by Delores Fossen, Rachel Lee, Carol Ericson, Tyler Anne Snell, Rita Herron
It had given her more time to worry about their father.
“How is he?” Remi asked, heart jumping back into her throat. “Does he have to have another surgery?”
Jonah shook his head. Then he did something she’d truly not seen coming. He smiled.
“His rehab is going to be extensive and he’ll have to take it easy for a long while to come, but the doc said he should be out of the woods now. He’s stable and both surgeries did exactly what they wanted them to do.” Remi threw her arms around her brother in an embrace. He spoke into her hair. “If you hadn’t gotten him help as fast as you did, it would be a different story.”
Remi squeezed and then pulled away. She looked him in the eye with certainty.
“And if you hadn’t gotten Josh here as fast as you did, he would have been in worse trouble, too.”
Jonah took the truth with a smile that waned.
“But if I’d never gone out with Lydia—” he started.
“They would have still probably come,” Declan finished.
They’d already had this conversation while waiting for Josh and their dad’s surgeries to finish. Jonah told Declan and Caleb everything he knew about Lydia, which hadn’t been much. She’d been nice and funny and had done a good job at pulling Jonah in with limited interaction.
The truth was, no one blamed him one bit, yet Remi could see he’d be blaming himself for a long while despite that fact.
Jonah shook himself a little.
“Did you talk to Mom?”
“Yeah. Her flight got grounded because of the weather and it took all I had to convince her and Dave not to drive through it instead. She only relented after hearing that Josh and Dad would be okay. She’ll call one of us tomorrow with an update but said you better call her soon.”
Jonah glanced at Declan. He lowered his voice.
“Does she know? About the...you know?”
Remi felt Declan’s gaze switch to her. She shook her head.
“I want to tell her in person.”
“She’d like that.” Jonah let out a loud, long sigh. “What she wouldn’t like is you running yourself into the ground while pregnant with her only claim to a grandkid.” He fixed her with a mock stern expression. “Get out of here and get some rest.”
Remi opened her mouth to complain, but he cut her off.
“I called Rick, Dad’s friend, and he said he wants to come up here and stay the night with Dad while I stay with Josh. There’s no reason you need to stay here, too.” He looked to Declan. “I’m assuming Remi has a place to stay with you, though?”
“She does.”
“But what if—” Remi tried.
Jonah still wasn’t having it.
“But what if nothing. I’ll let you know if anything happens. Plus, it’s not like the ranch is that far from here anyways.” He put his hands on her shoulders to focus her attention so that it stayed solely on him and his next words. “You shot a man to get us off the ranch and then went right back to it to get Dad. Let me do this very simple task of watching over everyone here.” His expression softened. “Give me this, Remi. I need it.”
So, she did.
Then, before she knew it, Remi was standing in Declan’s bathroom back on the Nash Family Ranch and staring at a mirror that was starting to steam over from the shower heating up behind her. She’d already stripped naked but couldn’t get her feet to move from the tile floor.
All because of the stain on her skin.
Blood from her father or her brother that had seeped through her shirt.
Remi knew they were okay now, but that crimson smear held too much power still.
Way too much.
It wasn’t until two beautiful green eyes met her gaze head-on that Remi realized she was sobbing.
And it wasn’t until Declan’s arms wrapped around her naked body that she realized how much she needed the man.
Chapter Sixteen
Sometime in the dark of late night or early morning, Remi woke up in bed alone. It wasn’t her bed, and she sussed that out pretty quickly through the haze of sleep thanks to the way the pillow smelled beneath her still-wet hair.
It smelled like spice and the woods and Declan Nash.
Remi rolled over and felt the empty space next to her.
After her breakdown in the bathroom, Declan had gone above and beyond the call of supportive. Not only had he taken her into the shower with his jeans still on, he’d scrubbed the blood off her skin and held her while she cried some more. Only after she’d regained her composure, or enough of it to stop crying, did the man dry her off, put a too-big shirt over her head and deposit her like a child in bed.
Remi had been so exhausted from her outburst to the adrenaline-filled day she’d had that sleep had overtaken her within the space of two blinks.
Now she guessed that the man who had saved her from herself hadn’t gotten beneath those same sheets next to her.
Remi rolled back over and found her phone on the nightstand. No new calls or texts from Jonah. She took that as good news and slowly got out of bed. She flushed when she realized she was wearing a pair of boxers. She didn’t remember putting those on.
Declan surely was a caring and sly man.
If he hadn’t already seen her as naked as naked could be, she might have been so embarrassed that she’d try to escape. Instead, she opened the door between the bedroom and living room with all the hope in the world of seeing the sheriff.
She wasn’t disappointed.
Declan looked up from his laptop on the coffee table with alarm. That alarm softened after a moment. He smiled.
“Hey, Huds.”
It was such a simple greeting, yet it shifted something inside of her that had already been moving.
“Hey, Sheriff.”
Remi settled in the chair kitty-corner to the couch so she could face him the best she could.
“Thank you for earlier, by the way. I kind of lost it, lost it.”
Declan waved off the apology.
“I only did what I could do to help.” He sighed and glanced at the computer. “I just wish I could do more.”
“I take that to mean no one has found Lydia and the men?”
He ran a hand over the stubble along his jaw. Whatever had softened his expression was now gone. Stress and frustration took its place.
“No. We’ve checked all the hospitals in the county, and even reached out past it, to see if we can’t locate the guy you got. We have so many APBs out on them and the three who pulled what they pulled on Main Street that the gossip mill is about to shatter. Mom said that Cooper Mann’s grandmother let her know in no uncertain terms that Overlook is losing faith in the department. In me. And, honestly, I can’t blame them.” He dragged his gaze to hers. “We have so many weird little pieces to this chaotic puzzle, and I just can’t seem to find a way to force them to fit. For a moment I’ll think I have something and then it gets lost in the chaos. It’s driving me crazy.”
Remi didn’t say anything right away. She knew the man well enough that telling him everything was going to be okay, telling him that he would get all of the bad guys in the end, wasn’t actually going to help him.
So, instead, she told him a story.
“One time when I was younger Dad and I went to a ranch out in Texas to visit a friend of his named Barry. The boys were too young and Mom had to stay to watch them and, to be honest, I wasn’t that excited to be the one who had to go. Dad knew it and tried to talk the place up before we even got there. He told me it was three times bigger than Heartland and had all kinds of animals everywhere you looked. I didn’t believe him—to me Heartland was massive—but then we drove the road to the main house and it felt like it took a lifetime to get there. All along the way I watched herds of cows grazing, people horseback riding, and even saw some goats running around.
I was mesmerized.” Remi couldn’t help the smile that she knew passed over her face. The little-kid awe she’d felt then was hard to forget even as an adult. “So when Barry invited us to move the herd of cows to a field at the opposite end of his property, I was actually excited. We got our own horses, our own tents, and some stuff to make s’mores, and rode all day until we got them to where they needed to be. That night I passed out with chocolate on my mouth and a sore butt from riding. It was magic.”
Declan smiled in turn at that.
“Later that night, though, I woke up to the sound of two hundred scared cattle. I’d barely gotten on my horse before they took off in all different directions,” she continued. “I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and neither could Dad or the ranch hands who had come with us. There was too much noise, too much movement, and not enough light. And do you know what Barry did?”
Declan raised his eyebrow in question. Remi leaned forward in her seat.
“He took a breath, tuned the world out and reminded himself that he’d been a rancher for years and was damn good at it. That’s when he spotted the wolf.”
Remi moved from her seat to the spot next to Declan and put her hand on his knee. She wanted to encourage him and comfort him all at the same time. She hoped that she’d at least hit one of her targets.
Declan angled his body so he could meet her gaze more easily.
Once again Remi marveled at how different this scene would have been if they were younger. He would have been the one talking while she listened in silence.
“With what I know from growing up in Overlook and from what I’ve heard since I’ve been gone, chaos seems to be more frequent than not. You’ve lived in it and still live in it. You’re good at navigating it. Now you just need to take a breath, tune the world out, and trust that you’re—”
Calling him fast was an injustice to the move he actually pulled off. In one fluid movement Declan went from a statue beneath her hand to heat against her lips.
He cupped the side of her face and Remi leaned in to the surprise.
She kissed the man back.
Hard.
Their lips parted and the taste of him was all she wanted in the world.
When he broke the kiss, Remi was left blinking and confused.
“You,” he rasped out.
“Me?”
“You,” he repeated. “That’s what I want.”
He was back to her lips within the space of a breath. The wild boy from her childhood and teen years. The reunited friend. The good—and not mention to last—fling. The accidental father of her child. The sheriff savior.
Declan Nash had a list of ever-evolving meanings to her.
But what was he now? Between a night of passion that wasn’t supposed to last through the next day to always being connected through their unborn child.
What would happen next?
Coparenting across state lines due to her promotion?
Getting married in no-man’s-land while her belly grew?
Or some form of in-between?
Remi had no idea about their future.
But she did know something about the present.
She looped her arms around Declan’s neck and pulled him against her until they were lying across the couch. He followed her down while never breaking their kiss. In fact, he deepened it with his tongue, trapping a moan of pleasure between them.
Declan’s hand tangled in her hair while the other gripped her hip. She moved up and against him as he tried to maneuver himself so his body weight wasn’t solely on her. In the process Remi felt how much Declan Nash truly wanted her.
It put fire straight through her. She dropped her hands down and went for the hem of his shirt. Remi had never wanted something gone as badly as she wanted that shirt off.
Declan felt her frustration. He broke their kiss and nearly ripped it in two. The shirt went flying and then he was focused on hers. Which was also his. A fact that must have encouraged him. He grabbed its hem and then tore it right up the middle.
Cold air hit Remi’s bare chest as the two sides of the fabric fell away, but there were only flames in her blood. When he dropped his mouth down to the skin of her neck and then followed a tantalizing path to her nipple, Remi almost cussed him.
When his hardness pushed against the boxers she was somehow still wearing and through the shorts he was somehow still wearing, Remi nearly lost it.
The second he came up for air, she decided to end the torture.
She pulled him back down on top of her and moaned.
It seemed to do the trick.
Remi moved against him as, one-handed, he took off his shorts. Then he focused on her. She moaned again as his hand, strong and warm, skimmed down the boxers on loan and then came back up her leg. Trailing heat and lust right to the spot where she wanted his attention next.
There was no trapping her moans now.
She yelled out in absolute bliss as he pushed inside of her and filled her with hard passion. She moved against him with uncontainable desire.
A man and a woman desperate to be closer.
Lips to lips.
Skin to skin.
Galloping heartbeats.
Remi didn’t know what their future held but she did know one thing.
She wanted Declan, too.
* * *
THE PHONE CALL didn’t wake Declan, Remi did.
Tangled together between the sheets of his bed, she couldn’t help thrashing around to escape to the bathroom.
Declan immediately went on high alert, fighting through the haze of the good sleep he’d fallen into with the naked woman wrapped in his arms. He followed her up and out of the bed, fists balled and eyes wild. It didn’t matter that he was as naked as the day he was born, he was going to fight tooth and nail to combat whatever had woken Remi so violently.
Then he heard her in the bathroom heaving.
There wasn’t anything he could punch or shoot to cure morning sickness.
So after Remi shooed him away, Declan went to the kitchen and poured her a glass of water and took stock of what he had to eat. Nina, Caleb’s wife, had claimed that sour candy had been a lifesaver when she’d first been pregnant with their son. Madi hadn’t really felt sick with Addison but with her second pregnancy she’d always had crackers, some kind of Popsicle, and a lot of snacks. Declan hadn’t been grocery shopping in a hot minute. All he had that met the criteria was a bag of pretzels Desmond had left the week before.
They would have to do.
He plated some, set the water next to it, and brought his phone back out to him.
That was when he saw the missed call. It was from Cussler and time-stamped at just after three in the morning. It was now almost five.
There were no texts or emails as a follow-up. No voice mail, either.
Declan wondered if it had been an accident. His chief deputy was a married man and a father to four. Declan only liked to call him when it was absolutely necessary. He decided to send a text, instead. He put the phone down and the ringer up, surprised he’d missed the call in the first place. Normally he was a light sleeper. Then again, normally, he didn’t have a naked Remi Hudson in his bed.
No sooner had he set the phone down than the woman of the hour made her entrance. She was wearing another one of his old T-shirts. It was too big for her and somehow still she made it an attractive piece. The urge to rip it off her like he’d done earlier was nearly overpowering. She frowned at him, picking up on his thoughts.
“Don’t go getting any ideas, buddy. I feel like death incarnate. I know it’s cliché to blame you for how I feel right now, but—” she took a seat at the dining table next to him “—this is all your fault.”
Declan chuckled.
“The words every man wants to hear after a night of rolling around naked in bed
with a beautiful woman.”
That pulled a smile from her. It was small but there. She motioned to the plate of pretzels. He nodded.
“I didn’t know if you would want to eat but read that if you eat a little every few hours that it might help with morning sickness, especially when you first wake up.”
Remi’s eyebrow arched high.
He unlocked his phone and found the app he was looking for. He tapped it and slid the phone over.
The surprise was clear on her face.
“You downloaded a pregnancy app?”
Declan shrugged.
“I figure I’m already behind on the game, might as well try to catch up best I can.”
Remi gave him a look he couldn’t quite place and grabbed a handful of pretzels.
“If I didn’t feel like I was about to be sick, starve, and cry all at the same time right now I’d kiss you.”
Declan smirked.
“And if you kissed me right now I might just destroy another one of my shirts.”
Remi’s cheeks flushed pink and she laughed.
“Smooth one, Sheriff.”
“I try.”
The phone between them buzzed.
Remi tensed.
“I missed a call from my chief deputy. I texted him I was up,” he explained, spinning the phone around to face him. “If something was wrong he would have called more than once or probably just come here to wake me up himself.”
He trailed off when the phone started to ring. He stopped whatever he was going to say and took the call right there. Cussler was quick and precise. He’d called Declan, then decided to let the sheriff get some sleep when he hadn’t answered. It was no secret Declan hadn’t gotten enough of it lately. Cussler recounted what had happened and had handled the situation.
Declan thanked him and ordered him to seek the same sleep he’d let Declan get.
