“I asked you to get off my property. Wasn’t my fault you weren’t dressed.” The fire’s sinking slowly into the wood beneath it, embers working their way in from the outside. That, combined with the beer, is mesmerizing. The scent of the smoke makes my heart beat faster, I can’t deny that it does. I’ll probably have some reaction for the rest of my life. But it’s easy enough to see it for what it is—a harmless thing, surrounded by dewy grass and a thick metal barrier. That fire isn’t going anywhere.
Unlike the one inside my chest.
“They look like they want to make out with each other.”
Austin turns his head, the orange from the firelight catching in his eyes. “Luke and Julie May?”
“They look like they can’t help it.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you felt the same.”
“About Luke? Gross.” A jittery anticipation hops down my spine, taking each vertebra like a step on a ladder until it’s all the way down at the base of me. “My sister might have had a thing for him, but she’s not me.”
“Why are you staring so hard at the fire, sweet thing?”
It should make me mad. It should make me so damn furious to hear those words out of his mouth. And far back in my mind, it does. But at the forefront of my beer-buzzed thoughts, I don’t hate it.
“Seems like you might want to kiss me. Again.”
“So what if I do?” I hear myself say.
“Then you’d have to get it out of your system somehow.” He says this like he might say we have to load up the truck or I’m headed to
the grocery store, we need food. “That kind of want will eat you in a thousand little bites.”
“How would you propose I do that?” I’m getting ready to shake my head, brush him off, when he speaks.
“Come here.”
I have no explanation for why I stand. The night? The win? The way Austin comes in every night with a sheen of manly sweat stretching cross his shirt from working hard? The ache that lives permanently behind my breastbone? I don’t know why. I just do, dropping the empty can to the grass beside my chair. I can come back for that later.
My nipples peak under my shirt. It takes three steps to get to Austin and one more to turn and face him. The heat from the fire massages my shoulders from behind.
He lifts a hand and pats his knee.
And I, Brooke Carson, straddle him.
It’s dark. Nobody can see, nobody’s here, and I want this. He runs his hand up the back of my neck and threads his fingers through my hair, loose from when I let it down after tonight’s round at the barn. He gives it a gently tug, tipping my head back to expose my neck.
“I can’t,” I whisper toward the sliver of a moon.
“I can,” says Austin, and then his mouth is on the side of my neck, working his way up toward my jaw until I can’t stand it anymore. Until our mouths meet. Slow, but not tentative. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He tastes me like a drowning man drinks in air. He wraps a big hand around the curve of my jaw and holds me still, the other tracing circles on my lower back. Between my spread legs, my knees on either side of his rock-solid hips, a hot desire pulses in time with my heart.
When he lets me up for air I gulp it in. “It can’t go any farther than that.”
He leans in and presses one more burning kiss to my neck. “Challenge accepted.”
Chapter Thirteen
Austin
I can’t even get her to the house, that’s how hard Brooke attacks me. It’s a good attack. It’s the best attack I’ve ever suffered. Her sweet mouth on mine, arms around my neck—and she’s already straddling me, so it makes it easier than anything to pick her up and let her hook her legs around my hips. I cradle her perfect ass in both forearms and hustle for the stables. A beer can catches on my toe in the dark and I kick it away with a muffled curse. There better not be anything else in the way.
Daisy whinnies as we come in but she settles down, body dropping lazily to the straw. The moonlight isn’t enough. If I’m going to fuck Brooke Carson—and I am, right now—I want to see it with my own two eyes. Battery-powered lanterns that kick off an old-fashioned light hang on hooks by the door for just this kind of emergency. Well—really, they’re there for horses giving birth. But this is better.
At the last stall on the right—the only empty one, now that two horses foaled in the spring—I hang the lantern back up and survey what I’ve got to work with while Brooke flicks her tongue along my neck. It’s such a small movement. It shouldn’t be earth shattering. It is.
I can’t lay her down on the fresh straw. That wouldn’t be the kind of hospitality expected of a Bliss man, not by far. It kills me to do it but I put her on her feet. “Stay there.”
She’s already panting, but she stays. It might be the first time all day she hasn’t argued with me.
I wrench open the big cabinet at the back of the stables. We keep it stocked with clean blankets and other things the horses might need. There’s a med kit in there, and I push past it to get the thickest, cleanest blanket there is. My cock wants out of my jeans. It throbs there insistently. I toss the blanket over my arm and take my zipper down on the way back to Brooke.
From the way she’s bouncing on the balls of her feet, there’s no time for any more niceties. I toss the blanket down on the straw. It flutters to its resting spot in the corner of my vision. Then Brooke’s shirt comes off.
She pulls it straight over her head, all business, and it chokes the air out of my lungs. She hasn’t been wearing a bra all night. I’ve been sitting two feet from her while her perfect pink nipples rub against the cotton of her shirt. How the hell did I not notice that?
I’m drawn to her like gravity pulls a rock to the earth. For a single heartbeat I hesitate.
Then I’ve got my hands on her skin, and everything else drops away. She’s so smooth. So flawless, except for a little mole on her right breast. I bend down and kiss it and she groans. “God, Austin, you’re torturing me.”
“I can do worse.”
“Hurry it up, then.”
I take her chin in my hand and pull her face close to mine. Close enough to feel how fast her breath is. “I take my time, sweet thing. You should know that by now.”
Her gray eyes are dark in the lantern light, almost black from how dilated her pupils are. She arches toward me and I loop her in my arm, letting my free hand explore. One nipple, then the next. They’re already peaked and waiting for me. I trace the line of her neck.
“I’ve had enough.” I push her back a half step and watch the shock move over her face in a crashing wave. “You’re too beautiful to be covered up like this. I’ve had enough. Strip.”
I expect sass. I expect an argument, a snarky comment, but Brooke slips her bottom lip between her teeth. My heart crashes inside my chest, flinging itself wildly from side to side. An ancient drumbeat. Her chin comes up, proud as ever, and Brooke lets out a sigh so soft a nightbird’s wings would be louder. It sounds like she’s giving in. As long as she’s giving in to me, I don’t care what else happens.
She wriggles out of her jeans and drops them on the straw bed. Her panties cut a dark outline against her skin.
I told her to strip, but I sink to my knees instead. All the beer has flung itself bodily out of my veins, and the only thing in control right now is the animal need driving down between my legs. Brooke comes willingly when I pull her close, hands on her ass, and breathe her in. Every curve is a revelation.
I give her a long lick right through the fabric, tasting her arousal in those shadows between her legs. “And you said you didn’t want to kiss me.” She responds to this scolding by working her fingers through my hair and holding on while I lick her again. “I always knew that Carson women were the best kind of liars.”
“I don’t want to—to know what the worst kind is.” Breathless and wanting—that’s how I need her to be. The bubbly warmth of the beer has taken over every blessed inch of me, and it leaves me humming with a kind of starlight energy. It fills up all the empty spaces in the world. I hook my thumbs through the waistband of her panties and do away with them.
Brooke groans like she’s been waiting for this moment all her life, then mumbles something I can’t make out. I’m too busy working my fingers between her sweet thighs, stroking the hot core of her with my fingertips. “What was that, sweet thing?”
“I said—my knees—are going—”
She’s not kidding about that. They’re shaking, trembling like she’s standing in the middle of a localized earthquake, and I get to my feet just in time to catch her.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s you that made me weak,” she says fiercely, her voice cutting through the quiet inches between us. “It’s not you, it’s—”
“It’s how much you want me. I know.”
I swallow up the next words out of her mouth with a kiss and lay her back on the blanket.
My pants are already unzipped, so it’s nothing to toss them to the ground. It’s even less to yank off my boxers, freeing my cock of the last of its constraints. The cool air wraps its fingers around my length, bobbing between my legs. Brooke pushes herself up on one elbow, lips slightly parted. “It was different at the river.” There’s the barest hint of anxiousness in her voice, and it makes me even harder.
“It was cold in the river.”
“But you were still...oh my god,” she whispers, and falls back against the blanket.
I come down on top of her, covering her with my body, propping myself up on elbows so I don’t crush this hailstorm of a woman
who suddenly seems...almost delicate. Delicate in a way that makes me want to fuck her, hard, just so I can prove to myself that she’s not as breakable as she looks in the pool of lantern light.
Brooke arches up toward me. Of all the times I’ve seen her in my life, I never thought it would come to this. Not even when she was straddling my lap earlier. This was still a fantasy.
Now it’s real. So, so real.
I position myself between her legs. She has to spread wide to accommodate me. Yes. Yes. I love to see her like this, open wide, all for me. My crown brushes against her opening.
Not yet.
“No,” she says as I shift downward, the straw rustling beneath the blanket. “No, Austin—”
“No, Austin, what?” One thigh for each of my hands. I spread her open another inch and bury my face between her legs, licking like I’ll never get another chance. Hell. I might not. Brooke doesn’t answer the question. She’s too busy fisting the blanket beneath her, pulling it up from the straw and making a mess of it like she’s made a mess of my life. I don’t care, I don’t care, all that I care about are the bursts of sweetness on my tongue and the roll of her hips. Her thighs tremble in my grip. If she thinks she’s going to close her legs right now she’s crazy.
But no—it’s just her body, reading to me. The words she’s whispering meld into each other and become moans. I play her like my old guitar. I spent hours learning how it sang. I don’t have hours with Brooke. I only have now.
She drops the blanket and goes for my hair, pressing my face hard into her, hips at a fever pitch. And then she comes. A recording of it wouldn’t do her justice. But even as she comes down and goes quiet again, every breath full and deep, I feel the sound searing itself into my memory. Even if I never have her again, this memory is mine.
“Austin—Austin—”
God, I love the sound of that. Begging. Coming from Brooke Carson. Nobody has ever said my name like this before, and nobody else is going to. I know that as certainly as I know the suns going to rise.
Never the Cowboy’s Bride Page 8