by Caro Carson
Trey kissed her lightly, a good-morning kiss. She smelled fantastic. She looked fantastic, with her hair brushed loose and her face clean and natural. “Just you, me and the horses.”
“Have you ever had sex in a stable?”
His body tightened in response. He wanted her too much. He couldn’t have casual sex with her. Not yet. Not this morning.
He turned away, and lifted another forkful of hay. “Having sex with your boots on is disrespectful to a woman. You don’t take your boots off in a barn.”
“But have you ever had sex in a barn? This barn?”
Trey’s brain might not work well, but he knew better than to tell a woman about experiences with another woman.
“I wouldn’t sleep with someone I didn’t respect.”
“I’m not talking about sleeping.”
He rolled his eyes at that, but found he was grinning as he spread more hay.
Rebecca stood on her toes to look into the stall of a dappled gray mare. He was glad to see her feet caused her no pain. The frostbite was nearly healed.
Keep it light.
“If people have sex near them, do the horses whinny or kick the stalls or get mad?” she asked.
“The horses don’t care.”
“A-ha! You have had sex in a barn.”
He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at her persistence. He stabbed the pitchfork into a tightly tied bale and left it there, upright, before he turned to face her. “No, I have not had sex in this barn. I’ve had my-father-would-kill-me-if-I-got-a-girl-pregnant-so-we’re-sure-gonna-fool-around-but-not-go-all-the-way in this barn.”
They stared each other down. He refused to admit he hadn’t quite intended to say that.
“Wow,” she said, first one to blink. “That sounds like it was kind of fabulous to be a teenager. Was it wonderful, growing up here?”
The expression on her face was so full of yearning, Trey looked up to the rafters to guard his heart. He could imagine her unstable childhood, stepparents and siblings and homes changing too often. As she’d become a teenager, he doubted she’d had the chance to taste love with a boy her age. Hell, she hadn’t been allowed to choose her own clothes. Her mother had stolen her childhood.
Trey had lived a great life, the best of childhoods, until he’d become an adult.
He looked at Rebecca again. “Yes, I was lucky to grow up here. I’m sorry you never got to fool around in a barn.”
He didn’t voice the rest of his thought. We’re opposites, me with my great childhood and lousy adulthood. You had a bad childhood, but your adult life will be beautiful.
Rebecca didn’t seem to be thinking anything quite so philosophical. She’d advanced on him slowly, a woman walking in a way that was anything but childish.
She slid a finger between the pearl-button snaps of his plaid shirt. “Just how sorry are you about my lack of barn experience?”
“I can’t help you with the not-go-all-the-way part.” He slid his hands down the curve of her backside, then scooped her off her feet with his hands under her thighs. She wrapped her legs around his waist naturally as he pressed her against the door to a stall. That particular horse, at least, minded a little bit, and moved away from them.
Rebecca kept toying with his shirt. “I’m a little worried about this being your first time. If you’ve never had sex in a barn before, are you going to be able to figure out how to do it with your boots on?”
“I’ve got some ideas. What happens if they work?”
“I’ll make you a coupon, so you can do it again.”
* * *
Trey watched Rebecca as she made her way back to the house. His body felt better than ever. His mind was still screwed up.
What the hell are you doing, Waterson?
Rebecca looked considerably more rumpled leaving than she had when she’d come in, but she walked with a bounce in her step, peeking back at Trey now and then with a look on her face like she was the cat that had eaten the canary.
Trey grinned back at her. She should look like that; she’d gotten her way.
He leaned against the barn’s door frame, hands in his pockets when they should have been on the pitchfork, keeping an eye on her for the pleasure of it. He had to shake his head at himself and their foolishness. Anyone on the ranch could’ve taken a look at the two of them and known what was up.
Just keeping it light. Friendly-like, until I get back to Oklahoma.
He needed to get back to work. Not to the pitchfork, but to his real job. Winter was the slow season for a landscaper, of course, so it had been fine to leave his lead crew with the truck keys and orders to handle the basic routine. But Trey was the owner, and an owner couldn’t leave a business and expect it to run itself.
Not the way this ranch got by without him. Luke had done well. Trey knew Luke hadn’t had much of a choice, because Trey had pretty much skipped town and their parents had decided to retire young, but the James Hill Ranch was thriving in Luke’s hands.
Rebecca disappeared into the house. Into her home, the only home she had right now. His grin faded. Trey was giving her a place to live, but he was being careful to give her nothing else. Sex in the stables had been fun. A little playtime. Nothing more.
He’d messed that up last night, making love to her with such intensity. They were back on track now. Light and breezy, not building any kind of foundation.
Trey turned back into the barn. He couldn’t think, standing still. That wasn’t part of any brain injury. He’d always done his best thinking while doing something physical. What he needed right now was something to throw. Hurling a football would clear his thoughts, but there wasn’t one in sight, and no one around to catch it if there were.
He grabbed a lasso off the wall, and headed through the barn to go out the far side. Coils in his left hand, loop in his right, he walked toward the paddock and started swinging the loop. He built up the motion, keeping the circle slow, turning his wrist with the loop, feeling muscles move in a way they hadn’t for ten years. With the rope at its apex, he let go, not throwing so much as guiding its trajectory, the way he’d been doing it since middle school.
He missed.
The rope bounced off the paddock’s fence post and hit the dirt.
Trey pulled it back toward himself, coiling it again. He needed to be able to do this. If he couldn’t throw a decent lasso, he couldn’t stay on the ranch. Regardless of how right it felt to be here, and despite the fact that it was the one place on earth he didn’t feel disoriented, Trey would not stay if he could not do the work. He wouldn’t be able to survive the sympathy if he was treated as the poor kid who’d gotten hit in the head. He’d rather mow lawns in Oklahoma than have his own ranch hands pity him.
He built the lasso’s momentum, and let it go. It landed around the fence post. Reflexively, Trey pulled it taut. Then he fed it some slack and flicked his wrist to jump the lasso off the fence post.
He gathered it back in, and threw it again.
The fence post was too easy. Trey transferred a few coils into his loop hand, enough to gain an extra ten feet or so, swung the circle over his head and let it sail to a farther post.
He snagged that post and pulled the loop taut, all reflex. This time, the post was too far away for him to flick the rope off. He walked toward it, winding up the rope as he went, thinking about what he needed to think about: Rebecca.
What the hell are you doing, Waterson?
He was laying a foundation with her, that was what he was doing. It wasn’t just built out of the serious lovemaking, the kind they’d shared last night or her first time, their first time, in the cabin. It was all of it. Every blush in the mirror, every slippery encounter in a soapy shower. Each time they were together, they set another brick in the foundation.
He could tell himself th
is morning in the stables had been just for fun, but it had added to that foundation. When he hauled in a box of decorations or she handed him a section of the newspaper, they built something solid. Every stomp of her foot, every marshmallow in the cocoa, it all counted. All of it.
Closer now to the fence post, Trey flipped the lasso free. The foreman was walking toward him from the direction of the cattle sheds. They met at the paddock’s fence.
“Been a while, huh?” Gus’s voice matched his look. Tough, weathered, cowboy to the core.
Trey nodded, once. “I’ll take that to mean it looks as rusty as it feels.”
Gus turned and spit some tobacco juice, a nasty habit that Trey had been dying to try when he was eleven. Gus had let him. Trey had turned green and manfully announced he would be a tobacco-free cowboy. That had been before he’d decided to be an NFL quarterback. He’d ended up being neither.
“Son, your rusty is still better’n most boys’ best.”
Trey raised an eyebrow at that. Those were high words of praise from the foreman.
“How’s landscaping treating you?”
“It’s a living.” Trey was mildly surprised at the personal question. It looked like Gus wanted to have a chat.
Trey rested his arm on the post and squinted against the Texas sun, bright even in winter, as he gazed across the paddock to the pasture beyond. That pasture, not too far away, was hardly ever used, because grass didn’t like to grow there.
It was a landscaping nightmare, an acre or two of tough soil on a bit of a rise, but Trey knew what would grow there: olive trees. The agricultural magazines he read as part of his profession had been featuring olive oil and wine presses in Texas Hill Country for a couple of years now. Trey didn’t know squat about grapevines, but trees were a different matter.
That pasture had always been underused. He should plant a couple of acres of olive trees there, sell the fruit to one of the local presses and turn a little profit on land that served no purpose.
If he were here to oversee it, that was. His brother didn’t know trees. Trey couldn’t plant an orchard and leave it for another ten years.
“Been meaning to ask you, son,” Gus began, and Trey knew the reason Gus had sought him out was about to become clear, “about that new hand Luke wants hired. I’ve got someone in mind.”
Luke and Trey and their father had held a three-way conference call last month. Luke had asked them to sink some of the year’s profits into hiring more ranch hands.
Trey remembered the conversation clearly now, because the memories came easier out here on the land with a lasso in his hands. He remembered the guilt he’d felt, the guilt he always felt about the ranch he mostly ignored.
Luke and his new wife intended to make the ranch house their home, but she was the director of Texas Rescue and Relief, the same organization that had sent the helicopter, and her office was in downtown Austin. They planned to keep her high-rise apartment, and spend time there, as well.
I’m not expecting my wife to commute from the ranch all the way to downtown Monday through Friday, and I’m not expecting to live apart from my bride most days, either.
They’d agreed to his plan, but Trey had known it had been more of an ultimatum. Luke was done with being tied to the ranch three hundred and sixty-five days a year. If neither Trey nor their father were willing to shoulder some of the responsibility, then they’d better hire someone to do it for them.
Now Gus was asking Trey about one of those new hires. Trey was the wrong man to ask. He’d just come to the ranch for the wedding.
“Has Luke met him?”
“No.” Gus spit again. “Luke’s gone a month. This boy needs a job now, so I figured you could give the okay.”
Trey tied off the rope into a knot every cowboy knew, an action he hadn’t done since he was nineteen, but it came naturally, anyway. “We trust your judgment, Gus. You don’t need a Waterson’s permission to hire a ranch hand for the James Hill. You know that.”
“Well, yeah, but this’n is different. He’s my nephew, so I don’t want it looking like I’m giving salaries to my own family. Good boy, but can’t seem to stick with a job in the city. I thought the ranch might be better for him.”
This was a delicate subject. Gus wouldn’t want to say someone in his family was a failure, but not being able to hold down a job was a red flag in Trey’s book.
“Does he know cattle?”
“Nope.”
“Horses?”
“Nope.”
Trey hung the coiled rope on the fence post, letting his silence speak for itself. Gus knew better. Maybe he’d asked so that he could go back to his nephew and honestly say he’d tried.
“But he’s strong. A Marine. Did his time overseas. He knows how to get up before the roosters tell him to and how to put in a full day. That’s more than you can say for half these wanna-be cowboys.”
Trey rubbed his jaw. So that was the rest of the story. A war veteran, having a hard time adjusting to civilian life. He put his boot on the bottom rung of the fence. “A three-month contract, then. We can always use someone with a strong back. We’ll see if he likes the ranch and if the ranch likes him. That’s three months to learn enough horses and cattle to make himself useful. If it works out, we can add him to the roster for roundup this spring.”
Gus tugged on the brim of his cowboy hat. “That’s a fair deal. Thank you.”
As Gus walked away, Trey studied the dead land of the not-too-distant pasture. He could bring it back to life with a nice olive grove.
Hell, the view from over there was pretty nice. A house could sit in the middle of the grove, nothing fancy, just a straightforward, square limestone. Big porch, to take advantage of the view. Modern inside, the kind of layout where the kitchen and the living room were one big space. Rebecca would like that. She could decorate the hell out of it at Christmas, hang little twinkly lights on the porch and stuff. He’d see them when he rode his horse back after a day on the range.
God, his chest hurt at the picture of it.
He stacked his fists on top of the fence post and rested his forehead on them, almost a prayerful position. What if...what if the next time Luke asked Trey to run the ranch with him, Trey dumped the guilt and said yes?
He felt like he could do it. He didn’t get lost out here. He could lasso and ride. Making decisions for the ranch like the one Gus had just asked him to make came easily, the same kind of decisions he’d been making for years for his business in Oklahoma.
The specter of his last roundup loomed large in the wreckage of his memory. He could brand a cow upside down again, or do something else that made him look like a drunken fool. But he was thirty-one years old now. He didn’t care to tell anyone about his brain injury, but if he said something stupid the way he had in the hospital when he’d thought Aunt June needed a ride home in his truck, could he just let it slide and carry on?
And Rebecca...
Trey lifted his head again and looked at his dead pasture. Would a small house in a big olive grove be enough? Would it make up for the fact that she’d have a husband who couldn’t help his kids with their elementary school homework? A husband who could forget which order to put the clothes in the washer and dryer? The shame of it made him not want to even try.
But Rebecca...
If he truly loved her, he’d let her find a better man, one without a bad brain. The idea of cutting her loose to build a life with another man caused a pain that felt like rage inside him.
He couldn’t let her go. He’d found her, he’d warmed her back to life with his own body, and they’d started laying a foundation together, brick by brick.
He was going to keep her.
If she’d have him.
He started walking back toward the ranch house to find out.
Chapte
r Sixteen
Rebecca sat in the mudroom and pulled off her boots. They were pink and designer-name and expensive, but they hadn’t kept her feet warm during an ice storm. When she got her first paycheck, she was going to buy new ones. Better ones.
She hung up her ski parka. That, at least, had been as functional as it was fashionable. Her mother had accidentally outfitted her in something useful despite its childish shade of pink. Since the coat was warm, Rebecca couldn’t really justify buying a new one right away, but she would, someday. Maybe something more ranch-like, natural leather with a sheepskin lining, like Trey wore. Hers would be nipped in a bit at the waist, more feminine in style.
Sorry, Mother, no more shapeless clothes to hide my figure. You’re just going to have to admit you’re old enough to have a grown-up daughter.
She walked through the black-and-white kitchen and into the comfy family room, where she’d decked the halls to her heart’s content. There, standing by the ornament-laden Christmas tree, was her mother.
“Hello, Becky. Merry Christmas, baby girl, one day late.”
It wasn’t possible. Rebecca had accidentally, horribly conjured her by thinking of her in the mudroom.
Her mother had chosen the perfect place to stand. Morning sunlight came in the window behind her, making a halo effect around the edges of her dark hair, sparkling off the silver threads in her loose black blouse. Her mother hit just the right casual note by wearing it tucked into flattering black jeans. She looked, as always, fabulous.
“Come here, Becky. I’ve surprised you terribly, haven’t I? No one answered the knock, but I knew an old-fashioned ranch like this would have the door open to visitors.” Her mother laughed and held out both hands, simply delighted to see her.
Rebecca, who had been obedient for twenty-four years, automatically responded and crossed the room toward her mother. They were obviously on stage. She looked to see who the performance was for. A man in a plain navy suit stood by the front door, but his suit wasn’t cut well enough to make him important. As she rounded the sofa, she saw, sitting in the winged-back armchair, the man for whom her mother was being so charming. Hector Ferrique, in crushingly expensive casual clothing, smiled at her.
