by Ana Lewin
It was a joke, but one that made him nearly choke on his saliva. In the time they’d been sleeping together Olivia had gotten a lot cruder as if he’d coaxed it right out of her. “Now that you mention it I think I have to give a couple of guys a tour of the place this morning too,” he grumbled, hauling his ass out of bed and smiling to himself when he noticed her eyes trained on his ass.
Good to know there was still a bit of novelty to having him naked in front of her, even after all of their naked time together in the past weeks. He had to hope that she would enjoy the sight for a long time ahead.
Then again, neither of them knew how long ahead their relationship would continue. They’d done nothing to technically define it. For all intents and purposes they were just sleeping together. But of course it felt like a lot more than that. Olivia came up to press herself against his half-naked body while he was still deep in his thoughts, pulling him out of it. One quick kiss later and she was gone, bouncing down to the kitchen to hopefully get some kind of real breakfast before she had the lesson.
***
“Off to the right there we have some of our horses. One of our volunteers is doing her lesson with Levi at the moment, but I’m sure you’ll get a chance to talk with him as soon as he’s done. It’ll give us a chance to finish the whole tour,” Grant droned on, trying to make the tour as interesting as possible. He wasn’t sure how good of a job he was doing, considering the three men behind him were in their early twenties and looked to have little to no interest in anything related to ranch life. Why the hell did these guys even want to learn how to ride horses? Was it some kind of dare? A bucket list item?
He didn’t ask, simply veering off in the direction of the barn until he realized that he didn’t have three twenty-something men following him anymore. Instead they were huddling beside the fence of the training area, watching Olivia in a way that made him grit his teeth and take a deep, calming breath. It wasn’t like they knew she belonged to him. She was an attractive woman, and it made sense for guys like these three to be interested in her. “Sorry, guys, but we try not to crowd the training area. Makes the horses and riders uncomfortable. Let’s head on with the tour.”
One of the guys looked at him and cocked an eyebrow, jerking his head in Olivia’s direction. On the other side of the training area she was far enough away that she wouldn’t hear them unless they were yelling, especially not when she had Levi in her ear giving her constant tips on her riding form. “You said she was a volunteer?” Grant nodded stiffly. “Any idea if she’s single?”
“I don’t believe she is. Now we really should continue with the tour if we’re going to stay on track here.”
Even the information that she wasn’t single didn’t do much to dissuade the guys from looking at her. They were checking out her ass and tits as she bounced while riding, making him fume at the idea that anyone other than him was looking at her. He hadn’t been planning on telling these guys that he was the one fucking her, but it appeared that it might actually be necessary to drag them away and stop him from committing a very serious crime. “If you’re done ogling my girlfriend, I’d love to introduce you to some of the horses that we have in the barn right now,” he made sure to say it loudly enough that they could easily hear, and three sets of confused eyes turned in his direction.
“Sorry, did you just say she’s your girlfriend?” the one who’d asked if she was single spoke again, tone laced with disbelief. “You seem a little old for her.”
“And you seem a little inexperienced considering what she likes,” he shouldn’t be saying this, but here he was. Talking shit to this man who was a potential customer, one that the ranch honestly probably needed. What else was he supposed to say in response to a comment like that, though? “Age doesn’t really matter all that much.”
“Sure, man,” he seemed skeptical, but shrugged and turned away from the training area. “As long as your dick still works I’m sure she’s happy with you.”
Grant was seconds away from punching the man in the face for that comment when a hand came down heavily on his shoulder. “Boss, there’s a call for you in the office,” it was Oscar, glaring down at the men Grant had been talking to with a level of intimidation that Grant simply couldn’t possess. Oscar had four inches on his already six-foot frame and a wide chest that indicated he could take down anyone who tried to start a fight. “I can finish taking these three on their tour and set them up to chat with Levi after he’s done with Liv’s lesson.”
Somehow Grant doubted that there was actually a phone call for him, but he started to haul ass to the office regardless. “Really appreciate it, Oscar. Hope this call is important if it’s interrupting my tour.”
He wasn’t sure if anyone believed him when he implied that he’d actually wanted to finish the tour. It didn’t matter. Right now he needed to go calm himself down so he didn’t start a fistfight.
As he’d expected when he got to the office there was no call waiting on the line. In fact, there was no one in the office at all. Sometimes Finn hung around this area, but Grant was particularly grateful not to see him at this exact moment. The office door pulled tightly closed and locked behind him, he finally had the chance to let his anger through. “Fucking assholes,” he grumbled under his breath, running a hand through his hair and pulling at it. “As long as my dick still works? Who the fuck says that to someone they don’t even know?”
But the more he ran the words from the conversation over and over in his mind the more he worried. Sure, his cock worked fine now. What about in ten years? He’d be in his forties, wasn’t that when some men started having problems? In ten years Olivia would only be twenty-nine, still in the prime of her life.
Then again, would they even make it that long? The sex was like nothing he’d ever had before and he’d overheard Olivia gushing about it on the phone once too, so he knew it was good for her. A relationship wasn’t just sex, though. And they’d spent precious little time actually talking about what they both wanted out of life. He knew what he wanted — to live on the ranch for the rest of his life, hopefully with little kids running around eventually. Olivia, though… he vaguely remembered her mentioning something about going to school for Agricultural Science. Was that even something she could do here or was the closest university to offer it too far away?
“We need to have a conversation,” he said to himself as he picked up a pad of sticky notes and a pen. At the top of the list he wrote the word ‘Future?’ and circled it. Below it, he wrote every damn question they should have asked each other from the beginning, before that first time they’d slept together and definitely before she’d started sleeping in his room every damn night.
The list ended up being three sticky notes long.
Chapter 10
Olivia
She couldn’t help but notice the exchange that had gone down at the edge of the training area. Three men, closer to her age than Grant’s, had been staring at her. She’d felt a chill go up her spine as the looks made her increasingly uncomfortable, but she tried to remember that she was used to it. Obliviousness was the best idea when it came to men that you weren’t interested in, and she’d learned that the hard way from years of charity galas. Men tended to get upset if you turned them down after they’d made their interest obvious.
So she’d kept her focus on her training, drowning out any discomfort she felt with the feeling of the wind in her hair as she rode Daisy back and forth across the field. If she was being honest, she was still shocked that she’d been able to pick up any riding skills at all. “You’ve been doing great recently,” Levi commented when they finished, and she was grateful when a glance told her the three men were no longer hovering outside the ring.
“Thank you,” she said, offering him a smile as she dismounted. “I have a great teacher, after all.”
He chuckled but didn’t dispute the praise, not that she was expecting him to. One thing she’d learned about Levi in the time they’d known each other was that
he basked in praise. She was fairly certain he wouldn’t be able to live without it. “Did you hear that Bri’s fiance cheated on her and she called off the wedding? You mentioned that you met her a couple of times, right?”
Heart stuttering a little bit in her chest, she shrugged. “Yeah, a couple of times. She didn’t seem like the nicest person, but no one deserves that.”
Levi snorted. “You don’t know her that well. Bri deserves that and more, especially considering how badly she broke Grant’s heart three years ago. I’m finding it hilarious that karma is coming right around to bite her in the ass.”
“Did she cheat on him when they were together?”
“Never been officially proven, but I’m willing to bet yes. I think Grant would say she didn’t, but that might just be some wishful thinking on his part. And besides, even without cheating on him she used him. Made him a bunch of promises that she’d never intended to keep when she went to New York. I don’t want to know how much money she got from him during their three years together. Grant’s never officially done the math, but I would have as soon as her ass walked out that door.”
It was obvious that Levi didn’t like Bri, and even more obvious that she’d been terrible to Grant. But at the back of Olivia’s mind one thought wouldn’t leave her alone: what if Grant wanted her back? Now that she was single, the woman would more than likely be all over him, whether she thought of him as a rebound or a meal ticket. “Were most of Grant’s previous girlfriends like Bri?” she asked. “High class, gorgeous, around his age. Bitchy.”
Running a hand along his bald head, Levi shrugged. “Yeah, I guess they were mostly like Bri. Grant’s dating history has a ridiculous amount of bitchy women around his age, and they all had gold-digging tendencies. But Bri was the worst of the lot.”
“How so?”
“She’s a master at putting up a front. She made him believe that she was in love with him and that she would put her dreams of living in New York on the back-burner so that they could be together. Instead of doing that, she lived free of any kind of housing payments for two years while working and saved all of her money for the move behind his back. While he was also buying her frivolous things like expensive purses and jewelry.”
Levi sounded downright disgusted, but even with his negative account of Brianna she was getting more and more worried. If the woman was a master manipulator… well, it wouldn’t exactly be difficult to tear Grant away from her. What was Olivia doing to keep him, really? They weren’t even officially together. Maybe that was because Grant didn’t want to be. Half-heartedly listening to Levi list off all of Bri’s negative qualities, she finished brushing down Daisy in the barn and then offered her teacher a faint smile. “Sorry, gotta go. I promised a friend I would call today.”
He didn’t look all too convinced, but they weren’t close enough for him to ask if anything was wrong. She was grateful for that, especially because she didn’t know if anything was wrong. It was entirely possible that this was all in her head, some fantasy she’d made up as an excuse to distance herself from Grant.
The men who had been watching her during her lesson were waiting just outside the barn, huddled close together but breaking apart to offer her insincere smiles when they saw her. “Hey sweetheart, I’m David. What’s your name?” one of the men sauntered up, holding out his hand.
Now, she remembered what she’d said before. Obliviousness worked best to keep men off your back. But after getting so far into her head she didn’t have the brainpower to pretend to be unaware of their come-ons. Stepping a few feet back, she offered him a faint smile. “My name is not interested and not available. Sorry.”
The apology at the end was an afterthought, whispered into the faint breeze that transported the scent of hay all around the ranch. Turning around without a second thought, she heard Levi come out of the barn and greet the men, hoping that that meant her rejection wouldn’t sting for long. Heading in the direction of the house she changed her mind at the last minute, turning to the left and walking out to the small gardens that Finn liked to keep so they could have fresh fruit and vegetables from their backyard. There was a small bench sitting in the middle of it all, hiding her from everything except the sight of raspberries and tomato plants. Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she dialed Maeve. “You’re calling early,” she picked up right away, and Olivia could imagine that she was right in the middle of applying her makeup right now. Maeve tended to sleep in and take forever to get ready, so her being in the midst of her beautification ritual at 9:30 am wouldn’t be that out of the ordinary.
“Sorry, I can call back later.”
Maeve let out an unladylike snort on the other end of the line. “Oh please, like it matters. It just makes me think that you have something on your mind.”
Nothing could get past her best friend and before she’d consciously decided to explain, all her thoughts and feelings from earlier were falling out of her mouth. Despite her quick wit and chattiness, Maeve was the best at just listening when it counted. And listen she did, for forty-five minutes as Olivia talked all about Brianna and her breakup with her fiance and how she was worried that Grant was going to fall in love with Bri all over again, leaving her behind. “Why the hell do we not have a label?” she finally said, taking a deep breath to catch herself after the long-winded explanation.
“Why haven’t you asked him for a label?” Maeve countered. “Older people are less quick with the labels than the younger generation. If you want to be Grant’s girlfriend, I don’t think he’d have anything against it. You just have to have the conversation.”
It seemed simple. Too simple, like it was too good to be true, but her friend had a point. When she sighed, Maeve spoke up again. “Also, I don’t want to be that person who makes your problems worse, but you should call your parents. Your mom is freaking out that you’re on some kind of drug bender down there while of course at the same time telling everyone except her closest friends that you’re spending some time away to volunteer and work on your philanthropy. I don’t even know if that’s the proper use of that word, but it’s been what she’s going around saying at all of the galas.”
Groan leaving her lips, she ran a hand through her hair and cursed when she hit a knot. “I’ve been avoiding calling her.”
There were a lot of reasons for that, but she was beginning to realize that one of the biggest ones was Grant. She was going to want to talk about him, but her mother… well, her mother would have a lot of things to say about Grant’s suitability as part of the family. Namely that he wasn’t suitable because he lived on a ranch in Tennessee and was fourteen years older than her. “You’ve got to get over that, or she might just go crazy enough to show up in Tennessee. Not that I think she even knows what city you’re living in, but still.”
With a sigh that could rival a gust of wind, she assured Maeve that she would call her mother soon, and then she hung up the phone. It left her to muse about Grant and Bri and her non-relationship as the gentle breeze surrounded her with the scents of the farm.
***
She still hadn’t called her mother.
Sure, she knew that she should. She should have done it the second she got off the phone with Maeve the previous day, but she hadn’t. The woman was hard to talk to and while she was well-versed in lying to her mother, it just felt wrong to lie about Grant. Like she was hiding their relationship with each other when that was the last thing she wanted to.
But she didn’t even know if her relationship with Grant was a relationship yet. She couldn’t exactly tell her mom what was going on. So she’d avoided the call and now she was sitting at the giant dining table eating dinner with the guys, trying not to notice that Grant was acting just as withdrawn as he had been the previous night. “What did you want to do after you’re done with volunteering here?” Finn asked her a question for once, a rare occurrence from the man who preferred to sit silently on the sidelines and only listen.
“I want to go to university,”
her answer was instant, although she didn’t know how much further she could explain after that. Being with Grant had changed things. Before, she’d been planning on heading right back to New York City and going to one of the universities there, living with her parents again, and paying for school with their dime if she could convince them to pay. That was sounding less and less appealing now. Her mother was the most controlling woman she’d ever met and the prospect of being back under her thumb made her stomach turn in nervousness. After all the freedom she’d had here, she wasn’t sure if she could be the perfect daughter Marianna Montgomery was used to anymore.
“Any plans on where you want to go?” this time Grant asked the question and she offered him a quick grin and a shrug.
“I’m open to a lot of options right now. There’s plenty of places I could go to school for what I want.”
“But the ones in New York are the best schools, right?”
“I guess technically, but the prestige of the school doesn’t matter that much. What matters more is grades and work placements and volunteering.”
Grant didn’t say anything else, but he was slumped in his chair and his face looked washed out with grey. She wrote it off as being the lighting, but couldn’t help the fact that she was worried about him. The conversation moved on to different topics, like where Finn went to vet school and what her ideal job might be, and she almost didn’t notice Grant leave the table. Wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t unintentionally scooted the bench back an inch when he got up. Everyone gave him a quick wave as he left. No one noticed his dour mood except for her. Standing abruptly, she offered an apologetic smile at the other men. “Sorry, I’ve just got something that I have to do.”
