A Diamond in the Dark

by Sassie Lewis

  “No. I mean. I think. I. Am. In. Love. With Tia.” Axton said it a lot slower this time, waiting for Ethan to get his meaning.

  If the look on Ethan’s face was an indication, the ball had just dropped. And it was about time, because that was about as pleasant as a night after eating one of Leonie’s chilis. Great going in but hurt like shit—pun intended—coming out. Although, Ethan standing there looking like a guppy fish brought a much needed smile to Axton’s face.

  “What the fuck!”

  Oookay, so maybe Ethan was having just a wee bit of a hard time digesting that little tidbit of news.

  “Seriously...Tia?” Ethan sputtered. “I can see her appeal, but the thought of…Well, she’s like my baby sister. How long have you felt this way? And what the hell are you going to do about it?”

  “A while, and nothing. As you said, she’s part of this family.” Axton scrubbed his palms over his head again, trying to dispel the hopeless feelings. “It’s wrong on so many levels to be lusting after someone who’s like a sister. It’s…it’s... Well, just sick.” Which Ax truly believed. He couldn’t get over the fact that he had watched Tia grow up, in some instances even helping to raise her. Teaching her to ride a bike, a horse, and drive a car.

  He stood up and started pacing. What the hell was he going to do? He really was freaking the fuck out.

  “Secondly, as you said, I’m getting to be an old man and she’s only twenty-one. I don’t know which to be disturbed by more. That I want to fuck my brother’s daughter? Or does the fact that I’m having wet dreams about a girl fifteen years my junior make me a pedophile?”

  Okay, maybe in the heat of the moment, Axton overshared a little there. But it seemed that once he started saying all this shit out loud, instead of just in his head, his mouth kept going, and his brain took a siesta.

  Slumping back onto the bale, Ax looked up at Ethan to find him doubled over laughing. Well, nice to see someone saw the funny side of this situation, because Ax surely couldn’t. Screw him. Looked like Ethan wasn’t going to take his problem seriously, so he stood and went back to work stacking the hay.

  “Sit back down, Ax.”

  Frustrated, Axton slumped back down onto the bale he’d been about to move.

  “First, I would like to point out that even though Tia has been part of this family for a very long time, she’s not our blood.”

  He could feel Ethan’s eyes boring into the top of his head. When he lifted his face to look at the other man Ethan continued.

  “If you think for a second that out of us four boys you’re the only one to notice her, think again, buddy. The girl has a rack on her that would get any man’s attention. Jesus, you know the first guy she kissed was Luke?”

  Axton shot up off the bale again. He was starting to feel a little like a yo-yo. But seriously, Luke...Luke, the little piss-ant, had kissed Tia? Fists clenched by his side, he wanted to punch the shit out of Luke for ever touching her.

  “Take a breath, Ax. It was just a kiss. We were camping, sitting around the fire one night, somehow the conversation got to her telling us she’d never been kissed. She was sixteen and hadn’t been kissed. I think Luke felt sorry for her, so he turned, grabbed her face, and planted one right on her lips. Afterward she gave him a big hug and said the kiss was nice, but he just didn’t do it for her. You know Luke...he acted all wounded. We all laughed and the night went on.”

  Ethan shook his head when Axton went to stand up again. He felt like a naughty dog being told don’t do that.

  “Back to your little confession. In case you haven’t noticed, Tia’s not a child. I don’t even think as a teenager she was a kid. She grew up around a bunch of boys roughhousing her and working her just as hard as we had to. And she’s smart. Real smart. So this pedophile shit—get that thought out of your head right now. You do realize that your dad was twenty years older than your mom, right? And shit, my dad was ten years older than Ma. Jesus, Dad married Ma when she was only sixteen and she had me and Rick a year later.”

  Axton hadn’t thought about that. Yeah, there was a big age gap between his ma and pa. He’d been too young to remember Jack and Maggie getting married. But when he was old enough to understand, he remembered hearing the shit his brother got for marrying someone so young. Not from his family, Ax also had two other brothers and a sister, and they’d all loved Maggie. But the people in town just couldn’t understand what Jack had seen in her. Actually, most of those gossiping at the time were females who thought they’d had a chance with Jack. But it didn’t change anything. Axton had to get his shit together and stop obsessing over Tia.

  “Doesn’t matter, Ethan. I’m not going to do anything about it. Jesus, from what I’ve heard, Tia’s still a virgin. She has some growing to do, and she doesn’t need an old man stalking her.”

  “Look, Ax, I have no problem with you having a relationship with Tia, as long as it’s for the long haul and not the ‘fuck’ as you put it. But if you’re not gonna go after her, you might want to back off. Let the girl go on a proper date once in a while.”

  Axton was still cringing over the fact he had told Ethan he wanted to fuck Tia. When what Ethan had said registered, he asked, “What’d ya mean by that?”

  “Ax, man, you do realize that every time that girl has had a date, you’ve somehow been there to intimidate the poor sap. Hell, her prom date stood her up because you threatened to castrate him if he even danced too close to her. It’s gotten to the point where all the guys in town are too scared to ask her out.”

  Well shit, fuck, and crap! He had no idea she wasn’t even going on dates. She went out most weekends, with either Shelley or Mara. “Hey, don’t lay it all on me, y’all have said something a time or two as well.” He felt the need to defend himself.

  “Hate to break it to you, but none of us have done or said anything since she turned seventeen. Even Dad tried to set her up with one of the Dolands. Don’t know what happened, Jimmy took her out on one date, and then she never saw him again.”

  Christ! Ax knew why there had never been another date. He remembered going over to Jack’s house for supper. When Tia hadn’t been home, he’d asked where she was. Finding out she was down by the lake having a picnic dinner with Jimmy had him finishing his supper in record time so he could go check on her. When he had gotten to the lake, his vision turned red; Jimmy’s hand had been down the front of Tia’s pants. Axton had reacted without thinking. Tia wasn’t even eighteen yet, and Jimmy was already twenty-three. The fucker had been going for gold, right beside his fucking lake.

  Hadn’t that little outburst cost him? Nearly twenty K to pay for some rather nice new teeth for Jimmy. Lucky for Ax, he was pretty good friends with Jimmy’s older brother Robert. It was Robert who helped smooth things over with old man Doland and stopped the old-timer from having Axton thrown in jail.

  It had also helped that Robert didn’t like his brother very much. Jimmy had been an ass to Robert growing up. Robert was adopted after his folks thought they couldn’t have kids, then five years later Jimmy was born. He often liked to throw it in Robert’s face that he wasn’t really Doland ‘blood’. Prick. So when Jimmy had threatened to involve the law, Robert brought up a lot of dirty laundry he had on Jimmy.

  “Doesn’t matter, Ethan. I’m not going to touch her. Jack would kill me. I just need to get laid. It’s more likely I’m obsessing over the only decent looking female around here.” Okay, that was bullshit, but Ethan didn’t know that.

  Axton turned and started restacking the bales. He’d had enough of this conversation. He knew what he needed to do—find a willing bed partner and sweat it out between the sheets. He would shoot down to Houston on the weekend. There was a cattle and horse auction happening that he wanted to check out anyway. He also needed to look at a couple of new mares. There, decision made. Moving on with life.

  As Axton moved the bales he watched Ethan head toward the barn doors, only to stop and turn back around.

  “In case you need remind
ing, Dad has only ever wanted three things in life—Ma back, this ranch to prosper, and for us kids to be happy. Oh, and if you haven’t noticed—because you have your head shoved so far up your own ass—she watches you. She always has. And I wasn’t joking, Axton. Sort your shit out or one of us is going to bloody you, Dad included.”

  With that statement Axton was left with his own screwed up thoughts.

  Chapter 3

  Tia had spent the past five days dreaming about the kiss she’d given Ax in the car on Sunday. Really, it was a peck on the lips. She’d done that hundreds of times over the years to Uncle Jack and the others, but never Axton. By God, did the man have soft lips. Now she was starting to understand some of the gossip she’d heard in town from several different sources about Axton’s oral skills. She didn’t want to dwell on that too much. Thinking about his lips on another woman just pissed her off. She had seen him enough times with his tongue shoved down some hussy’s throat that she didn’t need her imagination creating fictitious ones to add to the list.

  Every night since Sunday she had dreamed about the kiss, but in them when she leaned in to kiss him, Axton grabbed her hair in both of his large fists and deepened it. Sweeping his tongue into her mouth, pulling her closer, until she was straddling his lap. Skirt riding high on her hips, bare pussy rubbing against the seam of his jeans, just as his hand started to skim her thigh. Leading up to where she needed him to touch. She would wake up panting, her own hand shoved down her pajama shorts, and no matter how much she worked her secret button, she couldn’t get the job done.

  She might be a virgin, but she sure as shit knew how to give herself an orgasm. Well…technically, she was a virgin. She hadn’t been with anyone. But one night while spending some quality time with BOB, she had gotten slightly overexcited and shoved him in a little too far, and there went her hymen.

  She even had a lockbox under her bed, holding quite a few toys in it that she had purchased over the years. She read a lot and experimented on herself. Tia’s favorite toy would have to be her Ben-Wa Balls. When she was feeling a little daring, she would pop those babies in and go for a long ride on Thunder, her thirteen-year-old Arabian stallion. The thrill of the ride combined with the balls and the seam of her jeans rubbing over her clit would make her one happy girl. By the time she got back to the house, no one was any the wiser about the flush she was sporting.

  So she was in a rather bad mood. What girl wouldn’t be when they had gone almost a week without cumming?

  Walking into the kitchen, she planned to get herself a cup of coffee. If she couldn’t have an orgasm, at least she could get her caffeine fix. Spotting Uncle Jack sitting at the table, she kissed him on the top of his slightly graying head.

  At fifty-eight he was still a very handsome man. She wished he would find himself a good woman. He was a widower, and even though she had never met his wife Maggie, the love he’d felt for her still permeated his every waking moment. Maggie had died giving birth to their first daughter, who tragically was stillborn. Uncle Jack still went to Maggie and Becca’s grave every Sunday, and Tia would often see him walking back from the family plot with tears in his eyes. Her mama was buried in the McGraetty family plot too, but Tia only went to her grave on the anniversary of her death and birth. Uncle Jack needed to move on and find himself someone to share all that love with.

  “Morning, sunshine. How you doing this morning? You look a bit… I don’t know...off,” he said in his gruff voice. Out of all the men that lived on the Three Circle he definitely had the deepest voice. It made her whole body vibrate when he laughed.

  “Just a little tired, Uncle Jack. I’ll be right after I get some coffee into me. You want another?” She was already grabbing his mug to refill it. One thing was for certain...everyone that lived on the ranch was as addicted to caffeine as she was.

  “Thanks, sunshine.”

  He’d been calling her sunshine since the day her mother had died. It was on that day that he had also asked her what she wanted to call him now that she would be living with him and the boys. At four Tia understood that she no longer had any family, and to her young mind she believed if she called him Uncle Jack it would make him family to her. She hadn’t been wrong—he was both an uncle and a father to her.

  “Can you do me a favor?” he asked. “We have an order due for pick up in town about one this afternoon. Can you head in and get it? Leonie has an appointment and can’t get there in time to collect it.”

  Leonie was their cook, housekeeper, and all-around errand runner. She lived in the little cabin just off the main house. The same one that Tia and her mama had once lived in. Leonie had been with them for almost fifteen years. She was a lovely lady in her mid-forties, who as far as Tia was aware, had never been married. Thank Christ Uncle Jack had hired her, because if it wasn’t for Leonie, Tia would have been taught about women’s problems by a bunch of men, who happened to know shit.

  “Sorry, Uncle Jack, I told y’all last week, I have to go to Houston this weekend. I’ll be leaving in about an hour.”

  She felt bad she couldn’t help him out, but she really did need to be in Houston. What no one knew—well, apart from Luke, but he was keeping her secret...under sufferance, but nonetheless keeping it—was that hopefully after this weekend she would be Doctor Tia Teeford. They all knew she was smart, they just didn’t know how smart she actually was. During high school she had not only done her regular work, she’d also completed her undergraduate studies along with her masters’ degree. She had spent the time since graduation studying for her PhD. After presenting her dissertation this weekend, she would hopefully walk away with a few initials added to her name, and her doctorate in breeding and animal genetic science.

  It wasn’t that she was geeky smart, more the fact that she had an eidetic memory. Which meant, pretty much everything she read, heard, smelt, or felt, just stuck in her head. Not always the best thing. There were lots of things over the years Tia wished she could forget. The death of her mama would be one to start with. It didn’t wake her from sleep anymore, but if she thought about the last week of her mother’s life, everything would come flooding back to her—the smell of her sick skin, the rasping sound of her breathing, the hacking cough that had kept Tia awake at night.

  Uncle Jack and the boys had been away that week at an auction. As soon as they returned and saw what kind of shape her mother was in, they rushed her to the nearest hospital, but three days later she died from complicated pneumonia.

  The day her mama passed Uncle Jack had called her maternal grandmother in California, a woman she had never met. Tia had been sitting on his lap and heard the whole conversation, the sound of the old grandfather clock in the hallway ticking in time with her saddened heart. She remembered the scent of horses and hay coming through the partially opened window, and the warm sun reflecting off a little glass figurine of a horse rearing up, which had put a rainbow prism on her hand, causing her to illogically try to catch it, just to have something happy in her life.

  “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your daughter Samantha passed away last night. The doctors said there was nothing else they could do.”

  “I don’t know who you are talking about, sir.”

  “I’m sorry, didn’t you say this was the Allen residence?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Mrs. Allen, Samantha Teeford has listed you as her next of kin.”

  “Why are you calling?”

  “As I said, Samantha passed away last night, and seeing as y’all are her next of kin. I need to know what you want done with her remains and where to send little Tia….”

  “Who?”

  “My understanding, ma’am, is she’s your granddaughter.”

  “No, she is not. As I told Samantha, if she kept that baby, she was no longer part of this family. Do with the child as you wish, I don’t want some half-breed in my house.”

  The only thing Tia had heard after that was the beeping of a dead phone line. That
day she moved into the big house, and she had been one of the family ever since.

  Uncle Jack, oblivious to her musing, continued talking. Shaking off her thoughts and blanking her face so Uncle Jack wouldn’t notice her emotions, she paid attention to what he was saying.

  “That’s okay, Tia. I’ll see if one of the hands can pick up the order.” He drained the rest of his coffee, and they sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes before he spoke again. “Are you seeing someone in Houston, sunshine? ’Cause you’ve been going there a lot lately.” He sat back, crossing his arms over that big chest of his, and stared at her.

  Tia about fell off her chair laughing. “No, Uncle Jack. There’s no man in my life, apart from five overbearing McGraetty men, that is,” she said while climbing on his lap and giving him a big hug to soften her words.

  “Sunshine, ya know that if you did have someone, I would like to meet the lucky man?” he said as he squeezed her back, an action that from childhood had always made her feel safe and secure.

  “No. What you’d like to do is make sure he passes muster. And I think that might be impossible for any other man that enters this house.”

  “What! Isn’t an old man allowed to look out for his little girl?” he said while tickling her sides.

  “Stop. Stop, you know how ticklish I am,” Tia wheezed out. Jumping off his lap, she leaned over and gave him one more kiss on the cheek. “I better go pack. I should be home Monday. If I’m going to be longer, I’ll call you. Love you.”

  Just as she was walking out of the kitchen, Axton walked in, and they said a passing “hey” to each other.

  Apart from suppertime, she hadn’t seen Ax. They’d both been busy doing their own jobs around the ranch. For the most part Tia looked after the accounting books along with the records for the cattle and horse breeding program, while the boys did all the heavy lifting. The ranch may bring in a bundle of money, but that didn’t mean they didn’t do the majority of work themselves.