Heartbreak Ranch

by Kylie Brant

  She caught sight of a movement in the room behind her and watched in the mirror as her door pushed slowly open and Jed’s reflection joined hers in the glass.

  It was ridiculous to feel modest about being dressed in nothing but the taupe-colored camisole and tap pants. Ridiculous after he’d seen her wearing much, much less last night. She pushed the weakness aside and whirled to meet him, bracing herself for a fight.

  “In the interest of world peace I think we should wait until tomorrow to continue our discussion.” Julianne was proud of the cool, steady tone she managed. It masked the nerves that had her fingers tightly gripping the dresser top behind her.

  “I’m sorry.”

  His terse words caught her in the midsection with the force of a blow. She drew in a breath, watching him carefully.

  He stood in the doorway, looking as if every muscle in his body was pierced with tension. “What I said to you downstairs…you didn’t deserve it.” His fingers curled into his palms, squeezed reflexively. “I have reasons for not wanting to meet this guy, this John Sullivan. But I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.” Sincerity leaked into his next words. “The last thing I want to do is hurt you, Jules.”

  She pressed a hand to her stomach to still the fluttering there. It wasn’t fair, she thought achingly, that a few simple words from him should hit so hard, mean so much. Just as it wasn’t fair that his earlier careless words could wound so deeply. When had she given him this power over her? she wondered, in a sudden burst of panic. Because she was very much afraid that it was a power that wasn’t reciprocated.

  A wiser woman wouldn’t have pushed. Knowing when to retreat was the mark of a seasoned strategist. But she didn’t consider wisdom and she didn’t think about strategy. Instead, she thought about the bleakness of his gaze, the flatness of his tone, and she did what it was in her nature to do.

  “Tell me,” she invited softly. She saw the instant denial flare in his eyes, watched his face close, and could have wept. “Make me understand.”

  He shifted, leaning his weight against the doorjamb, but it wasn’t a pose of relaxation. “It won’t change anything.”

  “Is it changing anything by keeping it inside to twist and torment you?”

  He was silent long enough to make her believe he wouldn’t answer. His gaze drifted down, and she knew he wasn’t seeing the forest green carpet beneath their feet. He was looking inward.

  His voice when he spoke was devoid of expression. “I told you my brother died.” He raised his gaze to meet hers then, and her throat closed up. Because in the depths of his eyes lurked brutal demons she’d never suspected existed. “What you don’t know is that I killed him.”

  Shock arrowed into her, followed closely by denial. Her hair brushed against her jaw as she shook her head. “No.”

  “I never knew what was worse as a kid, when my mother was there with us in the apartment or when she’d leave us alone.” Each word sounded as though he were pulling it from somewhere deep inside him. And perhaps he was. A place where he swept all the painful parts of his past, to rot and fester. “When she was there she was low on patience. Men would come over, and Cage and I were to wait in a closet. We never knew what we were waiting for. We just knew it was small and dark.” He stopped abruptly and his eyes met hers. She knew suddenly, intuitively that they were both thinking of his love for the boundless open skies of Montana.

  His fingers searched absently for a cigarette, then paused, as if remembering where he was. “She’d leave us alone. Sometimes there would be food to eat, sometimes not. That last night she left her matches on the kitchen table.”

  Understanding began to dawn, and with it, a terrible premonition. An image was taking shape in her mind, one too horrible to contemplate. Two boys, toddlers probably, uncared for, untended. Left to get into the kind of tragedy that most parents went to great lengths to protect their children from.

  Her voice was a whisper trapped in her throat. “Oh, Jed.”

  “I still remember the thrill of finally getting one to light. When it burned down to my fingers, I dropped it.” The words were dragged from him with a horrible lack of passion. The passion and guilt were all locked on the inside.

  “That’s how the apartment caught fire.”

  He gave a slow nod. “I remember being afraid of what my mother would do when she found out. We hid in the bedroom closet at first. When the smoke got too bad we opened the door and went for the window. The fire spread before help arrived.”

  She closed her eyes, but the picture he was painting was branded on her mind. The screams of the frightened children, the smell of smoke and the agony Jed must have suffered, caught in the flames. He had the scars to remind him of his nightmare. But it was the scars on the inside that worried her most. The massive load of guilt he’d carried with him most of his life would have leveled a weaker man.

  “It wasn’t your fault. Surely you know that?”

  He gave her a terrible parody of a smile. “Wasn’t it?”

  Driven to move, she went to touch him. She laid her hand on his arm and slid it up and back in a gentle glide.

  “You were a child. Lay the blame where it belongs—with your mother. She was to blame, not you.”

  His tone was final. “I lit the matches.”

  Her grip tightened on his arm and she gave it a slight shake. “You were four! It was a horrible, horrible situation, but you weren’t responsible.” Her voice softened, became imploring. “Forgive yourself, Jed. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It’s all tangled up inside,” he murmured wearily. “Everything I do, everything I want, comes from some pathetic piece of my childhood. You said you understand me. How could you? I’ve never told this to anybody before.” His mouth twisted. “There’s lots you don’t know.” In a gesture of frustrated weariness, he scrubbed both hands over his face. “Maybe it’s time you were told.”

  She didn’t doubt that there was more. But the fortress around his emotions had been breached and she didn’t know if he could withstand another assault. Not so soon. “Shh.” She went up on tiptoe to kiss his throat. “It’s enough. It’s enough for now.” Her arms went around him, his suffering eliciting an instinctive offer of solace.

  He cupped her elbows with his hands and bent his head. His lips were hard and more than a little desperate. She tasted his desperation and tempered it with compassion. Jed wouldn’t accept sympathy, would be offended by pity. What she wanted to give him was so much more than that. Tracing his lips with the tip of her tongue, she poured her heart into the kiss.

  She could feel the tense muscles under her hands, and her fingers went immediately to soothe. His primal male flavor surged through her body, and she leaned into him in a wholly female reaction.

  He stiffened under her hands. “Julianne.” His voice was a velvet caress.

  “I know,” she whispered. He’d come to apologize for hurting her, but the pain he’d just relived for her was the worst kind of torment she could imagine. Perhaps he even believed that he didn’t need to reach out to another person right now, but he was wrong. Her fingertips trailed down his shirtfront. She didn’t want to think of him alone tonight with only his torturous memories for company. He should be with someone who cared about him. As she did. She pressed her lips to the hollow in his throat.

  His body remained unyielding, but his face was set with the expression of a man waging a mighty war with himself. She was going to do her best to make sure it was a battle he would lose.

  Her gaze locked with his, she undid each button on his shirt with smooth, graceful movements. His eyes hooded, he watched her, still motionless. When she had his chest bared, she went up on tiptoe, brushing her silk-clad body against his skin. A shudder worked through him and his arms went around her with a fierceness that should have shocked but only thrilled.

  He buried his face in her hair for a moment, then stepped back and swept her up in his arms. She linked an arm around his neck, so when he laid her down on the bed,
she was able to pull him down to meet her mouth. He pulled away after a moment, stood and shrugged out of his shirt.

  Her heart jammed in her throat. The emotion he usually sought to contain was unleashed. He undid the button and zipper on his jeans, then, as if he couldn’t go without touching her any longer, joined her on the bed and covered her mouth with his. Passion flared, clean and bright, sending sharp darts of need throughout her system.

  They clung, pressed, rolled on the bed. The light from the single lamp on her dresser slanted across the bed so they moved from brightness, to shadow, to light again. His hands swept over the silky camisole, then slipped beneath it, streaking over skin. He rolled to his back, pulling her on top of him without releasing her mouth. Edgy blades of lust pricked at her, and her hands were as ruthless as his as she wedged them between their bodies and went on a sensual discovery.

  Once released, the emotions he sought to guard so closely were not easily restrained again. And before the night was over, she was determined to have every last one of them. With hot, voracious kisses and long, gliding strokes, she found what made him groan; what made his breath hiss and what caused shudders to rack his big body.

  She sat astride him and tipped her head back, letting her hair brush her shoulders, running her hands down the sides of her camisole. With her gaze locked on his, she grasped the hem in her hands and pulled it over her head. The restless smoke of his eyes was enough to send fiery little demons of passion pounding through her veins. Then his hands came up to stroke, to touch, to claim.

  His hand went to her nape, and he pulled her down for his kiss, his fingers shoving into her hair as his mouth ate at hers. Colors exploded behind her eyelids, fragmenting into a prism of brilliant hues.

  This was what she wanted from him, she thought dimly. Passion, primitive and unchecked. A need uncensored, unchained. One she returned without reservation. Her hands danced up his spine, lingering over each individual vertebra. Bodies rolled, tongues battled, damp flesh pressed to damp flesh. Sensation zinged from his fingertips to pulse points under her skin. She turned her head to graze his shoulder with her teeth, desperate for the taste of him. He indulged his own appetite by moving down her body and taking her nipple in his lips. Each rhythmic pull of his mouth elicited a corresponding contraction of pleasure low in her belly. Clawing need burst forth, a desperate wanting for now, now, without another moment of waiting. She was slowly being turned inside out as she writhed and moaned beneath him.

  She was too close to toppling from that towering pinnacle of pleasure that he built with each stroke of his tongue, each glide of his fingers. And she was determined not to fall alone.

  Her hands went to his hips and began tugging at the heavy denim. To aid her frantic fingers, he lifted up, and she reared beneath him, rolling him over and fighting the jeans down his long legs.

  When she’d freed him, she slid up his body and wrapped her fingers around him. She stroked her tongue up his heavy masculinity and a ragged groan tore from his throat. And then his hands were on her shoulders and she was flipped on her back. Her pants were swept away, and he made a place for himself between her legs.

  Yes. She almost wept at the promise of imminent satisfaction. The urge to have him inside her was brutal, the need to bind with this man primal. Then he drove into her, and she unraveled in one violent eruption.

  There was no time for muscles to relax, for sensations to calm. With a feral snarl vibrating deep in his throat, he yanked her legs higher around his hips, and thrust harder, faster, deeper.

  The aftermaths of the first climax slapped into the rising waves of the next. Breathing was impossible as she madly scrambled for the next peak. Her gaze unfocused, her nails scored the tense shoulders above her, and they went over the next shattering precipice together.

  His touch was less urgent, but no less possessive as he stroked her body back to calm. His heartbeat hammered against her ear, the sound solid and comforting. When he rolled away from her, she made a noise of protest but couldn’t summon the energy to open her eyes.

  “Don’t go,” she murmured.

  “I have no intentions of going anywhere tonight.” His voice was low, with the edgy rasp of satisfied male.

  “Good.” She smiled and snuggled more deeply into the pillow. “Otherwise I’d have to come after you and drag you back to bed, and that could prove tricky. I think I’ve gone blind.”

  There was a smile in his voice when he suggested, “Maybe you should open your eyes.”

  “Why, if you’re not going anywhere?”

  She could hear his footsteps padding across the room, the gentle click as the lamp on her dresser was turned off. Then the bed sank with the weight of his body, and she reached out and found his muscled thigh. He had the legs of an experienced horseman, she thought dreamily, pausing to caress the sleek bundle of muscles there. She stroked gently, neither of them speaking for a long time. But there was something she had to broach with him, because Jed needed pushing and he needed prodding. He’d be the first to admit that prodding was her forte. She’d always believed in going with her strengths.

  “What are you going to do about your brother?” The question hung in the darkness between them. And although she still touched him, she felt a part of him, a part deep inside, shift away.

  “Leave it alone, Julianne.”

  She wondered if he recognized the note of weary plea that threaded his words. It was enough to make her sorry she couldn’t do as he requested. Her touch was not quite absent, her fingernails lightly scoring hair-roughened skin.

  “I’ve never asked you for anything, Jed. And I’m not asking for myself, I’m asking for you. Just promise me you’ll think about it.”

  He didn’t answer, and her heart split just a little. She’d always known the man was stubborn, and what she’d learned from him tonight told her that there was a seething cauldron of rusty guilt and pain oozing inside him. It was naive of her to hope, but she was helpless not to try.

  He rolled away from her, and this time she didn’t protest, thinking she’d pushed too hard, too fast. After several moments she became aware of something feather light fluttering to land on her sensitized skin. She smiled slowly, stretched, keeping her eyes tightly closed. Because Jed was here. He may have closed up again, but he wasn’t running. At least not from her.

  The scent of rose petals stung the air, and she drew in a sharp breath as his lips followed the path of the flowers he’d shredded. He kissed each inch of skin covered by the fragrant pieces, then she laced her fingers in his hair, drew him up to meet her lips.

  “Promise me,” she whispered against his mouth.

  His lips hesitated against hers for an instant before kissing her deeply. And as the silken web of passion began to tighten around them once again, she was very much aware that he hadn’t promised her anything at all.

  Chapter 13

  “What in heaven’s name are you doin’ in there, girl?”

  Julianne started in surprise, banging her head on the inside of the refrigerator. Wincing, she withdrew from the appliance and faced Annie. The woman was carefully moving her walker toward a chair, where she sat down, breathing heavily.

  “We’re going to have to put a bell on that thing,” Julianne observed. “It’s getting downright dangerous the way you sneak up on a person.”

  Annie was flushed with exertion. “Never thought I’d see the day when just getting around was enough to wear me out. Why, it can’t be more than twenty yards from my room to the kitchen, and look at me. Puffing and panting like a hound dog on a hot day.”

  “Maybe that should tell you something.”

  The housekeeper waved away the concern in Julianne’s voice. “All it tells me is that I’ve laid in that blasted bed too long. Now.” She fixed the younger woman with a steely look. “What was it you thought you were doing, climbing into that fridge?”

  Julianne pointed with her wet rag to the countertop lined with the refrigerator’s contents. “Cleaning it, of
course.”

  “Don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that those shelves and drawers are removable.”

  She blinked once, then turned, opened the door and peered inside. “Well, I’ll be darned,” she said, wonder tingeing the words. “That’s handy, isn’t it?”

  When she looked back at Annie, the woman’s eyes were twinkling. “Learn something new every day, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes too late,” Julianne muttered. With quick movements she started replacing the food items in the freshly cleaned appliance. She caught the other woman’s broad grin, and it elicited an answering smile. Whatever her feelings about taking over for Annie during her convalescence, she couldn’t deny that the experience had been an education. When she’d been a girl, the housekeeper had never required Julianne to do more around the house than keep her room neat. And there had always been servants at the homes she’d shared with Andrew. She’d been kept too busy during her marriage, at any rate, trying to pull her ex-husband out of a bottle or the nearest casino.

  But despite the aching muscles and the sheer drudgery of some of the tasks she’d taken over, Julianne didn’t regret a moment she’d spent replacing Annie. Regardless of the tedium of some of the days, regardless of the missed hours for riding and the sometimes bone-deep exhaustion, there was an undeniable sense of accomplishment at being able to keep the household running smoothly. A quiet satisfaction that came from looking at a sparkling room and knowing she was responsible.

  “Why don’t you sit down for a few minutes?” Annie suggested. “Lord, the way you fly around the house these days is enough to make a body tired just looking at you. Take a break.”

  “And when did you ever take a break?” Julianne asked. But after a quick sideways glance at the clock, she slipped into a chair. There was still the laundry to finish, the upstairs to dust and a cake to bake and frost for dinner. But she’d always left time in her day to check on Annie, to fetch and carry for her and to stop in for a few minutes of chatter every hour or so.