Going Hard: Steele Ridge Series

by Kelsey Browning

  Unable—and unwilling—to stop himself, he stroked a thumb over the proof that her body thought they were an excellent, an arousing, idea. The savvy negotiator in him was tempted to lay out a handful of logical reasons why she should have dinner with him.

  But the Steele Shark knew the best way to come out on top of a deal was to force someone to react emotionally while he remained calm. “You haven’t forgotten what it was like. In my backseat. On my hood.”

  She said nothing, but her pulse picked up more speed.

  “I sure as hell haven’t forgotten,” he said, deliberately lowering his voice. Any time she’d come to mind since he’d moved to the West Coast, she’d always been a warm and sweetly wicked memory.

  “That was a long time ago. It has nothing to do with now.” The sound she made could only be called a scoff. Looked like there was only one effective way to get her to concede, so Grif backed her against the wall and covered her mouth with his. She tasted like the first bite of a homemade apple pie, sugary with just a hint of tart. So delicious he already knew he wouldn’t be satisfied with a mere slice. A single kiss and he wanted the whole damn pie.

  That didn’t happen to him. He wouldn’t allow it.

  But she wasn’t fully engaged, her lips hesitant on his. And that wouldn’t do. He released her wrist to cup her jaw and stroke her cheek. Sure enough, her mouth opened to him and the kiss was no longer sweet. In no way innocent.

  It became a hot tangle of tongues and heated breath. He wanted to haul her up, have her wrap her body around him, meet him equally. He pushed into her, half surprised at how small she felt against him. But the way she kissed him made her feel anything but small or weak.

  Her fingers plunged into his hair and she yanked him closer. So close air couldn’t flow between them. And she kissed the holy fuck out of him.

  Teeth, tongue, lips—she used them all. And with a seductive skill that made Grif’s head go blank. The feel of her short nails against his scalp shot an unreasonable amount of lust into his bloodstream. He wanted those nails, her small but capable hands, all over his body.

  Why now? Why her?

  Maybe because she was so different. Nothing like the last woman he’d kissed. Carlie Beth was flash and spark. Raw and honest. So different and strangely familiar.

  He spanned her ribcage with his palms, was on his way to covering her breasts when her tight hold on his hair suddenly loosened. And unfortunately, she used that newly freed hand to push at his shoulder.

  God, they were making out in a stockroom like two teenagers.

  His first inclination was to keep going. The way she’d reacted to him made it more than clear he could persuade her, change her mind. But he, of all people, knew both the man and the woman needed to be on the same page.

  Using extreme control, he shifted his hands next to Carlie Beth’s head, bracing himself against the wall. He hung his own head and blew out a breath that was about a hundred times shakier than he would’ve liked. “Still think we’re not a good idea?”

  Before he could catch her, she ducked under his outstretched arms and danced away like a boxer who knew the only way he could beat his opponent was to keep moving around the ring. “I…I don’t know what just happened.”

  Grif stared down at the floor, or where the floor should be if his tented pants weren’t obscuring his view of it. “Flash knockdown,” he said, half to himself. Because just like a punch that came out of nowhere, she’d momentarily thrown him off his game. His over-the-top reaction to this woman was just a matter of circumstance, happenstance.

  “Whatever it was, it’s not happening again.”

  Bull. Shit. Something this hot, this powerful, needed to be finished. He pushed off the wall and pivoted toward her. “Why not?”

  Carlie Beth glanced down, and her staring at his dick certainly didn’t do a damn thing to cool off the lust still cruising through him. Her gaze flickered back up to his, and she made a sexy little humming sound that made his skin ripple.

  “Can’t be a chemistry problem.”

  “I…because…because I’m just not interested.”

  Under her baseball shirt, her nipples were tight little beads, completely ruining her argument. But Grif knew when it was a good time to push and when it was time to change tactics. So he took a few deep breaths, but didn’t bother to turn his back when he adjusted his slowly fading hard-on.

  And he grinned when Carlie Beth tracked his every movement.

  He’d just taken his hand off his fly when Yvonne poked her head into the stockroom and said, “Oh, my gosh. Did Sheriff Kingston tell y’all about Roy Darden?”

  “Yes.” Carlie Beth’s hands went to her hair, smoothing and fiddling. When she caught him watching her, she dropped her hands to her sides and strolled back toward the showroom as if they hadn’t been plastered together a few minutes before. “Isn’t it terrible?”

  The hell if he would let her avoid him, so he followed and saw her wave a hand toward the items she and Yvonne had been studying when he walked in the gallery. “If you don’t mind, can we talk about these pieces later?” Her artwork was spread out on a cloth on the glass counter, everything from a scrolled iron-and-pearl ring to what looked like a belt buckle.

  Damn, she was talented.

  He ran his fingers over a pair of intricately fashioned bookends—one a dragon’s head, the other his tail. No, Carlie Beth was insanely gifted.

  “I can just take them and we’ll come to an agreement on price later,” Yvonne said. “You know I’ll be fair.”

  “You always are.” Carlie Beth’s smile was genuine and relaxed, and Grif found himself wishing it was aimed at him.

  A ring tone that sounded like Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” came from Carlie Beth’s pocket, and her expression immediately closed up. Kissing him like her life depended on it one minute and pulling away the next. He couldn’t get a read on her. She clutched her phone and bolted for the stockroom. “Excuse me.”

  “Something wrong?” he asked Yvonne.

  “That was her daughter’s ring tone.” Yvonne glanced over her shoulder, then turned back to Grif with an expression he couldn’t quite interpret. She leaned on the counter as if she was imparting state secrets, and he couldn’t help but notice the way her cleavage was put on display. But it interested him about as much as unbuttered grits. Carlie Beth’s breasts in a baseball T-shirt, on the other hand, were like a bowl of double cheese grits doused with Tabasco sauce.

  And what the hell was wrong with him, comparing tits to grits? Another day in this town, and he’d be turning into a dirty old man like Mr. Greene or knuckle-dragging like that poor son of a bitch Roy Darden.

  Returning his apparently addled brain to his conversation with Yvonne, he asked, “Carlie Beth has a daughter?”

  “You talk about two peas in a pod. She and that kiddo are so close it’s hard to tear them apart.”

  The muscles in his neck tensed the way they did when he discovered one of his clients had omitted a critical detail, something like yeah, he was driving drunk or yes, the girl in his car was underage. He’d come to hate that tense feeling because most recently it had been brought on by his own clusterfuck of a life.

  Carlie Beth was a mother. With a daughter. Well, that put a different spin on his invitation. He’d just been looking for a little dinner, hopefully topped off with some tasty dessert.

  But he had absolutely no interest in getting mixed up with a full meal deal.

  6

  “Mom, it’s one o’clock!”

  Carlie Beth lifted her attention from the oak leaf keyring she was shaping to glance at her daughter standing in the forge’s doorway. “Okay.”

  “The party at Miss Joan’s new house starts in an hour.”

  The sudden need to whack the crap out of the leaf’s delicate curve with her rounding hammer almost overwhelmed Carlie Beth. Why had she thought Aubrey wouldn’t hear about the shindig out at Tupelo Hill, which was now owned by Jonah Steele?

 
; She still couldn’t believe he—and Grif, from what she’d heard—had strong-armed the mayor into changing Canyon Ridge’s name to Steele Ridge. Now she’d think of Grif every time she wrote her own address. “I hadn’t planned on going. I need to finish these keyrings.”

  Aubrey’s mouth dropped open, revealing her silver braces with pink brackets, and Carlie Beth looked closer. Was her daughter wearing lipstick? God, it was bad enough that Aubrey had a sweep of hair the color of Carlie Beth’s, but in the past year, her figure had begun to bloom, with the hint of a woman’s hips and breasts Aubrey insisted required an underwire bra. As if. Aubrey was emotionally and intellectually mature, but Carlie Beth was in no rush for her to grow up completely. “Did you get into my makeup?”

  Aubrey touched her lips self-consciously. “It’s not like you wear it often enough for it to matter.”

  “My tools don’t really care how I look.” Resigned to a discussion, she set aside her hammer and the keyring already stamped with her initials and identifying symbol.

  Aubrey crept closer, cupped her hand to one side of her mouth and surreptitiously pointed toward Austin, who was in the corner working on a custom set of J-hooks. “He does,” she mouthed.

  Even thinking about the way Austin had acted like an idiot in front of Dave the other day made her feel as if she should register herself as a card-carrying cougar. No, thank you.

  If Austin continued to make advances, no matter how subtle, she might have to find him another teacher. And that would be a shame because he’d been working with her for six months now and showed real promise. But blacksmithing was becoming a lost art, and it wasn’t a skill learned overnight. If he wanted to open his own forge someday, he had lots of crawling to do before he walked, which he couldn’t do if he was busy flirting with her.

  “Not funny, Aub. Whatever you have rolling around in your head, you need to put the brakes on it right this second.”

  At fourteen, everything in a young girl’s life was rainbows and unicorns and hearts. Sometimes exhausting for the thirty-four-year-old mother, but Carlie Beth wasn’t so old that she couldn’t remember feeling the same way herself. She’d had the biggest crush on her eighth-grade science teacher, Mr. George. Lord, how she’d mooned over him, scratching Carlie Beth George in a spiral notebook and even naming the four children she just knew they’d have.

  Of course, that was way before she’d given birth to her own beautiful but colicky baby.

  “You should ask him to the party.”

  “Everyone in town was invited, including Austin.”

  “But he won’t go if you stay here working. He looks at you like a dog checks out a piece of rawhide.”

  Ew. Carlie Beth rubbed at her temple, probably smearing ash on her face.

  But Aubrey was right, Austin never left the forge before she did. And she was there any time she wasn’t working a bigger welding job or hanging out with Aubrey. The poor guy needed a break, one he’d never ask for.

  “Fine, I’ll encourage him to go,” Carlie Beth finally said. “But not with me, and you’re not going.”

  And oh, Aubrey’s blue eyes could spark hot so fast. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” she said. “Don’t you have a class project due soon?”

  Aubrey tossed her hair and rolled her eyes, somehow pulling off the move with the kind of disgust only a teenager could. “I’ve been done with that for two days.”

  Damn.

  “I thought you and Brooke were planning to do something this weekend. You mentioned spending the night at her house.”

  “Brooke will be at the Steeles’ party with her family. Why don’t you want me to go? Miss Joan is one of the nicest people in the universe.”

  Absolutely, one hundred percent true. Grif’s mom was pretty much an angel with hidden wings. Raising a big family, sometimes singlehandedly when her husband disappeared for weeks at a time. And all the while, she’d worked as the receptionist at the elementary school. All the kids in Cany—dammit, Steele—Ridge adored her. Probably had a little to do with the Jolly Ranchers she’d snuck them when the principal and parents weren’t watching. Many a time Aubrey had come home from grade school smelling of watermelon candy.

  Any time Carlie caught the scent on the Sack & Snack’s candy aisle, it made her uneasy.

  “It would probably hurt her feelings,” Aubrey wheedled. “Make her think we don’t appreciate what her son did for everyone. I heard if Jonah Steele hadn’t basically bought this town that everyone would be out of jobs. Either have to go on welfare or move to Charlotte.”

  That made Carlie Beth smile. Oh, the horrors of living in a big city. Once upon a time, she’d believed she would move away from her hometown, become a famous artist in a place like Charlotte or Miami or Atlanta. Maybe even Los Angeles.

  She shook her head, only slightly able to imagine that life now. After all, she’d traded in that future years ago. She was happy here in her hometown.

  Or at least satisfied.

  Definitely comfortable.

  God, that sounded pitiful.

  But she’d had to put down roots for her daughter’s sake. Over the years, she might’ve wanted to rip them free once in a while, if only for a night or two. But it had become clear that excitement and spark weren’t in the cards for her.

  After all, one of the men to recently show interest in her—however misguided—was apparently lying in the county morgue. And although Dave out at Black Horn was a nice guy, the spark was missing on her side.

  But one man most definitely set off her sparks. He’d made that abundantly clear with his mind-and-bone-melting kiss in Yvonne’s storage room over a week ago. When was the last time Carlie Beth had felt tempted to let a man touch her like that in a place where they could so easily be caught? Or touch her like that period.

  Don’t think about that too closely. You might find yourself counting back to—

  Carlie Beth scrubbed her knuckles across her lips, but it didn’t drive away the taste of his kiss—minty but not cool. Blistering was a much better description. Trying to shake off the memory, she drew in an unsteady breath.

  Grif Steele was completely off-limits.

  Because he was the one who’d changed her dreams of making art for a living.

  He would do nothing but tear apart her life again.

  Besides, for all she knew, he was back in Los Angeles.

  Which meant it also wasn’t fair to keep Aubrey from celebrating with her friends, and from what Carlie Beth had heard, today’s party would be one for the record books. Which meant it shouldn’t be a problem for her to stay out of Grif’s sights even if he was still in town.

  “Fine, but I need half an hour to get ready.” She sighed and began to straighten her tools—hammers on the left side of her pegboard and tongs on the right. “Have you seen my favorite scrolling tongs?” she asked Aubrey.

  “Nope. Maybe Austin borrowed them. Hurry and clean up, okay? I’ll do your hair and makeup. Oh, and pick out your clothes.” Aubrey’s smile widened, making it obvious she’d stolen Carlie Beth’s favorite—okay, her only—shade of lipstick.

  * * *

  From where Grif stood on the front porch steps, it was clear the sprawling two-story farmhouse and some of the other buildings on the old Tupelo Farm property needed a new coat of paint, but if he knew his mom, she’d have the place marshaled into order in no time. After all, she’d somehow managed to not only move in but also plant whisky barrels of daffodils and those little purple flowers in a week. And that was over and above organizing a community get-together.

  He angled away from the house to look across the lawn, where it appeared as if the entire town of Steele Ridge and the rest of Haywood County had turned out for his mom’s housewarming party. He shouldn’t be surprised. His mom could be incredibly persuasive in her sweet, Southern way.

  But she rarely had to turn that brand of persuasion on anyone but her own kids. Everyone else tripped over themselves to do Miss Joan’s bidding. Hell, wh
o was he kidding? Her kids did, too.

  She’d been a giver their whole lives, and it was about damn time someone gave back to her. Both he and Jonah had offered to buy her a house more than once over the past ten years, but she’d always said no, thank you. Until the town had gotten itself into a bind and needed to unload the twenty thousand acres with his mom’s dream house sitting on it.

  What she would’ve given to raise her kids in a place this size instead of the three-bedroom ranch-style house with a basement they’d converted into what his mom called the Boxing Ring. That thousand square feet of space was probably the only thing that had saved everyone’s sanity, especially on cold winter days when restlessness set in.

  And there was his mom, socializing in the crowd. As she chatted it up, her short silver-shot hairdo gleamed in the sunlight. He’d bet all the money in his wallet she would talk to every person before the afternoon was over. She was heading into her seventh decade of life, but she was as active as she’d been when she was younger.

  “Ten to one she calls everyone by their name.”

  He glanced over to find his younger sister Evie standing at his elbow. Her dark hair fell in thick waves over her shoulders, and her blue eyes were warm with amusement. He threw an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in to his side. “Nuh-uh. That’s a sucker’s bet.”

  “You know she’s in hog heaven.”

  “Speaking of, she actually let me buy the pig we’ve got on the pit.”

  Evie inclined her head toward the farmhouse. “What’s she gonna do with this big ol’ place?”

  Right now, she’d filled it with her grown sons, with a bedroom set aside for Evie’s weekend visits from college. “Turn it into a bed-and-breakfast?”

  Evie laughed. “Can you imagine how much she’d feed her guests? If Mom had her way, it would be a bed and breakfast, lunch, and supper. Maybe Hog Heaven would be the perfect name.” Her face sobered, and she looked up at him. “Do you know if Dad’s stopped by?”