Gloomily, Abigail sopped up her fries with gravy, stuck one in her mouth, swallowed it the wrong way, and had a coughing fit.
“You okay?” a long shadow fell across the table, and Abigail blinked her watering eyes and looked up, grimacing.
It was Ty. And he looked madder than a wet hen.
“We need to talk,” he said.
Chapter Seven
“What is so damned important that I can’t finish my lunch?” Abigail snapped. Ty had practically dragged her out the front door to his pickup truck.
He opened the door for her and gestured impatiently. “Climb in.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“It’s an emergency. Believe me, it can’t wait.”
She considered saying no, but she was curious as to what Ty could possibly want to talk to her about. And, she hated to admit it, but the thought of getting back in that truck with him made her heart flutter. Stupid, stupid heart, she thought.
Scowling, she climbed in to the truck and slammed the door. She glanced at him, at the hard, angry line of his jaw, at the way his white t-shirt fit him just right, at his tanned, muscular arms, those arms which baled hay and gently cradled newborn calves in cold barns at three in the morning on winter nights…
For a brief, dizzying moment, she imagined those arms wrapped around her again, and his strong hands cradling her face. But that would never happen. She turned away and looked out the window, and her heart pulsed in her chest with a dull throb of longing.
“This better be good,” she said as he pulled away from the curb. She looked behind her and saw half a dozen people standing on the boardwalk watching the truck pull away, including Edna Vale, who flashed her a wink and a thumb’s up.
Oh, great. Edna wrote the gossip column for the Crooked Creek Telegraph, and she had everybody in town on speed dial. By nightfall everybody would know Abigail had taken a ride with Ty Jackson, and they’d all be speculating on what she’d done with him. Again.
“Where are we going, exactly?” she asked peevishly.
“I’ll tell you when we get there. How much do you know about my family history?” Ty asked, as they headed north up the Crooked Mile.
“Uh…what about it, in particular?”
“My grandfather, Jebediah Jackson. You know about how he put the ranch in trust, rather than letting my father control it? How my father was just a figurehead who lived in the farmhouse and showed up at the board of trustees meetings so he could collect his allowance?”
“Basically, yes. I don’t know all the details. I know that your grandfather was married, and when his sons were teenagers they died in a car accident, and your father was…er….”
“My father was Jebediah’s bastard. Everybody in town knows it. His mother was a barmaid who lived in Denver; my grandfather knocked her up when he was on a business trip, then paid her hush money every month to support her and her son and shut her up. He never had anything to do with his illegitimate son until the accident. When Jebediah’s sons died, his wife was in her fifties. Too old to have more children. Jebediah was determined to leave his ranch to his own flesh and blood, so he moved Boone onto the ranch, and Jebediah’s wife raged at him and cursed at him and moved out to one of the houses on the edge of the property and never said a word to him again. She wouldn’t even sit next to him at church on Sunday mornings.”
“That sounds horrible. And I’m sorry. How exactly does this relate to you kidnapping me before I finished my French fries?”
“Keep your britches on.” He glanced at her, and managed a faint smile. “Although I also like it when you take them off…but obviously the feeling wasn’t mutual.”
“What? I…that wasn’t it!” Abigail spluttered.
“Wasn’t it?” He glanced at her, and she could have sworn she was a flash of hurt in his eyes, but maybe that was just from dredging up his old, painful family history.
“Anyway, Jebediah was angry at the world over the loss of his sons and the breakup of his marriage, furious that Boone was all he had left…he made Boone feel worthless. Took out all his anger on him. Let him know how much he missed his real sons, every day of Boone’s life, if what I hear tell is true. Boone grew up to be a drunk, angry hell-raiser who embarrassed his dad every chance he got. That’s why Jebediah wrote the trust in a way that left Boone as a powerless figurehead who had no say in the running of the ranch.”
“Ouch. Okay, I’ve now lost my appetite. And I feel bad for all the times I thought Boone was a drunk woman-hating pig.”
“He hated just about everyone, darlin’. He took it out on his first wife, my brother’s mother, until the day she died, and you know the stories about that.”
“That when she fell down the stairs, she had some help? And he paid off the coroner to write a fake report and cover it up?”
“Exactly. And right after she died, when Clayton was only two, he married my mother, and started beating on her too, until…it doesn’t matter. She found a way to make him stop. She took me and made my father build another house for us on the property, had affairs all over town and flaunted them in front of my father’s face. It just made my father more bitter and full of self-hatred. She left my father living in that big ole house with Clayton and his nannies…left him to beat up on Clayton until Clayton was old enough to hit back.”
He glided into a parking lot in front of a white clapboard house. Abigail’s heart leaped to her throat. What the heck was going on here? Ty had just pulled up in front of offices of Reginald Bigelow, Justice of the Peace.
Ty ran a weary hand over his face, pressing against his eyes. “Our family tree has poison running through it, Abigail. Clayton grew up angry and bitter. Hating the ranch. Hating everything it stands for.”
“You said you were going to stop him from developing the ranch.”
Ty turned to look her full in the eyes. “Turns out it’s not that easy. The terms of my grandfather’s will are that whichever one of his grandsons’ marries first gets the ranch. The other grandson gets a substantial amount of money, free and clear; worth as much as the ranch. What my grandfather wanted was that the Jackson legacy would live on. The trust says that whoever inherits the ranch can’t subdivide it, can’t split it up at all. Unfortunately he didn’t specify how the property can be developed.”
“Oookay…” She didn’t like where this was going.
“Clayton doesn’t want the money. He wants to tear down the main house and pave over everything, over his childhood, over every bad memory that haunts him.”
“There must be something we could do…maybe if I found that black-footed ferret…”Abigail felt faint. This couldn’t be happening.
“That might slow him down, it might not. He might just build first and face the penalties. He’s absolutely determined to go ahead with the development, and I’m running out of time. I’ve had private investigators keeping an eye on Clayton ever since he went back to Los Angeles, and they just called me this morning. He picked some Eastern European model that he’s been dating for about three weeks, and convinced her to enter an arranged marriage so he could get the ranch. He’s getting married in a few hours.”
Abigail’s eyes widened. Ty could not possibly be headed where she thought he was headed with this.
“And?” she barely managed to squeak out the word.
“If he gets married before I do, he will ruin the ranch and ruin this town.”
She shrank back away from Ty as far as she could into the corner of the truck, and shook her head, eyes like saucers. She knew what Ty was about to ask of her. She couldn’t do it.
“Talk sense into him!”
“I’ve tried everything. Begging. Threatening. I’ve consulted numerous lawyers. The trust is ironclad, unbreakable. If he gets married first, the ranch goes to him, and I have absolutely no say over it.”
“But…” Abigail spluttered. “Are you about to ask me what I think you’re going to ask me?”
“Yes. I know you don’t want anything t
o do with me. I know you’re sorry about that night we spent together. I know you can’t stand the sight of me. But I also know you love this town, and you love the land, and you will not stand by and let anyone destroy it if you can stop it. Abigail Wintergreen, will you fake-marry me?”
“I am not sorry we spent the night together!” Abigail’s head was whirling.
“Oh, really? So you’ll maybe real-marry me?” He was half-smiling, as if he were about to break into a laugh. She almost wanted to laugh too.
Why did the stupid bastard have to be so funny and charming?
“No! Not that either!” she groaned. “Why don’t you marry your bitchy little girlfriend?”
“She’s not my girlfriend. She works for Graniti Industries, she’s out here with all the developers that Clayton invited, and she’s been following me around trying to get in my pants since the day she got here. I have no interest in her. But I’m glad to see that you’re jealous of her; it means maybe you like me a little bit after all.”
“I am not jealous!” Abigail squawked indignantly, but she sounded ridiculous, even to herself.
“Either way. We need to get married right now.”
“No. Absolutely not. I am not fake-marrying you. Find somebody else. You’re a good looking millionaire. Any single girl in town would jump at the chance. Any single girl anywhere. You could even get them to sign a prenup protecting the ranch and all of your assets.”
“Billionaire.” His lips quirked in a smile. “I could pay you.”
“There is literally not enough money in the world to make me agree to a fake marriage. Take me back to town and pick up a new bride.”
“It has to be you. I know that I can trust you. I know that you love this town and would fight to your last breath to preserve it. I know you don’t care about my money. Or me. But you care about the land.”
“Are you not hearing me? I am not your only option.” Abigail felt dizzy; there wasn’t enough air in the tiny little cab of the truck. She threw open the door and stumbled out into the parking lot.
Ty climbed out, following her. “I didn’t want to do it this way, but I’ll fight dirty if I have to. I’ve got you on videotape cutting the wire fence to my property and riding on to it.”
She turned to stare at him, jaw dropping open.
“What? Are you blackmailing me?”
“Not at all. I’m just saying that you’ve been arrested for trespassing before. Twice. And got off with community service.”
“One time it was to keep a chain store out of town, and another time it was to protest the hunting of feral horses!”
He shrugged, looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “The judge probably won’t be as lenient the third time. And that would be really hard on your mother.”
“You son of a bitch!”
He turned to look at her, and his eyes had gone as hard as flint. “I can be one when I have to be, darlin’. After all I’ve got Jackson family blood in me. I will stop at nothing to save this ranch and this town.”
Furious, she raised her hand to slap him, and he grabbed her wrist and pinned it above her head. Before she knew it, he was pressed up against her, pushing her against the truck, and she found him plunging his lips on to hers, hot and hungry. And her mouth parted to accept him, and he kissed her with a ferocious intensity, tongue thrusting into her, claiming her as his own.
Time seemed to slow, and she kissed him back, eagerly, pressing up against him and feeling the thickness of his erection pressing against her. When he touched her, she lost all control; he made her weak with need and desire.
Finally, reluctantly, she found the strength to pull away from him. She tipped her head back to look up at him.
“Fine. I’ll do it,” she said, not believing the words as they came out of her mouth. “But you don’t kiss me again. You don’t touch me. This is a marriage on paper only. We stay married until you’re sure the ranch is under your control, then we cite irreconcilable differences and file for divorce.”
He looked down at her, his lips pressed together in an angry line.
“If that’s the way that you want it.”
“That’s the way that I want it.” Her heart pounded against her ribcage and she turned without looking back at him and strode towards the old clapboard building that housed the justice of the peace.
Chapter Eight
Ty set his fork down and glanced across the table at the woman who didn’t want to be his wife.
“Lunch was delicious,” he told her, and meant it. She’d made pasta puttanesca, with homemade tomato sauce and fresh mushrooms and garlic from his own garden out behind his house. She was a great cook. It was one of the many things he appreciated about her. He’d dated his share of bone thin women who looked at food with hatred, who picked at their plates when he took them out to dinner and who wouldn’t know a saucepan from a cat litter pan. It wasn’t a lot of fun.
Abigail loved food, and he loved to watch her eat. She enjoyed her food with a sensuous passion that he wished she felt for him.
They’d been married a week now, and it hadn’t gotten any easier. She avoided him as if she were afraid he carried the bubonic plague. She left first thing in the morning to head in to work, worked late, came home, cooked dinner, made polite conversation over dinner without meeting his eyes, and then rushed back to her room, where she sat and talked on her cell phone with her little posse of girlfriends every night.
She’d even gone to work on Saturday. The only reason she hadn’t worked today was because the Telegraph was closed on Sundays. He suspected that she’d have rushed into town anyway and hung out there all day if she wasn’t afraid that people would talk. The marriage had to look real, after all.
What little time she wasn’t hiding from him in the bedroom, she’d spent redecorating the kitchen, throwing away the faded, forty-year-old curtains and replacing them with gingham checked café curtains, and adding hand carved sculptures of fruit that she picked up from a downtown gift shop on the Crooked Mile.
When he offered to help, she answered him with a clipped “No, thank you,” without even turning to look at him.
And yet…what baffled him was the way he saw her look at him when she didn’t know he was watching. He’d glanced at the mirror and seen her look at him with her lips parted, with her eyes shining, the way she had when they’d had sex first time. He’d looked away from her once, only to look back and see her staring with a strange mixture of hurt and hunger in her eyes.
He knew she wanted him…but he sensed she’d rather die than admit it.
Just to torment her, to make her burn for him the way he burned for her, he’d taken to walking around the house without his shirt on. He wasn’t hampered by false modesty; he knew what he looked like. He saw her eyes follow him. He heard the quick, sharp intake of breath when he passed by her in the hallway, brushing against her accidentally and murmuring “sorry,”and not meaning it at all.
Although it hurt him just as much as it hurt her, because being close to her meant that he smelled the sweet, light floral notes of her perfume and remembered the smell of her musk when she was aroused, and he dreamed of burying himself in her soft flesh again, of taking refuge in her in her warmth.
But there was no refuge to be found there anymore, he knew. Just anger and hurt and too much past history between them to ever overcome.
Fine. He stood up. “I’m going to take a quick shower before I head back out,” he told her. He’d been planning for several days now to accompany his ranch hands when they rode up to the higher mountain pastures to check on the cows and calves. Today was as good a day as any.
“Enjoy yourself,” she said, without meeting his eyes.
“I will,” he bit out, and stalked out of the room.
Well, that had come out both childish and churlish. But that’s how he was feeling right now.
He walked into his room, ripped his clothes off, and tossed them on the floor, not bothering with the hamper.
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Angry, he climbed into the shower, wondering how much more of this he could take. Being so near to her and not being able to touch her. Watching her flinch away from him.
He found his hand drifting to his thick erection, gripping it hard, imagining that it was her hand on him. God, what he’d do to her…
Suddenly, he realized that somebody was in his bedroom. He could hear drawers rattling and a door slamming.
That wasn’t Abigail, was it? It couldn’t be. She had literally never set foot in his bedroom.
He turned the water off, toweled off quickly, and then wrapped a towel around his midsection. He flung open the bathroom door to see Abigail dumping a garbage bag of clothes on to his closet floor and quickly shutting the closet door.
His bedroom door was wide open, and she’d stripped off her shirt and stood before him in her lacy camisole and flowered skirt, the outline of her pink nipples standing out in perfect circles.
At his startled glance, she hissed “Follow my lead,” and threw her arms around him, tilting her head back for a kiss.
Follow her lead? Okay. This was only what had been haunting his dreams ever since the night he’d been with her…
He grabbed her roughly, fingers tangling in her silky brown hair, tilting her head back and claiming her mouth in a kiss that bore no tenderness at all. With one hand, he cupped the full globe of her left buttock, and pressed her up against him, so his throbbing cock was pressed into her soft flesh.
He ravaged her mouth, with hungry thrusts of his tongue, sucking her into him, his fingers tightening in her hair.
In the hallway, he heard angry shouts and footsteps banging towards them.
“You can’t go in there! What do you think-“ It was the voice of his ranch hand Mack, in his doorway. He let go of Abigail spun around, only to see his brother, his brother’s wife, and Winston Maplethorpe, head of the trust that managed the Jackson ranch’s affairs, all standing and staring at him.
Ludmilla, Clayton’s wife, was a tall, willowy blonde, shockingly thin, with sharp cheekbones and beestung lips. She dressed like someone pretending to be a rancher’s wife, in spotless designer jeans that looked as if they were painted onto her pipecleaner-thin legs, and gleaming new ostrich skin cowboy boots with mother of pearl inlay which must have cost several thousand dollars and would never get a speck of mud on them. Her makeup was flawlessly applied, pink lips gleaming with frosty gloss and emerald green eyes outlined with perfectly applied makeup in khaki tones.
Curvy Girls: Claimed By The Cowboy (The BBW and the Billionaire Rancher) Page 5
