“Oh my god, Dan,” I said, unable to control what suddenly escaped my lips. “It’s gorgeous.”
Dan shrugged. “I like it.”
It was a completely uncommitted response; something I was pretty sure was regular fare with him. I was more used to the urban setting, but I didn’t really have an aversion to nature and its beauty. I wasn’t particularly comfortable in the middle of nowhere, but beauty is beauty wherever it’s found.
We didn’t speak as we descended toward the ranch below; not that there had been an overabundance of conversation up to that point. Other than explaining that my car had broken down and wouldn’t start and him giving instructions on getting onto the back of the horse, there hadn’t been much said between us. It had given me plenty of time to try to figure out how I was going to break the news of my real reason for being there. By the time we reached the ranch, I still didn’t have a way to do it that wasn’t going to strand me in the desert.
I decided that since he’d been nice enough to give me a ride to the ranch and agreed to see if he could get the car running again, that he was at least a partially decent human-being, so, I thought that keeping it cool until my car was able to limp its way back out was the best bet. I could always tell him just before I sped away, right? It seemed like a cowardly approach, but being around him sober was a great deal different than it had been when I was plastered off my ass. Sober, he scared me.
There were plenty more surprises awaiting for me once we were down in the valley. The first surprise was that there was no electricity and no phone service. That explained why I wasn’t able to track down any phone number connected to him. Dan wasn’t really much of a host either, which wasn’t really a surprise whenever I really think about it, but I guess I expected some of the common courtesies extended to a guest rather than dropping me off of the back of the horse in the ranch yard, pointing toward the rundown adobe shack and saying, “there’s the house.”
“I’d kind of like a shower,” I responded.
“Don’t have one,” he said curtly.
“What am I supposed to do about this?” I stood in front of him and swept my hands from my chest to my hips, making certain that he saw how my clothes clung to my body from the heat and sweat.
“Pool in the creek out back,” he said.
“Clothes? Robe? Towels? Soap?”
“Towels and soap are inside. Clothes?” He shrugged and turned the horse toward the corrals and barn.
“What an asshole,” I said under my breath as I walked toward the house. I was pretty sure he didn’t hear me, but I really didn’t care whether he did or not. I was considering going ahead and laying everything on the line and letting the chips fall where they may. I started to turn toward him to do just that, but rationality got the better of me and I just kept walking toward the house.
Judging from the outside, I wasn’t surprised when I saw the inside. It was livable, but there wasn’t much else that could be said about it. It was tidy and organized, which wasn’t exactly what I had expected from an arrogant bad boy, but everything was plain and there wasn’t much in the way of décor. I found the bathroom behind one of the three doors along one wall of the long, rectangular room, which had a kitchen at one end and a living room at the other. The bathroom was basically a toilet and sink with deep shelves against one wall and the remnants of what looked like the frame and walls of a closet that were recently removed. The shelves were empty except for one, which held three folded towels, a bar of soap in one of those plastic boxes that you get at the Dollar Store, and a cup with a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste in it.
I snatched up the soap and a towel, left the bathroom and then tried one of the other two remaining doors in search of something that I might wear. If worse came to worse, I’d put on one of his shirts. That was sort of a sexy, girlfriend thing and I didn’t want to give him any wrong impressions, but I had to be practical. “Besides,” I smiled as I spoke to the empty room. “I might as well tease him with it a little before I refuse to have anything to do with him.” It was a devilish thought, but I wasn’t in an angelic mood.
My next surprise came when I opened the closet door in the first bedroom that I entered. The clothes hanging there were not fashionable by anybody’s definition of the term, nor were the collection of boots and pair of slippers that were on the floor below, however, the jeans and shirts that were hanging on hangers or folded up on the shelves beside them, were pretty close to my size. The mystery that was Dan Sexton had just deepened. Whose clothes were these? They obviously belonged to a woman, though it was only the size and the fact that there were some granny panties mixed in with the lot that created any sort of differentiation. Whoever the woman was or had been, she certainly didn’t care how she looked. “Bastard probably had a wife or girlfriend and killed her,” I smirked while gathering clothes to take with me to the “pool in the creek out back.”
That particular location for bathing wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but given the choice of sweaty clothes sticking to me and feeling clean and fresh, even in someone else’s ugly clothes was the better alternative, so I stripped down and stepped in. The pool was in the shade of some cottonwood trees and had one hell of a picturesque view down the valley. It had been dug out and lined with stones with what felt like a concrete bottom to it. The creek spilled into the pool from above and retreated over a spillway below and returned back to its winding path through the green meadow of the valley.
Not only was the cool water and the shade refreshing after my trek through hell, but I was forced to admit that it was actually a very nice place to take a bath. Away from the heat, the cactus, the rocks and the sand, I was relatively content, though admitting that I would ever want to stay there for longer than it took to get my car fixed and to tell Dan that I was pregnant with his baby would have been stretching the truth.
My relaxation ended whenever Dan came around the corner of the house and sat down in one of those chairs like they have in the Adirondacks, which was only a few paces from the pool. “You found some clothes.”
“Yes, I did.” Only an asshole would have sat down there to watch me bathe. What should I have expected?
IV.
“Don’t get too comfortable here,” he said, pushing himself up out of the chair after having watched me bathe, towel off and get dressed.
Though I wasn’t thrilled with his invasion of my privacy, I had decided to go ahead and give him his thrill. I’ve been known to be a pretty good tease and I brought out my A game for him. Torturing him the way I was, was a means of revenge, but that last comment had taken all of the thrill out of it.
“I wasn’t,” I snapped back.
His eyes penetrated straight through me. Those eyes that had made my insides do flips and caused me to give my body to him in Vegas were icy cold. To be honest, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had pulled a Rambo knife from behind his back, jerk me to him by my hair and slit my throat.
“Good, because as soon as your car is fixed you’re leaving. I didn’t invite you and I don’t want you here.”
“You were singing a different tune back in Vegas,” I retorted.
He shrugged and then turned to walk away.
There are some insults that just dig in too deep for rationality to overcome and that was one of them. “You were hell on wheels to have me around when you got me pregnant,” I yelled at his retreating back.
“What the hell did you just say?” When he turned around, I saw Satan and all his demons in the eyes of that one man. I’d heard stories about how ruthless SEALS were and how they killed with deadly precision, but it wasn’t until I saw him turn back toward me in that moment that I believed any of them.
“I’m pregnant,” I said in a soft tone. I wasn’t sure where I was going to run to, but I was certainly thinking about it.
“Came here to apologize my ass,” he growled. “You came here to pin your fucking problem on me. How do you know it wasn’t one of the other half-dozen guys tha
t you fucked in Vegas?”
I’m not very big, a little over 110 when I have my clothes on; okay, 120. For the most part, I’m pretty even tempered. I work hard and am considered a pretty serious, dependable and good natured person. One thing that I’m not, is a slut and having him suggest that, no matter how cold blooded he was and no matter how he dwarfed me with his muscle packed body, I wasn’t going to stand for that. I went on the attack.
“Look, asshole,” I said, moving toward him rapidly, standing toe to toe with him and pushing my face up toward his as closely as I could. “I only made one stupid mistake in Vegas and that was fucking you. The baby is yours!”
The frozen moment that passed after that was excruciating. I was standing my ground against a trained killer who could snap my neck like a toothpick and bury me somewhere out in the desert where nobody would ever find me. I stopped breathing and listened to my heart thundering in my chest as I realized that it was likely the last moments of my life. His ice cold eyes cut through me as he studied my own and then with a grunt, he turned and walked away.
What the hell was I supposed to say? What the hell was I supposed to do? Following him and engaging in an argument that might get me killed didn’t seem like the right thing to do, but that voice of rationality that I had ignored only moments before came back and reminded me that I still needed him to help me get my car fixed so that I could return home.
“You hungry?” he said, turning before he went around the corner of the house.
What the fuck? I had just told the guy that I was pregnant with his baby and his only response was to ask me if I was hungry. I just stood there and stared at him.
“Come on, we have shit to do.”
That was certainly a better response. But, again, I know I’m repeating myself, but what else could I do? I’d gotten myself into one hell of a fix and I was far from getting out of it, but if I was going to see the light at the end of the tunnel, then I had to survive to get there. “Sure, what the hell,” I muttered, going back to gather up my sweaty clothes, the towel and the soap.
I’ll have to hand it to him, he was a decent cook. It wasn’t anything fancy. It was pretty damned simple, really, but it tasted really good, or maybe I was just really hungry. Though it wasn’t my usual choice for lunch nor my usual portion size, I cleaned up my plate, even soaking up the last of the juices with the tortilla. “That was surprisingly good,” I commented, mostly just to break the thick silence between us.
“I told you not to get comfortable,” he growled, scooping up my plate along with his and carrying it to the sink. “Come on, we need to go get your car.”
That son of a bitch couldn’t even take a compliment. I was about ready to point out that particular trait in him. Rational, rational, rational, I repeated in my mind over and over. I swallowed my response and started carrying things to the sink.
For all of his bad traits, it surprised me that he didn’t abandon me to do the dishes while he went to sit down. No doubt, living alone and having to do things for himself had eliminated that particularly sexist behavior from him. I didn’t want to give him too much credit, but he wouldn’t even allow me to help. He didn’t say anything to that effect, he just blocked me from doing things or snatched things out of my hands if I picked them up.
“Fine,” I sighed, moving away from him. I remembered the sweaty clothes that I’d taken off and tossed in a pile in bedroom. I decided to go hang them up so that the sweat could dry. Washing them was a consideration, but I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation.
“Put on a pair of those boots,” he called out from the kitchen. “They’re probably about your size.”
Then the mystery of the woman who had owned the boots and clothes returned suddenly. Had he had a woman there before, killed her and buried her out in the desert somewhere? Had he had a woman before and she’d gotten tired of his shit and left him? Maybe she broke his heart and that was the reason that he had become such an asshole.
“That’s still no excuse,” I muttered.
“Huh?” he said, suddenly appearing in the doorway to the bedroom.
Shit, I should have closed the door. “Nothing,” I replied.
“They fit?” he asked while he watched me take up the left boot and pull it on over a borrowed sock.
“Yes.”
“Good. Let’s get a move on.”
I wasn’t going to win a beauty pageant, but I was properly dressed for going back out into the desert to retrieve my car. When I walked out the door and looked around the ranch yard, however, was the first time that it struck me that I hadn’t seen anything but horses on the place. Were we seriously going to go get my car and tow it with a horse?
V.
“Well, you might as well make yourself useful,” he said, rising up from the breakfast table a few days later. “Come on.”
It wasn’t a particularly warm form of address, but it was in stark contrast to what I had gotten used to as being our form of interaction. We hadn’t gotten my car with horses, but with a Ram 350 diesel truck that he kept under a tarp in the barn. We’d towed the car back to the house and into an empty stall in the barn. He’d gotten it up on blocks and crawled around underneath it for about an hour and then, got up and walked out without saying a word. When he didn’t come back for quite a while, I wandered out to try and figure out what had become of him. He was swinging a leg over the saddle of the horse we’d ridden in on earlier and then he was gone for a couple of hours.
I’d rummaged around the place, looking at equipment, tools and implements that I had absolutely no knowledge or understanding of. At one point, I had considered taking the truck and going back to civilization, but quickly put that idea out of my mind, because, if I did that, he probably would hunt me down and kill me. Not sure where he went or what he did while he was gone, for all I knew, he’d gone out to send up a smoke signal, he came back and announced that he’d have the part he needed to fix my car by the end of the next week. Not much other conversation had gone on between us after that, nor did he seem to stick around long enough for a conversation to have a fighting chance to get started, so the fact that he had told me to “come on” was a pretty big deal. In fact, from that point forward, what happened changed both of our lives forever.
Dan led me to the corral where a half-dozen horses that I hadn’t seen before were standing along with the three that had been there when we’d first arrived. I’d acquainted myself with the others and found them to be quite charming and peaceful to be around, but that had been the extent of my interaction with them.
“You ever ridden?” he asked as he took down a bridle and started out into the corral.
“You mean a horse?” The question had caught me off guard.
He just glared at me in response. Yeah, it was a stupid question.
“Does summer camp or the Grand Canyon count?”
“Not really,” he replied.
“Then, no.”
“Guess you’re about to learn, then.”
It hadn’t been pretty, at first, but I finally got the hang of it. I have to admit that I was scared, but I kept that hidden. It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of him, but more that I felt like I needed to stretch myself to meet whatever challenge he presented to me. I’d stood up to him without getting killed and I’d tried my best to put up the appearance that I could match him in whatever way he wanted. Basically, I was determined not to back down.
After I’d gotten the basics down, we started riding out onto the ranch each morning. We rode through the cattle, even out onto the desert to some hidden streams and oasis where green grass and cottonwoods replaced cactus, rocks and sage. Oddly enough, whenever we were out riding together was when he would actually open up and talk to me. Why he opened up to me out there when he couldn’t say two words to me at the house was another of the mysteries that continued to haunt me. However, with things thawing between us, I finally came around to asking about the first mystery;
the existence of my not so fashionable outfits.
“I don’t mean to pry into things,” I led off.
“That’s what people say right before they start prying,” he muttered.
“It’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while, but I guess it can wait.”
“You might as well ask it,” he said. “You’ve already started it.”
“Where did the clothes come from? You know the ones…”
“Yes,” he interrupted with a whisper. “I know which clothes you’re asking about. And yes, you’re prying.” The pain on his face was in complete contrast to every other side of him that I’d seen up until that point. He didn’t snap at me or glare at me, which was sort of a new thing for us. For the first time, I began to see his human side.
“I’m sor…”
“Don’t be,” he cut me off again. He gazed off across the desert toward the shimmering horizon and started out slowly. “They belonged to my sister. We inherited all of this when my Dad died a half-dozen years back. My Mom had gone on some years before him and, well, it hadn’t been the same, even for him after that.”
He was quiet for a few minutes, but I just watched him and kept my mouth shut. I could tell that he was struggling with some pretty intense feelings.
“She got thrown from a horse and broke her back on one of these damned rocks.” His deep voice was barely above a whisper. “God only knows how long she laid out here.” He walked several paces away from me and turned his back. I saw his shoulders shaking and knew what was going on, but I just let him be.
After about ten minutes, he came back and stretched himself out under the shade of the cottonwood tree, but continued to gaze toward the horizon. The sound of the horses stomping and switching their tails as they cropped grass and fought flies blended with those of the bubbling spring, dragonflies and cicadas. It was then that my entire attitude toward him and toward the Southern Arizona desert began to change. I suddenly understood the isolation and the peace that the desert and especially the oases that we frequented provided. I understood why he’d wanted to be left alone and why he’d been such an asshole. In that moment, I wanted to apologize for the thoughts that I’d had about him, but I wasn’t sure how to start.
AFRICAN AMERICAN URBAN FICTION: BWWM ROMANCE: Billionaire Baby Daddy (Billionaire Secret Baby Pregnancy Romance) (Multicultural & Interracial Romance Short Stories) Page 29
