The Rancher's Baby

by Maisey Yates

  She didn’t want to stop. Not now.

  He tried to pull away again but she moved her hands down, clapping them over his muscular ass and holding him to her. She shook her head, her lips still fused to his.

  He said nothing. Then he just continued on, slowly withdrawing from her body before thrusting back inside. He shuddered, lowering his head, his forehead pressed to hers. And she recognized the moment where whatever reservations he’d had were washed away by his own tide of need.

  She’d had an orgasm already; he had not.

  “Yes,” she whispered as he began to move inside of her. As he began to establish a steady, luxurious rhythm that erased the pain she had felt only a moment before.

  She wrapped her legs around his narrow hips, urging him on, chasing the pleasure she had felt before. And it began to build, low and deep inside of her, a band of tension that increased in intensity, drawing her closer to a second release. But this one seemed to come from somewhere deeper.

  This time, when she shattered, it was just as he did, as his muscles tensed and his body shuddered, as his own orgasm washed through her, his thick, heavy cock pulsing as he spilled himself into her.

  And when it was over, they lay there gasping, and she knew she was never going to be the same again. That there was no getting anyone out of her system. That her need for him would never change.

  But along with that realization came a deep sense of peace. One that she was sure would vanish. But for now, she clung to it. For now, she clung to it and him, because reality would hit soon enough.

  And she was in no hurry.

  Because she had a feeling as soon as the afterglow receded there would be questions. She had a feeling there were in fact going to be quite a few follow-up questions. And what she really hadn’t thought through in this moment was that there were going to be a lot of questions about Will.

  She closed her eyes. Of course, she had already alluded to the fact that their marriage wasn’t everything it seemed. So maybe Knox wouldn’t be completely shocked. Maybe.

  Well, even if he was—maybe that wasn’t the end of the world. Maybe it was time to share the truth with him. She had closed him off. And now... Now he had been inside her body. So maybe that time was over. Maybe she just needed to go for it.

  There was only one way to find out.

  “Yes,” she said, finding courage from deep inside that she hadn’t realized existed. “I was a virgin.”

  He swore and moved away from her. She looked over at him just in time to see him scrubbing his hands over his face in what one might be forgiven for assuming was despair.

  She folded her hands and rested them on her bare stomach, staring up at the canvas ceiling. “I assume you have queries.”

  “Yes,” he responded. “I have several.”

  “Well,” she said. “My marriage to Will wasn’t real. I mean, we were never in a relationship.”

  “Never?” He treated her to a long hard look.

  “No,” she said. “We were never in a relationship at all. It was purely to help me get the trust-fund money.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me? You could have picked either of your friends to help you out with this and you asked him?”

  Panic fluttered in her breast and she took a deep breath, trying to tap it down. She wasn’t going to tell him that she hadn’t asked because she couldn’t face the possibility that living with him wouldn’t have felt fake to her. She wasn’t going to bring up her feelings at all. “I just... Look what happened with my friendship with Will afterward. Don’t tell me I was wrong in trying to protect our friendship from problems like that. Choosing Will seemed necessary. Marrying him seemed like the only thing I could do to make sure that you and I were going to be okay. You were always more important to me, Knox. I just didn’t...”

  “That’s bullshit, Selena,” he said. “I know it is. Give me a straight answer.”

  “Why?” she asked. “I don’t want to give you a straight answer. Because there is no good answer.”

  “I want the truth.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I was afraid we would end up like this.” She swept her arm up and down, indicating their nudity. “I didn’t worry about that with Will. Not at all. It was just never like that between us. I never had those feelings for him.”

  “You had them for me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s kind of obvious, considering we are lying here naked.”

  “But even back then?” he asked.

  He’d already confessed to being attracted to her, but she hadn’t handed out a similar confession. For her it felt so raw. So deep.

  “I wanted you. But I knew I wasn’t in a position to have you. I thought maybe someday... And then...marrying Will was a bad choice, Knox. And it’s one I’ve never been particularly interested in interrogating. It ruined a lot of things.”

  “About the time you got divorced I was with Cassandra.”

  “Yes,” she said. “In a lot of ways, I was grateful for that. Because it helped us preserve our friendship. I don’t regret that neither of us made a move. I feel like it was actually better. I feel like if it had happened when we were young, we wouldn’t have been able to...process this. We wouldn’t have been able to separate the attraction from the friendship.”

  “And you think we can now?”

  “I think we’re both tired,” she said, obviously. “I think we’re both fatigued after spending a long time denying what we wanted. It’s a pattern. In both of our lives. I’m not going to pretend to compare my struggle to yours. I’m really not. But...why fight this? We both wanted it. And for the first time, we’re in a place where we can both take it. It was always wrong, and maybe in the future it will be wrong again. Maybe it will just naturally fade away.”

  “Is that what you really believe?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. I believe this is something we can work out. This is something we can have.”

  “But... Hell, Selena,” he said. “You’ve really never been with another guy?”

  “No. I was really busy. I was really busy growing the company and...”

  “Yeah, usually that’s the kind of thing people say when they miss a lot of coffee dates. Not when they just kind of forgot to have sex ever.”

  Now this, she could not be honest about. She was not going to have a discussion with him about how no man had ever seemed to measure up to him in her mind.

  Because that was beyond sad.

  “It really wasn’t something that mattered to me. And then... Over the past few weeks with you...” She cleared her throat. “I’m attracted to you. I always have been. But it’s not something I dwell on. I mean, you were married to somebody else. You had another life. And I always respected that. I did. What you had with Cassandra... I would never have dreamed of encroaching on it. I care about you like a friend, and I kind of want to tear your clothes off and bite you like a crazed lioness, and those two things are separate. But there was never any crazed lioness fantasies while you were married.” That was a little lie. There was the occasional fantasy, but she had known she could never act on it.

  He paused for a moment, then placed his hand on her. “So your attraction went dormant?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Your marriage was the winter of our attraction. It hibernated.”

  “Your libido hibernated,” he said, his tone bland.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And my burrow was work. Work and friends and establishing my life in Royal.” She let out a heavy sigh. “I never wanted to get married and have a family,” she admitted. “My father was... You know he was difficult. And it’s...” She knew it was time to share everything. They were naked, after all. They were naked and he had just taken her virginity, and there really were very few secrets left between them. But the last one was hers. She was holding it. She had to give it up.

  �
��My father used to beat us. He was violent. His temper was unpredictable. We walked like there was broken glass under our feet all the time. Doing the very best we could not to bring that temper up. It was terrible. Terrifying. I will never, ever submit myself to that kind of thing again.”

  “So is that why you avoided relationships?”

  “I would say that’s why they weren’t a priority. I’m not sure that I avoided them. I just didn’t pursue them.”

  “You’re being difficult.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “I reserve the right to be difficult. I can be difficult now. That’s the beauty of life on your own terms.”

  “And you think that’s the key to happiness?” he asked, brushing his knuckles idly over her hip. It was a question void of judgment, but it made her chest feel weird all the same. Mostly because she’d never thought of it in those terms.

  “It’s a luxury. One that I appreciate. That’s why I was so desperate to marry Will,” she said. “Because I needed that money. Because I needed to be able to control my life. Because if I couldn’t, then I was always going to be under my father’s thumb.”

  “He hit you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “All the time. For anything. For attitude, disrespect. For not complying with his wishes when he wanted us to. We didn’t have any control. We had to be the perfect family. His perfect wife. His perfect daughter. He didn’t want me to go to college. He didn’t want me to have any kind of autonomy at all. My grandfather is the one who helped me enroll in Harvard. But then he died. And I knew I wasn’t going to find any more support. I wasn’t going to have the resources for college. I was going to have to go back home, Knox, and I couldn’t face that. I didn’t want to need my father again. Ever. And I needed to get my hands on that trust fund in order to make that happen. In order to protect myself. To protect my mother. After I got it, I moved her out of the house. I installed her somewhere he couldn’t get to her. I did everything I could do with my money to make sure we were never beholden to him again.”

  He shifted, tightening his hold on her. “I didn’t know it was that bad.” His words were like ground glass, sharp and gritty, and it gratified her to know that Knox was holding her tight with murder on his mind, because he couldn’t stand the thought of her being hurt.

  She was right to trust him.

  “We all have our own struggles,” she said, working to keep her tone casual. “I never wanted anyone to look at me like I was broken. Like I needed to be treated gently. I’ve always felt strong. Growing up that way, I had to be. But I protect what I have. I protect what’s mine.

  “You can see how our relationship, love, all of that never figured into my plans. I could never see myself submitting to a man controlling my life. To anyone controlling my life. To love controlling my life. Because that was my experience. It took so much for my mother to leave because she loved him, not just because she was afraid of him. Because part of her wanted to make it work. Wanted to find the man she had once known. The one who had made her fall for him in the first place. No matter how much I tried to tell her that man never existed, it was difficult for her to accept.”

  Selena took a deep breath before continuing, “She refused to press charges in the end. She used to cry. And say that I ruined her life by breaking up the marriage. By sending her to live in Manhattan, far away from him, and safely ensconced in an apartment there. She would think about going back to him, and it was only her fear that kept her away. She skips therapy all the time, no matter how many appointments I set up. I just... I never wanted to be that creature. Ever.”

  Knox grabbed hold of her chin, met her gaze. “You never could be.”

  She reached up, curled her fingers over his wrist and held his arm steady. “Any of us can be. At least, that’s what I think. One step in the wrong direction and you’re on that path, and at some point you’re too many steps in, and you can’t imagine going back. I’ve never thought I was above anything. I’ve never thought I was too good, too smart... Because that’s not it. That’s not what does it. We can all get bound up in it.”

  He looked genuinely stricken by that. “I never thought of it like that,” he admitted.

  “I know. It’s human nature to want to believe people are at fault for their own bad situations. And often times they are complicit. But I don’t think it was a fundamental personality flaw that made my mother stay with my father. It was fear of change. A fear of losing what she had. Because what if she ended up with less?”

  “But she stayed in a house with a man who hit her daughter. You might be able to excuse that, Selena, but I don’t think I can.”

  She looked away from him. “Sometimes I have a hard time with that. I won’t lie to you. I can’t have a relationship with my father. He’s not a good man. He hurt me. He hurt my mother. He was made of rage that had nothing to do with us. I’m convinced it had everything to do with some kind of anger at himself. But whatever it was, it’s nothing I want touching my life. So yes. I feel like I could be angry at her. Maybe I would even be justified. Because you’re right. She did stay. Her fear was bigger than her desire to take action to get us out. In the end, my fear of living in that hell forever is what made me take action. And I just... We are out. And I don’t have the energy for anger anymore. I want to have at least one relationship with one family member that isn’t toxic. I want to heal what I can.”

  “That’s pretty damned big of you,” he said.

  She laughed, lifting her shoulder. “Sure, but then, I also don’t want to have a romantic relationship, so I’m emotionally scarred in other ways.”

  “I can appreciate that.”

  Silence fell over them and she allowed herself to fully take in the moment. The fact that she was lying there, skin to skin with her best friend. With the man she had fantasized about all of her life. She had told him everything. She had finally laid bare all the secrets she had been so scared to roll out. But on the heels of sharing everything came the revelation she had been working on avoiding. The real reason she had been afraid of confiding in him all this time.

  It wasn’t just that she cared for him. It wasn’t just that she was attracted to him. She was in love with Knox McCoy, and she always had been. In love with a man she could never allow herself to have, because she had sworn that she would never get involved in those kinds of relationships.

  And she was such a fool. Because she had been in love with him from the moment he had first walked into her life. She had thought she could keep him as a friend, and ignore the bigger feelings, the deeper feelings, but that was a lie. There was no avoiding it. There never had been.

  But she didn’t tell him that. She had let out all her other secrets and replaced them with another. One that she hoped he would never discover.

  Because as horrifying as it was to admit to herself that she was in love with him, it would be even worse to have him know and have him reject her.

  So she laid her head on his chest and focused on the rhythm of his heartbeat, on the way his skin felt beneath hers.

  It wasn’t love. But for now, maybe it was enough.

  Nine

  They finished out the trail ride the next day in relative silence. Knox was saddle sore, because it had been a while since he had ridden a horse. And it had been a while since he had ridden a woman. But he and Selena had definitely indulged themselves the entire night. He still wasn’t sure what to make of any of it. Of the fact that he’d made love to his best friend, of the fact that she had been a virgin.

  Yeah, he didn’t even the hell know. But things weren’t terribly awkward, which was a miracle in and of itself.

  When they arrived back at Paradise Farms he noticed that Selena was pretty cagey with Scarlett as they deposited the horses and thanked her for the generous loan.

  “She knew, didn’t she?” Selena asked when they got back into the car and headed down the highway.<
br />
  “Do you think so?”

  “Well, I wonder, because she obviously knew the tent only had one bed.”

  He chuckled. “So you think she was trying to set you up?”

  “I think she was trying to set you up,” she said. “She thought you seemed sad.”

  “I am,” he responded, his tone dry. The answer more revealing than he’d intended it to be. He had meant to make the comment kind of light, but it was difficult for him to keep it light these days.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t apologize,” he said. “There’s no damned reason to. You didn’t do anything. Nobody did.”

  “I’m not apologizing, not really. I’m just sorry that life is so messed up.”

  He huffed out a laugh. “You and me both. I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do with a bunch of broken pieces,” he said, the words torn from him. “When they’re all you have left. When you had this full, complete life and then suddenly it’s just gone. I don’t know what the hell you’re supposed to do with that.”

  “I don’t either,” she commented. “I really don’t. I guess you try to make a new life, new things. Out of the broken bits.”

  “I don’t think I have the desire or the energy,” he said.

  “What’s the alternative?” she asked, her voice hushed. “I’m not trying to be flippant. I’m asking a serious question. If you don’t rebuild, what do you do? Just sit there in the rubble? Because I think you deserve a hell of a lot more than that.”

  “What’s the point? Everything you do, everything you are, can be taken from you.” He didn’t know what had gotten him into such a dire place. He’d just had sex for the first time in years and now suddenly they were talking about the fragility of life. “All these things you make your identity out of. Husband. Father. Billionaire. They’re just things. They get taken from you, and then what? It’s like you said about your mother last night. You lose sight of who you are, and then you’re just afraid of what will be left. Once you lose those titles that defined you then...then there’s just nothing. That’s how it feels. Like I’m standing on a hell of a lot of nothing. Somehow I’m not in a free fall...but I don’t trust this will last. I don’t trust that the whole world won’t just fall apart again.”