by Megan Crane
Oh my God, Devyn thought in horror as she drained her mug. They’re flirting.
It was too much.
“You all right over there, kid?” her father asked in that deep rumble of a voice. In case Devyn had been under the impression he missed a single thing, ever.
“Never better,” Devyn said, and the whiskey helped make her sound almost as chipper as she thought she should.
“Devyn’s my rock,” Melody confided. “I don’t know what I’d do without her level-headedness. She’s very centering.”
“She’s a stress case,” Derrick retorted.
And she couldn’t really believe this was happening, so Devyn sat there, stiffly, on her mother’s sleek leather couch while her parents discussed her like she was an errant teen.
“She’s always been like that,” Melody said, sipping at her drink. “I think she likes it that way. Some people thrive on stress.”
“I thrive on stress,” Derrick replied. “You can tell this because I’m a happy guy.” He eyed Devyn. “You happy, Devyn?”
“Is this a therapy session I didn’t know I signed up for?” she asked, finding it much harder than it should have been to sound anything but appalled. And maybe a little bit mad, while she was at it. “Of course I’m happy. I’m on Christmas vacation. I’ve never been happier in my entire life.”
And then she wished she’d just stayed quiet as both of her parents aimed skeptical gazes right at her. Devyn entertained a vivid little daydream of flipping over the coffee table and screaming out a few home truths about what it was like to have been raised by Melody and infrequently parented by Derrick—
But she refrained. Because her parents didn’t have conversations like that.
And more importantly, she didn’t want to have conversations like that with her parents. She would happily die before ever admitting to either one of them that she wasn’t perfectly fine, despite their many shenanigans across the years.
“I want to talk to you about the schedule over the next week,” Devyn said, training her gaze on her mother. “Do you actually have one? Or did you just invite all these people here to see what would happen?”
Okay, maybe she also wanted to remind her father that he wasn’t here as her mother’s date. Or not her only date, anyway.
“I’m not a child, Devyn.” Melody’s voice was chiding, even when she let out a little laugh to soften it. Devyn gritted her teeth and said nothing. “The party is on Tuesday, my actual birthday. But of course a lot of people decided to come earlier, to celebrate the holiday here. And I thought it would be fun to have a few activities.”
“Like sleigh rides.”
“Exactly.”
“Except not with elk.”
“Elk,” Melody said serenely, “make very problematic horses.”
Devyn found her father’s gaze against her will, and saw entirely too much in those blue eyes that were disturbingly like her own. He was amused, yes, but that amusement was shot through with something darker. Hotter. More—
God, no. Stop.
Devyn shot to her feet, fishing her phone out of her pocket and frowning dramatically at it.
“It’s getting late,” she said, much too loudly, and she didn’t look up to see what glances her parents might or might not have been shooting at each other. She’d already seen too much. “And I promised I’d meet up with the cousins in town tonight.”
“What cousins?” Melody asked. “I didn’t think anyone was showing up yet.”
Devyn just smiled that away. She doubted very much that her mother actually knew all the Grey cousins’ travel schedules when all Devyn knew was that everyone was showing up sooner or later. And that all of them were annoyed about it, because it was a Grey family tradition to spend their Christmases tucked away together in their grandparents’ Big Sky home in Montana listening to their grandmother mutter dark things about how all the Greys were destined to live out their lives sad and alone.
There was no fury on earth like that of a family forced to change up the holiday traditions they spent every other year complaining about. Devyn expected she’d have to hear every single cousin she had expound on that topic, at length.
Something she’d been dreading...but now? She could hardly wait.
“I’ll call a taxi,” she assured her parents, as if they’d asked.
Then, still not making eye contact, she rushed into the front hall. Where she called for a car, slammed her feet into her boots, and zipped herself into her winter coat well in advance of her taxi’s arrival. And hid out, absolutely not listening to a single thing she might or might not have heard from around the corner in the living room, because a person could only be expected to take so much.
I hope you’re happy, she texted Sydney in a fury. My parents are FLIRTING WITH EACH OTHER and I want to die.
I’ve never been happier that my father remarried, Sydney texted back, apparently not quite as busy busy busy as usual. Because my stepmother would cut him before she let him near that mess.
You can tell YOUR MOTHER that when you get here THIS WEEKEND, Devyn retorted, and wasn’t surprised when her sister didn’t reply.
And when she saw headlights sweep into her mother’s driveway, she pushed her way out to meet the car in the drive.
“You told the dispatcher you were heading into town,” the old cowboy at the wheel said when she slammed the car door behind her, managing to sound laconic and monosyllabic even while speaking in complete sentences. “Do you have a specific address?”
Devyn had been to various different places in Jackson over the years, but she’d seen the bar in Vaughn’s hotel when she’d dropped him there earlier, gleaming through the steamed-up glass windows. It had looked bright and busy and better yet, filled with people she wasn’t related to and who were very unlikely to know her mother. Perfect, in other words.
She leaned forward and gave the driver the address, ignoring the shivery little feeling that spun around inside her and settled in her gut.
Because she was the dependable one. She was the center. She was the rock, because she’d never had any other choice. Melody danced and deflected. Sydney disappeared. All her mother’s men came and went at will.
If Devyn had acted the way any of them did, everything would have fallen apart.
But none of that was her concern any longer. Her mother wasn’t a child. Melody had said so herself.
And there was absolutely no reason Devyn shouldn’t follow the urging of the whiskey she’d already tossed back and follow that runaway train wherever it would take her. She could drink cocktails. She could smile at pretty boys.
She could be just as irresponsible as everyone else in her life, for a change, and who knew? Maybe she’d wake up tomorrow morning to discover she’d turned into someone else. Someone who wasn’t an uptight stress case. Someone who wasn’t the resident buzz kill. Someone as bright and careless and as freaking happy as everyone seemed to think she wasn’t.
There was only one way to find out.
Chapter Four
Vaughn learned a great deal about himself in the time it took for Devyn Voss to walk into his hotel’s crowded little bar, shrug her way out of her winter coat, sidle on up to the bar, and catch the notice of a handful of cowboys clustered there.
Not that they were real cowboys. Not in a swanky bar like this one just off Jackson’s iconic central square, bursting with the sort of people who could afford destination ski vacations. But they were throwing country drawls around like they were going out of style, here in Wyoming where they most assuredly were not, and they clearly liked the look of Devyn.
Vaughn learned that after years in the country music scene, it turned out that he was no fan of cowboys, after all. Real or otherwise.
He was not a fan of the way Devyn accepted the drink the big, beefy one offered her. He definitely didn’t like the way she threw it back with a careless, reckless little laugh. In fact, the longer he watched her, the less he liked pretty much everything and anything
she did.
He didn’t like her smile, a bit too wide and easy, when every smile she’d ever aimed his way had been forced. Tight. He didn’t like how shiny her blue eyes were, making the rest of the bar seemed to fade away every time he caught sight of them. He didn’t like the thin, long-sleeved T-shirt she’d apparently had on beneath her coat, or the silver necklace she wore that directed attention to its low-cut neck. He didn’t like those jeans she was wearing—tucked into her snow boots—that clung to her figure. He especially didn’t like how her short black hair was a little messy, which made it basically impossible to do anything but imagine how it got that way and how good it would feel to be the man whose hands did the messing up.
The list went on and on and on. He didn’t like any of it.
Before she’d showed up, Vaughn had been enjoying himself.
It had been a kind of revelation to be anonymous for a change. He’d found a seat by the fire, kicked back in a chair, and had taken the opportunity to do a little people-watching, for once. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a public place like this and hadn’t had to engage in some form of evasive maneuvers to keep people from bothering him or the people he was with.
In fact, aside from airport lounges on various trips, he couldn’t think of the last time he’d been out like this on his own. There were always clients who wanted to have a drink with him. There was always business. He never seemed to turn off his head, or step away from the latest song, and he’d been enjoying the fact that these stolen days in Jackson, Wyoming, looked like they might allow him to do just that.
Here, he was nothing more or less than Frederick Taylor’s son. It felt a lot like freedom.
Then Devyn walked in and ruined everything.
The trouble was, neither one of their parents was in the room. Instead, there were a whole bunch of happy, loud people, shooting off their mouths about ski slopes and the various shops and restaurants that ringed Jackson’s town square. They had money to burn and time on their hands, and Vaughn could appreciate that. He’d worked hard to be one of them himself.
But then there was Devyn, and it was as if no one else was in the bar at all.
In the airport earlier, he’d recognized her from afar. He’d seen her face, known it was her, and that had been that. But tonight it hadn’t been her face he’d seen first.
So it was a whole lot harder to lie to himself. He’d seen the curve of her butt first, and there was no unringing that bell. His entire body had taken notice, instantly. He’d only noticed that it was her after, but by then it was too late.
There was no pretending he wasn’t wildly attracted to the woman who wasn’t his stepsister.
And even if she had been his stepsister, he told himself a little darkly, what would that matter? They’d been adults—or near enough—when they’d met.
But he shoved that aside, because none of that mattered now.
She was here. He was here.
And neither one of them lived at home or was seventeen.
He watched her entertain her little pack of admirers over at the bar while completely unfamiliar things warred for supremacy inside of him.
All of them feral and possessive and wholly new to him.
He told himself that he’d just wander over there, filled with near-brotherly love and concern, and take the lay of the land. He’d just check in to see whether or not she’d had a few too many, because maybe that was why she was here in the first place, instead of off totting up spreadsheets or drawing up schedules—or whatever it was his uptight almost-stepsister usually did for fun.
But he couldn’t pretend, even in his own head, that there was the slightest brotherly thing about the way he was eyeing Devyn across the length of the bar.
The mature, rational thing to do would be to go back up to his room. Let Devyn do whatever it was Devyn was doing, which had nothing at all to do with him.
But Vaughn didn’t move from his spot near the fire.
Not, that was, until the big, beefy wannabe cowboy ran a finger down the length of Devyn’s jaw in response to something she laughed up at him.
And that was that.
Vaughn was up and on his feet. He didn’t have time to think about what he was doing, he was just moving. The crowd posed no problem whatsoever, probably because he barely noticed they were there. He was across the bar floor in a breath. Then he pushed his way through the scrum of men surrounding Devyn like she was his and planted himself right there in front of her.
“This is real cute, darlin’,” he drawled, and made very little attempt to sound anything but menacing, “but you’re done.”
“I’m done?” Devyn asked, turning that wide smile with too much laughter toward him. And when her gaze narrowed a little, Vaughn figured she wasn’t foolish enough to think he was kidding.
Her wannabe cowboys certainly didn’t mistake the matter. It took exactly one hard look from Vaughn, shared equally around the little group, for all of them to back off. The big and beefy one first and fastest, which told Vaughn all he needed to know about that guy.
He took his time directing his attention back where it belonged.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked her.
Politely, he thought, all things considered. Because he was a good guy and he didn’t need to crush her in public.
Devyn watched her new friends melt off into the crowd, then frowned up at Vaughn.
She looked notably uncrushed.
“I think that’s a question you need to answer yourself, Vaughn.” Her frown seemed fixed on her face, because she could smile and laugh and allow face-touching from any random dude who happened by, apparently. But not him. Never him. “What the hell was that? Why would you think it was a good call to storm over here and interfere in some perfectly friendly drinking?”
“Since when do you drink with strangers in bars?” It turned out that was a question he very badly wanted answers to. Immediately.
“I can’t imagine how that’s any of your business.”
“I just made it my business.”
She looked mutinous, but she didn’t walk away from him. Instead, she seemed to relax against the bar beside her, as if she was humoring him.
Though her smile could have cut glass. “I drink with strangers in bars all the time, actually,” she told him, her voice as bland as that glint in her eyes. “Three to five times a week, at an estimate. My family and you are the only people alive who consider me uptight.” She leaned closer to him, which meant he could smell the whiskey she was swirling in her glass, and the faintest hint of her shampoo, like marzipan. He felt it in his gut. And lower, where his cock was heavy and hard and in no way relaxed or bland. “In Chicago, everybody knows me as significantly more easygoing. If you get what I’m saying.”
Vaughn reflected, as if from a great distance when he knew he was still standing there entirely too close to her, that his never-quite stepsister was lucky he knew that she was full of crap. Because the idea of huffy, prissy Devyn as easy, flinging her favors all over the Midwest, made him...restless.
“And somehow I don’t believe you,” he said.
Well. It was more of a growl.
“You don’t have to believe me.” Devyn sipped at her drink. Maybe it was the whiskey that made her eyes even brighter than usual, merry and wicked at once. Looking at her made him feel like he’d had a whole lot more to drink than the single local beer he’d nursed while reveling in his anonymity. “In fact, why don’t you go back to wherever you came from and stay there, disbelieving me to your heart’s content?”
Vaughn helped himself to the tumbler in her hand, holding it high when she tried to take it away from him, and then throwing the contents back before he slapped the empty glass down on the bar.
“Hey. I paid good money for that drink.”
“Barry Beefcake bought it for you. I’m sure he’d be just as happy to give it to me. If he hadn’t run away so fast, like a scared little kid, we could ask him.”
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“Barry Beefcake’s name is actually Mitchell, Vaughn. He’s an engineer. He told me very interesting things about hydraulic systems, none of which I can now remember.”
Everyone was touching her tonight, and Vaughn decided he might as well just follow suit. He could go along with the crowd, something he never did normally. Whatever the rationale, he reached over and fit his hand to the curve of her cheek, as if he wanted to touch that lofty tone she’d used.
As if he needed to touch her or topple over the edge of the world.
“Are you drunk?” he asked, gruff and serious all of a sudden.
That soft mouth of hers opened slightly and her eyes looked brilliant. Much too wide and still so impossibly blue. And there was a knowing sort of look in them that he probably should have discouraged, especially when her gaze searched his. But he didn’t look away.
Instead, his thumb moved of its own accord, tracing her lower lip once. Then again.
“No,” she said quietly. “I’m not drunk. But I’m working on it. I figure if I give it my all, I’ll get there eventually.”
“Because you have a sudden hankering to act out of character and get good and wasted?”
“I understand it’s a time-honored tradition. It’s what grown children do when forced back into the family fold. Start the whole thing off with a hangover and there’s nowhere to go but up.”
Her tone was bright, even funny, but he was too close. His hand was on her cheek. And he could see something a whole lot darker move over her face.
“Did something happen at your mom’s house?”
She smiled, though he couldn’t say he believed it. Still, he could feel her cheek move beneath his hand, and there was something about it that pierced its way through him, its own kind of guerrilla intimacy.
He wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t ready for her. Vaughn hadn’t come here for any reason but supporting his father.
But he didn’t let go of her. He didn’t step away.
