by Erika Kelly
But with his princess, it was fucking magic. No one had ever felt so right for him. They fit. He’d never had that before.
She shifted again, and he started to go a little crazy with want. He wanted to grab under her arms and drag her onto this lap. Fuse their mouths and gather those tits in his hands.
He wanted to peel her shirt off and watch her breasts bounce with the helicopter’s choppy moves. And then he wanted them in his mouth, the bead of her nipple hard on his tongue.
Raw, burning hot lust tore through him. He could not believe her asshole ex had fucked around with another woman. Had taken Rosie for granted.
Guys could be such assholes, expecting women to be porn stars in the bedroom, but not giving them the kind of pleasure that would unleash them.
An image hit him, his face between her legs, his hands clamping down on her straining hips. Licking her into a climax that made her arch off the mattress and cry out.
“That lake’s the perfect size for your triathlon.”
Jerked from his dirty thoughts, he cast a glance out the window. A breeze rippled the surface of the navy blue water, the choppy waves creating white crests. He dragged a hand across the perspiration forming on his hairline.
She leaned even further, pointing to the right. “Looks like, if they ride their bikes along the highway and cut across the meadow for the run up the Bowie Pass, they’d wind up right at that lake for the swimming portion of the race.”
He and his brothers knew every inch of the property, and they’d thrown out ideas for possible courses, but she’d nailed it. Sometimes it took an outsider to see the obvious. “You’re right. I like your brain.” So much so that he’d given up the rare chance to board the glacier just for the pleasure of her company.
“Where’s the pilot dropping us off?”
Brodie leaned back, pointing to a glistening sheet of hard-packed snow on the face of the mountain. Smooth, easy. She’d do just fine.
So why did she look so disappointed? “You have something else in mind?” he asked.
A smile bloomed across her gorgeous features, and she pointed higher up the mountain.
“You think you can handle the glacier?” For a moment there, he’d forgotten she’d grown up in the Alps. He’d obviously underestimated her. “Let’s do this.”
The only reason he’d felt comfortable landing on top of the glacier was because of the way Rosie had staked out the mountain. She’d pointed out a few features, a copse of trees they needed to avoid. Clearly, she knew what she was doing.
Still, from the moment they’d jumped out of the chopper, Brodie had watched her carefully, wanting to keep her safe. Just his nature. He’d ridden this glacier about a hundred times.
But Rosie hadn’t even hesitated. And it was hard to reconcile the woman jibbing across a boulder right then with the princess he’d first met in the lobby of the hotel. She soared off the edge, tucked her board up tight and then, to his astonishment, she pulled a backside method, before landing smoothly and continuing down the mountain.
Yeah, he’d underestimated her, all right.
Just above the tree line sat a plateau large enough for a chopper to land. Theirs waited for them, its rotors glinting in the sunlight. As they neared it, he cruised over a mogul and landed on fresh powder.
She slid to a stop beside him, spraying snow out from under her board. She grinned, cheeks red, and when she tore off her ski mask, he got the gift of seeing her eyes shine with happiness. “That was amazing.”
He tugged a lock of hair. You’re amazing. “Let’s get back to town and grab something to eat.”
Chapter Thirteen
“This smells so good,” Rosie said.
On their way home, they’d grabbed take-out from a local barbecue joint. The scent had filled the truck, making Brodie’s stomach practically crawl out of his body to get some of the succulent, spicy meat.
Now, they sat out on the back patio of the bunkhouse, twilight painting the mountains purple.
If she liked the smell so much, why was she just staring at the ribs on her plate? It was a messy meal, so maybe she needed more napkins. Snatching some off the pile on the table, he set them in front of her. “Dig in.”
Spread out before him, he had a glass of water, some slaw, a rib rack, and a pile of juicy chicken. Picking up a breast, he bit into it, and all that smoky flavor hit his taste buds.
After swallowing, he downed some water. “Man, when you sailed off the boulder, I nearly lost my shit.”
Picking up the plastic knife and fork, she tried to slice meat off a rib. “That’s because you still see me as a princess.”
“Yeah, but you ride like a pro.”
She watched him tear off another bite with his teeth, then looked back at her plate.
“Come on. You can dial in a fat three with a safety grab on a glacier, but you can’t eat ribs with your hands?”
“Well, I mean, is that an actual requirement?”
He loved the humor in her eyes. “Not at all. Have at it.” He stabbed his fork into the cole slaw. “Would it go down easier if I brought out the silver? Maybe, while you’re here, I should hire a butler?”
“I don’t need fancy flatware. I just need to figure out how to get the damn meat into my belly.” Plunging her fork in to stabilize it, she sawed away. The tines snapped off, and she grumbled, “Okay, you win.” Setting down the cutlery, she looked at the greasy meat. “This is so unnatural.”
“It’s the most natural way to eat, princess. Do it like this.”
She watched him lift his chicken breast, sink his teeth into the flesh, and tear it off the bone like a starved animal. She laughed. “You do you. I’m good doing me.” With a napkin in each hand, she picked up the rib and nibbled from the center, careful not to get sauce on her face. But the paper dissolved, leaving her with a soggy mess. “Fine, I’m starving. If I have to become a savage, so be it.” Picking up the rib, she clamped her teeth into it and twisted her head like a dog with a chew toy. Sauce dripped off her fingers and smeared across her chin, and she looked to Brodie with an expression that said, What now, genius?
Licking the sauce off his fingers, he made a popping sound when each one left his mouth.
“You’re disgusting.”
“Am I, though?”
She nudged him. “This is delicious. And, I have to admit, it tastes better when I eat it with my hands.” She sucked sauce off her thumb. “So, I have to get something off my chest.”
“Is that another American saying from your roommate’s dad?”
“Yes. Did I get it right?”
He nodded, then gestured. Go on.
“I was mean when I said you’re the kind of guy who doesn’t follow through. I’m just upset about my situation. The Jubilee really drove everything home for me, you know? I’m valued for my womb, and that scares me to death because there’s so much more I want to do, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get to do any of it in St. Christophe.” She lowered her wrists to the edge of the table, looking defeated. “Brodie, I can’t do anything to jeopardize our partnership, but…”
“But you want to lick barbecue sauce off my naked chest?”
“That’s too gross to even address.” But she gazed down at her plate for a moment. “Is that…have you done that before? Licked barbecue sauce off someone’s breasts?”
“Not barbecue sauce, no. I’m not that into mixing food with sex. Mostly, I want to taste your tits, not sauce.”
A wave of desire fluttered across her features, and she tensed.
“You like that dirty talk, huh?”
“Well, apparently.” She said it so primly, it made him crack up. She balled up a napkin and tossed it at him. “Anyway. I’m sorry for taking a shot at you. That wasn’t nice.”
“We’re good, princess. You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”
“But you’re following through now. With Owl Hoot.”
He ripped open a moist toilette and cleaned his hands. “Thing
is, Owl Hoot…that was my dad’s dream.”
“I haven’t met him yet. What does he do?”
“My dad passed away nearly four years ago. In an avalanche.”
Her eyes went wide, before her features crashed in sorrow. “Oh, Brodie. I’m so sorry. That’s…devastating.”
“It was. Hardest thing I’ve ever been through. My dad was a great man, and I miss him every day.” He thought about the man’s big, booming laughter. The thing about Mack Bowie was that he’d held nothing back. He’d lived loud and hard and had encouraged his sons to do the same.
He’d believed in natural consequences, so he hadn’t disciplined a whole hell of a lot. He’d been a fair man, and he’d loved his boys more than anything.
Even after all this time, Brodie still walked into the main house expecting to hear his dad’s voice, and he always landed hard when he remembered the old man was gone.
He balled up the wet-wipe, staring at his plate. “Owl Hoot’s pretty much my way of giving him what I never did while he was alive.”
“You don’t mean the gold medal, do you?”
“I do. He devoted his whole life to us, and we didn’t make it easy for him. We were a pack of wild-assed boys growing up in the mountains, and my injury was a big wake-up call for him. By the time I came back after physical therapy, he’d hired a coach to live on the ranch and train us. He figured the only way to keep us safe was to teach us how to work with our bodies on this terrain. I think, also, he used training to give us a reason to say no when our friends were partying in high school. To me, that gold medal was a way of saying, You did good by us, Dad.”
A long-forgotten memory came up out of nowhere. “I remember my first year of competitions. I sucked. Couldn’t make a clean run to save my life.” Of course, his twelve-year-old self had been checking the crowds for his dad every couple of minutes. He’d lived to see his dad’s smile of encouragement, his pride. “And then, toward the end of that first season, my dad came into the tent with me, while I waited for my next run, and he said, You know, it just occurred to me…I don’t think anybody remembered to let you in on the joke.”
“The joke?”
“Yeah. He said, See all those kids? They think they’re here to win. But nobody told them that it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. It’s about doing the tricks over and over until they become as natural to you as walking. That doesn’t happen in your first year or even your second or third. So, take winning off the table. We’re not here to bring home medals. We’re here to get you experience. Quit thinking about winning and focus on getting the tricks right. The rest’ll come naturally.”
“That’s a really great thing to say.”
“It was perfect. From that moment on, I focused on the tricks.”
“And the next season you began winning?”
“No. I didn’t win right away. It was gradual. I started placing and, eventually, I took home the medals. But my dad never rewarded me for winning. He commented on my style and my technique.” He went quiet, letting his feelings for his dad fill him up.
He missed having his dad around for advice. For companionship. He’d taken for granted that his dad would always be around…he wished he hadn’t done that.
Wished he’d been able to hug him before he’d left that morning. To tell him how much he loved him.
He’d never get that chance, and that was tough to live with.
As hard as he tried to suppress it, sorrow spilled over, blurring his vision and making it hard to swallow. He gave it a moment to subside. “Everyone thinks I was devastated about the Olympics itself.” His voice came out a little rough, so he waited for the hard knot in his throat to stop hurting.
And he fucking liked that Rosie sat there quietly, all still and peaceful, giving him the room he needed to pull himself together. “But it wasn’t that. I just wanted to give him something back. I was a kid. It’s not like I had anything to give him.” He grabbed a napkin and swiped across his mouth. “He was there for us, came to all our competitions, took us freeriding on the sickest mountains in the world. I mean, he taught us how to be men. How to live with honor and integrity.” Fuck, what was happening to him? His skin was so damn hot he wanted to tear his shirt off. “In any event, I wanted the medal so he could see it in the trophy case and know that everything he’d given up for us had paid off.”
“I obviously didn’t know your dad, but from the way you describe him, it sounds like the best gift you could give him is to become a good man. The medals were just to keep you focused and driven. He didn’t care if you won them or not.”
“That’s actually a good point.” Brodie never talked about this shit with anyone, but since he’d started, he might as well go on. He picked up a plastic knife and tapped it on the table. “Sometimes I think…I just wish he could see us now. A lot has changed in the four years since he’s been gone. I think he’d be proud as hell of Will. To your point, my brother’s won more medals in freestyle skiing than anyone in the world, but it’s the way he dropped everything to raise our half-sister that would make my dad proud.” He gave her a smile. “So, yeah, you’re right about that.”
“Is it all right if I ask about your mother?”
“Sure. There’s not much to say, though. She hasn’t been in our lives in years.” He tapped the knife. “Which goes back to how I got injured in the first place. When I was nine, my brothers and I went night skiing. I messed up and had to get Life-Flighted to a hospital in Utah. Right after that, my mom took me to New York City for physical therapy. She never came back to Wyoming.”
She looked appalled. “Why not?”
“My mom’s a New Yorker. She met my dad at Stanford—a university in California. When they graduated, he hit it big in venture capital, and they lived the high life in San Francisco. But, after she kept popping out boys, my dad moved us back here, where he grew up. My mom hated it.”
“Okay, but her sons lived here.”
“She didn’t like us much.” It sounded weird to say it out loud. Parents were supposed to love their kids.
“That’s…I don’t even know what to say about that. She lost out on knowing some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met.”
He sat forward. “But, see, that’s my point. We’re good people because of my dad. My mom had nothing to do with it.”
“Wait, so, what happened in New York? You obviously didn’t stay there.”
This was the part he hated thinking about. “Right after I got out of the hospital, she took me and my younger brothers there so I could get the right kind of therapy, and when she figured out she couldn’t handle us any better in the city than she had in the Tetons she sent us home.”
“Hang on. Will’s older, right?”
He nodded.
“So…you’re not saying she left him behind, are you?”
“Yeah.” He gave an awkward laugh. “It’s a pretty shitty story. From her perspective, Will was a hellion, and she couldn’t control him. From my dad’s perspective, she didn’t want to be a parent. She wanted Will, the oldest, to keep us in line. And when he didn’t, she got pissed.”
“I can’t imagine how he processed the fact that his own mother left him behind. What a terrible thing to do to a child.”
“Yeah, and he heard her say it, too. He felt like shit the night I got injured, blamed himself. So, he went to see how I was doing, and he heard my parents going at it. My mom basically threatened my dad, saying if he didn’t send Will to boarding school, she’d leave. My dad said there was nothing wrong with him. He was a normal boy, and that maybe she should try being a better mom. The next day, she packed up me and brothers and took off.”
“How long did you live in New York?”
“We were gone a year.” A year, where it was just Will and his dad. “My brother was eleven.” Gazing out at his beloved mountain, the sun setting on its peaks, Brodie tapped the knife again. “I was her favorite.”
“It was that obvious?”
“Oh,
no. She told me.” He shook his head. “All the time. She’d given up on Will, so I was next in line to control my brothers. She used my injury as a way to manipulate me.”
“How did she do it…like, what would she say?”
“She’d tell me, if I stayed with my dad, I’d never walk right again. That she was the only one who cared enough to make sure I got the right care, that she loved me the most because I was the most intelligent, the most well-behaved, and that if I’d just keep my brothers from acting out, she could come home and we’d be a family.”
“No offense, but she sounds horrible.”
“No offense taken. Like I said, we don’t really have much to do with her. It all fell to shit, though, when my brothers and I wanted to play hockey on the iced-over pond in Central Park. Crashed right through.” He smiled at the recollection. They were completely fine, but paramedics had taken them to the hospital, and their mom had come stomping in, pissed as hell. “She sent us home after that.” Here was the tricky part. He never talked about this time in his life, but somehow…he couldn’t stop the flow of words. “I assumed we were all going home—including her—but she wasn’t packing. And, every time I asked about it, she’d say she was busy, that she had a project to finish up. Which, if you know my mom, is horseshit. The only project I ever saw her work on was making sure she was on the list for the latest ‘it’ handbag. Finally, when it came time to get on the plane, I said I wouldn’t go unless she came with us, and she swore she’d come as soon as she closed up the apartment. Of course, she didn’t, so I kept pestering her.”
“It’s hardly pestering, Brodie. Your mom should’ve come home.”
“You know those regrets that hit you while you’re taking a shower? Slam you in the middle of the night and wake you up so hard there’s no going back to sleep? That’s one of mine. The way I kept after her. I got so damn worked up.” He could remember it clearly, harassing her on the phone.
But you said you’re coming.
When?
Are you coming for my birthday?
That one was the worst. With each month that went by, each fresh batch of excuses given, he’d grown more anxious. Each call became more aggressive, more insistent. And, then, with his birthday approaching, she’d sworn she would come. He’d believed her.