by Imani King
Table of Contents
Epilogue
Tia
Dallas
Excerpt from 'Killian: Prince of Rhenland'
Coming Soon
About the Author
Other Books by Imani King:
The Cowboy’s Baby
A Small Town Montana Romance
Imani King
Contents
1. Tia
2. Dallas
3. Tia
4. Dallas
5. Tia
6. Dallas
7. Tia
8. Dallas
9. Tia
10. Dallas
11. Tia
12. Dallas
13. Tia
14. Dallas
15. Tia
16. Dallas
17. Tia
18. Dallas
Epilogue
Excerpt from 'Killian: Prince of Rhenland'
Coming Soon
About the Author
Other Books by Imani King:
Copyright © 2017 Imani King
All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 and over.
Kindle Edition
One
Tia
The horse's hair reminded me of a crow's feathers – so black it was almost blue under the scorching Montana sun. I reached out towards the massive beast, curious and just a little afraid – I'd never been that close to an animal of that stature before. The horse tossed its head and let out a snort, but it didn't move away when I flattened my palm against its smooth neck.
"HEY!"
I jumped. A tall man in dusty jeans, with the brim of a cowboy hat obscuring most of his face, was striding towards us.
"Don't touch him, he's not friendly," he snapped.
I looked at the horse, and then at the man, waiting for him to say something else. He was silent, though, untying the reins and ignoring me completely.
"He didn't seem to mind," I said tersely, offended at being yelled at by a complete stranger.
"What was that?"
The man didn't even look up when he spoke to me. Irritated, I repeated myself, louder that time.
"I said, he didn't seem to mind."
No answer. Who the hell was this jerk? And why did he think it was OK to snap at people for petting an animal tied up in a public place? I turned and watched him load about twenty cans of soup and a bottle of shampoo into a leather satchel slung across the horse's back, still awaiting a response – or an apology. None was forthcoming, but I found myself suddenly distracted by something else about the surly stranger: he was hot. Not the designer jeans and trendy haircut kind of hot, either, which was the kind I was used to. This one was country-boy hot. Thick stubble covered a strong, sharp jaw-line and the ratty old t-shirt he was wearing did absolutely nothing to hide the sort of muscularity you just don't get from working out in an air-conditioned gym four times a week.
I'd never seen a man like him in my life. And I confess, the thought did run through my mind that if they were all like this in River Bend, Montana, I might not miss the city so much after all. Still, he'd been rude, and I wasn't about to start giggling and fidgeting with my hair just because something about the cleft in his chin made my knees weak.
I stepped back a little, thinking that maybe he would say something when the cans of soup were all put away, but he didn't even glance at me. He pulled himself into the saddle and gave the horse a little nudge in the ribs. I couldn't hold back anymore.
"Well he certainly seems friendlier than you!"
The man pulled back on the reins, then, and turned to look back at me, finally giving me a clear view of his face. And oh my God, what a face. Piercing blue eyes stared down at me and a smile I wasn't quite sure I'd call friendly played at one corner of his mouth.
"You're not from around here, are you?" he asked, in a tone that suggested he couldn't care less where I was from – and that I was lucky he'd bothered taking a few seconds out of his day to scold me like a child.
"I – uh, no, I'm not," I stammered, frowning with annoyance at my own inability to remain unflustered around hot, ill-mannered men.
"Well there's no need to get your panties in a twist, missy, although I can see it's too late for that. Ranger here is a stallion – I was just trying to keep you from getting knocked on your pretty little ass."
Missy. He called me missy. He also accused me of being the one with my panties in a twist – which didn't really seem to be a fair take on the situation, in my opinion.
"I can see he's a horse!" I spluttered. "I'm not an idiot."
"Not a horse," the man corrected me, speaking slowly like he wasn't sure I was all there. "A stallion."
"A stallion is a horse," I responded.
"Ah, so you're not from around here. City girl, huh? Yeah, well, you're right in a way. He's a horse. But he still has his balls. Do you know what that means?"
I glanced up, shielding my eyes from the bright sunshine and entirely taken aback by the abruptness of the handsome stranger who seemed, for some reason, rather eager to tell me about his horse's balls. "No," I replied shortly.
"It means he's temperamental. Take away a horse's balls and he gets all cuddly and docile. Don't take away his balls and, well, you get something else. So there's no need to give me attitude, I was just trying to help."
"Oh is that what you were trying to do? Help? Well you could have fooled me."
I waited, still half-expecting an apology. Instead of offering one, the man shrugged, tipped his hat at me in what felt very much like a sarcastic gesture, and turned the horse around. I watched him as he left, trying – and failing utterly – to think of some smart remark to throw his way. He looked good riding the horse. At ease, the way men are when they know what they're doing. When he was gone there was an odd feeling of disappointment. Really? I asked myself. Really? You're disappointed that jackass is gone?
Shaking my head, I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check the shopping list my great-aunt Jenny had given me, and headed into the only grocery store there was in the town of River Bend. Once inside, I paused and stood, for a few delicious moments, in the cool rush of air-conditioned air on my sweaty skin.
"Don't worry about him," came a voice from behind me. "Dallas Corbett is a jerk to everyone. No one likes him. And he brings that damned animal into town all the time – one of these days it's going to attack another horse and then he's really going to be up shit creek."
It was the checkout girl, sitting at her till with a women's magazine open on her lap. I smiled at the 'up shit creek' phrasing and then, for some reason, looked right at her and asked who she was talking about, even though I knew perfectly well. The urge to pretend Dallas wasn't having any effect on me showed itself early.
"Dallas – the guy with the horse," she replied. "Don't pay him any mind. I didn't even have to hear a word to know he was pulling his usual tough-guy act. Don't get me wrong, he's hot as hell, but it ain't much good being that hot if everyone thinks you're a dick, is it? Say, are you new here?"
Finally, I appeared to be meeting one of the friendly country-folk everyone back in Philly had told me about when they were trying to make me feel better about my forced exile from the only place I'd ever called home.
"Yeah," I responded, feeling a familiar – and unwelcome – sting of tears in my eyes. I blinked them away. "Yes, I'm new. I'm staying with Jenny and John Dawkins, my great-aunt and great-uncle."
The checkout girl eyed me curiously. "Really? Huh. We don't get too many newcomers in River Bend. When did you get in?"
"Two days ago."
"You here all summer?"
I pressed my lips together tightly and willed the emotions – still so prone to surfacing at awkward moments – back down. "Um, I'm not sure. Definitely for the summer. Maybe longer..."
"Well I'm Amber," the checkout girl said, tucking a lock of straw-blonde hair behind one ear. "There aren't too many young people in town so if you want to come out with me and some friends on Friday, that'd be cool."
Grief is a strange thing. One day you're standing in front of two coffins, dry-eyed and emotionally blank, unable to even understand what you're experiencing. Weeks later, you find yourself standing in front of a stranger in a brightly-lit grocery store, struggling to keep from breaking into loud, ugly sobs over a simple gesture of kindness.
"Yes," I whispered, scuttling away in a panic before she could see that I was crying. "That would be nice."
Safely ensconced in the cereal aisle, I took a few deep breaths and wiped the tears off my cheeks with trembling fingers. Don't think about it. Just get the groceries. If you need to do this, do it when you're alone.
Two
Dallas
I arrived home hot and agitated from my trip into town. It was that girl's fault, although I wasn't quite sure why she'd gotten to me the way she had – lord knows I was used to hostile locals. So why had she put such a bee in my bonnet? Maybe it was Ranger and his uncharacteristic docility. Ranger doesn't really let anyone touch him – anyone except me, anyway, and even then it's only when he feels like it. But I'd seen the girl before she saw me, I'd watched her reach out and put one of her little hands on my mercurial stallion, and then I'd watched him react with what almost looked like contentment.
Jealousy, that must have been it. I'm a possessive man and I'd be lying if I said I didn't like the fact that the only person Ranger deigned to tolerate was me. He'd let her touch him, though. Let her pet him. Like he was some soft-ass gelding up at the Henson's riding school.
The cupboards, after I'd neatly stacked the cans of soup on the shelves with all of their labels aligned and facing outwards, looked marginally less bare than usual. There was cold beer in the fridge, too, but I had cattle to water and a fence to check before I could even think about drinking beer. Beau, my cattle-dog cross, was at my feet looking up at me hopefully.
"Alright boy," I addressed him, scratching his thick ears. "Let's go see about getting those critters watered."
It was quarter past four in the afternoon when the three of us – Ranger, Beau and myself – headed out onto the Corbett Ranch property to check on the livestock. The sun was just beginning to sink down towards the horizon and the light was golden, illuminating the wings of the insects that flew up in front of us as Ranger made his way across the dry grass.
"Did you like that girl?" I asked my horse – because yes, I talk to my animals all the time. In my experience, they're generally much better listeners than people. "Huh? Did you? You got a weakness for city girls that I don't know about, Ranger?"
You might think it was a lonely life out there in a small town nestled right up against the edge of the Rockies. I wouldn't use the word 'lonely.' Peaceful, maybe. As peaceful as it was possible for my life to be. Quiet. I like peace and quiet. Two tours in Iraq will do that to a man. I left the States for the first time at eighteen, craving action and excitement in the way only teenage boys can. When I came back my fiancée was gone, her belly already swollen with another man's baby, and my family didn't exactly cover themselves in glory trying to understand that the world was, for me, a very different place after the war.
Maybe I'm being ungrateful, I don't know. They tried, in their own way, but so much of it rang hollow. The yellow ribbons on the trees at the family estate and the 'My Son Is A US Marine' Facebook posts sat uneasily with the memories of my parents balking whenever I tried to talk about the war in a way that didn't fit their simplistic narrative. After my second tour, after seeing things that no man can fail to be changed by, and after losing my best friend to a sniper's bullet, it was like the United States was no longer a place I recognized. Like the fragility of life was something no one around me understood.
I tried. I tried for quite a while. After an incident at a family party that ended with me shoving one of my dad's best friends up against the garage door and nearly choking him out, it was time to leave. My family had owned the ranch in Montana since before I was born, and it had been willed to me by my great-grandfather, to be signed over on my eighteenth birthday. It just seemed obvious that River Bend was the place to go. Somewhere where no one knew me, somewhere I could be alone with my animals and my thoughts, a place where life moved at a slower pace.
So did I get lonely? Sometimes, maybe. But there was a bar in town, a bar that always had a couple of single women – usually tourists on their way to somewhere else – in it. I got my needs met when they arose, let's put it that way. Mostly, though, River Bend and the Corbett Ranch were a sanctuary to me.
In the distance, I heard the sound of cattle. Beau heard it too, taking off like a shot across the rolling ground as I dismounted Ranger and got to refilling the water troughs.
"Easy boy," I called as the dog ran circles around the steers. "They're already thirsty, they don't need any more convincin' from you."
When the troughs were filled and the cattle were drinking their fill, I lay down in the shade of a tree and looked up at the sunlight filtering through the leaves. It was a hot afternoon, which was fine by me – I like the heat. Usually, I'd have myself a nap before heading back to the cabin. That afternoon, something else was keeping my mind occupied. That girl – the one outside Parson's Grocery. Why had Ranger seen fit to be so sweet with her?
I thought of the surprised look on her face when I'd spoken to her like she wasn't a pretty girl and chuckled to myself. Women, man. Turns out you can live without them, as long as you schedule brief visits every now and again.
Half an hour later I woke up suddenly, instantly alert the way I always am upon waking. I'd been dreaming. The kind of dream that makes it so you have to stay in bed for a little longer than you expected, if you know what I mean. It was her – and the image in my mind's eye, of her sweet, curvy little body perched on my lap as I buried my face in her tits hadn't fully faded yet. I glanced down at the hard-on straining against my jeans, and surprised the hell out of myself by considering a jerk-off session under the tree, in full view of the cattle.
That wasn't like me. My life was pretty well-regulated by then, and that definitely included sex. When I needed it, I got it. When I needed it and the bar was empty or closed, I did it myself. But I wasn't going to do it out there, in the middle of a goddamned field. Still, though. It was a close one.
I got to my feet and tried to will the beast to stand down, but he wasn't having any of it. So that's how I rode back to the cabin, with a hard-on that refused to settle in my pants and a distracting ache in my balls.
When I got in I dumped one of the cans of soup into a saucepan and put it on the stove, trying to think about anything but the way that girl's tank top had clung to the ripe curves of her body. Soup. That's what I could think about. I ate too much of the stuff, because the truth was, if it was anything more complicated than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I couldn't do it. Domesticity is not my skill-set. Still, I should have made an effort to eat more food that didn't come out of a can and smell vaguely like something you might feed a cat.
Fuck. Thinking about my nutritional ne
eds wasn't helping. I stirred soup with one hand and tried to adjust my cock into a more comfortable position with the other. A couple of minutes later I gave up, turned the oven off and climbed up to the loft, unzipping my jeans before I'd even hit the bed.
I thought about her lips – full, sensuous and curved into an offended pout. Just the kind of lips you want to think about parting slightly as a helpless little sigh escapes from between them. I thought about the tone of her voice, too. Feisty and confident. How sweet would it be to hear that voice dissolve into a soft moan as I slipped my hand into her panties? I wrapped my hand around my own thick length and closed my eyes, concentrating on that thought, on how she would sound, on the wetness I would discover there, warm and slippery and inviting.
It didn't take long. In fact it was so quick it surprised even me. I lay there afterwards, catching my breath and feeling for a brief moment like I was fifteen again and so horny I couldn't even think about taking my time. Then I cleaned up and went back downstairs to my soup, my stomach growling with hunger by then. Whoever that girl had been, with her dark eyes and her luscious body, I knew the odds were I was never going to see her again. She was probably halfway to Washington State already, or northern California or wherever it was she was heading – and none the wiser about the effect she'd had on me.
Three
Tia
My great-aunt Jenny set a bowl of steaming oatmeal down in front of me and patted me on the shoulder as she hovered worriedly.
"Have some breakfast," she urged me. "You need to eat, Tia."
A week ago, I had never met the woman sitting across the table from me. She was in her sixties, tall and thin like my father, and I could tell she had no idea what to do with me. Unfortunately for her and her husband, they were the only family I had left, and they were stuck with me for the foreseeable future.
