April, Dani - Raven's Ranch (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme)

by April, Dani

  It was useless because she found she couldn’t force herself outside to go to them. She cared about them all as individuals, but the group scene was something else entirely. Frankly, she was terrified to think of all these big, muscle-bound guys lusting after her at the same time. She was pretty sure she could not handle that.

  When she kept their relationships compartmentalized it was just like she had a normal relationship. One guy and one girl. There was no jealousy and no lies. She could tell each man about her experiences with the others. They all cared about her, and she cared about them, only singularly.

  A part of her really did want to run out of the trailer to them right now and take them all on this minute. The other part of her was not only scared of that encounter but also embarrassed and humiliated by merely the thought.

  How could she face Chip and the pure and gentle feelings she had for him when Roy stood right next to him, and her feelings for him were totally the opposite—hot and aggressive, downright mean. Or how could she square the facts if Connor and Bran were both standing before her at the same time. Connor with his beautiful face and body that caused her to go wet when she only thought about him, and Bran’s giant frame that was the perfect male body, making her hot and lust filled with a need to reach out and touch him each time he was near.

  Someone was knocking at her door. She roused herself from her reverie and went to open it.

  “I need to talk to you, Raven.” It was Tyler outside. “Can I please come inside?” He was wet from the rain, had not even bothered to cover up with a jacket.

  “Sure, Tyler, come on in.” Raven greeted him, not certain if she was happy to see him or not. “Look at you, you’re soaked.”

  “You still have your grandfather’s bar stocked up over here.” Tyler motioned to a little counter in the kitchenette.

  “Sure do.”

  He ran his fingers through his thick, black hair to dry out the rainwater. “All right if I go over and make us a couple of drinks?”

  “Yeah, what are we having?”

  He walked over and got out two minibar-sized bottles and two glasses. “Something strong, if that’s all right?”

  “Sounds good after the night I’ve had on this damn computer.”

  He filled the glasses with ice and whiskey and handed hers over. “I need to apologize to you. I’m not dealing with my life well, and I’m taking it out on anyone who happens to be unlucky enough to be around me.”

  She took her drink and went over and leaned against a chair, taking a sip. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said.”

  “Don’t think about it. I was wrong to say that to you.”

  “You were wrong about me being a whore.” She laughed and took another sip of her drink. “I wouldn’t make a very good whore. I only sleep with incredibly gorgeous guys.”

  “You were the victim of my unhappy, empty life today, and I can never tell you how sorry I am for that.”

  “A part of what you said did strike a chord in me,” she admitted. “When I think about what I’ve been doing, sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy. I feel like I should have just picked one of you and taken him back to the city with me, and said to hell with the rest. If I had done that, my life would be a whole lot easier right now.”

  “You couldn’t do that because you’re George Spencer’s granddaughter.” He took a swallow of his drink and ran his hand back through his wavy hair. “He raised you to be an uncompromising hellcat just like he was.”

  Raven stepped outside the screen door and watched it rain. “Funny thing is, I don’t even remember him that well. I know I was real close to him when I was a child. After that I think I wrote to him a few times a year, maybe sent him a picture of me doing something crazy in college once or twice, and called him on the holidays.”

  “He sure did miss you when your mother took you away to the city.”

  “I never had a father. He left momma and me when I was a baby, and I never had any brothers or sisters. When my mother died I was right in the middle of the trying to be popular at college phase, failing miserably at it, too, I might add. I was too stupid back then to realize that granddad was all I had left after my mother died. I never tried to get close to him again. He used to ask me to come out here and visit him in every letter he’d write to me, but I never did. Now I’ll never get the chance to know him again.”

  “When he died, he left you in a real bad situation out here. I think he would have been proud of the way you’ve been trying to fight your way out of it ever since.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure about that.” Raven laughed, although it was without humor. “He was from the old school. One woman with five men…he probably would have thought about me what you were thinking today.”

  He came and stood next to her at the screen door. The night outside the trailer was silent except for the steady rain. “I told you I didn’t really think that about you, and I never have. But I can tell you what I was trying to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Push you away,” he said. “I wanted to push you away because I’m so damned attracted to you. You’re so beautiful and strong and smart. You have so much energy, you think you can tackle anything the world throws at you, and you have so much courage you just about can.”

  She smiled and turned to face him. “Thanks, Tyler. That’s nice, but I don’t think I deserve it.”

  Tyler laughed with her. This is the first time she had heard him laugh. “I don’t know if you do or not. I’m just letting my emotions speak for me. I haven’t cared about or felt attracted to a woman since…”

  He couldn’t even finish. Even now, years later, the pain of just mentioning his wife was too much for him to bear. She saw there was a tear in his eye, and his face had taken on a painful grimace.

  She turned to him. “Tyler, I don’t want to take the place of your wife. No one can ever do that. And I can’t promise you children because I don’t know if or when this crazy five-way relationship will ever produce children. But you are such a handsome, sexy, strong man, and you have so much to offer a woman. You need to let a woman in your life again before you grow old and turn into a sour old man.”

  He reached out for her, to take her in his arms, and she allowed him to do so. She put her arms around his broad shoulders and held him. He buried his face in her long, black hair and started crying. For a long time she held him like a baby and gently rocked him.

  He composed himself but still let her rock him in her arms. “Can I spend the night?” he asked her.

  “Are you really ready for that?” She was not at all certain that he was.

  “I don’t know.” He cleared his throat. “I think I am. I guess there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

  She reached up and kissed him on the forehead. “Wait for me in bed. I’m just going to take a minute to get ready.”

  Raven went into the tiny bathroom of her trailer and shut the door. She quickly undressed and stepped into the sheer red nightie she had purchased in town with Chip the other day and matching panties.

  She came out of the bathroom and turned off the overhead light. The sound of the rain beating against the metal roof of the trailer was peaceful. Tyler was already under the covers waiting for her. He pulled back the covers and reached out his hand for her. She accepted it and crawled under the covers with him. She went into his arms and he quickly covered them both up. Under the blankets he was wearing only his boxers. His erection throbbed against her thigh.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready yet,” he told her. “But this still feels damn nice just to have you like this in my arms.”

  “Just give it time, baby. We have all the time in the world. We don’t have to rush.”

  “Raven, if we lose the ranch and I lose you…well…” his voice choked.

  “Yeah, I know it looks bad right now for us. We’ve run out of money and credit, and we can’t seem to keep the herd together well enough to turn a profit.”

  “Soun
ds like you’ve been doing your homework.”

  Raven laughed and gently stroked his chest. “I still don’t get the ranching business,” she told him. “But I understand our problems a lot better now.”

  “Come up with any solutions?”

  “Not a one so far.”

  “Don’t give up.”

  “I’m not going to.” She put determination in her voice for him, but wasn’t really certain she felt it in her heart. “Do you know anything about ranching technology…like high-tech ranching equipment?”

  “I’m sorry, I wish I did. But that’s your line of work isn’t it?”

  “It is,” she admitted, shifting her body against his beneath the blanket. “If I was in an office or a lab I could probably think of something. But I’m out of my league out here. I don’t know anything about what goes on, and I can’t figure it out.”

  “Keep working, baby.” He placed a reassuring kiss on top of her head. “You’ll find something.”

  “I just hope it will be in time.” Her voice sounded small with the sound of the rain pounding against the roof.

  He tightened his grip around her and ran his hand through her long hair, brushing it back from her forehead, behind her ears. “It’s been so long since I’ve been with a woman, I’m not sure if I know what to do anymore.”

  “I’ve been getting a lot of experience recently.” She laughed. “I think I know enough for both of us.”

  They fell asleep holding onto each other. Raven was awakened later in the night by his urgent touch. His erection burned her from under his boxers. She opened her mouth to his kiss. It was a gentle and quiet passion. His hands fondled her breasts under the covers. He slid down her nightie and one of her nipples popped out. He took it in his mouth and sucked it greedily. She ran her fingers through his long, wavy hair and moaned. His hands explored down her back. She squirmed beneath him on the bed.

  “Let me take off my panties for you, darling,” she whispered in his ear, feeling his desperate need for her.

  She brought the panties down her waist, over her knees, and kicked them from her ankles under the blankets. He got on top of her, and she spread her legs for him.

  He looked down at her with uncertainty, hesitating before he entered her. “Is it okay?”

  She smiled up at him and put her arms around his shoulders. “It’s fine. I’m already lubricated.”

  He penetrated her. He was a large man and took his time with her, the gentlest lover she’d had. He brought them to such a nice rhythm, that even though she was tired from the long day she’d had, after a few minutes she found herself responding to him. Her pussy muscles tightened around his thrusting cock, and sweat poured down from her inner walls.

  When he brought her to climax, it was sweet and long. She wrapped her legs tightly around his back, and within a second of her orgasm he had reached the pinnacle with her and was coming inside her.

  She couldn’t go to sleep for a while after their sex was finished. Tyler, on the other hand, fell quickly off into a deep sleep. She wondered if this was the deepest sleep he’d had since he lost his wife, and hoped for his sake it was the start of better things to come.

  She was happy to have him sleeping next to her in bed, but at the same time she found herself becoming scared. This was guy number four. Things just kept getting more complicated. She felt like she was sitting on a powder keg that was about to explode.

  Tomorrow she had a date with Roy. Guy number five. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how that one would go down. Roy was the only one of her five guys who actually frightened her. He had been in and out of jail, after all, but she supposed that’s also what turned her on about him, and she thought somewhere beneath that bearded exterior there was a good heart. Tomorrow she would find out if she was right about him or not.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tyler got up before sunrise and left her with a good-bye kiss on the lips. She thought he seemed like a new man this morning and was happy to know she’d had a lot to do with it.

  She pulled up the Internet on her computer and began retyping her searches from the night before. She also started a notepad text document of ideas that had been going through her head. She was soon chatting online with a cyber buddy of hers that was also a professor of computer science in California. Things were beginning to take shape that morning.

  What did she know about the financial problems of the ranch? First off, they didn’t make enough revenue in selling the cattle to cover all their expenses. This had been going on for some years and they were far in debt to the bank. Secondly, she knew from looking at the accounting books of the Lazy L that the shortfall they ran every year was about twenty percent. That meant that if they could make twenty percent more from the sale of their cattle at market, they could pay off all of their bills and might even start turning a profit.

  From talking to Chip she had learned that the Lazy L lost about twenty percent of its herd every year before they could even get them to market. Bran had confirmed that number and said it was probably even higher. Apparently the cattle were easily spooked and just wandered off away from the rest of the herd, got lost on the range, and ultimately died.

  If she could figure out how to bring all of her cattle to market every year, she would make up the financial deficit of the ranch and start turning a profit. She could pay her ranch hands the money they deserved and maybe even have some left over.

  The problem was there was no way to track the cattle, no way to find out where they were when they went running off. The range was a huge, open expanse of land. Once a single cow left the herd, finding it out on the range would be impossible, and cattle were not like cats and dogs. They weren’t smart enough to know how to find their own way home. They weren’t even smart enough to watch where they were going out on the badlands and were prone to falling down a crevice and breaking their necks or getting themselves stuck inside a gulley and starving to death.

  Bran had said there was technology available that might help. Raven knew there was, from her studies in computer science. GPS technology was the answer. It was simple, really, as it applied to the cattle industry. Just staple an ear tag to each member of the herd when they were born. Inside the ear tag would be a tiny chip that would send a radio signal into the atmosphere to be picked up by orbiting satellites. The satellites in turn would send a signal to computers back on the ground telling them the exact spot where that member of the herd was. In fact, it was so accurate they could pinpoint the location of the cow to within two feet. Computer software could be loaded onto any machine that would graphically display all the cattle in real time. When members of the herd began to wander and stray, all one would have to do is watch the computer screen and then they would know when the cows were leaving the herd and where they were going.

  It was really as simple as that. Once one knew a cow had strayed all one had to do is get in their truck and go round it up, forcing it back to the safety of the herd. This technology would even save the ranch hands work, because rather than idly patrolling the range looking for stray members of the herd they could merely drive directly to those bad boys and round them up.

  Raven knew how to install and run the GPS software that would track the cattle from the comfort of the computer screen right here in her office. She could even turn her laptop into a makeshift server until they could afford a better machine.

  The only problem was, and it was a big one, she didn’t know how to procure all those GPS tags on her nonexistent budget. She would have to think about that one for a while.

  I have to go now.

  She typed in the chat room to her cyber friend, the computer professor.

  So soon? We just started going over the plan for beta testing.

  My boyfriend has the day off. We have a date.

  I thought you told me your boyfriend was going to be off yesterday.

  He was. But that was a different boyfriend.

  How many boyfriends do you have?

 
Five.

  Girl, you are in trouble. Do they know about each other?

  Yes. We’re cool.

  How’d you ever manage to get five boyfriends?

  It’s a long story.

  I hope they’re treating you right.

  Yes. They’re treating me great.

  You seem to be happy.

  Yes, I am very happy. Only the boyfriend I am meeting today is angry with life. I hope that I can make him happy.

  She closed down her chat room window and turned her focus to the day at hand. Looking at the clock on the status bar of her PC, she saw that it was well after nine o’clock. This was late. She had let the time escape her as she chatted on the computer.

  Where could Roy be? She had imagined that he would come barging into her trailer, without knocking, at the crack of dawn demanding her to get naked and spread her legs. Instead, here it was hours later and still no Roy. What had happened?

  Deciding that she might be in for a long wait she made herself a tuna salad sandwich for lunch and pulled a soft drink from the refrigerator. She was starting to lose patience with Roy and becoming somewhat angry with him. She was wasting an entire day that she couldn’t afford, and she could have been well into her research on the new GPS system by now if it hadn’t been for that stupid cowboy.

  Curses and obscenities that she would never have spoken aloud ran through her head in regard to the lost cowboy. “You stupid idiot, where are you?”

  One o’clock came and still no Roy. She turned on the TV and found an old movie to watch. One thirty rolled around. Still nothing. It was a lonely feeling to be stood up on a date and when she got her hands on that good for nothing…

  Her phone rang. Raven clutched it off the table next to her PC and answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Where the heck are you?” It was Roy’s voice and he sounded upset.

  This, of course, upset Raven even more. “What do you mean where am I? I have been waiting around here all day for you. Where the hell have you been?”