by Alexis Anne
I couldn’t read his expression. Was it angry? I didn’t think so. But it wasn’t excited either. “Of course.” I followed him out, shooting Christina a shrug as she watched silently from the table.
I could feel his mood before I saw his expression. Colt had that ability—to change the air around him with his feelings. When Colt was angry, the room was hot, electric. When he was sad, the air hung heavy. But when he was frustrated like he was now, well it was like any wrong move might spark the air and send us all up in flames.
I followed him all the way down the hall and out to the high garden that stood between the main house and the barn. “I’m sorry about earlier.” He stood a careful distance away. “I was a jerk.”
No chocolate or theatrics for me, just a simple, genuine, apology “Are you feeling better?”
“It’s amazing what a hot shower and a good meal can do.” He stepped closer, toeing the dirt. “I let my emotions get the better of me. It’s the one thing I can’t seem to stop doing over and over again.”
“You love this ranch. You had a bad day.” I shrugged because I didn’t know what else to say other than the obvious. I didn’t think, “Hey, I overheard that private conversation you had on the stairs. Want to talk about it?” was an option.
“That doesn’t mean I get a free pass to let those emotions explode all over everyone around me.”
Except that it was one of the things I’d come to love about Colt. He might see it as a weakness but to someone like me, someone who was surrounded by people who lacked empathy, those emotions were everything. “Some people don’t care about anyone but themselves. They use everyone around them, suck up everything they can in hopes that one day it will finally be enough.” I moved closer until I could feel the air shift, the heat from my body colliding with his. “Do you know the exact moment I knew I’d sleep with you Colt?”
His eyes dropped to my lips, darkened. “No. When?”
“You’d just brought me that shrimp cocktail and something I said got you all defensive. But then I told you I was at The Westerly to escape my real life and relearn how to relax.”
His jaw tensed and his eyes snapped back up to lock with mine, filling those blue depths with that same clouded, protective energy he had that day.
When I reached up to cup his jaw he didn’t flinch. Instead he leaned into me. “Your eyes did that,” I whispered. “And I was done. You had me right then.”
He hesitated. “What am I doing?”
“You care.”
I swallowed down a gasp as his eyes turned to fire. “Who are these assholes in your life that make you feel this way?” He grabbed my hips, tugged me against him as if he were claiming me. “I remember that moment. You looked so . . . alone. I forgot about myself, the ranch, everything, for the first time my head was empty except for one thought.”
“And what was that?” I could feel Colt everywhere. It was as if his energy had slipped inside me. It filled my veins and flooded my heart until I thought I might explode from the overload.
“You,” he said simply. “It was as if my whole life I’d been looking for something, except I didn’t even know that I’d been searching at all. Not until that moment. And suddenly everything made sense. I was there to meet you.”
It was simpler back then. He’d just said it: we could forget everything else. Here in the real world it was harder to let those other thoughts and feelings go. They clouded something that should be easy.
“Will you ever be able to forgive me? Or was there one lie too many?” Name, occupation, where I lived. All lies. I hadn’t told him about my parents or what they’d done. Even my hair color was a twist on reality.
I hadn’t even told him how much I needed him.
“I’m trying,” he whispered. “At night . . . when it’s just the two of us? That’s what I want. But I see you during the day and all I can think about is how many days I’ve dreamt about seeing Annie again. The artist with a slightly dark spot in her soul, the woman who made me feel again. I hear them call you Lily and it confuses me. It’s like you’re only real when we’re alone.”
“I feel the same way,” I whispered back at him. I think it was that pull in two directions that kept us both so confused. The past and the present, the dream and the reality. “You’re grumpy and damn near angry all the time. Until we close the door. And then . . . then you’re mine again.”
His mouth crashed down, kissing me, bruising me. His hands gripped my hair even as he held his body firm against mine. “Back then I knew,” he fought to catch his breath, eyes screwed shut, forehead against mine, “I just knew you needed me and that was enough to erase all the doubts about putting myself out there with a stranger.” He pulled back and looked up at the sky, shaking his head. “Or maybe you never needed me at all. Maybe I wanted you to need me. I saw that emptiness and for the life of me I can’t explain what happened . . . what I felt.”
But I knew. He didn’t need to say with words what I’d already seen for myself. Colt was a protector by nature and maybe at first it was a simple instinct to want to shield me, but at some point instinct turned into feelings.
“Is this more? Or are we just instinct and sex?”
He ever so slowly turned his attention back to me. His eyes raked over my face, drifted over my lips, his hands slid from my hair until his thumbs grazed my cheeks, and, finally, he looked me in the eye. “If we were just raw instinct we wouldn’t be so miserable. If I was just fucking you for fun I wouldn’t be standing outside, holding you like I’m afraid if I let you go you’ll disappear again.”
Oh god. My chest ached from the weight of the emotions bursting inside. “I don’t want to go anywhere, but I will if I’m hurting you.”
“You’re not hurting me.” His thumbs moved over my lips. “Not unless you leave me again.”
“Then I need to make a confession.” I swallowed down the fear that admitting a need felt like weakness. Except how could a need ever be a weakness? It simply was. My feelings for Colt were as simple as the reality that he made me happy. “I need you. I’ve always needed you.”
CHAPTER 16
The Price of Love was a family saga movie. I’d never done a horror flick. But as I crept into the dark barn where Colt had asked me to meet him, I wondered if I were about to be killed by a secret ax murderer.
The air was cold and stale, it didn’t smell like horses the way I expected. And the lack of light was really super freaky.
“Up here,” Colt called from above me.
That’s when I noticed a faint light at the top of a set of stairs. “If you’re going to murder me, could you do it down here instead?”
His head appeared. “What?”
“Dark night. A woman goes alone into mysterious building. This has murder written all over it.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
I shrugged. “What do you have up there?”
“You’ll have to come up to find out.” He shot me a sexy smile and I temporarily forgot that I was scared.
The view that greeted me upstairs was not on my list of possibilities. For one, it was very clean. I didn’t expect a barn to be spotless. And for two it was . . . well, it was romantic. String lights were strung up between rafters, soft lanterns glowed from the corners, and a large, old, comfortable looking brown leather couch had blankets draped over it. An old blue rug covered the wood floor and an old desk sat near the windows.
“What is this place?”
Colt held out a glass of red wine. “We don’t use this barn for livestock anymore, only storing grain and supplies. My father turned the loft into an office.”
That explained why it smelled stale.
“And what do you use it for?”
“Sometimes I work here. Mostly I just escape.”
After our intense exchange in the garden Colt said he needed to talk to me. He didn’t say why, only that he needed a few minutes to breathe and to meet him here when I was ready.
“It’s yo
ur tree fort.”
He laughed. “I guess so. Even adults need to have fun.”
I got the feeling the kind of fun he was looking for was definitely more on the adult side. “So what did you want to talk about?”
“Me. You. Us. All the things we’re still holding back.” He took my hand and electricity shot up my arm. “I can’t keep up this dance with you. It’s distracting and, quite frankly, I don’t think my heart can take it. I need to know whether we can do this or not.”
Put up or shut up. Lay it all out on the table. At least there was wine and twinkle lights. “How do we do this? Take turns? One at a time?”
“I thought I’d go first. I have some things I’ve been meaning to tell you and considering I’ve been putting all our problems on you, I thought I owed it to you to go first.”
I’d have told him he was being gentlemanly if he didn’t look so nervous. Oh, and there was the fact that he’d been putting me through hell. Yeah, he could totally go first. “I don’t bite, Colt. Stop pacing.”
He froze mid-stride. “It’s just . . . I never really considered what would happen if I met someone. And now that I’m trying to find the words it all sounds terrible and I’m afraid you’re not going to look at me the same.”
I didn’t know what that meant but it made all the blood drain out of my head. It sounded like he had something kind of big to tell me. “Do you have a secret girlfriend I don’t know about?”
“No.” But he said it slowly, as if that wasn’t exactly the answer.
“Colt?”
“I was engaged once.”
I sat down on the couch behind me. “Engaged.” The word felt all wrong coming out of my mouth. Engaged. Colt had been engaged?
“It was one of those stupid arrangements. Her father and my father were business partners. We were the same age. We grew up together. She was young, rich and beautiful. I was supposed to marry her. I proposed our junior year of college and we were engaged for two years.”
Engaged. Why was that stupid word stuck on repeat inside my head? “What happened?”
“I found out she only accepted because she thought the ranch was doing well enough to keep her rich and happy. All she wanted was a comfortable position. She didn’t love me and honestly? I didn’t love her. I proposed because after my father died I was on autopilot, doing what I was supposed to do, afraid if I started changing things, I’d start to lose him.”
I wasn’t really conscious of what I was doing—my body seemed to know what my mind didn’t. I wanted to touch him so that’s what I did. I stood up and crossed the loft so that I could hold his hand. “You loved your father very much.”
“To my own detriment, according to Christina.” He pulled our clasped hands to his mouth and brushed his lips over my knuckles. The action was a simple one, but to me it said a thousand things at once. Colt was an emotional man with a kindness to him that was rare in the men I knew, but he was also commanding and unmistakably masculine. That duality was the sexiest thing about him. “Turns out she’d been sleeping with my roommate the whole time. And to add insult to injury, when we ended the engagement, her father ended our distribution agreement. It was a pretty shit time all around.”
Love and business—both gone with a single action. “No wonder you’re skittish about relationships.”
He grimaced, leaning down until our foreheads touched. He took a long deep breath. “That did a number on me. You’re right. I made bad decisions and those decisions still haunt me. Especially the ones that came next.” His hands slid back to my hair, tilting my face up to his. “I decided I wouldn’t do relationships until I got the ranch where I wanted it. And that made sense to me. How could I possibly be any good to a woman when my heart and attention were already completely consumed by my work?”
“Why do I get the feeling you haven’t been honing your impressive bedroom moves alone with your hand at night?” There was no way Colt just magically knew his way around my body. I understood he’d probably had a string of lovers that taught him what he knew but that didn’t mean I liked thinking about it.
“My sister calls them my ‘arrangements’. In the rumors that float around they call them my ‘mysterious mistresses.’” His voice was low, even. “But they aren’t mistresses at all. Mysterious, yes. We both agree that our relationship is purely sexual and no one else’s business. But it’s completely mutual and they’re using me for the exact same reasons I use them. I would never call them mistresses.”
It was so cold. So unlike the warm, passionate man I knew Colt to be. Which meant he’d done this because it was convenient and because it kept his emotions out of the equation entirely. The man with the mysterious mistresses was the very definition of detached and unemotional. He buried himself under layers upon layers of protection and made sure his emotions were never involved in anything except his family—who he clearly adored and would protect with his very last breath.
That’s when I realized, really realized, why Colt was so driven. It wasn’t just for himself or his legacy. It wasn’t even for his father’s memory. It was for Christina and Jonas. He loved them and needed to be sure he could protect them no matter what.
“Until me?”
He nodded quickly, the nervous energy practically leaping off of him. “Until you. I’ve never done this before, Lily. I’ve never combined sex and feelings. I don’t know how to do this and I’m completely out of my depth.”
I hated how tortured he seemed but I loved that I made him feel so much. “I haven’t either. We’re clueless together.”
“Was that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No,” I said so my breath whispered across his neck as I slid my arms around his shoulders. “I’m supposed to do that.” He quivered in my arms as I nipped and kissed at all his sensitive spots. “What were these arrangements like? How would you find them?”
I tugged on his earlobe with my teeth and he hissed, his hands gripping my hips as he held on for dear life. “I’m not the only stressed out person with a high profile. I found someone in a similar position who didn’t want to deal with having a boyfriend. We reached an agreement that suited both of us. No complications. Just much needed stress relief.”
“In the bedroom.” I didn’t want details so I really wasn’t sure why I was still talking.
“Usually a hotel room, actually. We met up on business trips.”
Even better. I liked to think that I was the only woman who graced Colt’s bed. “And you had several of these . . . arrangements?” I began removing his clothes, exploring new ways to make him moan. I wasn’t entirely sure what had come over me, other than an intense urge to brand Colt and erase these other women from his mind with my tongue.
“A few over the years. Things like that don’t last forever.” His hips jerked against me, looking for friction.
“And what would you have asked me for if we were going to have an arrangement?”
“I could never have an arrangement with you,” he growled. “I think I was trying to.” He meant that first week of sex in his room. “You can see how that ended.”
In an explosion of emotions and needs. There was no mistaking that now. Colt needed me every bit as much as I needed him. These feelings were real and deep—far deeper than either of us could comprehend—and they were drowning us as long as we kept fighting them.
His hand coasted over my breast as he leaned back to look me in the eyes. His had grown dark and hungry, his pupils wide. “You should know that it wasn’t always simple. I miscalculated once. The woman I was with, she sought me out specifically when she heard about me. She used our relationship to feed details about the ranch to one of our competitors. I’m only telling you this because it’s a sore spot with my family. If it ever comes up I wanted you to hear it from me, not them.”
I kissed him, catching him totally off guard. “Thank you.”
“That was not the reaction I expected.” He kissed me back.
I knew it was weird to
be talking about our pasts and the last thing I wanted to dwell on was the other women who’d had what I was quickly beginning to think of as mine, but his confessions were exactly what made him so special to me. “In my family, those secrets are weapons, Colt.” I stripped off my dress. “So thank you.”
Understanding dawned on his face and his eyes darkened. “That’s enough talking for now.” He picked me up and set me on the couch. “Fuck, Lily. Do you have any idea what you do to me when you look at me like that?”
I had no idea what expression was on my face. I was too caught up in the moment. “No.”
He lowered his much larger body carefully onto mine, my legs wrapping around his hips as he settled against me. “You look at me like I can conquer the world, and that makes me want to conquer it for you.” He rocked against me, lighting me up. “I want to keep you here with me so I can fill up your life with light and drive out all the darkness that haunts your eyes.”
Oh god. Yes. This. Always. “What you had before? Don’t ever expect it from me. I want your emotions. I want your life. I give you my eyes and I want yours in return.”
And for the next hour we took turns showing each other just how more satisfying sex could be when you let yourself feel.
* * *
WE FELL asleep in the loft and I decided it was my second favorite place after Colt’s bed. It was our little hideaway without having to go on vacation. Plus it was a barn and that made it feel like Cowboy and Annie, a little tie to our past.
As Colt dozed beneath me I made a list of all the fun things we could do up here, all the places we could make love.
The desk was first on my list. Old, sturdy, smooth . . . the list of options was endless. In fact, if I wasn’t mistaken, those legs would make an excellent place to tie off some rope . . .
Bzzzz! Bzzzzz! Bzzzz!
My phone began rattling from across the room. I grabbed Colt’s wrist to check the time. 10:15 p.m.
The only people who called me after nine were Ted and Elizabeth, which meant I really needed to answer that call.
