Chance ran his tongue along his dried lips, stalling. “So I was thinking...”
Graham was the soul of encouragement. Nodding, he said, “Yes?”
Chance took a deep breath. “I was thinking that if I could feel this way, working with kids who needed help and horses that needed their own form of rehabilitation, maybe in the long run this could work for other soldiers, as well.”
Graham kept his gaze even. “Go on.”
He’d come this far; he couldn’t just let his courage flag now, Chance thought. “What would you think of the idea of opening up a Peter’s Place for returning vets?” he asked. Then the next moment, not wanting to put pressure on the man who had given him a second chance to live his life, Chance shrugged evasively and murmured, “It’s a dumb idea, huh?”
“No,” Graham told him with feeling, “I think it’s a great idea.”
Chance was as close to being dumbfound as he’d ever been in his life. He felt his excitement growing. “Really?”
“Absolutely.” Graham nodded. “In all honesty I always thought that the work we did here could have other uses. Not just for troubled teens. Give me a while to see if I can either find funding for a separate place, or if there’s a way to build on to Peter’s Place. You know, incorporate the vets and the teens.”
This was more than Chance had hoped for. He’d come in expecting Graham to at least listen to his idea, but not to jump on it like this. He was more than delighted.
Apparently so was Graham, as he went on enthusiastically. “The Fortune Foundation’s already given us funding to expand the original Peter’s Place—that’s why you and Chloe are here. Maybe I can talk to the people who hold the foundation’s purse strings while they’re still feeling generous and see if I can get them to part with a little more money for this added venture. I certainly think it’s worth a try—and definitely worthy of consideration.”
Graham took a deep breath as he leaned back in his chair. “You have any other suggestions?”
“No, fresh out,” Chance told him, spreading his hands out in front of him, a pleased expression on his face. “That was it.” So saying, he rose, ready to leave.
“Well, what you came up with was damn good,” Graham assured him. “But like I said, let me see what I can do on my end and whose cage I can rattle. And, Chance—?”
Chance stopped on his way out the door, half turned and looked at his boss over his shoulder. “Yes?”
“If you have any other ideas, be sure to come see me with them. I’d be more than happy to hear you out.”
Chance grinned broadly, really pleased with how well this had gone. He’d had bosses who had looked upon him as nothing more than a big dumb cowboy. Muscle on horseback. Any minor suggestions he’d tried to make regarding running the ranch had been quickly disregarded. It was nice to be working for someone who regarded him as a person. “Yes, sir, I will. Thank you, sir.”
“It’s Graham,” Graham said, calling after him. “Graham, not ‘sir.’”
“Got it,” Chance called back, although he had to admit, if only to himself, that it was hard to think of his boss in terms personal enough to refer to him by his first name.
That just wasn’t the way he operated.
* * *
“Well, you certainly look happy,” Chloe observed when Chance walked into the stable a little later that day.
She had arrived a few minutes ago and was saddling her horse. When she hadn’t seen Chance here, she’d begun to wonder if maybe he was tired of mentoring her and spending his late afternoon riding with her.
For her, these riding lessons had become the highlight of her day, but she could well understand if Chance was viewing them as time-consuming nuisances.
Then again maybe she was worried about nothing, Chloe thought, because he was here now and he was smiling.
“I am happy,” Chance declared, still running on the energy generated by what he felt had been an extremely successful pitch. It amounted to his first small victory in a long, long time.
He was still flying so high on his earlier exchange with Graham that he completely forgot all about being on his good behavior with Chloe—something he’d instituted for himself after that long kiss at the lake. Instead, he took hold of her shoulders and kissed her before he could think to stop himself.
He kissed her hard and with enthusiasm that melted into something more, something meaningful and soul searing. It was only after Chance unlocked his brain and began to think that he realized he’d done it again. He’d gotten carried away.
Chloe made it all too easy to do that.
Releasing her shoulders, Chance still didn’t step back immediately. Instead, he forced himself to look into Chloe’s eyes, half afraid he would see condemnation there, but nonetheless hoping against hope that what he would find there would be acceptance.
Having been soundly kissed by this handsome cowboy, Chloe found that, just like the first time, she had to struggle to get air in, struggle not to sound as if she were some addled-brained, incoherent groupie who had just been kissed for the first time.
It took her more than a second to find her mind, which had temporarily gone MIA. When she and her mind were reunited, she was finally able to question him. “Mind if I ask what’s made you so happy?”
“I just talked to Graham about the possibility of establishing another center like this one, to help returning veterans. You know, the ones who feel like they’re caught between two worlds and don’t really belong to either.”
It sounded like a noble suggestion to her, and she was proud of him for making it. “What did Graham say?” she wanted to know.
“That he’d look into it.” The paltry sentence didn’t begin to cover the hope he had attached to the proposed venture.
Chloe felt torn. Torn between being happy for Chance and being unhappy for herself. Because if this suggestion of his worked out and Graham went ahead with establishing a new companion facility to Peter’s Place, this one strictly for veterans, she knew that she’d lose Chance. He’d move on, just as she had been afraid he would.
She admonished herself for being selfish. This would help a lot of servicemen if it came to fruition. But she couldn’t quite help her emotions.
Feeling almost disloyal, she still had to ask, “Does that mean that you’ll be leaving here?”
He honestly hadn’t even considered that possibility. He just assumed that if the center he’d suggested turned out to be a separate one, it would still be built somewhere within the area. It had to be, he silently insisted.
“What? No,” he told her. “I don’t want to leave here.”
“But if you wind up running this new center for Graham,” she began, “wouldn’t you have to?”
But there was so much up in the air that Chance didn’t want to talk about it right now. And he silenced Chloe the only way he knew how.
By kissing her.
Chapter Thirteen
That kiss by the lake hadn’t been a fluke, Chloe realized. It hadn’t been just a one-time exhibition of fireworks going off within her and somehow managing to light the darkening skies. Because whatever she’d felt that evening when Chance had kissed her, right now she was feeling that and more.
So much more.
She was feeling almost too much, Chloe realized, a sliver of panic burrowing its way through to her consciousness.
Because of that, she was the one who called a halt to the kiss by drawing her head back. Pulling in air, she put her hands up against his chest to serve as a wedge between them.
When Chance looked at her quizzically, undoubtedly wondering why she’d stopped him, Chloe grasped at the first excuse that she could think of.
It was also true.
“Someone might walk in and see us,” she warned him breathlessly.
Chance blew out a breath. She was right. What had come over him? They were both in positions of authority when it came to the boys at the ranch. If one of the boys accidentally saw them behaving like hormone-driven teenagers, that wouldn’t exactly be the best kind of example for them.
“Right,” he murmured, striving to regain control over himself. He flashed her an apologetic look. “Don’t know what I was thinking.”
Actually, he knew exactly what he had been thinking. What he was still thinking. That more than anything, he wanted to take Chloe to his bed and make love with her.
But he wasn’t about to force his will on her, and if Chloe wasn’t interested in making love with him for one reason or another, then that was that.
End of story.
But was it? He couldn’t help thinking about that sunset on the lake—and the kiss they’d just shared now. He was certain that he wasn’t imagining things. Chloe had kissed him back—with as much feeling as he had experienced himself.
He was just going to have to be patient, he told himself.
“You were probably thinking that we’re both human,” Chloe said, answering his rhetorical question. “But right now we have to be more than that—for the sake of the boys,” she added emphatically. “They look at you as a father figure, you know,” she told him.
Since both horses were saddled and ready to ride, Chloe swung onto Mirabel’s back and pointed the mare toward the open stable doors.
“Father figure? I wouldn’t go that far,” Chance told her, easily mounting his stallion and following her out through the doors.
“I would.” She knew what it was like to desperately want a father figure in her life and was acquainted with the signs. She saw them in the four teens at Peter’s Place, in the way they interacted with Chance. “Because it’s true. I think it’s a good thing,” Chloe went on, seeing she needed to convince him. “All of them need a father figure in their lives. It’s an awful thing for a kid when that space is left empty.”
He was only vaguely aware of her backstory, her connection to the Fortunes. None of it was his business, he knew that, but he had the feeling that she wanted to talk, so he asked, “You lose your dad early?”
She laughed and he thought the sound was a bit hollow. It made him wonder about what she’d gone through, growing up.
“Yeah, really early,” she emphasized. “My father was gone before I was born.”
“Sorry for your loss,” Chance told her, echoing the phrase that people somehow thought was supposed to make up for the pain and cover every sentiment in between mourning and anger. He knew her father wasn’t dead, but if he’d been an absentee father, in a way, that was even worse.
Chance sounded genuinely sincere, Chloe thought, and she appreciated it. But the whole tale was just too sordid to get into right now. She was trying to find her purpose here, feeling better about herself because she was reaching out to these boys. For the most part, until just now, she’d managed to focus on the present and not the past.
“It wasn’t my loss, it was his.” Chloe said. “The man just ran for the hills when he found out my mom was pregnant with me, and he was never heard from again.”
She saw that Chance was struggling to find something appropriate to say to her—as if there was such a thing. Which there wasn’t.
“It’s okay,” she assured him. “I got over it. For a while there, I harbored hopes that he’d just come walking back into my life someday, like a scene in one of those ‘feel good’ movies—you know, the kind that never really happen in real life. But to be honest, I did miss having a father,” she admitted. “Until I turned about twelve.”
“What happened when you turned twelve?” he asked before he could stop himself.
He realized that perhaps this was going to get way too personal and she was going to tell him about some traumatic event that was better left unsaid. He didn’t feel he was equipped to offer her the kind of comfort she might deserve.
She tossed her head almost defiantly, sending her hair flying over her shoulder. “I decided that it was his loss if he wasn’t there, not mine.”
There was admiration in Chance’s laugh. “You know, you turned out to be a lot feistier than I first thought you were.”
“That’s what happens when you’ve got only one parent and you have to half raise yourself,” she told him. “Don’t get me wrong,” she quickly added. “I didn’t have the kind of childhood that Will had. I adored my mother and she was my best friend until the day she died. Heaven knew she tried her best to be both mother and father to me. But there were times, more than a few,” she admitted, “when I was acutely aware that I could have used having a father around, the way a lot of the other girls did.”
“So, does it feel any better now?” Chance wanted to know.
“Now?” she questioned, not sure what he was asking her.
He would have thought it was the first thing that came to her mind.
“Well, you’re part of the Fortune family now,” he reminded her. “That has got to feel different to you, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” she agreed. “In a way.” Chloe searched for the right words to make him understand what was happening and how she felt about it. “But to be honest, I’m not exactly being embraced by one and all and pressed to the bosom of my family.”
“Graham hired you.” He’d just assumed that was a sign that she’d been accepted.
“Yes,” she allowed. “And being a Fortune no doubt had something to do with that. But some of the others—the ones I met at a family dinner at Kate Fortune’s last month—they regard me as an outsider, an interloper they made clear they were on their guard against. I got the feeling they thought I wanted more from them than just their acceptance.” She was thinking of Sophie Fortune Robinson. The woman had been especially accusatory and downright unkind. Chloe was still trying to get over that ill-fated meeting because it had hurt so much.
And then it dawned on Chloe that she was talking too much, admitting too much. She didn’t ordinarily open up like this. Attempting to cover up her feelings, she shrugged.
“That’s okay,” she said, affecting a careless attitude. “I’ve been on my own for the most part for so long, I’m pretty used to it. It’s nice to have a family, but at this point, if for some reason that changes, I’m okay with that, too.”
Chance wasn’t buying the nonchalant act. There was a look in her eyes, a distant, wary, hurt look that he didn’t know if she was even aware of. But he was. And what it told him was that she had her guard up.
What it didn’t tell him was why. He had a feeling that it had something to do with whoever it was whom she had lost—he remembered the one time that she’d let that slip—but until she trusted him enough to really open up, he wouldn’t know anything for sure.
“Well, this still looks like a good spot,” he said when they came to a stop by the lake—the same exact place he had brought her to that day he’d first kissed her. “Feel like stopping here for a while?”
“Sure, why not?” Chloe thought it looked as perfect now as it had the first time, and it was quickly becoming her favorite place. Dismounting, she saw that Chance had already gotten off his horse and held a blanket in his hands.
“I thought we could just sit here and enjoy the sunset,” Chance told her, spreading the blanket on the ground.
“I guess we think alike,” she told him. When he stopped to look at her, a question in his eyes, she told him, “I packed a couple of sandwiches for us.” She took them out of her saddlebag, along with bottles of water.
They sat down on the blanket. Facing the lake, they watched the sun going progressively lower in the sky as they ate.
When they were finished, Chloe rolled the sandwich wrappers into a transparent ball. “It almost looks like the sun is sinking into the lake, doesn’t it?” she observed
in hushed awe as she looked on.
“Just gets better every time I see it,” Chance admitted.
His words seemed to linger in the air as he turned to look at her.
She told herself that she was imagining things, but it almost sounded as if Chance was applying the words to her as well as to the sunset.
She couldn’t help the flash of excitement that went through her veins.
“Does it?” she asked in a hushed whisper.
Chance started to answer.
Or thought he did.
But what he wound up doing was framing Chloe’s face with his hands and turning it up to his.
The next moment, he was kissing her again. Kissing her and losing himself in the taste of her mouth, the scent of her breath as she exhaled. Losing himself in the very essence of her.
The sun continued dipping down lower in the sky until it looked as if it was gracefully dancing along the lake’s edge, savoring one last moment before it finally vanished completely into the water.
Despite being in the presence of a magnificent display by nature, Chance was aware only of the woman in his arms. How she felt, how soft her lips were, how inviting the press of her body was against his.
And how much he wanted her.
The kisses grew longer.
And deeper.
As did his desire.
His body urged him to go faster, to take what was right there in front of him. But with effort, Chance forced himself to go slow, to not just enjoy her, but to give Chloe the opportunity to consider what was happening between them—and to say no at any point if it came to that for her.
Although he fervently hoped that she wouldn’t.
It was inevitable. The more he caressed her, familiarizing himself with every soft, inviting curve of her body, the more he wanted her.
His heart was hammering wildly as he drew Chloe beneath him on the blanket, slowly exploring every inch of her, finding pleasure in every inch of her and giving her the same pleasure.
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