by Maisey Yates
“Of course I do,” he said. “You matter to me. You always have.”
“Except for the couple of months where you didn’t talk to me.”
He felt like he’d been slapped. “That was nothing. That was just...me going through some things. And when Clint died it didn’t matter anymore.”
“If he hadn’t died would you ever have talked to me again?”
The words hit him hard. And he had honestly never thought of it before. Because there had never been a reason to think about something like that. Their lives had changed. Utterly and completely in the space of a moment.
“Yes,” he said, because it was the only answer that could possibly be true. He couldn’t imagine never speaking to Ellie. That had never been in the cards. Hell, if it was that easy, he would have done that in the beginning instead of just trying to carve his feelings out of his chest with a spoon. Instead of just suppressing his desire for the better part of the decade.
“Why were you mad at me?”
“Why does it matter?”
“I don’t know. Because I keep thinking about it. Because things are changing with us. And because I’ve made you mad recently, and it made me think about then.”
He gritted his teeth. “Because we had a secret,” he said. “And when you told me you were pregnant it hit me how stupid it was. Meeting for secret lessons.”
“It was a secret because you didn’t want...”
“Yeah, but it occurred to me how messed up it was that we had one at all.”
Realization seemed to wash through her like a wave.
“Oh,” she said, looking away.
“It’s okay if you didn’t think of it that way. You were married. I’m not. I wasn’t. So for me, I was a single guy coming to your house in the middle of the day when your husband wasn’t home, and spending time with you that he didn’t know about. Hell, outside work I was starting to spend more time with you than I did him. Our...friendship was getting stronger than the one I had with Clint. And I’m sorry that I didn’t handle it well.”
“Were you...? Were you attracted to me?”
“Fuck, Ellie. Why would you ask that?” The words escaped before he could hold them back in.
“Because I want to know.”
She was asking expensive questions and she had no idea how much they cost.
“Yes,” he grated. “Obviously, if I thought of you as nothing more than a talking cabbage it wouldn’t have been an issue that I was meeting with you by myself.”
There was a long pause, and he wanted to grab that line of tension and strangle himself with it. Knock himself unconscious for a bit. Anything rather than being right here in it.
“You didn’t do anything,” she said.
“Yeah, well.”
“And you wouldn’t have. It’s obvious that you wouldn’t have. You cut off lessons with me. So...”
“Don’t absolve me of it.”
“I’m not,” she said softly. “I’m not doing anything with you, or to you, when it comes to...whatever you felt back then. It’s not... Life is really complicated. And it doesn’t matter what you felt for a minute. What matters is what you did. You were there for me. You’ve always been there for me.” She put her hand on his chest, and for a moment it seemed like a comfort gesture. But then her hand slid upward an inch, and the mood shifted, the tension between them becoming sexual.
He let go of her wrist and pressed his hand over hers. “But I was never as safe as you thought.”
She huffed a laugh. “My whole life wasn’t as safe as I thought. Life changes. That’s about the only thing we can guarantee. It will be what it is—that’s another thing. I don’t want to be safe, Caleb. If I wanted to be safe then I would just keep doing what I was doing.”
He looked down at her, and his mouth burned. Her tongue darted out, touching the center of her lower lip, and he ached to taste it. Ached to claim her mouth again the way that he had done last night.
“Caleb! There’s an owl in one of your trees.”
“What?” He looked over at Amelia.
“You have an owl,” she said.
“Those trees are too short for owls,” he said.
He had no idea if that was scientifically or...zoologically true, but he barely knew his own name right now.
“Not these,” Amelia said. “That one.”
She pointed to a tall, scraggly pine on the edge of the curated rows. And indeed, there was a white, moon-faced barn owl up at the top, gazing down at them with no small amount of judgment.
“That’s great,” he said. “Just great.”
“Kids have an unerring sense of timing,” Ellie whispered.
“And it’s a good thing she does,” he said. “Because there’s no way anything can happen with her twenty feet away. And also...you’re not ready yet.”
“Why am I not ready?” she asked.
A teasing response hovered on the edge of his lips, but for the first time he wondered if it was he who wasn’t ready. It was weird, the way that he had ended up confessing about the reading lessons.
He certainly hadn’t anticipated that.
Exposing his tarnished soul to her wasn’t exactly on his to-do list. Just the opposite.
He hadn’t expected to put that out there in the open, but it didn’t seem to have changed anything. She seemed resolved, and it hadn’t seemed to rock her world in any way.
He had to wonder why that was.
“Just trust me,” he said. “You’re not ready yet.”
“I don’t know that I do.”
“Until you do, you won’t be ready. You gotta trust me with your body, honey. And if you don’t...”
“How many years of fantasies do you have?”
That hit him like a bullet. “You’re not going to find out if you don’t behave.”
“Then I guess I’ll behave.”
* * *
THE NEXT WEEK was an exercise in frustration, at least for Ellie. Caleb seemed...well, distressingly fine. And Ellie was...
She didn’t know what was happening to her. Because the need for sex had shifted into a need for Caleb, and that had happened before they had ever kissed.
But sometime between their encounter by the fireplace and this very moment, it had turned into a sickness.
She was going to die if she couldn’t have him.
Him, specifically.
And everything between them was a jumble, a ridiculous tangle that she wasn’t sure she could quite sort out, but it didn’t change the fact that she wanted him.
“You seem cheerful today,” Vanessa said, coming into the classroom with lunch in hand.
“I am...bemused.”
“By?” Vanessa pressed.
“My life?”
“That is a lot to be bemused by.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Does it have to do with a certain tall, handsome cowboy?”
“How did you guess?”
“Oddly,” Vanessa said, taking a fierce bite of her sandwich, “we live in a place where that necessitates being more specific. Because we are beset by tall, handsome cowboys.”
“What a thing to be beset by.”
“And bemused by.”
“Obviously, it’s Caleb.”
“Obviously. What’s going on?”
“He won’t... He...”
She’d been sitting on what had happened between the two of them because it felt very raw and personal. Because her reaction to Caleb was embarrassing.
“He’s being a tease. And I have...blue...ovaries? Is that a thing?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, if they were a thing, I would have them. He’s torturing me. He... He kissed me. And then...he did more than kiss me. And I want...everything.”
“You want to go all the way.” Vanessa smirked over the top of her sandwich.
“Yes,” Ellie said. “I want...” She sighed. “I wanted to get carried away with passion, the way that you and Jacob did. When you talked about the two of you having sex against the wall... I was jealous. I was jealous because it sounded so intense and wonderful and like an escape.”
“Yes,” Vanessa agreed. “An escape into motherhood.” She put her hand on her stomach. Yes, her impetuous sex with Jacob had had consequences. But still.
“You know what I mean. He’s drawing it out. He’s not giving me the thing. And the worst part is I...I want him so much I can’t see straight. Him. It’s like a sickness. He is my best friend.”
“I’m a little wounded by that,” Vanessa said. “But go on.”
“You know what I mean. He’s been in my life for years. As my friend. And it’s like the world suddenly tipped over. And I feel like I’ve reached my quota for how many times my world is allowed to shift on its axis completely. This isn’t something that I wanted, but now... It’s happening, and I have never looked at my best friend’s ass so many times in the entire fourteen years that I’ve known him as I have in the past week.”
“Well, what are you going to do about that?”
“He says I’m not ready,” she said.
“What?”
“He says I’m not ready,” she repeated.
“Do you have to...wax on wax off a car first before you’re ready to get on him?”
Ellie shot her a baleful look. “He doesn’t like that I propositioned him. At least, that’s my take on it. And he’s making me wait, because he’s in charge.”
Vanessa snorted. “Oh, what alpha male crap.”
“Right?” Ellie said. “I thought so, too.”
“I bet he would not be able to stick to his guns if you ambushed him with yours.” She gestured toward Ellie’s boobs.
“He made it pretty clear,” Ellie said.
“So what?” Vanessa asked.
“What happened to considering him as another person involved in this list situation?”
“Well, obviously he wants you. And I never said that you couldn’t play a little dirty. Isn’t that the point, after all?”
“I guess,” she said.
“You guessed nothing. You want him.”
“I do. And...”
Ellie thought about telling Vanessa what Caleb had told her about his attraction to her while she was married. But somehow...it didn’t seem right. It seemed like something that should be between the two of them. Because it obviously bothered him to admit it.
But attraction was normal, wasn’t it? She had always thought he was a good-looking guy. And the fact of the matter was, she never considered sleeping with him because she hadn’t considered sleeping with anyone other than her husband. But she had known that he was handsome. And clearly she’d always possessed the ability to be attracted to him, or they wouldn’t be in this situation now.
She wondered why he felt so cut up about it.
But then, it probably had to do with the fact that he and Clint had a long relationship, and also that Caleb admired Clint so much.
“I lost you,” Vanessa said.
“What?” Ellie jerked out of her drifting thoughts.
“I’m just saying,” Vanessa said. “If you want him, make it happen. Honestly, I don’t think there’s a man alive who wouldn’t be pretty excited to have the woman that he wants to sleep with show up at his place half-naked.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“I can watch Amelia for you. And he’s closing on his house, and moving in within the next couple of days...”
“You’re enabling me.”
“Yes,” she said. “And why not?”
And now that it was in her mind, she couldn’t let it go. Because these feelings that she had for him were starting to feel a little bit like a drawn-out illness, and she was eager to get in bed, and get it done with.
Then maybe she would magically be on the path to moving on. From all kinds of things.
Of course, she had asked him in the most explicit terms she possibly could have to have sex with her last week, and he had still walked away.
But he was only a man. Flesh and blood. If she took her top off... Well, Vanessa might have something there.
Ellie really hoped that she did, because there would be no real way for her to get a grip on her life if she couldn’t handle this.
She didn’t like feeling off-kilter, and she didn’t like feeling out of control. And that meant it was time for her to do something about Caleb.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CALEB WAS HOME. Really home.
The concept of home didn’t matter much to him. He took it for granted. He had spent most of his life in the house his parents lived in now. Of course, when he’d been really little, they had lived in a trailer park. But he barely remembered that, and at his age, it felt stable enough. Though he knew that his father resented the years spent in their humble residence, to a little boy a roof over your head was a roof over your head.
But there was something about this. About something that was his. His specifically and not anyone else’s.
It wasn’t Hank’s, and it wasn’t bought with Hank’s money.
It was his place. His ranch. His land.
And in his estimation, a man wasn’t no kind of man if he didn’t have some land.
The place was a little bit weathered—inside and out—but it would give him something to do, fixing it up. Yeah, it would make for a nice project.
Something that he could do. He’d always been good at working with his hands. He might not have been able to ace a test, every essay he’d ever written might look like chicken scratch, but he could build things. He’d done the sets for the school play, and that kind of extra credit was about the only way that he’d managed to graduate high school.
He took on physical projects that no one else really wanted to do. And he did them well.
You’re letting them pigeonhole you.
His dad’s voice rang in his ears. A memory from a long time ago.
They think you’re just trailer trash. The kind of boy that’s only suited for manual labor.
We haven’t been trailer trash in a long time, Dad.
It doesn’t matter. People remember. Their memories are long.
You only care about us doing well in school because you want to prove that we are not trash down in our blood.
Is that so bad? I worked hard to get us out of there. I worked hard to change our circumstances. You don’t care because you don’t remember.
I remember well enough. But I thought the point of having money was to get a little bit more freedom in your life.
As far as Caleb could see, it had meant that for his father. It had given him permission to go out and do whatever he wanted, even though he had been doing a bit of it beforehand—as evidenced by the ages of his half siblings.
But Caleb had never wanted to be the fulfillment of Hank Dalton’s shortcomings.
And he didn’t want to sit around having a constant reminder of his own. So now...this was his place.
It wasn’t gold-plated like his father’s, but Caleb didn’t need all that.
He just wanted what was his.
So maybe... Maybe that was his concept of home. Thankfully, he had few possessions. He hadn’t brought any of his furniture with him—it had been old anyway—and his new furniture had arrived from the delivery service that morning. Otherwise, it had been work boots, fancy boots, work pants, fancy pants, T-shirts and button-up shirts. A few cowboy hats. His TV, which he basically reserved for watching football, and his truck.
He was a man who traveled light through the world.
The new house, weathered though it was, was so much bigger than the cabin that he
’d been renting, that he’d gone and gotten himself about the biggest bed he could find. One his feet wouldn’t hang off, and one that could easily fit a partner, and accommodate no small amount of physical activity.
It seemed to be a little bit of a mockery right at the moment.
But he’d chosen it. Because he was a masochist, apparently.
He closed his eyes and thought about Ellie. He wanted her.
But for how long? And what did she want from him?
And why the hell did it matter?
He hadn’t thought this deeply about sex since he was a sixteen-year-old virgin.
He went and opened the fridge and stared at the contents. Beer bottles, that was basically it.
And as he reached for one of them, wrapped his hand around the cold glass, he froze. Because his own motivation suddenly fell on him like a ton of bricks.
He was testing his control.
Proving to himself that Ellie Bell couldn’t tempt him beyond what he could handle.
And he thought back to what she’d said earlier.
It doesn’t matter what you wanted to do. What matters is what you did.
It did matter. Both things. But whether or not he was able to be the master of his own body meant something.
Because he didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of feelings about what kind of man he was, and about how worthy or good he might be, but he had his control.
He’d never been the smartest. He’d never been the most successful. But he was a man who put his head down and did what the hell he believed in.
He had been a loyal friend, a good brother. And wanting Clint’s wife had gone in the face of the one thing he was the best at.
And now... Now it was like he was testing his own mettle.
Dammit, how annoying.
He slammed the fridge shut and pressed his beer bottle lip against the counter and slammed his palm down on the top, separating the cap from the rim.
He lifted the bottle to his lips and shook his head.
There was nothing wrong with making sure his control was rock-solid.
Hell, he’d spent all his school years feeling like his life was out of control.
Every other damn kid in the class just learned to read. Why couldn’t he do that?
