by Megan Crane
And Skylar didn’t run. She stood there instead, as if she was hanging on every word her father was saying when the truth was, she doubted she’d be able to repeat a single syllable of it later if her life depended on it.
Inside, she was still spinning. Reeling, if she was honest. And she didn’t want that. She’d hoped she wouldn’t see Cody again. But now that she had, there was no need to make it dramatic. There was nothing dramatic about it, surely.
When another local vendor called out to her father and he started to move away, Skylar smiled politely and tried to go with him.
But everything in her went still when she felt a big, calloused hand wrap around her wrist and hold her tight.
“I’m not as familiar with Billings as I’d like to be,” Cody said, in the most amiable, genial voice she’d heard from him yet. It was so out of character that she actually did a double take, and was sure that was a smile there on his arrogant mouth. “I’d sure appreciate it if a local could give me a few recommendations.”
“Skylar would be happy to do that,” her father said at once, because she probably would have been if it had been anyone else asking. “She might even give you a tour, if you ask nicely.”
“I’m not much of a tour guide,” Skylar demurred at once.
“You haven’t let me ask you,” Cody replied. “Nicely.”
And somehow her father managed not to hear the sensual menace in the way he said it. But Skylar certainly did. Still, there was nothing to do but stand there, a smile pasted to her face despite how sharp it felt, while Billy walked off and left her there in Cody’s clutches.
Literally.
She took her time looking back at him and told herself she was just gathering her strength and preparing to be easy. Carefree. Unbothered, the way she wanted to be. But the truth was, everything felt intimate again—and had since she’d locked eyes with him. There was a crowd all around them, just as there had been the other night. She knew people could see them, which made this much more public and safe than the other night at her father’s house.
It shouldn’t have felt dangerous. But oh, how it did.
Skylar made herself face him fully, because she didn’t want to. She refused to be a coward.
“I don’t know how this works,” she told him before he could say a word. She even kept her smile on her face. “But if you think this is an opportunity to let me down easy, or condescend to me, or make me feel bad about what happened that night, you can just let go of my arm and let me walk away right now.”
Skylar pulled against his grip, but he didn’t loosen it. Of course he didn’t. This was a man who held on tight while a deadly bull bucked him back and forth—what made her think she could pry his hand open if he didn’t want to open it?
She frowned at him, forgetting about the pleasant expression she wanted to wear. “I’m not kidding.”
“Exactly what do you think I’m going to say to you?” he asked, and his voice had gone all…lazy.
That was worse than the molasses before. It dripped all over her, hot and sweet. And hot in ways she didn’t know how to handle.
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I suppose you could say anything. I’m sure you do these things all the time.”
Skylar didn’t know why his gaze changed a little at that. It got more intent. Hotter, somehow. It made her want to squirm in her sandals.
“Darlin’,” he said, and she knew she shouldn’t like the way he said that. Especially when she was sure a man like him used it so he wouldn’t have to concern himself with remembering names. “What benefit would there possibly be to me making you feel bad?”
As he spoke, he let his thumb move up and down along the inside of her wrist. An easy, almost offhanded little caress, so light it could have been an accident.
It wasn’t an accident.
An accident wouldn’t have felt like an avalanche. It wouldn’t have roared through her, making her nipples pull tight and her belly go taut, while her pussy was so slippery and so wildly hot she was half afraid that it was visible from across the room.
Or even just to him.
Skylar pulled in a breath and it shook. Audibly. And that dark green gaze Cody kept trained on her got that much more intent.
So intent that something in her…shifted. As if a knot suddenly pulled free.
“My understanding is that it’s not a one-night stand unless both parties show some measure of shame about the experience,” she heard herself say then, as if she was someone else. Someone who tilted her head to look up at a man through her eyelashes. Someone who let her voice go a little flirtatious. Someone who didn’t yank her arm out of his grasp but instead, let him continue to make her shiver. Someone invulnerable, who had never lost a thing. “The impression I get is that it tends to be the female, but I’m warning you. Not here. And definitely not me.”
Cody kept his thumb moving, a drugging sweep one way, then the other. His dark green gaze was hot and somehow narrow, or maybe it was that she felt as if nothing else existed in the whole wide world. As if the way he looked at her in the middle of a crowded cocktail party was the only thing that could even dream of competing with the vastness of the Montana sky.
“I’m glad to hear it,” he said after a while. Maybe it was more than a while. Maybe it was years, and Skylar couldn’t say she cared as long as he held on to her like that. “But who said it was a one-night stand?”
“Please.” She sounded like that someone else, then. That girl who feared nothing—and certainly not a man like him. “You don’t even know my name.”
“Skylar. And I knew it that night.”
She didn’t think he could have—but then she remembered Angelique calling for her, out there in the dark grass.
But the woman who’d taken over her body rolled her eyes. “Well, I didn’t know yours.”
“You know it now.” He didn’t quite grin at her, and still, her chest felt tight as if he had. “You can read all my vital statistics on the American Extreme Bull Riders website, if you like. Height. Weight. Wins. If that matters to you.”
“I’m not really a buckle bunny,” she replied. She nodded at his. “Though it’s awfully shiny.”
Cody’s grip on her shifted, and when he tugged her closer to him, she didn’t object. It didn’t occur to her to object.
“There’s a way to prove that,” he said. “Buckle bunnies are almost always one-night stands. Because once they get what they want from one cowboy, off they go to ride another.”
“I guess that makes me a buckle bunny, then.” This time when she smiled at him, there was nothing fake about it. Skylar opted not to interrogate herself about that. “And to be clear, I’m perfectly fine with the one-night stand thing. I didn’t expect I’d ever lay eyes on you again.”
The I didn’t want to lay eyes on you again part was implied.
“I get that.” That was definitely a smile, then. That curve in the corner of his mouth that only seemed to deepen the longer he looked at her. “But you did.”
Skylar was finding it hard to breathe. She felt as if she was wrapped in something shimmery and too hot. And he was still holding on to her. She thought she should say something, but words seemed beyond her. She just watched him, all that granite and steel. And she felt the way his touch reverberated all throughout her body. She told herself she didn’t care what happened next.
Because it hadn’t occurred to her that there would be a next. Skylar hadn’t thought in terms of next for so long now, that all she wanted to do was revel in the fact that there was a next and it was happening. Right now.
“For one thing, darlin’, it wasn’t really a one-night stand,” Cody said, and his gaze grew somehow even more intent as he maneuvered her an inch or so closer to him, so she could feel all that heat she remembered coming off him in waves. It became a struggle not to touch him the way she wanted. Everywhere. “It wasn’t really a night, was it? I think if aspersions are going to be cast and names called, it needs to be longer t
han an hour on a picnic table. Don’t you?”
Chapter Five
Cody had no idea what the hell he was doing.
He’d kept hold of Skylar’s wrist and he’d escorted her out of the restaurant, then helped her into his truck like they were on a sweet little date. When he didn’t date and wasn’t sweet, because why pretend he was interested in anything other than one thing—which he could find a whole lot quicker in a bar? No sweetness required. And now he was driving out of Billings proper as the last of the July light seemed to singe the edges of the Rimrocks with this woman beside him and he had no idea why he hadn’t simply nodded politely and then walked away when her father had introduced them.
But that wasn’t any kind of explanation.
There was a too-pretty woman sitting in the cab of his truck, with that unreadable, crooked smile aimed out the window as he followed the Yellowstone River out of town. Cody had already had her and he didn’t do second helpings. It wasn’t worth the hassle. He should have been delighted to hear that she didn’t want anything else from him. He should have taken her at her word.
But instead, he’d taken her with him.
Now she was close enough that he could smell her and it was driving him a little crazy. Maybe that was the explanation. It wasn’t the spun-sugar scent of her skin that he remembered despite himself, and could still taste, but something else. Maybe a perfume. Maybe whatever soap she used. Either way it was a hint of cedar and something warm, the way sunlight would smell if it could.
And now he was a goddamned poet. What the hell was the matter with him?
Cody needed to turn his truck around and get her away from him before he did something even stupider than this. But he didn’t. He didn’t even slow down.
“I thought the tour stayed in a hotel,” Skylar said. She didn’t sound accusing or even particularly worried. She was still staring out the window as if she’d never seen this part of Billings before, and she sounded completely relaxed about the fact that he was driving her away from the city. And all the people. And any kind of safety.
There was no reason that should irritate him. But it did. His voice was clipped and a little too pissed when he answered her.
“The tour does. I don’t.”
He felt her gaze on him for a moment, but then it was gone again and he hated the fact that he could feel anything. Much less that. Her. When he glanced over, she had her fingers laced together in the depression her dress made between her thighs, and he had no idea why that seemed to fall through him like water cascading over rock. As if he’d remember it forever, Skylar Grey in his truck with the last little bit of summer light making her glow, with her hands in her lap and that lopsided smile on her face.
It was like he was in a trance.
Cody shook it off, and tried to figure out what it was about her smile that bugged him so much. Maybe it was because it wasn’t quite a smile. Not really. It was just that maddening tilt of her lips in the corners that made her look entirely too satisfied. Too pleased with herself.
As if she knew something he didn’t.
“Maybe you should be a little more concerned that I abducted you from the middle of the city and am driving you out to parts unknown,” he heard himself say, like a psycho.
She didn’t quite laugh, but the sound she made was close enough that he found himself suddenly obsessed with hearing that rusty, surprised, real laughter he’d heard the other night, out there in the woods. He could almost feel the scrape of it again, moving over him like her hands on his skin.
“I wouldn’t suggest you do me any harm.” This time when she looked his way, she kept that blue gaze of hers on him long enough for him to catch it. “Everybody in that restaurant saw me leave with Cody Galen, veteran star of the American Extreme Bull Riders Tour. I’m sure they’re gossiping about it right now. If I don’t turn up safe and sound after such a public abduction, you’ll spend the weekend explaining yourself to the authorities. I imagine I’m safer with you tonight than I would be with my own father.”
He should have found her irritating. He clearly wanted to find her irritating.
But instead, Cody was the one to laugh. “Not quite that safe, darlin’.”
He could feel the temperature change in the truck. He knew the look he threw at her as he took the road that led out of town was charged. Electric. Filled with all that dark need that had been clawing at him since he’d realized who Billy Grey was taking him across the restaurant to meet.
It had seemed inevitable that it would be her, standing there with her back to the party. And he knew he could have headed the entire interaction off at the pass if he’d wanted. He could have avoided the potential awkwardness and continued doing what passed for his glad-handing routine all around. There’d been no reason to let Billy introduce him to his daughter.
This felt inevitable too. A back road leading out into the middle of nowhere. A pretty girl and all that hunger heating up the space between them. Cody couldn’t seem to help himself.
“Why don’t you want to stay with the rest of the tour?” she asked after a while. After the lights of Billings had dimmed a bit, and they were driving out on a country road deep into the thick embrace of a Montana summer night.
That wasn’t the kind of question he usually answered.
Cody didn’t want to think about what it was about her that was so different. He didn’t want to think. If he hadn’t wanted more from her than what he’d already gotten on that picnic table, he would have handled this situation back there in that restaurant. In a bathroom or closet with a lock. Out in an alley, if necessary. He wasn’t picky. And he was pretty confident that even if she was, generally speaking, he probably could have convinced her otherwise.
He’d always been a greedy bastard. He’d wanted more than that. And apparently more than that came with the kinds of questions he usually refused to entertain.
Of course, Skylar wasn’t the tour promoter, forever on his case about the interviews Cody should be doing and the narrative he should be selling to cater to the fans—who apparently found cowboys risking their lives on the backs of animals that could kill them in an instant insufficiently dramatic. She wasn’t one of the cloying, drunk women he gravitated toward because it was easy, who giggled instead of asking questions, and knew better than to ask him for more than he gave.
From the sleek way she styled her hair to the dresses she wore, neat and tailored to her body without in any way overtly emphasizing her form, Skylar had good, decent woman written all over her. With a touch of something sophisticated besides. And having met her father, Cody figured that came directly from her.
It was the way she held herself, even sitting there in the cab of his truck. She kept her back straight, her hands folded in her lap. She didn’t slouch or hunker down in the seat. She didn’t prop her feet up on the dashboard. She wasn’t a cowgirl, she wasn’t a skank, she wasn’t even a fan of bull riding as far as he could tell. And yet he couldn’t remember ever wanting another woman more.
“Is that a tricky question?” she asked, reminding him that he’d let her question sit there. She didn’t actually shrug, but it was there in her voice. “You don’t have to tell me if it is.”
And he shouldn’t have felt disarmed. Out of his depth, when there was almost nothing he was better at than taking a woman home with him. There was no reason that tonight should feel different from a hundred other nights out on tour, from Oklahoma to Washington to Florida and back again, all one big blur. There was no reason Skylar should be any different. There was no reason she should stand out, in perfect focus.
But she was. She did. There was no getting past it.
He’d watched her walk away from him in her father’s backyard and he’d thought about little else since. Not something he wanted to admit, but then again, maybe that was why he heard himself talking about things he didn’t talk about. Ever.
“The tour is different when you’re young,” he said gruffly. “You’re on the road all the t
ime. You don’t have much money, because you’re not that good. You have your moments to shine, sure. It’s how you got on the tour in the first place and you have to keep your ranking. But sustaining a high score across a weekend, and then a season—that’s the hard part.”
He barely remembered that kid. All he remembered was the anger. It was all he’d had going for him back then. Anger and his ability to channel it all into eight perfect seconds, just him and a bull in a wild, raw dance.
“Anyone can have one good ride,” he said now. “It’s having a good ride every time you get on the bull, or most of the time, that makes a career.”
“Sounds like the only people who could really understand that would be the people who were doing it right along with you,” she ventured. “But maybe I’m missing something.”
“My first few years, the other riders were my brothers. Family.” He refused to talk about his own family. He couldn’t be that far gone, surely. This was bad enough. “But that was a long time ago.”
He expected her to comment on that, but she didn’t. Because apparently, Skylar didn’t do a damn thing that he expected her to do. Cody kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel, and didn’t let himself think too much about the fact that his mouth kept moving.
“The best friend I made on the tour is in a wheelchair now. He got carried out of an arena in Texas and he’ll never walk again. The others dropped off here and there. A lot of injuries. Surgery after surgery, always thinking the next one might fix what getting stomped on by a pissed-off bull broke. It never does. Or there are babies and wives and a whole lot more concerns about all those concussions, suddenly.” He shrugged. “What no one wants to talk about is that sooner or later, you lose the fire for it. And you can’t do it without the fire, because all you are then is a crazy man with too many stress fractures who might die if he goes back out there one more time.”
