Million Dollar Cowboy

by Lori Wilde

  “I don’t believe you for a second.” She said it in a teasing voice, but her pulse was bouncing crazily through her veins. She put the flowers into a water-filled vase and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.

  “Ready,” she said, her voice coming out a little frayed.

  “I like your hair like that,” he said. “Loose and wild. Suits your inner goddess.”

  There he was with the sweet-talking again. She ducked her head to cover her pleasure, mumbled “thanks,” and flipped her hair over her shoulder, showing off.

  “I’m just itching to get my fingers tangled up in it again.” And with that rabble-rousing comment, he took her arm and guided her toward the door.

  On the way out, she snagged her straw cowgirl hat from the coatrack, settled it on her head for protection from the sun and Ridge’s hot-edged gaze.

  They arrived in Balmorhea around noon, a perfect time for a picnic. They ate fried chicken underneath a canvas awning and drank sweet tea from thermoses, eating in companionable silence. When they finished, they kicked back on the blanket they’d found in Archer’s SUV, waiting for their food to settle before going swimming in the clear, deep, artesian springs.

  There were pictures in the family album of her first time at the springs. She was young, no older than two, wearing a pink bathing suit with big orange flowers and adorable little kid sunglasses. She splashed in the springs, a huge smile on her face like she’d found a stash of the most delicious candy on earth.

  And later, other pictures, pictures that included her siblings’ friends. Ridge was there.

  In one photograph, her favorite, they were playing chicken fight in the water and she was on Ridge’s shoulders as they battled against Archer and Tara. She was six at the time to Ridge’s twelve, and she’d followed him around like he was a superhero. He’d been pretty good-natured about it, tolerating her childish adoration as part and parcel of hanging out with Archer.

  The clear cool water was such a contrast to the dusty hot dry desert. It was her favorite place to visit, and every weekend she’d beg her parents to drive the sixty miles to Balmorhea from Cupid. But they’d been raising five children on a shoestring budget. Such luxuries were few and far between.

  She often dreamed of the springs, woke to the feel of water on her skin, the slow churn of waves as she swam through it, the mineral taste pleasing to her tongue, the clear depths that beckoned her to dive deep, the fish and plant life that lurked beneath the surface a world away from her ordinary reality.

  And now, here she was, in Balmorhea with Ridge Lockhart as an adult. On a date. Something she’d never imagined would happen.

  “So tell me,” Ridge said idly, cradling the back of his head in his palms as he leaned back against the wide base of the metal support beams that held up the awning. “What does Kaia Alzate do when she’s not working, tending animals, or going to school?”

  “Hmm,” she said, kicking off her sandals and digging her toes into the soft blanket. She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms over her head. “I just enjoy being alive.”

  “No special hobbies or interests?”

  “After what I went through? I’m interested in everything.”

  “Movies? Music? Sports?”

  “Yes.” She turned on her side to look at him. He was still sitting up, looking down at her, a mysterious smile playing across his lips.

  He laughed and stretched out beside her.

  “What about you?” she asked. “What do you do when you’re not working?”

  “I’m always working.”

  “You’re not working now.”

  “No.” His smile was electric. “Not right now.”

  “Let’s put it another way. What do you miss most because you’re always working?”

  “Swimming.”

  The conversation lapsed into silence, but it was easy, companionable. After a while, Kaia said, “I know it was you.”

  “What was me?”

  “The one who paid the deductible gap on my hospital bill.”

  “Archer rat me out?”

  “No. I figured it out.”

  “How?”

  “You’re the only one I knew who had the money and cared about me enough to bother.”

  “I showed up at the hospital,” he said. “But you were in a coma.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” She studied his profile, felt a twist of pure love for this man.

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t about me.”

  “I appreciate it more than you can ever know.”

  “Know what I appreciate?” he asked, reaching over and lightly running his finger over the shoulder strap of her bikini top peeking from the sleeve of her tank top.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your astounding body.”

  She tried not to let his compliment go to her head, failed. “Now I know the real reason you invited me on a swim date. Not because you know how much I love the springs. You just wanted to see me in a bikini.”

  “Guilty as charged,” he admitted with a wicked gleam in his eyes, and stripped off his T-shirt. “I’m going in.”

  “It hasn’t been an hour since we ate.”

  “Complete myth,” he said.

  She was so busy staring at his magnificent chest that it didn’t even register what he was saying. She sat up and watched him saunter toward the water, the sun dappling his bare back as it filtered through the leaves of the oak trees planted along the path to the springs.

  The man was a god, ripped and leanly muscled. His swim trunks hung low on his hips. She bit down on her bottom lip. Have mercy! He was the finest thing she had ever seen and he was here with her. And according to his kisses, he was The One, even if he didn’t know it yet. It was all too much to absorb.

  But damn if she wasn’t going to try.

  “Wait for me,” she said breathlessly, snatching up the towels he’d brought with them and running after him.

  Chapter 20

  A few other people were also in the springs, but they were in the shallows. He’d picked the deep end for privacy. Ridge floated on his back in the water, watching Kaia approach.

  She resembled the women in one of those ads photographed near waterfalls and clear running streams. Strolling toward him in that short denim skirt and chicly shredded pink tank top showing peekaboo bare skin and her red bikini beneath, straw cowboy hat, and a pair of pink hiking sandals.

  She could rock a man to sleep with her hips. Her hair was a straight, dark, mesmerizing curtain that swayed when she moved. Her elbows swinging in easy pumps against her side, two beach towels dangling from her fingers.

  Sweat trickled down his brow.

  He was not going to survive. He rolled over in the water so she couldn’t see how aroused he was getting.

  “I love to watch you walk,” he said lazily, stupidly throwing gasoline on the fire. “You move with such confidence.”

  Love.

  He’d said the word “love.” Shit, why had he said that word? His throat tightened and his chest swelled and his blood heated. He felt light-headed and lighthearted.

  “Hey,” she said, dropping causally to the ground at the edge of the springs. “Look in the mirror. You are the most self-confident person I know. You didn’t let your rough childhood dissuade you. You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and now you’re on the verge of becoming a billionaire.”

  “Who told you that?” he asked.

  “Everyone knows it. You and your drilling technique are the talk of the town. Whether you realize it or not, Ridge Lockhart, people in these parts are proud of you.”

  “People in these parts gossip too much.”

  “True,” she said, not the least bit offended, sliding off her sandals, setting them aside, and dipping her toes, painted a pearly peach color, into the water. “But that just goes to show how much they care.”

  “Do you always put a positive spin on things?”

  “For the most part.” She gave a soft shrug, and slipped
out of her tank top. Revealing that red bikini he’d been salivating to see all morning. God, she was gorgeous; her burnished skin glowed. He’d missed so much in the ten years he’d been away, so much about her.

  “You know,” she said, dragging one big toe back and forth across the top of the water as if she was stroking a beloved pet. “You never did keep up your end of the bargain.”

  He was so busy staring at her that he drew a blank. “Huh? What bargain?”

  “Last night,” she reminded him. “You promised to tell me your shameful secret if I told you mine. Then Ember and Ranger interrupted us.”

  “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said, swimming over to her, remembering what she’d told him last night. It hurt him to think she blamed herself for what had happened. “You did nothing wrong.”

  “I still felt ashamed. That’s why I kept it a secret.”

  Except from him. She’d told him everything. It made him feel special to know something about her that no one else knew. Not even her family.

  He shouldn’t let it go to his head. She most likely told him because she needed to tell someone and she knew he wouldn’t be around. That was probably the reason she had told him. He won by default.

  “Your turn,” she prodded. “Do not leave me hanging, Lockhart.”

  “Take off your skirt and come into the water and I’ll tell you,” he invited.

  She laughed. “You sound like the Big Bad Wolf.”

  Teasingly, he wriggled his eyebrows, sent her a leering grin. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your …”

  He let the suggestion hang in the air.

  She laughed, shucked off her denim skirt, flung her cowgirl hat to the ground, and dove into the water. She surfaced beside him, her hair drenched, her face full of joy, looking at him as if he was the most incredible thing she’d ever seen.

  Freakadilly circus. Coming here with her had been a major mistake. They were in the deep. No safe harbor. No touching bottom.

  “Here I am,” she said. “Now you have to tell me your story.”

  He dog-paddled. Trying to keep his head above water. She rolled over onto her back, floated beside him like a porpoise, happy and so full of life she blinded him with possibilities. She loved the water, belonged here. She could do this all day, whereas he was floundering. Trying to find footing that was not there.

  “You’ve built it up too much,” he said. “It’s not going to live up to the hype.”

  “Stop trying to get out of it. You owe me.”

  Indeed he did. Because of her, he’d stopped checking his phone every five minutes. Because of her, the weekend he’d been dreading had turned enjoyable. Because of her, he’d started to remember all the things he missed about Cupid. Because of her—

  “Sometime while we’re still young would be good,” she said, doing the backstroke in circles around him.

  “You love every second in the water and you know it.”

  “Yes.” She sighed. “The curse of being a water creature born in the desert.”

  He could take her away from the desert. Wanted to open his mouth and say they could move to Baja and spend their days sipping margaritas on the beach.

  If he licensed his drilling technique to a big silver mining company, he could retire with enough money to last a lifetime with millions left over, and nothing to do but make love to Kaia for the next fifty years or so.

  “Ridge,” she said, and her voice was so full of concern he snapped his head around to stare at her. “You’re struggling.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the third time you’ve sucked in water.”

  Huh? Was it?

  “Let’s head for the shallows.”

  Shallow water. Yes. Perfect. Good idea.

  He followed her as she swam effortlessly the length of the springs toward the other visitors. She found a spot where they could be off by themselves and sit on the bottom of the springs with their shoulders above water.

  They settled in.

  She waited, watching him, not speaking.

  “Like I said.” He inhaled. “My story is not going to live up to the buildup. It’s certainly not going to live up to yours.”

  She crossed her arms, leveled him a get-on-with-it look.

  He shook his head, amused by her tenacity. “All right,” he said, and started the tale he’d not ever shared with anyone, not even Archer.

  “After I left Cupid,” Ridge said, “after my father and Vivi … well you know … I was a train wreck. I spent an entire week in a drunken stupor, but then I shook it off and went in search of my mother’s people. I was seeking some kind of connection, for the place where I belonged.”

  He scratched his chin. The raspy sound of his fingernails against beard stubble peppered the pause.

  They’d been born in the same place, raised together, but there was a lot she did not know about him. He’d been gone a long time, and he’d never been one to dig deep into feelings. As if skimming along on the surface of life would keep him safe.

  “You’d never tried to contact them before?” Kaia asked, keeping her gaze trained on his face, studying every nuance, every shift of expression, trying to ferret out what he was feeling.

  He shook his head. “I’d done some research when I was a teen. Learned my grandmother’s name and where she lived, but I wasn’t brave enough to call or show up on her doorstep.”

  Kaia pushed her wet hair back from her forehead, tried to suppress the uneasy feeling crawling under her skin.

  “My maternal grandmother was living in San Antonio in a rough section of town. I worked up the courage to ring the doorbell and when I told her who I was, she asked me what I wanted from her.”

  “Not exactly the reaction you were hoping for?”

  Ridge snorted. “No openhearted embraces. No.”

  “Bitch,” she said it succinctly, pulling no punches.

  Ridge burst out laughing, but it was a brittle sound, dark and dry. “I learned she’d kicked my mother out of the house when she was fifteen, claiming my mother had come on to my grandmother’s boyfriend,” he explained.

  “Lovely woman,” Kaia said, lacing her voice with sarcasm. “I take that back. That word I said before? Go ahead and insert it here again.”

  “You’re good for my ego, Kaia Alzate.”

  “Why, thank you.” She beamed. “You’re welcome.” She stuck a toe out of the water, wiggled it at him. “Go on.”

  “I’d rather come over there and play piranhas like when we were kids.”

  “Piranhas!” she squealed, feeling eight years old again. “Don’t get none on ya.”

  He gnashed his teeth like a hungry piranha and came for her, but she giggled and swam away. “Nope. Not until you finish the story.”

  “You’re not letting me off the hook.”

  “No, so you might as well get to talking.”

  “Here goes.” He spoke fast, his words tumbling over each other. “My mother called her when she was seventeen and pregnant with me, wanted to come home. Good old grandmother told her no and sent her money for an abortion. Apparently, she thought Mom had gotten rid of me. Because I came as a big surprise. She told me she wasn’t giving me any money if that’s what I was there for.”

  Kaia reached out a hand and gently touched his shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

  His muscles tensed beneath her fingers, but he didn’t shake her off. “Hey, I don’t need pity any more than you do.”

  “I get your point,” she said, keeping her hand on him. “It wasn’t the family reunion you were hoping for. What did you do?”

  “What was there to do? I left.” His voice was quick, clipped. “And I got a job in a silver mine in New Mexico. I craved hard, backbreaking work to clean my head of all that crap. In the meantime, long-lost grandma did some sleuthing, discovered I was a Trans-Pecos Lockhart, and called me a few weeks later to put the bite on me for money.”

  “Oh no, she didn’t,” Kaia stretched out the last syll
able and lowered her voice to show her disgust.

  “Yep. She makes Duke look like a Prince Charming.”

  “Did you give her money?”

  He looked chagrined. “She was going to get evicted.”

  “Ridge! You didn’t owe that awful woman a thing. She didn’t deserve a penny.”

  “I decided to take the high road.”

  “Or,” Kaia pointed out, not unkindly, “you were trying to buy her love.”

  He barked an attempt at laughter that crashed and burned. “I’m not that pathetic.”

  “Everyone wants to be loved, and needs to belong somewhere. Nothing pathetic about that.”

  “Yeah, well, some of us need it more than others.”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant by that. “What about your mother’s father? Did you try to find him?”

  “Another blue ribbon winner,” Ridge muttered. “Under the three strikes rule, dear old granddad is serving a life sentence in Huntsville for armed robbery. Under the circumstances, I decided to skip the family reunion. ”

  “Oh my.” Her heart broke to pieces for him. She was so lucky to have such a supportive, loving extended family.

  He spread his arms wide. “So there you have it, the rundown of my rotten DNA. Are you sorry you asked?”

  “No. Not at all.” She breathed. “But wow. Just wow.”

  “Wow?” He arched a dubious eyebrow.

  “I always had a lot of respect for you before, but now, after learning all this?” Kaia looked at him with admiration and sadness. She didn’t feel sorry for him. She knew how it felt when people pitied you, and the last thing Ridge engendered was anyone’s pity. He was a self-made man, someone to admire and look up to. But she did hate that he’d had a crappy family. “You’re something special, Ridge Lockhart. Do you know that?”

  He shifted in the water, dropped his gaze. “Do we have any of that chicken left?”

  “Look how far you’ve come.” She feared her praise was making him uncomfortable, but he had to know how truly miraculous he was to have successfully pulled out of the toxic emotional environments he’d been planted in.

  “Lots of people have it worse. I’m the son of a multimillionaire—granted, an illegitimate son—but Duke put a roof over my head, food in my belly, and paid for my education.”