Playing Pretend Box Set

by Natasha L. Black

  “So if you saw a nest of rattlers out on the ranch you’d want to name them?”

  “Uh, no. I like snakes, but I never wanted to live with something cold-blooded. Except the frogs. But I was young, right? It could’ve been worse. I could’ve gotten a lower back tattoo of a boy band or something. Hey, I have a ton of pizza here. Want to stay for supper?” she said.

  “I’d like that. I don’t want to intrude, but the truth is I didn’t just come here to bring you dog food. It was an excuse to see you again. I’d like to get to know you better. Are you busy Friday night? Let me take you to dinner.” I said.

  “Wow. I like your approach—straightforward, clear with your intentions. Yes. I’m free on Friday to go to dinner with you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, joining her at the kitchen table laden with pizzas, “After you,” I said when she offered me my choice of slices.

  “I’m glad you came over here. I’ve thought about you off and on all day,” she said. She didn’t seem bashful about it or embarrassed, just truthful.

  “I did the same. When I was in a bar earlier, and every woman I saw seemed less warm, less lively than you had this morning.”

  “So, I’m the woman you compare all others to,” she teased with a smile.

  “I left a bar with live music and available women to buy dog food and find you. That should tell you everything you need to know. I didn’t want the path of least resistance. I wanted to see how Dori was, and I was glad of the excuse to see you again.”

  “Thanks. I was debating whether to send you a personal email since you gave me your card.”

  “The email goes through an assistant at the ranch office. My personal number is on that card. Feel free to use it.”

  “So, if I need more dog treats or a chew toy I can call you?” she asked.

  “Anything,” I said. I should have hesitated, said something other than that. I felt like promising her anything though. I felt edgy and excited ready to get to know her. Friday couldn’t come around soon enough.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, licking her lips.

  God, I had been stiff with awareness since the minute I walked in the door, but the tip of her pink tongue gliding across her full lower lip had me rock hard and aching for her. If I shut my eyes, I’d dive into a fantasy so graphic I wouldn’t be able to act normal at all. Not in the face of this radioactive attraction. I wanted to taste the soft skin of her neck, feel the full swell of her breasts in my palms, her nipples growing hard under the ministrations of my tongue. My cock strained against my zipper painfully. I took a long drink of water from a glass that was on the table. I didn’t care whose it had been. I was about five seconds from having to pour it on my lap.

  “Are you okay?” she said, her voice sweet with concern. That pretty mouth, it undid me. I could’ve groaned out loud.

  “I’m good,” I said, clearing my throat.

  “Dessert? I have fresh raspberries and ice cream,” she offered.

  “I don’t think so, thanks. I’ve taken up enough of your time. Thank you for inviting me in.”

  “You’re welcome. I was surprised to see you, but you have to know I was happy, too. I just wish—“ she trailed off with a small smile.

  “What do you wish?” I said.

  “That you weren’t such a gentleman,” she said, her blue eyes bright and teasing.

  “You are a mischief maker, Allie Shaw,” I said, a thread of delight running through me, “I’ll see you Friday night. And I promise I won’t be such a gentleman.”

  I got to my feet, said goodbye to the dog and turned to the door. Allie stood in front of it, and she reached out, pressing her hand to my chest. I shut my eyes briefly, overcome by how it felt. It wasn’t just the sizzle of a new attraction. There was a deep pull that I felt at her touch, at the pressure of her fingers and palm over my heart. I couldn’t resist bringing my mouth down over hers, rocking against her full, soft lips. I held her face cupped in my palm, kept her pressed to me as her lips parted for my tongue. I stroked her once, twice, just tantalizing her softly before I pulled back. I felt her trembling under my hands, the quiver in her lips as I’d kissed her.

  Then she’d expertly swayed against me, bumping her lips into mine again, tempting me back in for a deeper kiss. I swear to God I damn near swallowed her whole then. Her body was soft and yielding, her mouth pliant and lush. I groaned as her tongue slid past my lips. I slid my arm around her waist, canting her hips against mine. I knew she felt my hardness against her belly, and I didn’t care. I wanted her to feel it, to know the effect she had on me, the desire that coursed through my body.

  When I finally broke the kiss, my chest heaving like a bellows as I tried to drag in enough air, I tipped my forehead against hers. She looked up at me through her lashes and rolled her lips under.

  “That was amazing,” she said, her voice soft and breathless as she, too, gasped for air.

  I kissed her forehead and managed to choke out, “Good night, Allie,” and left.

  I stood in the ground-floor hall for a moment until I heard the deadbolt click. Partly because I wanted to make sure she was safe, and partly because I knew I had to go home. I never knew when to leave well enough alone, and if it weren’t for the clear message of the deadbolt, I would’ve been between Allie Shaw’s legs in no time.

  Friday was too damn far away.

  The next two days were busy ones. I managed deliveries, revamped some scheduling around upcoming deadlines. I went to a sale and bought a couple of horses. One for working cattle, and one because it was a beautiful dapple white with spirit, the perfect mount for a woman who used to love riding but is a little rusty. I admit to making the impulsive decision to buy the filly when her lot came up because I pictured Allie riding fences with me, her hair windblown, maybe wearing my hat to shield her eyes from the sunlight.

  If things didn’t work out with her, I’d still be happy to have that horse. I’d still find someone else to marry. I wasn’t stupid enough to pin all my hopes on her with the ranch at stake. My office assistant created a dating profile for me on one of the apps that was advertised as commitment focused. Maybe a temporary wife could be found that way, when all I really desired was a woman who would stay married for three years, be kind and polite. Maybe someone I could be friends with. I didn’t think about loneliness. I was too busy with Santeria to worry about that. But I acknowledged that somewhere along the line, I’d wound up alone. With one or two friends who worked the ranch, and no one else close to me, through choices I’d made, plans I’d backed out of. The things I’d prioritized and what I’d left behind.

  Before he died, Papí was the person I spoke to the most, my closest friend. So when he used his last will and testament to impose his wishes, to make my marriage a condition for the inheritance, it had been a betrayal that struck deep. If I withdrew, if I focused solely on the ranch and on breaking that damn will, who could blame me?

  There was a whisper of something more than attraction with Allie on my side. Of course, I was very attracted to her. Our chemistry was insane. That kiss alone had left me keyed up and desperate for more. Aside from that, I liked her. I liked talking to her, making her smile. It was possible that I missed having a confidante, someone to laugh with and talk about my life. If she could be that, if she was the one I could marry for three years and have a close friend in the bargain, that would be ideal. An outcome like that was more than I’d hoped for. Better than a business arrangement. A real friend, someone to share my life with for the three-year term. I felt hope lift me, probably for the first time since the reading of the will. Not determination to break it, to bend it to get the ranch any way I had to, but hope that everything could turn out well.

  So Friday I took off work early, which I never did. I showered and shaved, traded my ranch clothes for trousers and a shirt I’d bought on my last trip to Italy. The tailored shirt was a deep crimson, the narrow black trousers tailored perfectly.

  I went out to the flower
garden. Our landscapers maintained it after abuela died, so I had my pick of her pink cosmos, her blue plumbago for a bouquet. I could’ve bought Allie any greenhouse flowers I wanted from the finest florists—not that the rural area had a hell of a lot of upscale florists—but I wanted to give her something more personal, something from Santeria. After Wanda, the housekeeper, trimmed the stems and wrapped the bouquet for me in some tissue paper, I set off to pick up Allie.

  We had messaged back and forth, but seeing her in person was a shock for me all over again. I went to her door with the flowers. She answered in a sundress, her feet bare. A smile broke across her face, and she took the flowers, lifted them to her face and smelled them.

  “I love these! Thank you. Come on in and sit down. I’m not quite ready yet.”

  The blue fabric of her skirt swirled around her knees as she turned to put the flowers in a jar. I went to the couch to see Dumbledore. He popped up off his pillow, wagged his tail and yipped at me.

  “He remembers me,” I said, feeling like a kid, full of happy surprise.

  I sat down and gave him scratches while he tried to lick all over my face. Allie joined us, stopping to pat her other dog who was pretty chill about the situation.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this,” she said.

  “Me, too. I took off work early.”

  “From what I hear, you work 24/7. I figured you’d show up on a horse with a lasso.”

  “Sorry to disappoint. I drove my truck, and I even wore clean clothes. I don’t want you to start out thinking I can’t clean up nice.”

  “Oh, you clean up damn nice,” she said with a grin, “but I’m pretty sure I’d like you the other way too.”

  “Good to know. Since you told me that pizza is your favorite, there’s a place I want you to try. Are you up for a drive?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Okay,” I said, “after you.”

  I held the door, then she locked it once we were in the hall. I reached for her hand and held it in mine. I liked touching her, liked knowing that I could. She laced her fingers with mine. Her smaller, warm palm pressed against mine, soft and wonderful. I tugged her closer, bumped my shoulder against hers playfully. She bumped me with her hip and laughed. I helped her up into my truck—lifted her with my hands around her waist. She sat on the edge of the seat, leaned over and kissed me. Her hands were on my shoulders, and the next thing I had maneuvered my hips between her knees, my tongue dipping in her hot mouth. My thumbs stroked circles on her sides, hands sliding up until my thumb brushed the underside of her breast. I felt the catch of her breath as I kissed her, felt the eagerness as she arched closer, pressing the swell of her breast into my hand for more. I groaned aloud, drew back. I couldn’t do this standing at the passenger side of my truck on a public street. Her laugh was shaky as she slid her hands off my shoulders, down my chest in a lingering stroke that did nothing to relieve the hardness straining at my zipper.

  “God that felt good,” she whispered. “I said I could handle a long drive, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “I want to take you to dinner,” I said, my iron control back in place. I held my reckless desire on a tight rein, determined to show her a romantic evening like a gentleman, not take her roughly in the cab of my pickup before dinner.

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” she said, turning to swing her feet into the truck and fasten her seat belt.

  When I got in on the driver’s side and started the truck, I was taking long breaths through my gritted teeth to calm down.

  “The place we’re going is right outside Lubbock. It’s been there forever. They have a real brick oven. I used to go there on my birthday, and Pablo and I would eat as much Pizza Napolitano as we could,” I said.

  “Your brother?”

  “No, my best friend. I was an only child. My parents died in a car accident when I was little, so I grew up on the ranch with my grandparents. What about you? I know you have two sisters.”

  “Yeah our parents got rid of the house and have an RV now. They’re all about cross country drives and sightseeing. We shared a room growing up, me and Megan and Addie. So we fought like cats in a bag. But we love each other. We’re closer now than we were as kids,” she said.

  “Growing up, I used to wish I had a brother. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as much fun as I thought,” I said.

  “It’s less campouts and tree houses and more ‘give me back my goddamn hairbrush, you skank!” she laughed.

  “See, I never had to fight over a hairbrush. Maybe that was from sharing a room though. The big house at the ranch had plenty of bedrooms.”

  “Oh you still would’ve fought. It’s part of the experience. Just like when you order a taco without sour cream and it comes with sour cream just dripping off it. Whether you wanted it or not, the fighting,” she said knowingly.

  “Okay, you’re the expert. What was your best birthday gift? Mine was a horse.”

  “A horse? Who gets a real horse for their birthday, my God,” she said, “when I was nine I got a cat. I had been begging for a kitten for like three years.”

  “What did you name it?”

  “Snowball.”

  “So it was white?”

  “No, it was gray but I was stubborn. I wanted a precious white kitten. What I got was the gray cat that needed a new home because my dad’s coworkers were moving. So I named it Snowball anyway.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “It peed on the clean laundry, shredded my only pair of cute jeans and made Megan sneeze. We got rid of it. Some other poor family had to take care of Snowball the Tyrant.”

  “So you’re not a cat person.”

  “I liked the idea of cats. Cute little fluffballs that mew and purr. It was really for the best that my sister was allergic because Snowball was more of an asshole than I’d expected. I work with cats at the vet all the time, and they’re fine. But I’m more of a dog person in real life.”

  “We have barn cats to clear out the rodents, but I don’t have house cats.”

  “What about house dogs? Do you have like hunting dogs or ranch dogs?”

  “Pablo has Barney, a border collie, and there’s a lab mix that hangs around the stables but doesn’t do any work.”

  “So did you ever have a pet?”

  “Yeah, horses. Lots of them. Most of them are workers, but some are just pets. Ones that are out to pasture, a couple we use for barrel racing courses.”

  “Do you have a main one? Like a favorite?”

  “The mount I ride most is Mantilla. I call her Tia. I just bought a couple at auction the other day. You said you used to ride. Let me know when you have a day off and I’ll take you riding.”

  “I would love to do that. I’m off next Wednesday.”

  “So you might be free Tuesday night for dinner?” I said.

  “I might be. Let’s see how tonight goes first, okay?” she said, a little tentative. I knew she liked me, and the chemistry was off the charts, but she was cautious, not rushing into anything.

  We talked a little about our favorite presents growing up, and the ones we hated. She got stilts from Santa one year and fell off them and broke her arm the same morning. She always got peppermint candy canes in her stocking, but she never liked peppermint. I had hated getting new jeans in the fall for school—the stiff kind with the strong blue dye smell and the sharp creases, rough fabric, and my plaid western shirts. The housekeeper’s jurisdiction had extended to choosing my wardrobe, and it wasn’t till I was fourteen that I got to pick out my own clothes. Until then I’d looked like an extra from Urban Cowboy, complete with the occasional string tie for a school dance.

  “I have to see photo evidence of you in the string tie. Pics or it didn’t happen,” she laughed.

  We had just been seated at the pizza place. There was newsprint covering the rickety tables, ceiling fans keeping the dining area fairly cool despite the oven in back. We ordered off the laminated menu, old school supreme with Italian peppers on t
he side.

  “I love that this menu is probably as old as me. No white chicken pizza, no gluten-free anything, no cauliflower crust. Just the real thing,” she said.

  “That’s what I like. That and the appetizers that come in a red plastic basket.”

  “With crackly white paper in it to soak up the grease? God, that’s the best! I hope the garlic bread has that shiny yellow margarine stuff with the green flecks. I used to think garlic was green when I was little. Because we only had the garlic salt with parsley in it. My mom was never like the cooking show kind. We had mac and cheese, we had chili, we had this one thing with grilled chicken on a pile of red peppers the year she did Weight Watchers. I never did figure out what it was supposed to be.”

  “Healthy, probably. We always had a cook, so there was roast beef for Saturday night, fried chicken on Sundays, that kind of thing.”

  “That’s—I never knew anybody who grew up having a cook.”

  “We didn’t have like a candlelight meal with crystal goblets and maids in uniform or anything. It was a luxury, obviously, but it was for convenience. The midday meal, we fed all the ranch hands, all of us at picnic tables.”

  “That sounds fun.”

  “It was.”

  Our food came, and we had a delicious meal. I wiped sauce off the tip of her nose with a paper napkin and thought how I’d be glad to have more dinners like this, fun and simple, with her to talk to. She told me about the animals at the clinic and about how one of the vets was afraid of reptiles—not just snakes but all reptiles. So she and another tech had to do most of the work with reptiles that came in needing help. As I drove home, she unbuckled her seat belt and slid across to the middle of the seat so she could lean her head on my shoulder. Not for anything racier than that, just to snuggle up against me on the drive. I turned and kissed the top of her head, liking her strawberry shampoo smell and the warmth of her against me.

  “Would you like to go out again?” I said.

  “Yeah, I really would,” she said.

  “I like you, but I don’t want you to think I’m moving too fast here. I’m the kind of man who makes up my mind and goes after what I want, but I’m not here to pressure you.”