Claiming the Rancher's Heir

by Maisey Yates

  This was different from the other times they had been together. It wasn’t fast or frantic. And when it was over, she drifted off to sleep. She had the oddest sensation that in his bed, without her clothes, without any of the trappings that normally made her feel like her... She was the closest to real that she had ever been.

  Nine

  Wren began stirring in the late evening. They had skipped straight to the wedding night before the sun had gone down, and Creed was certain he would never get enough of her.

  Then she had fallen asleep, all soft and warm and satisfied against him, and he would’ve thought that he’d find it...irritating. That he still wanted sex and the woman had fallen asleep.

  But he didn’t. Instead, he just enjoyed holding her.

  It was amazing how much less of a termagant she was when she was asleep.

  As soon as she began making sleepy little noises, he hauled himself down to the kitchen and put together a plate of cheese and crackers, and grabbed a bottle of sparkling cider, which he had bought a couple of days earlier.

  How funny for Wren not to be able to drink wine. Wine was their business. It was what they were. But, of course, it wouldn’t be part of her life for the next few months.

  That meant it wouldn’t be part of his either. No wine, but she got him as a consolation prize.

  He imagined it was all a very strange turn of events for her.

  He brought the food upstairs just as Wren was sitting up, scrubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands, the covers fallen down around her waist, exposing her perfect, gorgeous breasts.

  “Happy wedding night,” he said, holding up his offerings as he made his way toward the bed.

  Her eyes took a leisurely tour of his body, and he could tell she enjoyed the view.

  That she had ever thought the two of them could keep their hands off each other was almost funny.

  Almost.

  The problem was, he didn’t find much funny about the way he wanted her. It flew in the face of everything that he was. Everything he knew about himself.

  Everything he knew about keeping himself separate.

  All the decisions that he’d made about his life eighteen years ago seemed... They didn’t seem quite so clear when he was staring at Wren. The woman carrying his child.

  The woman who was now his wife.

  “Well, this is nice,” she said.

  “I can be nice.”

  She chuckled, and pushed herself up so she was sitting a little taller. The covers fell down even farther, and he set the food and drink down on the nightstand next to her, then yanked them off the rest of the way.

  “Hey,” she said.

  But he was too busy admiring her thighs, and that sweet spot between them, to care.

  “It’s my payment,” he said.

  “I retract what I said about you being nice.”

  “If you keep showing me all this glory, I might go ahead and drop dead. And then you can do a little dance on my grave. I really would like to see you dance.”

  She smirked, then shook her hips slightly as she got up onto her knees, leaning over and taking a piece of cheese off the tray.

  “Honestly, I would have married you a lot sooner if I’d known you came with room service.”

  “Room service and multiple orgasms,” he said.

  “You know, if you have to be the one to say it...”

  “You know you’re sleeping with a woman who has more pride than sense?”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” she said. “A little bit of pride never hurt anybody.”

  “Neither did a little bit of submission.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “It hurts unless you want to give it.”

  “You say that as an expert?”

  She shook her head. “Definitely not. Being totally honest, I’ve had a few very underwhelming boyfriends. And none of them have enticed me to do the kinds of things that you entice me to do. So there you have it.”

  “I haven’t had girlfriends. None.” He got into bed with her and stretched out alongside her, running his knuckles along the line of her waist. “I hook up. It’s never about any one woman in particular so much as about my desire to get laid. That’s actually vastly unsatisfying.”

  “Tell me more.” She narrowed her eyes. “And this better end in a way that compliments me and makes me feel singular, magical and like a sex goddess.”

  “I can’t keep my hands off you,” he growled. “More to the point, I can’t keep my mind off you. When I’m not with you, I want to be with you. And when you said you didn’t want our relationship to be physical... I didn’t know what I was going to do with that. I think about you, and I burn, Wren. Even if we weren’t having the baby, even if we weren’t together tonight because it was our wedding night, I think we would still be in my bed.”

  The frown on her face made his chest feel strange.

  “We don’t like each other,” she said.

  “I think we’re both going to have to let go of that idea. Because obviously it’s more complicated than that.”

  “We don’t mesh,” she said.

  “We seem to mesh pretty well.”

  She poured herself a glass of the sparkling cider and took another slice of cheese, leaning back against the headboard, sighing heavily. “My parents’ marriage has always mystified me. They don’t really talk. It was very civil, but very distant, and I think I always imagined that’s what marriage was. I tried to find a similar thing with the men I dated. This kind of external compatibility. We never fought. And anytime I ever broke up with someone... It just sort of fizzled out. Like I would notice it had been a while since we’d seen each other and I didn’t really care. Or we were still going to events together, but not even bothering to have sex after. Or worse, we did have sex and I basically spent the whole time thinking about which canapés I liked best at the party, and not about what we were doing. I knew I didn’t want that in a long-term relationship. Boredom before we got to forever, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “But there was never this. There was never any fighting, there was never any passion. I just thought passion was for other people.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  She sighed. “It’s stupid.”

  “Look, Wren, you know all about the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. You tell me why you can’t have passion.”

  “I never think about it. It’s one of those things usually buried in my memory. You know when you’re a kid you think you’re going to be all kinds of different things. From a unicorn on down the list. For a while, I even fantasized about being a police officer. Chasing bad guys, solving mysteries. And then I realized that I don’t like to run, and I never want to be shot at, so that kind of takes being a cop off the table.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, I can see how that would be an issue.”

  “But when I was a little bit older, I thought... I got really good grades in math. I really liked it. I also really liked art, and a teacher at school, at the boarding school I went to, told me that combination was sort of rare. She said it made me special, that I could think creatively and wield numbers the way that I did. She talked to me about the kinds of things I could do with a talent like that. One of the things we spoke about was architectural engineering. I was really fascinated by it. By the way you could put different materials together. Marrying form and function. Art with practicality. My father said it just wasn’t what he saw me doing. He said my brain would be useful for the brand, and that I needed to remember the school that I went to, the clothes that I wore, everything that I was, came from the winery. Which meant I needed to invest back into the winery. I understood that. I really did. And I just didn’t think about architectural engineering anymore after that. I got my degree in hospitality and marketing. And I’ve found that I really love m
y job. But I’ve just been asking myself a lot of questions lately. About who I might’ve been if my whole life hadn’t felt so rigidly decided.”

  “Do you want to go back to school?”

  “I have to take care of the winery. Cricket doesn’t have any interest in it. Emerson is awesome, but she does a very particular thing, this kind of global brand ambassador stuff that requires lots of computer savvy. She’s brilliant. It’s actually a very similar kind of skill set as the one I have. She’s so good with algorithms, but she’s also great at finessing public branding. Doing posts that are visually appealing and that have a result. I mean, I get to use my gifts in my job. It’s just every so often I wonder if I had known who my father was back then, would I have worked so hard to make him happy?”

  “I don’t think you can know that. The same way I can’t actually know what kind of father I would’ve been. The honest truth is, Wren, I can get myself really angry about what was taken from me, and when I do that... Well, in my head I’m the best damn teenage father ever. I give up everything for my kid. Women and drinking and partying and being carefree.” He paused, working hard to speak around the weight that settled over his heart. “But I didn’t do any of that, I didn’t have to. Louisa did. So did Cal. They are the ones who ended up sacrificing. They’re the ones who gave my son a family. They’re the ones who gave him his life. Yeah, in hindsight I can make myself a hero. But I don’t know that I would’ve been. We can’t actually know what we would have done. We can just do something different now.”

  As soon as he said those words, he realized how true they were. And they made his chest feel bruised.

  He looked at Wren, and he felt a sense of deep certainty. “From this day on, Wren Maxfield, you can be whoever you want. You’ve chosen to be the mother of my child, and I appreciate that. Whatever else you want to be, I would never hold you back from it. I’d support you. If you wanted to quit working and just take care of the baby, I’d be fine with that. If you wanted to go back to school, I’d be fine with that, too. Whatever it is you need, I will help make that a reality.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I’ve had more what-ifs in my life than I care to. And this... This gives me the chance to answer a lot of my greatest ones. Getting to be the father that I’ve wondered if I could be... I want to be a father. Everything else... Everything else doesn’t matter as much.”

  “You don’t expect to hear that from men,” she said.

  “Maybe not. But most men didn’t lose out on the chance of fatherhood the way that I did. So for me... If you’re going to get a second chance, you gotta be willing to pour everything into it. And that includes caring about your happiness, Wren. I want you to stay my wife.”

  “Creed...”

  “Like I said, be whatever you want along with that. I’ll support you. I swear it.”

  He had assumed so many things about her. He had looked at her and seen the glitter and polish, had associated her with her father and the kinds of things her father had done, and Creed had imagined her to be avaricious and shallow, because it was so much easier to reduce people to stereotypes. Because it was easier to do that than to see her as a person.

  Because now that he saw her as a person, he had to contend with the complicated feelings she created inside him. And he knew he had been avoiding that. Avoiding it because something in him had recognized a connection to Wren the moment they first met.

  He had no doubt about that.

  And he had been running from complicated since the first time emotional entanglements had bit him in the ass when he was sixteen.

  But he hadn’t known anything then. And he hadn’t known anything for a lot of years after because he had simply clung to his anger at Louisa and used it as a shield.

  But age forced him to see everything with a hell of a lot more nuance, and being in this situation again demanded the same thing.

  He was having to contend with the fact that Louisa didn’t seem like such a villain anymore. And that the fact didn’t make the past hurt any less for him.

  Having to contend with the fact that there was a lot of mileage between just sex and whatever this was between him and Wren.

  And whatever their feelings were, whatever they could be, they were having a baby. And he wanted this child to have the benefit of everything his son had.

  If there was one good thing about Creed never busting into his son’s life, it was that he’d given him a family. He’d honored and respected that.

  But now, Creed wanted the same kind of family for this child.

  So he would give Wren anything. Absolutely anything.

  “I don’t know what I want yet,” she said, looking almost helpless. “I’m not sure that I can make that decision while I’m still in the middle of this big...change.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I understand. Maybe it’s not the best time, but my offer stands no matter when you take it.”

  “Thank you.” She looked at him again. “For now, can we just focus on cheese and sex? Because those are decisions I feel like I can make. I would like both.”

  “And I can accommodate.”

  And that was when he pulled her into his arms again, and they quit talking about the future, about anything serious.

  Because there was a whole lot of uncertainty out there, and in the future. But there was no uncertainty of any kind between them when it came to their mutual desire. It was certain, and it was real. And it made everything else seem manageable. Like it might be the easiest thing in the world for them to find some way to make this marriage and parenthood work.

  Creed was determined in that.

  If sheer stubbornness could will something into being possible, then he knew he and Wren would succeed.

  Because they were two of the most stubborn people on the planet.

  He just had to hope they could do it without deciding they wanted different things. Because in the end, that would end up tearing both of them apart.

  * * *

  She and Creed had been living together for two months.

  She’d wanted a wedding night... She was getting a full-on honeymoon.

  She’d wanted to do all this with a clear head. Had wanted to make plans for the baby, for how they would conduct themselves...

  She’d wanted to do it all in a lab-like environment. As if they were talking heads who could divorce feeling and desire from everything else.

  But they couldn’t do that.

  He’d set something free inside her and she didn’t want to deny it. Didn’t want to put it back. He’d asked for permanent and she didn’t feel like she could answer him.

  Was afraid to.

  But she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t fantasizing about it.

  They had been sleeping together, talking to each other, eating cheese in bed. They’d talked about Christmas, and not just in the context of the event they were planning.

  Their memories of it. The way they liked to decorate.

  She liked it sparkly. He liked it homespun.

  She liked a full turkey dinner. His mom had always made spaghetti, lasagna and bread.

  They opened a present on Christmas Eve. He was scandalized by the idea. Christmas morning only.

  She liked fake trees because they were perfect and didn’t shed.

  If he’d had pearls, he’d have clutched them. He’d been subjected to the virtues and tradition inherent in going to the woods and getting your own tree.

  Another discussion they’d tabled for later, in terms of how they’d raise their child.

  It was so difficult for her to reconcile the man that she was involved with now with the one she had first kissed all that time ago.

  She could hardly remember hating him. She didn’t hate him now. Not even close. She couldn’t hate him. Her feelings were starting to get jumbled up, and it was fr
ightening, to be honest.

  But no more frightening than when she came home and saw that a real estate sign had been put up at his ranch.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “I’m selling this place. Because I want us to pick out our own place.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Wren, you told me you didn’t know who you were. And that you were going from a house designed to your father’s taste to one better suited to mine. I don’t want you to feel that way. I don’t want that for you. I don’t want that for us.”

  “So you put your house up for sale without talking to me about it?”

  “I didn’t go out and buy a house without talking to you. That would have defeated the purpose.”

  She looked at him, and boggled. Because as much as she was coming to feel affection for him, he was still a big, stubborn, hardheaded fool.

  And she cared about him an awful lot.

  “I can’t believe you would do this for me. This is your place. Your ranch.”

  “That’s the only requirement I have,” he said. “I do need to have property, or I need to be close enough to property I can lease.”

  “Don’t be silly. That would be inconvenient.”

  “I don’t care about the house,” he said. “It can be whatever you want it to be. We could build too if you want, but that would take a lot of time.”

  “We need a place sooner than that.”

  They didn’t waste any time. They started to house hunt after that. They went overboard looking at places, and Wren felt giddy with the independence of it.

  That she was choosing a place. A place to call her own. One that would be shaped around this life she was sharing with Creed and...

  She wondered when she had accepted it. That they were going to make a try at this together.

  That she wasn’t going to leave him after a year. Or when the baby was born, or whatever she had told him all those weeks ago.

  Because she knew now that she wasn’t going to do that. That there was no way. Because she knew now there would be no separating the two of them. They were forming a unit, as strange as it was.