Tempting Fate

by Stacy Finz

  On the way out of the restaurant he asked her, “What are you planning to do with all that gold when we dig it up?” It wasn’t as if she needed the money, she’d been left a small fortune. But he wanted to know if her so-called eternal remorse extended to splitting her bogus buried treasure with Logan, who was as much a Rosser as she was.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get your share.”

  He laughed to himself, because his share of nothing was nothing. “Wrong answer.”

  Raylene turned away, swishing that fantastic ass of hers in the air, and got into his SUV without saying a word. As they drove to the farm, she turned on the radio and, to piss him off, flipped the dial from his classic rock station to country music. When Dolly Pardon’s “Jolene” came on, Gabe sang along.

  “Raylene, Raylene, Raylene, Raylene, I’m begging of you please don’t take my gold.”

  She slugged him in the shoulder and muttered something about him being an idiot. When they pulled up to the house, there were a couple of cars in the driveway that weren’t Logan and Annie’s and Gabe could feel Raylene tense. He shut off the engine and grabbed her by the arm before she could flee.

  “Tonight’s just family, so you can relax.”

  “Gia and Flynn will be there. Flynn hates me, and I hate him.” That was Raylene, always on the offensive. Gabe knew it was her coping mechanism.

  Flynn had been old man Rosser’s estate attorney. He thought Raylene was a spoiled brat and never hesitated to voice that opinion out loud. The fact that he and Gia now owned Rosser Ranch was probably another thing that stuck in Raylene’s craw.

  “Gia’s in the wedding, Ray. It only stands to reason that she and her husband would be included in the rehearsal dinner.”

  “I know,” she said, trying to sound conciliatory. Yet Gabe saw the same vulnerability that had been there the night of the potluck streak across her face. And damn it, it brought the protector out in him. No matter how much he tried to look at Raylene as an assignment, she got to him. And despite his better judgment, he pulled her over the seat into his lap.

  “You’ll be fine, Ray.”

  She straightened her spine. “Damned right I’ll be fine.”

  He smiled because the woman was as stubborn as he was—and as proud. So damn proud he couldn’t help but admire her. “That’s the old spirit.”

  They sat there for a few seconds, her legs awkwardly splayed across the console, and it seemed like the best thing to do in that moment was kiss her. He cupped the back of her head, pulled her in, and claimed her mouth. That was the thing about Ray, she couldn’t resist a dare. And the kiss was definitely a dare. I dare you to kiss me back. And she did, long and slow, exploring his mouth with her lips and her tongue.

  He tugged her in closer and took charge, letting his hands wander a little. Even through her jacket, he could feel firm breasts and the curve of her waist. If she wasn’t such a pain in the ass, he’d say she was near perfect. And a phenomenal kisser. She tasted good, too, like Mexican food, hibiscus, and her own brand of sass.

  He moved over her, taking the kiss deeper, sifting his fingers through her hair. It was soft and fine and smelled like lavender. Her lips were also soft, and he liked the way she gripped his shoulders, clutching him as if she never wanted to let him go. He continued to devour her mouth and heard Raylene whimper. It took all his willpower not to take her right there, in the front of his SUV. But he heard a little voice reminding him that they were in Logan’s driveway, and that Raylene was his best friend’s sister, and he managed to pull away.

  “We should probably go inside,” he said, adjusting himself.

  She scrambled back to her side and opened the door before nudging her head pointedly toward his crotch, where he was so hard it hurt. “That’s for your moronic version of ‘Jolene.’ Jeez, Moretti, you know how many times I had to put up with that in junior high?” She slid out of the passenger seat, gave his package one more glance, and smirked. “Consider us even.”

  He wanted to shout that he was the one who’d put the brakes on, that if it wasn’t for him she’d be on her back right now with him inside her. Sweet relief. But that would’ve been even more junior high school than his rendition of the song, so he suffered in silence.

  * * * *

  Raylene got through the rehearsal dinner without a drink, which was a staggering achievement. She thought Wednesday’s potluck had drained every ounce of her willpower. That night in the bathroom, she’d gone as far as to touch her mouth to the edge of the glass until wine lapped at her lips. The taste had been sweet with the promise of escape. Or better yet, oblivion. But a voice inside her head had reminded her how awful she and alcohol mixed, and the last thing she wanted to do was get drunk, make a fool out of herself, and ruin Logan and Annie’s big week. So, she’d forced herself to dump the wine down the toilet just in time for Gabe to come banging on the door.

  Ninety days sober.

  She wiggled her toes, hitting the iron footboard, and let her eyes adjust to the light. According to the clock on the side table, it was a hair past six o’clock. Despite growing up on a ranch, she’d never been an early riser, languishing in bed sometimes well past nine. That’s what happened when you didn’t have a job or much of a reason to get up in the morning.

  She gazed around the room. The walls were a cornflower blue, the curtains a tattered sunny yellow. Rag rugs covered the floor and a chipped white French provincial dresser flanked a black salvaged fireplace mantel. Old, empty picture frames had been glued to the door. Though a hodgepodge, it somehow worked, wrapping Raylene in a great big bear hug every time she entered the room. It was all Annie. Everything her brother’s fiancée did was done with love. Raylene had never known anyone like her.

  Growing up, Raylene’s mother had hired a legion of decorators in their mammoth log home on the ranch. Custom cabinetry, marble countertops, handmade linens, museum-quality Navajo rugs, and Olaf Wieghorst paintings. Everything top-of-the-line, because Ray had to have the best.

  If I wanted cheap I would’ve married a whore, then at least the sex would be good.

  Her father had been a real class act. Raylene’s mother should’ve told him to go to hell and back, but she was Ray’s personal servant. Raylene couldn’t blame her, because she’d also done Ray’s bidding no matter how morally bankrupt it was. Whatever Ray wanted, Ray got. She’d once seen a documentary about Jim Jones, and icy fingers had crawled up her spine because she understood with such frightening clarity why all those people had blindly taken their own lives in his name. She understood because for her entire life she’d belonged to the cult of Ray Rosser.

  And when it came time for her to build her own house with Butch in Denver, she’d followed the same philosophy. Bigger is better, glitzy is glamorous.

  In the end, both houses had been soulless mausoleums, so cold and loveless they made you feel frozen inside. All the money in the world couldn’t buy what Annie had accomplished with a full heart and few trips to a thrift store. A real home.

  Raylene stretched, threw her legs over the side of the bed, and padded to the window. The sun had barely risen, but it looked like a promising day. Not the summer wedding Annie had wanted, but clear and breathtakingly beautiful. Even as an indulged girl who thought she was too good for a railroad town in the middle of nowhere, Raylene had known these mountains were special. Even magical.

  Pressed against the glass, she wished Gunner was here and she could take him for a ride across the fields and up the hills. But Gunner was in Colorado and Raylene had a wedding to attend. A wedding that started in less than eight hours.

  She showered, dressed, and made her way downstairs. Logan’s truck was gone and Raylene figured he and Annie were already at the Lumber Baron in town, making sure everything was in order for the ceremony. Chad and Annie’s parents appeared to still be sleeping and the Winnebago was dark.

  Perfect. Sh
e could slip out without being noticed. Five minutes later, she was cruising down the highway with Carrie Underwood singing about bashing out her cheating man’s headlights with a Louisville slugger and hummed along. It had been a while, but she found Donner Road without any trouble and climbed the steep grade. A recollection of her and Lucky parked up here in the woods, the windshield of his old rusty truck fogged from their make-out sessions, flitted through her head. Their adolescent kisses had been sweet and clumsy—nothing like Gabe’s. The man was too practiced for his own good and had gotten her hot and bothered. She wouldn’t let that happen again. As far as reminiscing about Lucky, she quickly shut it down. She didn’t deserve a walk down memory lane.

  She deserved nothing.

  The driveway was a craggy mess from last week’s snow and she slowly nosed down, careful not to get stuck in a rut. There was a spot next to Gabe’s SUV and she slid in, surprised to find him awake, lifting weights on his front porch. She sat awhile, watching his muscles bunch as he hefted what had to be at least three hundred pounds. His skin glistened with sweat and a picture of him kissing her, the way his hands had deftly moved over her breasts, popped into her head. Stop it!

  She hadn’t been with a man since Butch, who never made it past the eight-second bell anyway, and she told herself that was the only reason Gabe had affected her like he did. With abstinence from sex and alcohol, she was simply hard up. Then she took another look at Gabe, shirtless, muscles flexing under all that golden skin, and knew she was a big fat liar.

  He put the barbell down and came over to her truck and motioned for her to unroll the window, which she did. “Hey, Ray, here for a booty call?”

  For a second, she feared that he’d read her mind. “I came for coffee. You better have some, Moretti.”

  He eyed her for a second, opened the door, and waved his arm for her to get out. “I could probably make that happen.”

  She skipped down from the running board and felt the morning chill bite through her jeans. “Aren’t you freezing?”

  “Nope.”

  The man thought he was a superhero, working out in twenty-degree weather.

  “Come in and I’ll put a pot on before I shower.”

  She followed him into his tiny duplex apartment, surprised to find that it was quite tidy. Other than a sixty-inch flat screen that made the small room appear even smaller and a black leather couch, there weren’t a whole lot of furnishings. A couple of cheap posters and a hideous Nagel print of a short-haired woman with sunglasses hung on the wall.

  “Where’d you get that?” She took a closer look and shuddered. “A nail salon?”

  “A mobbed-up Russian gave it to me. It’s my most prized possession.”

  She shook her head, because she didn’t know if he was being sarcastic or not, and trailed him into the kitchen “I don’t even want to know.”

  He flicked a switch on a Mr. Coffee and pulled down a couple of mugs from the cupboard, handing her the one that said, “A fun thing to do in the morning is not talk to me.”

  “I’ll be out in twenty,” he said, and disappeared behind a door Raylene assumed was his bathroom. Right off the kitchen was a funny place to have it. But the duplex was an old railroad apartment that was designed like a mid-century rail car. There were a number of them in Nugget. The town harkened back to the Gold Rush, but later became a hub for the Western Pacific Railroad. Now, it was a crew-change site for the Union Pacific.

  She took the opportunity to snoop, first taking in the kitchen, which was even more sparse than the living room. Other than a few boxes of cereal, a container of protein powder, and a six-pack of beer, Gabe didn’t have much food. He had even fewer pots and pans. His dishes were an assortment of mismatched pieces that reminded Raylene of dime-toss prizes from the county fair. Again, everything was spotless.

  His bedroom showed more promise. Pine log furniture, reminiscent of the rustic pieces at Rosser Ranch, filled the room. The bed was neatly made with a crisp plaid duvet, which had been turned under the mattress to form perfect hospital corners. A seaman’s chest with Gabe’s initials carved in the wood sat at the foot of the bed. At least a dozen framed photographs of what Raylene presumed was his family lined his dresser. She examined each picture individually. Pretty people smiled back, and Gabe’s parents looked so in love it took her breath away. The photograph was nothing like the Rosser family portraits her mother paid a high-priced San Francisco photographer to take. The sessions had been comical—and not in a good way. The three of them would dress in their Sunday Western attire and stand stiffly while the photographer snapped their pictures. Halfway through the ordeal, Ray would start complaining that he didn’t have time for “this bullshit.” One of the pictures, which Raylene liked to call American Gothic II because she and her parents looked equally as unhappy as the couple in the painting, hung above the fireplace until Ray was forced to sell the house to pay his dream team of lawyers. Raylene had no idea where the photograph was now.

  “You don’t mess around, do you Ray?” Gabe entered with a towel wrapped around his waist and a second one slung around his neck and blew a catcall. “Straight to the bedroom without even buying me a cup of coffee.”

  She eyed him, trying to act unaffected by his bulging biceps and his six-pack abs. “It’s coffee, not cawfee.”

  “That’s what I said.” He removed the towel from his neck and snapped it at her, then pointed at the picture she was holding in her hand. “That’s my stepsister, Marie. She’s a bigwig at Morgan Stanley. You go through my underwear drawer, too?”

  She would’ve if he hadn’t walked in when he did. Raylene put the picture down, squeezed by him, and went back in the kitchen to fill her mug with coffee. She filled his too and checked the fridge, hoping she’d missed the milk on her first pass. No such luck.

  Not long after, he came strolling in, dressed, droplets of water still clinging to his light-brown hair. He leaned against the counter, dripping on the linoleum floor, making the kitchen shrink before Raylene’s eyes.

  “So you want me to lug this thing all the way to the farm?”

  “You said you would.”

  “And I will.” He reached for the cup of coffee she’d poured him and took a sip. “I’ll install it too but I’m putting my name on the card.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine, take half the credit, even though I did all the work.” It had taken her a month to come up with the right design. Nothing too flashy but with just enough zing. She’d had to consider Logan’s more conservative taste with Annie’s quirky sensibility and find a happy medium. And then there was the question of a name. After the Rossers sold the property to Lila Stone years ago, the property had become known as the Stone place. Since Logan and Annie bought it, everyone called it The Farm. So that’s what Raylene went with. The Farm. She’d worked hand in hand with a metal artist to get the gate and sign just right, incorporating Annie’s logo into the motif. The gift had cost an arm and a leg, depleting much of Raylene’s reserves, but it had been worth it.

  “I’m okay with that.” He winked and something in her chest fluttered.

  “We better get going then. I want them to have their present before the wedding.”

  “Let me at least finish my coffee.” He continued to lean against the counter, holding and blowing on his cup.

  She noted the size of his hands. Large, like the rest of him. Butch and her father, they’d had large hands, too. Raylene remembered feeling the sting of them across her face too many times to count.

  “Hurry up.” She took her mug to the sink, washed it, and set it on the drainboard. “I still have to get ready.”

  “You’ve got hours still.”

  Annie had hired a local stylist to come to the house at eleven-thirty to do her, her mother’s, Maisy’s, Gia’s, and Raylene’s hair. There was a time when Raylene would’ve spent hours in front of a mirror, primping for an event like th
is. As the reigning Plumas County rodeo queen three years in a row, she had a reputation to uphold. And Ray liked her to make an impression. It wasn’t enough for her to be smart or pretty or an accomplished equestrian; she had to be the girl all the other girls wanted to be and all the boys wanted to bed. Unless that boy was Lucky Rodriguez.

  Gabe put down his cup and grabbed his jacket. “Let’s do it then.”

  Together, they went to Gabe’s storage shed where they loaded the framework, gate, and sign into both their trucks.

  “Thanks for storing it here for me.” She’d arranged to have it shipped to his house.

  “You’re welcome.” Gabe tied everything down in the bed of Raylene’s Ford while she dragged a bag of quick-set concrete out of the storage shed.

  “You sure this will dry in time?”

  Gabe grabbed the sack from her, his hands brushing hers, sending a shiver down her spine. She told herself it was the cold.

  “Yep,” he said. “I’ll follow you.”

  “Hey, King of Covert, how do we do this without getting caught? I want it to be a surprise.”

  He opened her driver’s door and shooed her in. “We’ve got an hour.”

  “What do you mean an hour?”

  “I’ve got Chad diverting them at the Lumber Baron while we get this sucker up.”

  “So all this time we were drinking coffee we could’ve been installing the gate?” She scooted into the cab and started her engine to move him along.

  “I like living on the edge.” He hung his hands off the roof of her pickup, leaned in, and pecked her on the lips. “Chillax, Ray.”

  She slugged him in the arm, reversed out of the driveway, and smiled all the way back to the farm. If she didn’t hate all men, she might’ve actually liked him.

  Chapter 8

  Drew Matthews stared out his kitchen window. “Did you see that?”

  His wife, Kristy, lifted her head from the screen of her laptop. “See what?”

  “I could’ve sworn there was someone out there.” He continued to search his wooded backyard.