A Bride for Liam Brand

by Joanna Sims

  Willing, Liam lay back and let his woman have her way with him. Once Kate was ready to enjoy her creation, Liam rolled on another condom. Kate took him inside of her, sinking down until their bodies were joined. “Hmm.” Kate curled her body down onto Liam’s chest, rocking her hips back and forth, her face breathing in the sexy scent of his skin.

  Nothing—nothing—had felt this good to her. She wanted to savor all of the sensations she was feeling; the friction of their skin, the sensitivity of her nipples against the hair on his chest, the feel of his tongue in her mouth.

  Liam held onto her bottom, pulling her downward so he could push more deeply inside of her. And, then, just like that, there is was again—that building, and pressure and sparks at the core of her body.

  “There you go, baby,” Liam murmured as she began to moan. “There you go.”

  Kate bit his shoulder, holding on to his body so tightly as she writhed on his rock hard erection. Her cry was stifled against his hot skin and Kate closed her eyes until the last shudders of the climax danced over her body.

  After a moment to catch her breath, Kate sat upright with a surprised laugh.

  With a tender smile, Liam said, “You’re so beautiful, Kate.”

  Liam rolled her onto her back, rejoined their bodies so he could find his own release. And then the dance began again. He moved inside of her, hard, fast, demanding; skin to skin, legs intertwined, Liam thrust several times and then threw his head back with a growl of satisfaction.

  “Lord, woman.” Liam laughed, his forehead wet with perspiration. “I think you damn near wore me out.”

  Pinned down by his weight, their bodies slippery with sweat, Kate took his handsome face into her hands.

  “You’re the best thing that’s happen to me in a long time, Liam.”

  Her lover kissed her sweetly on the lips. “My sweet Kate. I am yours for as long as you want me.”

  Chapter Six

  “Thank you, Mommy!” Callie screamed while she simultaneously hugged her around the neck and jumped up and down. “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! I have to call Daddy right now!”

  Was it the afternoon she had spent in Liam’s arms, making love, talking, and then dozing off for a well-needed nap? Or was it just the fact that she realized that she was fighting a losing battle? Maybe it was a combination of both, but when she returned home later that afternoon, she gave Callie the greenlight to go visit her father and her sister in New York. It required her to block out two days when normally she would be training horses or clients, and it required her to spend the extra money, money that wasn’t abundant, to fly to New York and back.

  “I hope I don’t regret this.” Kate stared after her daughter for a moment before she headed back into the barn to check on the progress of the evening chores.

  As she always did, she swung by Visa’s stall first. The poor boy, normally such an easygoing fellow, was beginning to develop some food aggression from being stuck in his stall for so long, pinning his ears and nipping at her when she brought him his hay. Liam was scheduled to x-ray the hind leg in a week; she was so hopeful that Visa would get the green light to go back to work.

  “Fred!” Kate stood in the middle of the aisle, her hands on her hips, furious. “Where are you?”

  Her barn manager came around the corner, a concerned look on his face.

  “Yes, Ms. King?”

  “None of these stalls have been cleaned.” Kate pointed to several of the stalls. “This entire aisle is filthy. The water buckets haven’t been washed today, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s on the list for today, is it not? What’s going on around here?”

  “I don’t know.” Fred seemed as surprised as she was. “I’ll get the crew on this right away.”

  “You do that,” Kate said, annoyed. “These horses have a right to have clean stalls. They can’t do it themselves.”

  Everyone who worked for her knew that she had zero tolerance for letting any of the housekeeping chores slide in the barn. She didn’t have much of a temper, except when it came to slacking in the barn.

  “I’m sorry, Visa.” Kate rubbed the gelding’s forehead. “We’ll get your stall fixed up right away.”

  Now that she was taking some time for herself, all of the cracks that she normally filled when she was on-site were starting to show. She was going to have to rethink the business if she was going to continue to spend extra time away from the ranch. The thought of not spending alone time with Liam didn’t seem like a good option. She had begun to count on that time for a little stress release.

  Her phone began to ring; she pulled it out of her pocket, satisfied to see two stable hands enter the aisle with pitchforks and carts to begin mucking the stalls.

  “Lloyd.” That was the name that came up on the caller ID. It was a name she rarely saw, and she liked it that way.

  “Hi, Lloyd.”

  “Katie.”

  Silence. That was how most of her conversations went with Callie’s father.

  “How have you been?”

  Kate winced. Small talk with Lloyd was a less desirable task than getting her gums deep cleaned at the periodontist.

  “Great,” she said quickly. “I take it Callie told you the good news.”

  “Yeah. She just called.”

  Another odd silence. A sick feeling in her stomach, often associated with Lloyd, bubbled up in her gut. She moved down the aisle away from prying ears.

  “Lloyd. What’s wrong now?”

  “Nothing.” He sounded, as he typically did, like a worm trying to squirm off a hook. “Nothing at all really. It’s just I didn’t know about this trip, is all.”

  That information stopped her in her tracks.

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  Kate took the phone away from her ear, closed her eyes, cursed under her breath several times.

  What had possessed Callie to lie to her about something as big as this? Yes, her daughter was known to tell white lies, but this was a whopper.

  “She told me that you invited her. That Bethany invited her.”

  “No.” The sound of Lloyd scratching the stubble on his face, something he had done when they were together, made her cringe.

  After another uncomfortable silence, she asked, “How did you leave it with Callie?”

  “I told her that we’d work something out.” Lloyd surprised her with that response, but with her ex, it was always “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “You’d work something out? What does that mean? Is she coming to see you or not?”

  “Well, now, Katie...”

  “Kate.”

  “...this is all getting sprung on me out of the blue. I need to check my calendar, shuffle some things around—I’m in between jobs right now. You how my business is—feast or famine. Let’s just see how it goes.”

  “Sure.” Same old wait-and-see Lloyd. “Let’s do that.”

  Without giving him the courtesy of a goodbye, Kate stabbed her finger on the red “hang up” button more times than needed to actually end the call.

  “Damn him.” She shoved her phone into her back pocket. “Damn him all to hell.”

  * * *

  Kate went to find her daughter; she stood in the doorway of Callie’s bedroom and watched her daughter balling up clothing and pushing it down into the open suitcase on her bed.

  “Watcha doin’, kiddo?” Kate walked over to the bed and sat down.

  Callie had that smile on her face that she reserved for moments when she was super excited about something.

  “I—I’m packing,” Callie said happily.

  Kate had to force down tears—tears of frustration and sadness for her daughter. Callie wanted to have a relationship with her father, and Lloyd had always let her down. No matter how gently or how often s
he had tried to explain the situation to her daughter, Callie simply couldn’t grasp the complexity of the situation. In her mind, she had a father and he didn’t love her. Maybe there was some truth to that simplistic assessment.

  “Come here and sit down with me for a minute, okay?” Kate pushed the suitcase back a little and patted the mattress next to her.

  Callie joined her and immediately leaned her body into hers and put her head on her shoulder. Kate put her arm around Callie’s shoulders and hugged her.

  “Sweetheart, I spoke to your father.”

  “Did he tell you that I—I was going to see him?”

  “Here.” Kate moved away from her daughter so she could look into her eyes. “Look at me.”

  Callie sat back, her brown eyes so full of hope.

  Kate moved her daughter’s long, brown hair over her shoulder before she took her hand and held on to it.

  “Callie, your father told me that he didn’t know about the trip.”

  Kate watched her daughter’s face carefully. Callie didn’t always know right from wrong, but she did know that it was wrong to lie.

  Callie looked away, her cheeks and neck turning red and blotchy.

  “Did you lie to me?”

  Still keeping her eyes averted, Callie nodded.

  “What have we said about lying, Calico?”

  Her daughter slipped her gaze back to her for the briefest of moments. “I—I can’t do it.”

  “Not that you can’t do it—that you shouldn’t do it.”

  Callie nodded again. “B-because it’s wrong.”

  “That’s right.”

  Her daughter’s sweet face crumpled, then the tears began to fall.

  “Come here.” Kate took her daughter in her arms, just as she had when she was a little girl. She couldn’t force Lloyd to be an engaged father; she could only be there, time and again, to pick up the pieces of Callie’s broken heart.

  “I—I wanted to go see my dad.” Callie sniffled.

  She wiped away the tears on her daughter’s cheeks with her thumbs. “I know you did, sweet girl. But that’s not an excuse to lie, Callie.”

  “I—I know. I—I’m sorry.”

  She stood, hands on hips, and assessed the mess in Callie’s room. “How ’bout I help you clean all this up, and then we can go in to town and pick up some ingredients for whatever you want to cook today.”

  Yes, it was a temporary bandage for a wound that was never going to truly heal, but it was worth it to see a new smile on her daughter’s face. This wouldn’t be the last time that she had to deal with the fallout from Lloyd’s absence in their daughter’s life. That was just the harsh truth of the reality she had been living since the day Calico was born.

  * * *

  “It breaks my heart every time,” Kate told Liam the next day. “Why does he have to be such a jerk? Yes, Callie did the wrong thing by lying, but she lied because she can’t make sense of the fact that her father doesn’t want to see her!”

  “I don’t know.” Liam was sitting next to her in their favorite spot at the top of the mountain.

  She glanced at his profile—they had agreed to keep talk about their exes at a minimum in order to focus on the present and their relationship. It wasn’t difficult to read his unsmiling expression—her ex wasn’t a top-priority topic for Liam.

  “Sorry.”

  He reached for her hand. “You don’t have to apologize. You need to be able to vent to me, and I need to be able to vent to you. We both have children with other people—no matter how hard we try, our past relationships will always resurface. I accept that.”

  She squeezed his hand gratefully.

  “Are you sufficiently vented?”

  With a laugh, she said, “Yes.”

  Liam had a real smile on his handsome face. “Good. Because I’d hate to think I schlepped this blanket up here for no reason at all.”

  She knew what he was driving at—one of her bucket list items was to make love outdoors, and today was the day they had slated to make love on their mountain. With all of her moaning and bellyaching, they were wasting time.

  Kate stood quickly, stood in front of the man who had become more than just a lover—he had become her best friend—and pulled her T-shirt over her head and dropped it on the ground. Now she was standing on top of the mountain in her bra, the balmy breeze brushing over her naked shoulders and stomach.

  Liam leaned back on his arm and took off his sunglasses so she could see his eyes admire her.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Kate.”

  She smiled in response and unsnapped the button on her faded jeans. “Are you gonna keep talking? Or are we going to do this?”

  Liam grinned at her, stood and pulled his T-shirt over his head. “Oh, we’re definitely doing this, lady.”

  She had grown to love Liam’s chest hair. She reached out and ran her fingers, tigress-like, through his light brown chest hair. Liam captured her hand and pulled her closer to him. He kissed her on the lips, on the neck, holding her tightly.

  “Are we doing the full monty?” he asked against her neck.

  She reached down between them, happy to discover that he was already aroused and ready for her.

  With a laugh, Kate pushed away from him so she could finish undressing. “Yes. I want to be like Adam and Eve. Minus the fig leaves.”

  “You don’t have to ask me twice.” Liam winked at her as he stripped off his jeans and underwear.

  He was naked, with the exception of his socks, before she could unzip her jeans.

  “Something tells me that this isn’t the first time you’ve been naked up here.”

  Kate unzipped her jeans, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Liam. He was so well-built, slender, with lean muscle all over his body, tanned on his arms and neck. The fact that he had a beautiful hard-on, just for her, only added to his appeal.

  “Come here.” Liam patted the spot next to him on the blanket.

  Still in her underwear, bra and socks, Kate sat next to him on the blanket. He took her hand and kissed her shoulder.

  “I like the way you smell,” he said as he unhooked her bra.

  “Manure and hay.”

  He laughed, gently slipping the strap of her bra down her shoulder. The moment the air hit her breasts, she knew that this feeling, this feeling of freedom, was exactly what she was looking to experience. She let him slip her bra completely off her body. Now sitting on top of their mountain, naked save her underwear and socks, Kate felt more free, and more adventurous, than she had in years.

  As he always did, Liam began to fondle her breasts, massaging them just how he knew she liked it.

  She dropped her head back. “Hmm. That feels so good.”

  “You feel good,” Liam murmured before he kissed her nipple.

  Kate thread her fingers through his hair, pressing his mouth harder to her breast. His mouth felt so good, so right. Her body was revving up, anticipating what was to come next. There was a tingling, an ache, between her thighs, building so quickly that she knew she would soon be pulling him on top of her, begging him to fill her.

  “Lay back,” Liam said, his eyes hooded with desire.

  She followed his direction, lifting her hips a bit as he slipped her underwear off her hips, along her thighs and past her ankles. Now she was naked, on a mountaintop, with the sun kissing her skin as the man she was growing to love kissed the inside of her thighs. She let her thighs fall open when Liam knelt between her legs. She knew what he wanted—he thought she tasted so sweet.

  The moment his lips touched her, the moment his tongue slipped inside her, Kate forgot where she was and cried out with pleasure. With his hands beneath her bottom, Liam brought her closer to his mouth, loving her, tasting her, enjoying her. Kate moaned and writhed, pressing her head hard into her body; it was easy f
or her to ignore the sharp edge of the boulder pressing into her back. It was easy for her to lose herself and just enjoy the feel of Liam’s mouth kissing her.

  “You liked that,” Liam said in a lover’s voice as he kissed his way up her stomach and her breasts, until he was holding himself above her, the tip of his erection teasing her, asking for entry.

  She reached for him with a pleased smile, wanting him so badly, needing him so badly. And then he was inside her, so deep, so thick. It felt like nothing else could. She opened her eyes and saw a look of sheer pleasure on Liam’s face as he seated himself deep inside her.

  “Oh, God, you feel good, baby.”

  The moment, which would have been perfect—which should have been perfect—wasn’t perfect. The more Liam moved, the more the jagged edge of the boulder cut into her spine, and it hurt.

  “Ow, ow! Wait! I have to shift,” she told her lover.

  Liam stopped moving, opened his eyes and smiled down at her. He braced his arms, lifted his hips off hers and gave her room to shift beneath him.

  “Better?” he asked when she was done.

  “I think so.” She leaned back and lifted her hips to signal she wanted to continue.

  They started the dance again, a rhythm they had developed over time. Their breath deepened, their eyes closed, and they both made noises of pleasure as they loved each other.

  “Ow!” Kate’s eyes flew open. “Wait!” She stopped moving. “Stupid rock. That really hurts!”

  Making love on the mountain in her fantasy hadn’t included sharp rocks poking into her butt and her back.

  Liam laughed. “Hold on.”

  “Oh.” Kate frowned as he disconnected their bodies. “It’s not over, is it?”

  “Hell, no.” Liam lay down next to her. “You get on top. I’ll handle the rocks.”

  With a smile, Kate put her hand on his stomach. “Are you sure?”

  Liam checked the condom to make sure it was still secure. “Climb on.”

  She did climb aboard—happily. But then, her knees were rubbing against the boulder, ruining the pleasure of the moment. Frustrated and disappointed, her hands splayed across Liam’s chest, Kate frowned. “This isn’t working out as I imagined it.”