by Maisey Yates
“What prompted all this?”
“A couple of things. McKenna, first of all. She’s someone who could have used help. If we had known about her, we could have given it. Instead, she was left out on her own. Plus...this is what I always wanted to do. Something that connects to horses, in a meaningful way. I love them. And I loved riding, for as long as I can remember.”
“Why didn’t you?” Jacob asked.
“You know why.”
“Because Dad didn’t want you to?”
If there was a safe space on earth, it was Jacob’s remote cabin. And Jacob himself. He was a fortress, and he didn’t share shit with anyone.
For some reason that perversely made Gabe feel like it was the right time to share this. And like he was the right person to share it with.
His stomach churned. Yes. Yes and no. “I did it for Mom,” he said.
He didn’t elaborate. He’d never told anyone even that much before.
“She’s proud of you,” Jacob said.
But it was deeper than that. More than that.
“Yeah,” Gabe said. “Either way, though, it’s time to move on. I’d like you to help me.”
Jacob looked around. “I’m hardly in a space to help myself.”
“Maybe if you got off your ass and started thinking of even one other person in your life, you would.” He realized that sounded harsh, but his brother was being ridiculous. He wasn’t dead.
“You can’t help anyone up here on a mountain,” Gabe pointed out.
“I still go out and fight fires, every year. I go right into the smoke, Gabe. I know how it can end, and I do it, anyway. So you can come up here and run your mouth about how I’m not doing anything...”
“You haven’t moved on.”
“Clint can’t move on. He’s dead. And if I hadn’t declined the call?”
“You would be dead. And we would be mourning you. I loved Clint. But you’re my brother, Jacob, and I am damned glad I didn’t have to say goodbye to you.”
“I’m not a husband or a father. Clint left Ellie and Annabelle. Amelia won’t ever know him. He never even saw his daughter, Gabe. Ellie was still pregnant...”
“I know. But this isn’t fixing it. And there’s some boys... There’s some boys that could be fixed. You know what Clint’s home life was like. The ranch was a refuge for him. We could make it a refuge for some other boys, too. I think he would have liked that.”
That made Jacob stop, still, the bottle of beer frozen up against his lips. “Yeah,” he said, settling the bottle down. “I expect he would have. Do you even know how to go about that? How to get funding?”
“I suspect we start by talking to some different agencies, figuring out what kind of certifications we need.”
“Well, I’m not dealing with any of that shit.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.”
“What made you decide to do all this now?”
He didn’t know how to explain that it had something to do with the fire in Jamie Dodge’s eyes. And he didn’t particularly want to talk about Jamie with his brother at all. Jamie, and everything that surrounded her, was his.
His secret. His pleasure.
And the crying really hadn’t been that big of a deal, because she wanted to be with him again.
“Just an idea I had,” he said, standing up, leaving half of his beer bottle sitting on top of the cool chest. “Maybe you can come out with Caleb and me sometime next week.”
“Maybe,” Jacob said. His brother’s eyes were fixed on the expansive view of the valley below. And he knew that Jacob had no intention of going out with them.
“You know, it doesn’t matter how long you sit up here. It isn’t gonna change anything.”
“That’s not why I’m sitting here.”
“Why are you sitting here, then?”
“Maybe I’m waiting for something inside me to feel different.”
“Well, I doubt that’s going to happen with you sitting here by yourself.”
Gabe had been sitting with himself for a long damn time, and it had taken Jamie to make him see things a little bit differently. He had a feeling it was going to take something like that to reach Jacob. But up here on a mountain, he had no idea how he was going to find someone to do any changing.
“Well, I’ll see you around, then,” Gabe said.
As he drove away he had to hope that no matter how disinterested his brother was, maybe one of the things he’d said would appeal to him.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“WANT TO JUST catch a ride back home with me?”
Jamie looked up and saw Gabe. She was just finishing up with the last horse, getting him brushed out and ready to get put away.
“I...I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I...I should. I should have my truck. And I should probably go home tonight.”
“Why?”
“I can’t leave my truck here. Someone will see it.”
“There are like twenty trucks here at any given time. No one’s going to realize it’s yours. Not that your Ford’s not super original, Jamie. But it’s basically what everybody has.”
She shifted. She didn’t know why she was resistant to this. Mostly because it seemed... Well, she wouldn’t have her escape plan. Her exit strategy. She wouldn’t be able to just jump into her truck and run back home. If things got real, she would have to stick it out. And she didn’t know how she felt about that.
But also, she did want to go home with him. And she didn’t really want to be weird about it. Really, she didn’t want to expose her inexperience. They hadn’t had a discussion about it, so she was kind of hoping he didn’t know... You know, about the fact that he was her first. It would all be so much easier if he never realized that.
And, if he hadn’t by now, he probably wouldn’t.
She took some comfort in that.
“You can drive if you want to, Jamie, but I figured we could catch a ride over together.”
She wanted that. Suddenly, she wanted that very badly. She had been skipping breakfast occasionally since she’d begun work at the Dalton ranch, so it wasn’t like she would owe Wyatt an explanation. And like he’d said, there were tons of trucks here at any given time. Nobody would notice if hers got left behind tonight.
“Okay,” she said, feeling breathless and a little bit giddy.
Giddy.
It was a strange, surreal kind of sensation. Being giddy over a man.
She wasn’t sure if she liked it. But she felt it. So there wasn’t much use fighting it.
They finished work silently, the only sound the metal buckles on the tack clinging against each other, and the shuffle of boots over the cement floor. Once they finished up, they both walked out toward his truck. Then Jamie looked around once before getting inside.
“You know, the only thing that makes this appear slightly suspicious is how shifty you look,” he pointed out.
Jamie buckled herself, wiggling in her seat. “I am not shifty.”
“You are intensely shifty.”
She frowned. “I didn’t know that I was submitting to be teased.”
“You don’t want to be teased?”
“Can’t you just feed me toast and tell me I’m pretty?” She said that lightly, but in point of fact, she would really like it if he would feed her toast and tell her she was pretty.
She blinked. He was chuckling softly, clearly amused by the joke, but she was too busy grappling with that marked change inside herself. She cared if Gabe thought she was pretty. She really cared. She wanted him to think that she was beautiful. She didn’t want to just win the battle over who got him in their bed for now with Crystal the beautiful blonde.
She wanted to be prettier than she was.
And Jamie didn’t
think there was a world in which she was, or could ever hope to be.
She really, really wanted Gabe to think she was pretty.
She had always been disdainful of things like that. Beauty, to her mind, was found in a mountaintop, and anything else was unnecessary. Was high-maintenance, temporary and insubstantial.
She wanted to be that. Just for a little bit. Just to him.
Something precious and special and...well, just pretty. She kept coming back to pretty.
“It bodes well for me that you like toast. Because that is about the extent of my culinary skill.”
“There’s nothing to dislike about toast.”
“I share that opinion.”
“Well, there you go. We have some things in common. Which will make the long hours of tonight go by much quicker.”
Hours. That was the thing. They had hours together.
She swallowed hard, her heart beginning to thunder faster, and faster still. What kinds of things could two people do naked together for...hours?
She had no idea.
She hoped that he wouldn’t pick up on that.
It didn’t take long for them to get to his house, and he didn’t act like he noticed if she took a little bit longer to get unbuckled and get out of the truck than he did. But he did wait by the door for her.
His smile went wicked as they approached the door. “I’d say race you to the shower, but there’s really no point. I don’t mind sharing.”
Sharing the shower. That seemed way above her skill level.
It seemed like you should have to compete in a few rounds before you went pro in an event like sex. A shower seemed like professional-grade activities.
In fact, if sex were barrel racing, she would basically need a Shetland pony, a lead rope and one water glass to go around in a circle. She was not ready for the real deal.
But she wasn’t going to say that.
So instead, she simply followed him to the shower. And once they were in the bathroom, he turned the water on, then grabbed her and pulled her to him.
“It’s been a long day of work. I figure we might need to get clean.”
“I...”
“I’m going to go get a condom.”
“I don’t... I don’t know how to do this,” she blurted out.
“You don’t know how to do what?”
Oh, well, she’d said it. She wasn’t going to tell him, but then she’d said it. Because she didn’t have any practice holding back the things that came in her mind. Because she usually just charged forward and said whatever, because she was always confident in her ability to handle things, to be right. To take on any fight.
But nothing about this made her feel confident. She knew that she wanted... She knew she wanted to be with him again. But she didn’t think she could accomplish whatever he had in mind in the shower.
Not without falling and killing them both.
“Gabe, I didn’t want to have this conversation. But I... The first time was my first time.”
She’d said it. She’d said it, and her heart was hitting her sternum so hard she thought it might start breaking apart. She felt dizzy. She wasn’t just admitting to being inexperienced at something. She was admitting to knowing nothing. Absolutely nothing. And as messed up as that was, that was one of the scariest things she could even think of. Having to admit that she didn’t know anything. Having to admit that she was all talk.
That she wasn’t really that tough at all.
That she cried because it had felt huge and scary and different, and she wasn’t really different than other women. She was the same. Vulnerable and susceptible to all the same things.
And no amount of pretending, no amount of posturing and running around lifting hay bales that weighed a third of her body weight, would change it.
“What?”
“It was my first time.”
“You can’t... Jamie,” he said. “Are you telling me that you were a virgin?”
She frowned. “I don’t like that word. It’s a stupid word.”
“Well, were you?”
She sighed heavily. “I guess so. If you want to be technical about it. Or whatever. I guess I was.”
“Shit,” he said. “And that’s why you cried?”
She spread her hands. “I don’t know. Maybe I cry every time. I guess we’ll find out. Unless I have completely freaked you out and ruined this for me, and for you.”
“No,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “No, you didn’t. Just... Come with me.”
He took her by the hand and led her down the hall after turning the water off, and brought her upstairs, back to his room, and into the bathroom that was connected.
There was a large tub in there that was raised up on claw feet.
“I figure we can change tactics.”
“Oh,” she said.
He turned the tap on and waited a moment, testing the water temperature. Then, seemingly satisfied, he put a plug in the drain. “Go ahead and get undressed, and I’ll meet you back in here in a minute.”
Jamie did, awkwardly, after he closed the door behind him. She was shaking. Which was stupid. She’d already had sex with him. But she had no idea what he intended to do now.
She didn’t...take baths.
They seemed silly. A waste of time. Just as well to rinse off.
Still, she couldn’t deny that when she sank into the warm water, which went all the way up over her shoulders, she couldn’t deny that it felt good.
There was a slight knock on the door.
“Come in,” she said, sinking down a little bit in the water.
Gabe did. He was shirtless, wearing his jeans, belt and cowboy boots still. He had a couple of condom packets in his hand, but he set them on the counter. Then he walked over to the edge of the tub, and crouched down beside her, those blue eyes making no secret of the fact that they were looking down through the water.
“Is that all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re not fine. I upset you. And I didn’t mean to.” He sighed heavily. “My dad... I don’t think he takes advantage of women. I think they throw themselves at him. I think they throw themselves at him because he’s famous and rich. And for women who are into that kind of thing...it doesn’t matter how old he is. Doesn’t matter if he’s married, has kids. But I think... I don’t want to be like that. The kind of person who doesn’t think. I don’t think a man is any kind of man if he can’t control himself. That’s part of what it means to be a man. To be strong, and to never use it against anyone. To be able to take advantage of people if you wanted to, but to choose instead to care about their feelings.”
“I think you do... I think you do a pretty good job of that, Gabe. Wyatt definitely has you wrong.”
“Yeah, he thought I would take advantage of you.” Gabe’s mouth pulled down into a rueful frown. “I pretty much did.”
“I think I took advantage of you. I purposefully withheld information about my virginity. Mostly because I was hoping it wouldn’t matter.”
“Have you ever not charged into things full on?”
He grabbed a bar of soap and worked it to lather over his hands, and then Jamie jolted when he stuck those hands into the water, rubbing them over her shoulders. She relaxed against him then, because his touch felt good, soothing to her aching muscles.
No one had ever done this for her before.
“Good?” he asked, his voice husky.
“Yes,” she said.
He took his hands away for a moment, then took hold of the bar of soap again, slicking them up, before he returned his attention to her. This time he slid his hands down over her breasts, touching them, cupping them and teasing her nipples before sliding down her stomach and grazing that place between her legs.
She shif
ted, whimpering slightly and turning her head, burying her face against his forearm.
His touch felt...so good.
His hands were so strong, and the way they slid over her body... He made her feel soft.
And yet again, the feelings she normally associated with that weren’t there. There was no fear. No sense of being weak. No, she felt... She felt wonderful.
He moved his hands back up to her shoulders, kneading her tight muscles with his thumbs, and she let her head roll back, resting on his arm as he pleasured her in an entirely different way now.
He moved his hand down again, and this time when he touched her breast he lingered there, sliding his thumb in low, slow circles around her nipple. Pinching her lightly, before circling again.
She turned her head up toward him and he dipped his head, kissing her in a rhythm that matched the way he was touching her breast.
She sighed and arched upward, into his touch, into his kiss.
This did not feel like it was beyond her. This felt easy. Natural. Felt right.
He removed his hands, and she made a small sound in protest until she realized he was taking his boots off.
He stood for a moment, shucking off his jeans and underwear before walking stark naked over to the bathroom counter.
She took a moment to admire his body. That broad, muscular back, the way his waist tapered in. His butt.
She had never been a big one for Wrangler butt. All the girls around her at amateur barrel racing events had gone on and on about it. Jamie had just been there to race.
She didn’t know about Wrangler butt or not. But Gabe Dalton’s butt was a thing of beauty. His thighs were muscular, and she had the strangest urge to take a bite out of one of them.
She didn’t know why the idea of putting her teeth on him was arousing. But it was.
