by Paula Graves
A commotion in the corral nipped off the rest of what she was about to say. And it wasn’t a very timely commotion.
Sex.
Specifically horse sex.
It went on a lot at the ranch. So often in fact that Anna rarely noticed, but because Heath was right next to her, she noticed it now. And he noticed that she noticed.
With all that noticing going on, it was amazing that she remembered how to turn around, but she finally managed it. She took hold of Heath’s arm and got him moving away from the corral and toward the pasture.
Where she immediately saw cow-and-bull sex.
Dang it. Was everything going at it today?
Heath chuckled. “The Angus bull was getting restless, trying to break fence, so the hands brought in some company for him.”
The ranch’s version of Match.com. And the icy wind definitely didn’t put a damper on things. Not for the bull anyway, but it did for Anna. She shivered and wished she’d opted for a warmer coat instead of the one that she thought looked better on her. It was hard to look your best with chattering teeth and a red nose.
“In here,” Heath said. He put his hand on her back and maneuvered her into the barn.
“The scene of the crime,” Anna mumbled. She’d fantasized about getting Heath back in here, but not like this. Not when she needed a tissue.
He glanced up at the hayloft, his attention lingering there a moment before coming back to her. The lingering lasted more than a moment though, and he took out a handkerchief and handed it to her.
“I should probably take you back to the house so you can warm up,” he offered.
She considered it just so she could blow her nose. It was tempting, but Riley was inside. Della and Stella, too. So Anna touched the handkerchief to her nose and hoped that did the trick. In case it didn’t, she went for what Riley would have called a tactical diversion.
“I’m surprised you’re not off somewhere enjoying some company like that bull before you leave for your deployment,” she said.
Anna figured that would get Heath to smile. It didn’t. And she saw it again—the look on his face to remind her that he needed to be cheered up about something. Apparently, it had something to do with his assignment.
“Unless a miracle happens, I won’t be deploying,” he finally answered. The strewn hay on the floor was suddenly riveting because he stared at it. “The Air Force wants me to take an instructor job in Florida.”
With the hay-staring and the gloomy look, Anna had braced herself for something a lot worse. “You make it sound as if you’re being banished to Pluto.”
“In a way, it is like that for me. I trained to be a combat rescue officer, like Riley. I didn’t go through all of that to work behind a desk.”
Anna wasn’t sure how far she should push this so she just waited him out. Waited out the profanity he muttered under his breath. Waited out more hay-staring.
“I feel washed up,” he added.
Ah, she got it then. “But the instructor job is temporary, right? You’ll go back to being a combat rescue officer?”
“In three years.”
She got that, too. It was an eternity for someone like Heath or Riley.
Anna touched his arm, rubbed gently. “The three years will fly by. Look how fast the past nine and a half years went.”
The hay finally lost its allure for him, and he looked at her. “Yeah.” Not so much of a sexy drawl this time. The hurt was still there. Time to pull out the big guns and do a little soul-baring.
“Remember when I told you I needed a change of scenery? Well, what I really need is to get away from my ex-boyfriend,” Anna confessed. “We had a bad breakup.”
Evidently, Heath didn’t like this soul-baring so much because he frowned. “Are you telling me this is rebound flirting you’ve been doing with me?”
“No. The breakup happened two years ago, but he’s getting married to one of my classmates. And they’re having a baby. Twins, actually. The classmate is a former Miss Texas beauty pageant winner.”
He nodded, made an “I got it” sound. “You’re still in love with him.”
“No!” And she couldn’t say that fast or loud enough. “He’s a lying, cheating weasel. My need for a change of scenery isn’t because I still care for him but because I’m sick and tired of everybody walking on eggshells around me.”
Her voice had gotten louder with each word, and she couldn’t stop the confessions now that the floodgates were open.
“Poor pitiful Anna McCord got dumped for the beauty queen,” she blathered on. “It reminds me of the stuff my brothers pull on me, and I’m tired of it. Tired of being treated like someone who needs to be handled with kid gloves.”
She probably would have just kept on blathering, too, if Heath hadn’t slid his hand around the back of her neck, hauled her to him and kissed her.
All in all, it was the perfect way to shut her up, and Anna didn’t object one bit. In fact, she would have cheered, but her mouth was otherwise occupied, and besides, cheering would have put an end to this kiss.
She didn’t want it to end.
Apparently, neither did Heath, because he put that clever mouth to good use and made the kiss French. And deep. And long.
All the makings of a good kiss even if Anna’s lungs started to ache for air.
Heath broke the kiss just long enough for them to take in some much needed oxygen, and he went in for another assault. Anna was no longer shivering, could no longer feel her nose, but the rest of her was hyperaware of what was happening. The heat zoomed from her mouth to her toes, but it especially fired up in her orgasm-zone.
Soon, very soon, the kiss just wasn’t enough, and they started to grapple for position. Trying to get closer and closer to each other. Heath was a lot better at grappling than she was because he dropped his hands to her butt and gave her a push against the front of his jeans.
Anna saw stars. Maybe the moon, too. And she darn near had an orgasm right then, right there while they were fully clothed.
Her heart was pounding now. Her breath, thin. She was melting. And there was a roaring sound in her head. That roaring sound was probably the reason she hadn’t heard the other sounds until it was too late. Not horse or bull sex this time.
Footsteps.
“Interrupting anything?” someone asked.
Not Riley or Logan. Her brother Lucky.
And he was standing in the barn doorway with a shovel gripped in his hand.
* * *
ONCE AGAIN HEATH was facing a McCord brother when he was aroused. Hardly the right bargaining tool for dealing with Anna’s older siblings who were hell-bent on protecting their sister.
Anna stepped in front of him as if she were his protector, but Heath remedied that. He stepped in front of her. But that only prompted her to attempt another stepping in front of him, and Heath put a stop to it. He dropped a kiss on her mouth, a chaste one this time hoping it would get her to cooperate.
“I need to talk to your brother alone,” Heath told her.
“No way. He’s here to browbeat you, and he’s got a shovel.”
Lucky shrugged. Propped the shovel against the wall. “Riley said I should bring it and do my part to remind Heath that he should keep his jeans zipped around you.” He shrugged again when he glanced at the front of Heath’s jeans. “The zipper’s still up, so my work here is done.”
Lucky turned to walk away.
“That’s really all you’ve got to say?” Anna asked.
Her brother stopped, smiled in that lazy way that Lucky had about him. Heath knew Lucky loved his sister, but he’d never been as Attila the Hun as Riley and Logan. Heath suspected that’s because Lucky got out all his restless energy by riding rodeo bulls. And having lots of sex.
“Should I ask
you two to stay away from each other?” Lucky didn’t wait for an answer though. “Wouldn’t work. You two have the hots for each other, and there’s only one way to cool that down.” His gaze drifted to the hayloft before he turned again to leave.
Was Lucky really giving them his approval?
No.
This had to be some kind of trick.
Heath went after Lucky. Anna, too, and they caught up with him by the porch steps. However, before Heath could say anything else, the door opened, and Della stuck her head out.
“Anna, you got a call on the house phone. It’s Claire.”
Anna volleyed glances between Heath and her brother and then huffed. “Don’t you dare say anything important before I get back.”
She hurried inside. So did Lucky and Heath, but they stopped in the sunroom.
“Zippers and haylofts aside,” Lucky said. “I don’t want Anna hurt again. She sort of fell apart the last time you left.”
“Yes. I heard about the crying from Logan.” Heath paused. “Define fell apart.”
“It wasn’t just the crying.” Lucky paused, too. “It was the pregnancy scare.”
Heath felt as if all the air had just been sucked out of his lungs. Out of the entire planet. And if there was air on Pluto, it was also gone.
“Anna doesn’t know that I know,” Lucky went on. “No one does, and I’d like to keep it from my brothers. If Riley and Logan find out, they’d want to kick your ass. And mine since I didn’t tell them. Then I’d have to kick theirs. If you don’t mind, I’d rather not have to go through an ass-kicking free-for-all.”
“Pregnancy?” Heath managed to ask. Considering there was still no air, he was doing good to get out that one word.
Lucky nodded. “A couple of weeks after you left, I went into Anna’s bathroom to get some eye drops, and I saw the box for the pregnancy test in her trash can. She’d torn up the box, but I was able to piece it together to figure out what it was.”
Heath managed another word. “Damn.”
“Yeah. Two words for you—safe sex.”
“I used a condom.”
Lucky shrugged again. “Then, it must have worked because when I found the pee stick—it was in the way bottom of the trash can, by the way—it had a negative sign on it.”
Heath heard the words. Felt the relief at that negative sign. Then managed another word.
“Hell.”
Anna had gone through a scare like that, and she hadn’t even told him.
“The only reason I dragged this up now was so that you’d understand why I’m protective of her,” Lucky went on. “Now, go find her. Confront her about all of this. Then use a condom when you have makeup sex.”
There’d be no makeup sex. Because Heath wasn’t touching her again. Hell. She could have had his kid.
Heath went looking for Anna, and when he didn’t find her in the kitchen or any of the living areas, he went to her bedroom. Of course she was there. The one room in the house where he shouldn’t be alone with her. The door was open, and she was still on the phone, but she motioned for him to come in. He did, but only because he wanted answers and didn’t want to wait for them.
But he had to wait anyway.
He listened to Anna talk niceties with Claire. Several “you’re welcomes” later, she finally ended the call and looked at him. The smile that was forming froze on her mouth though when she saw his expression.
Heath shut the door just as he blurted out, “You had a pee stick in the bottom of your trash can.”
Anna gave him a blank look.
“The pregnancy test from nine and a half years ago,” he clarified. “Lucky found it and just told me about it. I’m wondering why I had to hear it from him.”
She laughed. Hardly the reaction he’d expected. “It wasn’t my pee on that stick. It belonged to Kristy Welker. I bought it for her so her folks wouldn’t find out, and she did the test here.”
Heath had vague memories of this Kristy. Anna and she had been friends, and Kristy had come over a couple of times that summer.
Anna’s laughter quickly stopped. “What the heck was Lucky doing in my bathroom?”
She was using her sister voice now, and it wouldn’t have surprised Heath if she’d gone running out of there to confront her brother about it. She might have done that if Heath hadn’t done something so unmanly as having to catch on to the wall to steady himself.
“Whoa. Are you all right?” She slipped her arm around his waist, led him to the bed.
Heath didn’t even try to say he didn’t need to sit down. He did. “I thought... Well, I thought...”
“Trust me, if you had knocked me up, I would have told you about it.”
Of course she would have. But it might take a year or two for his heart rate to settle down.
She gave his arm another rub like the one she had in the barn. “Relax. You were my first, but I wasn’t totally clueless.” She stopped, paused. “I wasn’t your first though, and that’s why you knew to bring a condom to the hayloft.”
Even though Heath was still coming down from the shock-relief whammy, he heard her loud and clear. She’d given him something that a girl could only give once. Her virginity. That upped the encounter a significant notch, and maybe she was looking for some kind of assurance that she’d given it to the right guy.
“You were the first one that mattered,” he said. “I risked being hit by a shovel to be with you. That should have told you something.”
No smile. No more arm rub, either. “And yet you left.”
He nodded, tried to ignore the sting of that reminder. “I was leaving for basic training, and you were barely eighteen.”
Anna waved that off. “I know where this is going. We were too young for it to have been real love.”
“No, we weren’t too young.”
Okay, he hadn’t meant to say that, and it was another opened box with contents that Anna was clearly waiting to be spilled.
“What I felt for you was real,” Heath said. And strong.
He hadn’t cried as Anna had done, but leaving her had left a hole in his heart. Best not to mention that, especially since he would be leaving again soon.
“I knew I couldn’t give you a good life,” he added. “Not when I was still trying to figure out my own life.”
She stayed quiet a couple of seconds. “Fair enough. And if you’d stayed, you would have resented me because you gave up your dream of being in the military. Your wanderlust and need for an adrenaline fix would have come into play. We would have fought, broken up, and all these years later we would have cursed the mere mention of each other’s names.”
Heath frowned. He didn’t like that version of what could have been, but she was probably right. Probably. Now he was cursing her name for a different reason. Because it reminded him of how much he wanted her.
“I still have the need for that adrenaline fix,” he admitted. “The need to be...something. Somewhere. It’s easier if I stay on the move.”
“I get it.” She motioned around the room. “That’s why it’s hard for me to be at the ranch sometimes.”
He was pretty sure they were talking about her parents now, about the hole in her heart that their deaths had no doubt left. “Are the memories of your folks harder to deal with while you’re here?”
“Every now and then. But sometimes it’s hard no matter where I am. Sometimes, I wake up, and I can’t remember what they looked like. That sends me into a panic. So I run to grab one of the photo albums just to remember their faces.”
“It’s your way of keeping them in your life,” Heath said around the lump in his throat.
“Yes. The past has a way of staying with you like that.” Anna took a deep breath, then sighed. “And you can’t run away from your past. I know, I’ve tried
. It’s like that little mole I have on my right butt cheek. It just goes with me everywhere.” She looked at him. “I know what you’re thinking.”
Because he thought they could use some levity, Heath asked, “You have a little mole on your butt cheek?”
“All right, I didn’t know what you were thinking after all. I thought you might be wondering if I was trying to outrun my past by transferring colleges.”
That hadn’t even crossed his mind, mainly because he wondered why he hadn’t noticed that mole on her butt cheek. He was also wanting to see that mole. Clearly, he had a one-track mind here.
He shook his head. “I didn’t think the transfer was about running, more like ulcer prevention. No need for you to have to face a daily dose of Mr. Wrong and his new family.”
“Exactly.” She smiled in a triumphant I didn’t think you’d get that kind of way.
Heath got it all right. He got a lot of things when it came to Anna. A lot of things because of her, too. Like that tug below his belly that nudged him to kiss her again. That was his red-flag warning to get moving, and he would have done just that if he hadn’t spotted the silver heart locket on her nightstand.
When she saw that he’d spotted it, she tried to put it in the drawer, but Heath took hold of her hand to stop her.
Yes, it was the locket he’d given her all right.
“After Della asked about it, I found it in my old jewelry box,” she said. Then, she frowned. “All right, I wear it sometimes. Okay?”
She didn’t sound especially happy about that, but it pleased Heath that she still had it. Pleased him even more than she occasionally wore it. What didn’t please him was the reminder of the two words engraved on it.
“Be my.” Anna ran her fingertips over it. “I wasn’t sure what you were saying—be my heart, be my locket. Be my lay in the hay.” She chuckled, poked him with her elbow.
“It was a fill-in-the-blank kind of thing,” he joked, poking her back with his elbow.
“It sounds to me as if you didn’t know what you wanted to say.” No elbow poke that time.
“I was eighteen. I didn’t know.”
“And now?” she asked.
