For Ruby's Love

by Starla Kaye

  Daniel went to the refrigerator, grabbed a gallon of milk and a glass. He filled it and carried the glass to him. “Drink this. She’s probably right.”

  Still muddled by the pain in his throat and his reaction to her, he swallowed the cool liquid. Ah, much better. He wouldn’t keel over from internal burns. Although, he might spontaneously combust if he couldn’t stop the heat building inside him and the aching need for the woman who’d stepped away. Her cheeks turned pink. She worried her lower lip again, making him think thoughts he shouldn’t.

  The room was suddenly too small, too uncomfortable. “Thanks,” he said a tad late, glancing at Daniel. His friend’s eyes held curiosity as he studied him. What did he see? Could he sense his unwanted attraction to Ruby? God, he hoped not.

  She broke up the awkward moment by nodding at his feet. “While you’re putting on your boots, I’ll go visit the….” She blushed.

  Daniel pointed toward the hallway, appearing to understand. “First door on the left.” As she all but ran out of the room, he focused on Cal. “She’s a pretty woman, isn’t she?”

  “Hard not to notice.” He grimaced, sure he shouldn’t have admitted what to him sounded like interest in her. He wasn’t.

  “It’s okay,” Daniel said, “don’t beat yourself up because you’re attracted to her. What you and I have is still new to you.” He hesitated. “If—”

  Desperate, Cal clamped his hands to his lover’s face and pulled the man to him. The instant their lips met all the craziness inside him settled. He didn’t want to hear about any ifs, especially if it meant he and Daniel would drift apart. Possible attraction was one thing, true feelings—love—much different. He knew where he belonged and with whom.

  Daniel put his arms around his waist and held him in place. He deepened the kiss until they were both breathing hard. Need spiraled through him, for this man, this one person in the world who understood him better than he did himself. Finally, he eased back, dropped his hands, and their gazes locked. Neither spoke. He was content to stand there and—

  The comfortable feeling had just registered when footsteps headed in their direction. His heart pounded. Before he could move away from being pressed up against Daniel, his lover’s arms still wrapped around him, Ruby walked into the room. She blinked in surprise, and he remembered his excuse about going in search of his boots. But he doubted that was the real reason her eyes widened. No, he thought maybe her reaction had more to do with their closeness, at the obvious intimacy of their stolen moment.

  He wanted to disappear somehow, just fade away. As far as he knew, their relationship wasn’t common knowledge. The trusted men who worked for him probably suspected, since Daniel spent a great deal of time there and stayed in the house with him. But nobody ever looked at either of them in discomfort, at least that he could recall. The idea of this stranger, this woman, suspecting…. Well, he wasn’t ashamed, but uncomfortable.

  “You don’t need to feel awkward or guilty.” She gave a reassuring smile that held no sign of disapproval. “We love who we love.”

  Releasing him, Daniel moved away, looking calm. He rested a hip against the counter. “Cal’s a good man and, yes, I have strong feelings for him.” He chuckled, probably in an attempt to lighten the situation. “He can be pretty pigheaded, too, as you’ve already seen.”

  More than happy to shift the focus to another subject, even himself, he said, “I just know what’s right and what a good idea isn’t.”

  Her chin tipped up, and challenge fired in her eyes. “I’ve got two days to prove you wrong, cowboy. And I’m going to.” She turned back toward the hallway. “I’m going to get my coat and head out to my truck. I would appreciate if one, or both, of you would come help me with the tire problem. Once that’s taken care of, I’d like to meet Starbright.”

  ***

  Pigheaded didn’t come close to defining Calhoun Cordell. Ruby waited while the cowboy unhitched her trailer from the truck, never an easy task. She’d disconnected all of the cables, and he’d made sure the electrical hookup got unfastened. She’d prepared the truck, dropping the tailgate, shifting into neutral, and applying the brakes. She could have finished the job, having done so many times. But, no, he declared he could handle things from there.

  Another round of some mighty inventive curse words drifted toward her from where she stood a few feet away. She’d tried to tell him disengaging the kingpin-locking bar on the hitch took some doing, and a lot of patience. The bar had become rusty and more than a bit uncooperative over the last year. Yet another mechanical detail she needed to deal with sometime. He’d been swearing for a good ten minutes. He wouldn’t let her help in any way other than offering advice, which he ignored. Stubborn, obstinate, inflexible. The man fit every bit of each possible synonym for pigheaded.

  At last, he achieved success, straightened, and stretched his back muscles. Not wasting time, she climbed into the driver’s seat once more. It took a second for her to drive a few feet from the fifth-wheel RV.

  By the time she walked back to close the tailgate, he had already tossed out the damaged main tire from the truck bed and jumped to the ground. His hands were black from grease off the kingpin and hitch. He wiped at sweat on his brow beneath his hat brim and smeared grease across his forehead. She found the smear appealing. But she’d been watching the play of muscles on his powerful thighs and his taut ass while he strained over the task. She’d enjoyed the view, finding his actions and fine body darn sexy. With her vivid imagination, she pictured him straining and groaning and doing some wicked little maneuvers in bed. Oh yum!

  She gave a disheartened sigh. Too bad she wouldn’t be experiencing any of that yummy stuff. But Daniel…. Holy cow, don’t go there! Except her thoughts already had. What would they be like together? Stop it! None of my business.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, walking closer and shivering as a wintry-chilled breeze swept around them. “Your cheeks are pretty red.” He nodded across the ranch yard. “Why don’t you go sit by the fire and warm up? I can finish this project.”

  Mortified at blushing because of what naughty ideas flashed in her mind, she decided to do as he’d suggested. He wasn’t going to let her help anyway. “If you don’t need me, I’ll take you up on that offer,” she said, unable to meet his eyes. “I need to make a few phone calls. Try to arrange another job or two.”

  “Whoa!” he grouched, irritation resounding in the word and simmering in the air between them. “You haven’t even started this one.”

  When she raised her gaze, she found his familiar scowl back in place. The man couldn’t be pleased. “Since you’re only giving me two days, I need to line up something else.” She pinned him with a challenging look. “Or have you changed your mind?”

  “No.” He moved to the truck and reached down to pick up the tire jack she’d already set out.

  She snorted. “I’m making some calls.” She turned on her boot heel and headed for the appealing big house. He muttered a few unkind words about her being damn troublesome to a man. Instead of feeling offended, she smiled.

  Daniel must have seen her coming because he opened the front door for her. He’d shaved, his carved cheeks looking smooth. She wanted to stroke them, see if they were as soft as they appeared. She shook off the awkward thought and noted he’d put on shoes while she and Cordell dealt with the trailer.

  He lifted one eyebrow. “Why did you smile like that when you walked up? Smiling and looking pleased with yourself.” He glanced past her toward his friend. “I would have expected you to want to kick some cowboy butt.”

  He had a way of distracting her, making her at ease. She chuckled and moved by him into the tiled foyer, savoring the heated air in the house taking the chill from her bones. “I’ve been wanting to do that ever since he accompanied me to my truck.”

  “Cal’s definitely a trial.” He closed the door behind her.

  Nodding, she grinned at the good-looking man. Her thoughts flew back to those decadent, ho
t mental images of both men. She forced them away, inappropriate. Okay, intriguing, but still wrong.

  “Your…friend…can be one pain in the ass.” Realizing what she’d said and from the little she knew about men making love to one another—at least one way, she corrected, “Pain in the neck.” Her cheeks grew warm, and she hoped maybe he hadn’t caught her little mess-up.

  “You were right the first time.” Amusement danced in his chocolate-brown eyes. “He can be that literally, as well as when he tries your patience.”

  Her face flamed even more, though she didn’t mind his honesty, his teasing about something so intimate. Daniel Patterson was comfortable with himself and with his preferences. She decided to change the subject. Safer—less titillating, but safer. “He sent me in here to get warm by the fire. Is that okay with you?”

  He chortled in a deep, appealing laugh. “In other words, he sent you in here to get out of his way. He’s doing his macho take-care-of-the-little-woman thing, and you must have been somewhat opposed.”

  She slipped off her leather coat, and he hung it on the foyer’s elaborately carved hall tree. “My dad knew better than to pull that kind of sh— Than to do that. He raised me to be independent and able to handle whatever complications came up.”

  He led her into the great room, and she found herself admiring his ass, every bit as toned as Cordell’s. Again she sighed. What is wrong with me? Here she was becoming interested in men for more than just work partners or employers, contemplating her first sexual experience, and the first man—men—she desired were gay. What rotten luck.

  Turning, he motioned with a manicured hand, so different from the rancher’s tanned, calloused one for her to sit in one of the chairs facing the hearth. From where she stood, halfway into the room, the heat radiating from the burning logs in the stone fireplace warmed her. A half-dozen framed photos of varying sizes spread across the thick wood mantel caught her attention. Two of the pictures were of Cordell riding a beautiful quarter horse. Starbright? Three were of different spots on the ranch, gorgeous places she wouldn’t mind seeing herself. The sixth photo showed both men dressed in their finery at what appeared to be a church entryway at someone’s wedding. The men were shaking hands— Cordell looking uneasy, Daniel appearing casual and curious. Whose wedding? She sensed this might have been when they first met.

  “Your father sounds like he was a good man,” he said and pulled her back to the moment.

  Caught off guard at the mention of her dad, tears misted her eyes as she sunk into the thick-cushioned leather chair. She refused to cry in front of this kind-hearted man again. Sniffing, she said, “The best of both. I couldn’t be prouder than to have been Ryan Taylor McMurtry’s daughter.”

  Daniel sat in the matching chair across from Ruby. Emotional distress laced her voice, and her eyes held tears she wouldn’t let fall. She’d loved her father, worked with him for years, and respected him. But she was alone in the world. She’d admitted as much last night while he’d held her and let her babble about whatever came into her troubled mind. He continued to ache for her.

  As she stared at the fire, he considered his own family, which hadn’t been anything like a loving one. Each of his parents preferred to live and breathe their respective careers as a neurosurgeon and as a corporate attorney. They’d left him with nannies, barely saw him. They died together in a small plane crash when he was thirteen and he hadn’t missed them. After that, he’d lived with his paternal grandfather—again, no real sense of family. They’d shared the same roof and little more. His grandfather’s focus had been on his businesses instead of dealing with a teenager. Still, losing his last relative to cancer when he started college had been hard for him. Alone. Like her. Yes, he understood some of what she felt.

  “Cal will come around,” he said into the lull in their conversation. He didn’t like to dwell on his past, and he imagined she would rather think of other things beyond her recent loss, too. “After he sees you working with Starbright, he’ll realize how good you are.”

  She cocked her head as she studied him, her chin-length blonde hair moving against her cheeks. “How do you know I’m good with traumatized horses?”

  “Because I’ve read every word on your website, and I’ve researched you on the Internet. Your father had a gift in working with rebellious horses that wouldn’t easily accept training or control.” He remembered all the high-praise articles he’d run across about some of the animals she’d helped. Impressive. “But you have an even more unique gift. You’ve successfully worked with at least a dozen troubled horses in the last two years alone.”

  It took her a second before she nodded. She drew in a breath and let the air out in an uneasy sigh. “True enough, but there was one particular palomino I couldn’t heal.”

  Her eyes reflected agony; her expression taut with emotional pain. He’d read about that incident, too. He fought the urge to go to her and take her in his arms, hug her in comfort. He hadn’t experienced such strong protective feelings about a woman in a long time. He wanted to take care of her. As beautiful in body and spirit as he found her, he didn’t experience a yearning to take her to his bed. Did he? No.

  “You did everything you could have done and the owner understood. Not every animal can be saved, especially not one so wounded and emotionally damaged.” In the article, she’d admitted her failure, although the horse’s owner stated it hadn’t been her fault. She’d also related how her heart broke to learn the palomino had been put down while she’d been in the hospital. But she’d suffered a serious injury from the crazed horse, and the owner made his decision.

  “That kind of thing is rare,” she said, as if she’d understood his thoughts. She sat up straighter, looking defensive, her brow pinched. “I survived. I won’t ever quit what I do, helping whenever I can, just because I might get hurt.”

  He didn’t like the possibility of her being injured again, but he understood her need to function as a healer. It was what she did. He felt as strong about running his business and expanding it, though Cal believed he spread himself too thin. Of course, he didn’t agree with Cal’s desire to grow his ranch holdings either, by adding another good-sized spread to what he already owned. Cal already worked too hard and there were too many times when his friend fell into bed exhausted and aching. Problems for another time.

  “As far as I know, Cal hasn’t read about that incident. My advice is to not bring it up.”

  “What would it matter? He isn’t going to let me work with Starbright anyway.” She glanced toward the wall of windows, where Cal loaded her damaged tires into the bed of his ranch truck. “Two days—of which we are into one—isn’t enough time to do much.”

  He figured she might be right on both counts, but he was forever an optimist. Besides, he’d sensed Cal’s attraction to her, though the stubborn cowboy tried his best to deny his feelings. As much as he loved the man, he couldn’t satisfy all of his needs. He didn’t doubt his friend desired him and their intimate times together went beyond explosive. Yet, there were parts of Cal’s life he didn’t and would never understand. Just as there were parts of his life Cal couldn’t comprehend. In a lot of ways, they were an example of opposites attracting one another, at least as far as general interests and occupations went. In the bedroom, they worked well together. But, in his gut, he sensed this special young woman might be what Cal needed to be whole. She understood ranching, horses, the lifestyle he struggled with. She wouldn’t let Cal run over her with his tendency to overprotect, unless she chose to do so. He’d already witnessed that much.

  As much as Cal enjoyed their love life, he sensed his lover needed more. He missed the softness of a woman, the passion, and the fire—something Cal admitted one night when they’d gotten drunk after the barn fire. He didn’t think Cal would want to go completely back to being heterosexual because their relationship was too good. But if Cal made the choice, so be it.

  Of course, he might be over thinking things. He just wanted Cal to be happy
. Since the fire, he’d been frustrated, unsettled. He didn’t sleep well. He’d lost weight. When they had sex, it was more in desperation than anything else. He didn’t oppose their frantic couplings, a certain roughness appealed to him. But….

  Cal wasn’t the only one unhappy and troubled. Ruby was on her own and trying to adjust to missing her father, someone to travel with, to share her ups and downs with. She’d told him as much last night, just as she’d admitted how much she enjoyed her work. She held a deep love and respect for animals, especially horses. She got upset when she learned of traumatized horse from some kind of abuse or accident, like with Starbright. But, as she sat in his lap letting go of some of her internal pain, she also admitted someday she wanted a real home and maybe a family of her own. She’d told him she put the house in North Carolina up for sale before leaving to come here. It would be too painful to continue going back there. She would lead the nomadic life of living in her trailer for a while. He didn’t like the idea.

  “I need to make some calls,” she said, glancing at him, not looking thrilled.

  “To do with your father?” he asked, knowing the matter wasn’t any of his business. “Can I help in some way?”

  She shook her head and irritation sparked in her green gaze. “No, I have some clients I should talk to and make arrangements with. I’d already told them I might not get to them for another month or so.” She shrugged, but frustration remained etched on her face. “It seems I’ll be ready to head their way much sooner.”

  “I think you should wait a few more days before you make those calls.” She didn’t want to leave here yet. She wanted to work with Starbright, but she’d tired of butting heads with Cal. He understood. Except another part of the problem was her attraction to the cowboy. He witnessed it in her eyes as she admired him at the breakfast table, although she tried her best to ignore Cal. No doubt with knowing about his relationship with the man, she believed anything happening between them would be impossible.