by Heidi Rice
He jumped out of the truck, and then arrived at her side of the cab just as she was about to jump down.
“Easy now,” he said, offering her his hand.
Moonlight and the final strains of the dusk illuminated an idyllic scene as they passed the copse of trees.
The half-built timber shell of an A-frame cabin stood on the banks of the river flanked by a cluster of pine trees. The river meandered through the valley, the pine forest on the opposite bank and the purple mountain beyond making the view so majestic her breath squeezed in her lungs.
“Where are we?” she asked as they stepped up onto the porch.
He slung an arm around her waist and tucked her into his side, nibbling her neck and then letting his lips drift under her earlobe. She jolted, lust and awe making strange bedfellows with the pang that had never quite left her chest all day and was now tightening around her ribs.
“This is my place,” he said. “I paid Logan the last of the money owing on it with the prize money this afternoon.” She could hear the catch of pride in his voice, as he straightened and held her hand. She was strangely honored he had chosen to bring her here. A casual fling.
“It’s a beautiful place,” she said, noticing the wild flowers growing in clumps beside the cabin’s porch.
“I don’t know about beautiful,” he said as he surveyed the land with a more practical and prosaic eye. “But it’s good pastureland. And Logan agreed to sell it to me at less than what it’s worth. No way could I afford the real cost of the land.”
“He must like you a lot,” Evie said, reminded of the easy camaraderie between the two men.
“We get on well enough, but he’s not doing it out of the kindness of his heart.” She could hear the smile in Flynn’s voice and found that strangely beguiling as well. He seemed such a positive, capable guy, it was just one of the many traits that made him so attractive.
“Then why is he?” Evie asked.
“Because we made a deal. It’s going to take a lot of dough and hard work to finish developing this place. I need to get the cabin completed for starters, construct a stable, add a corral. So Logan’s guaranteed a ranch hand for the rest of the year. I’ll need a paying job while I get the work finished because I’ve spent all my savings buying the land. And once the place is ready, I’ve promised to give him a discount on training his ranch horses. But the bulk of the business will be training performance horses.”
“What’s the difference?” she asked.
“Performance horses are for rodeo work, not ranch work—they require a different skill set,” he said. “There’s big money in training them if you’ve got a knack for it. And I have.”
She could hear the excitement in his voice and the pride, and her heart melted a little more.
Not smart.
“It sounds like you’ve got your work cut out?” she said, feeling wistful as she watched him. It must be wonderful to have everything planned out like that—to know where you were going, and what you wanted, and to have achievable goals that wouldn’t shift and crack beneath your feet.
Maybe she needed to get a new plan too, when she got back to the real world again.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “But having a home’s worth working at. That’s something Mitch and Dolores taught me.” She heard it then, the note of pain behind the pragmatism, and the memory of that moment yesterday, when he’d been talking about the bull-riding event, came spinning back to her.
“You loved them both very much didn’t you?”
He smiled down at her, and nodded, the deep affection in his gaze weaving a spell around them in the darkness. Maybe it was dangerous, this feeling of intimacy, of connection, but she couldn’t seem to care as she saw the sadness lurking in the emerald depths—and had the desperate urge to take it away.
“Can you tell me about them?” she said.
“They were…” He breathed slowly. “They were the best. They took me and my brothers and my sister Glory in when no one else wanted us. We’d been split up for years, ever since…” He paused, swallowed, and a flash of anger filled his eyes before he banked it. “Ever since they arrested our birth father. He got life in prison without parole and it left us on our own. No one wanted to take the kids of a convict…until Mitch and Dolores came along. And made a home for us. They taught us all the important stuff…”
“Such as?” she prompted, resisting the urge to ask him more about the arrest of his biological father and why he had been sentenced to life without parole. Because she didn’t want to exacerbate his pain and she could see even the mention of the man had done that.
He grinned, the memories flooding his face now all apparently good ones.
“Everything from cowboy courtesy—how to say please and thank you every time you talk to your elders—something none of us were much good at before we came to them. How to ride a horse, how to muck out a stall, how to slaughter and roast a hog, when and where to buy your first electric razor.” His grin suffused his whole face. “Glory got to skip that lesson. And I made a mess of it.”
“How so?” she asked, smiling back at him, and impossibly moved by this glimpse into his childhood.
“I saved up to buy the damn thing for months after I noticed three whole strands of hair on my lip. Spent hours checking out all the different models in the catalogue. When it finally arrived, I used it once and then it sat in the bathroom cabinet for over a year, eventually rusting out before I had managed to grow enough hair on my lip to use it again. Mitch had the decency not to tell me I told you so. Unlike Gabe and Rafe, who never missed an opportunity to ride me about my baby face and my non-existent beard scruff.”
She chuckled with him.
“What about you?” he asked, stroking her hair. “Did you have any siblings?”
“No, it was only me and my mam,” she said, her tongue loosened by the captivating portrait he had painted of his own family. And the odd sense of envy. If only she’d had siblings, brothers and sisters to love her and support her, even to make fun of her, maybe she wouldn’t have taken her mother’s constant criticisms and petty judgments, and her father’s absence, quite so much to heart. “And she passed a year after I moved to New York.”
“Hey, I’m sorry, Irish.” His hand swept down to rest on her shoulder and he gave it a gentle squeeze. “I know how much it sucks when you lose a parent,” he said and she could see he did know. “We managed to lose Mitch and Dolores in the space of a couple of years and it almost broke all four of us.”
She covered his hand with hers, and found herself squeezing the callused fingers, as it occurred to her, and not for the first time, what a good man he was.
So honest and open and forthright, but also so much more complicated than she’d given him credit for. And so much more genuine and optimistic than she was. And less entitled.
She’d expected certain things from life, and had resented fate and everything else when it hadn’t delivered. Maybe she wasn’t all that different from her mother after all?
But for all her bitterness, her mother had always provided for her. So there was that.
Flynn’s childhood and that of his siblings had clearly been much tougher than hers, before the O’Connells had taken them in. She’d gathered that much from the dark look that had flashed across his face when he’d mentioned what had happened to his biological father. But all she’d seen was anger. Not self-pity.
And despite those early setbacks, he’d worked hard to make a life for himself, and find a place to settle down. From what Charlie had told her, he’d only been living in Marietta for a year and yet, just from their brief stroll through town that afternoon, it was obvious everyone adored him. He’d made so many friends in a year, and she’d made so few after close to a decade in Brooklyn.
What did that say about them both? And their priorities?
“You don’t have to be sorry for me, Flynn,” she said, correcting him. “My mam and I weren’t particularly close.”
“Yeah? Why is
that?” he asked, surprising her with the question. What surprised her more, though, was the urge to reveal to him something she had never even admitted to her therapist in the months after her marriage had broken down.
“Because I ruined her life,” she said. “I was a mistake. The penance she was made to pay for a one-night stand that cost her her virginity, her chance of a career, and left her with a baby she didn’t want for her sins. As she never missed the chance to tell me when I was growing up.”
“Damn. She told you all that? When you were just a little kid?”
“Well, yes…” Evie said, astonished not just by the edge of anger in his tone, but also by the way it made her feel.
Clearly there was still a tiny part of that little girl lurking inside her who had always been desperate for a champion, someone to cheer her successes and commiserate with her when she failed, the way her mother had never been capable of.
She was fairly sure that made her pretty pathetic, but still she felt the wave of gratitude overwhelm her when he added in that same fierce tone: “Then I’m sorry you got stuck with a mom like that. She sounds like even more of a heartless bastard than my birth daddy.”
Evie huffed out a laugh, unlocking the odd choking sensation in her throat.
“You know what, you’re probably not wrong.” The ridiculous thought of her uptight, rigidly sanctimonious mother being unfavorably compared to a man who had been sentenced to life in prison without parole wasn’t just amusing, it also turned out to be a great way to break the tension, and stem the flow of self-indulgent tears that had started to make her sinuses ache.
A breeze rustled through the pine trees and she shivered, aware for the first time of the nip of autumn in the air.
“Hey, are you cold?” Rubbing her arms, he pulled her in to his body. “Perhaps we should head back to the ranch and have our picnic there?”
“And have Charlie track our every move? No thanks!” She stretched up, and wrapped her hands around his neck, the fierce feeling of connection, of joy, joined by the blast of heat as Flynn pressed warm lips to her forehead and caressed her bottom through her dress with hot hands.
“I’m sure Logan will keep her busy for us,” he said against her hair, the brush of his breath sending her senses into overdrive. “I don’t want you to freeze to death while I make love to you in the moonlight.”
Make love to you.
The words echoed in her soul for one shimmering moment of bliss. But then she grabbed his ears and yanked his face down to hers to trace her tongue against those sensual lips. “Then stop mucking about and start warming me up,” she demanded.
This wasn’t love. It was lust. No matter what they’d just shared in the moonlight.
And she wanted to binge on as much of it as she could get before tomorrow dawned.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, then grabbed her round the waist and hoisted her up.
She laughed, the sound rich and heady and reckless, as he carried her off the porch. He growled against her hair, his hands finding her butt cheeks again, this time beneath her dress as she wrapped her legs around his waist.
“Tonight there’s gonna be no more talk,” he said, his palms sinking beneath the waistband of her panties and making her shiver again. But this time it wasn’t from the cold. “From here on in, all we’re gonna do is play.”
“Bring it on, cowboy,” she whispered against his throat.
His mouth found hers as he toted her to the back of the truck. He let down the tailgate with one hand, then whipped aside a tarpaulin. But as he set her in the truck, she found herself sinking into a mound of quilts and pillows, on top of a mattress, which had been laid over the bare steel.
“What’s this?” she said, her heart getting caught in her throat again.
“I did it this morning before we left for town,” he said as he climbed into the makeshift bed with her. “I figured it would come in handy if we decided to make out under the stars,” he added, while undressing her under the quilts.
Excitement roared to life under her breastbone, helping to cover the ache in her chest at his thoughtfulness, as she tugged off his clothes in return, and freed his impressive erection from his jeans.
They made fast, furious love under the stars just like he’d promised. Then ate fried chicken and coleslaw, before lying in each other’s arms under the pile of quilts. As he pointed out the different constellations and she gasped when a shooting star flashed overhead, Evie struggled to contain the yearning ache in her chest.
This wasn’t her life, or her man; she only had him for one more night. She needed to remember that.
But when she fell asleep in his arms, the dreams came—of a different life, a different her who could have taken this fleeting joy and made it last.
The sprinkle of raindrops that woke them up after midnight had them scrambling into their clothes in the chilly night air, chuckling. But as they climbed into the truck cab and drove back to the ranch, the laughter faded into weighed silence.
“You want to come to my room?” he asked, as she stopped at her door after they had crept up the back stairs of The Double T. “Snuggle up some more on a real bed?”
She made herself shake her head, and let go of his hand. Even though it was the last thing she wanted to do. “I should get some sleep,” she said as she pushed open her bedroom door. “I’ve got an early flight in the morning.” And the one thing she knew they wouldn’t do in Flynn’s bed was sleep.
She watched him swallow and the silence stretched impossibly between them.
Had tonight, the last two, no three nights, meant as much to him as they had to her?
The silly question entered her head—and got stuck there, as she found herself willing him to persuade her not to go to her room. To stay with him. But after a long pause, he took her fingers in his and lifted them to his lips.
“Okay, Irish. If you say so,” he said. He touched his thumb to her cheek, and drew it down to her chin. “Can I give you a ride to Bozeman in the morning?”
Yes.
She swallowed, her throat raw, but forced herself not to say the word she wanted to say. “I’ve already ordered a cab,” she lied.
She needed to be realistic now. She couldn’t afford to indulge in a long goodbye, because she might not have the strength to step on that plane tomorrow morning, she realized, suddenly scared she was already halfway in love with him.
Which was utter madness, obviously.
No one fell in love over a long weekend. Not even halfway. And especially not her. She’d dated Dan for over a year, before they’d made a mutual decision to make a life together. And she’d never felt this intense yearning to steal a few more moments with Dan, even at the height of their relationship.
This was her endorphins talking. Fabulous, spontaneous, knock-your-socks-off sex was new and uncharted territory for her, that was all. She must not let the afterglow from sex with Flynn cloud her brain or her better judgment. And okay, they’d shared a few moments of candor and companionship tonight that she hadn’t expected. But the only reason they had, was because they both knew this thing had a limited shelf life. A guaranteed end date. And they needed to respect it now.
“All right,” he said, the note of regret in his voice threatening to slice through her qualifications. And her resolve. “But come get me before you leave tomorrow, okay? So I can say farewell properly?”
She nodded.
She placed her hands on his jaw, absorbed the delicious shiver of awareness as the stubble on his cheeks abraded her palms for the last time, and placed a kiss on his lips before letting him go.
“Thank you, Flynn. For making my first rodeo so perfect.”
He grinned and saluted her. “My pleasure, Irish,” he said.
But as he strolled off down the corridor to his own room, the yearning in her heart refused to leave with him.
*
“Aren’t you going to say goodbye to Flynn? He’s in the barn.”
Evie shook her h
ead at Charlie’s question, feeling stupidly close to tears as she ducked into the cab. “Could you tell him goodbye for me? I don’t want to miss my flight and I’ve got to check in.”
Her flight wasn’t for another two hours, and she’d already checked in online, but no one needed to know that. Or that she’d totally chickened out of her promise the night before.
She waved goodbye to Logan and Charlie, who stood on their porch, arms wrapped around each other like the happy couple they were.
She stifled the new twinge of envy, and attempted to ignore the empty space that had been lying in her stomach ever since she’d bid Flynn good night. But as the cab turned round in the yard, and she congratulated herself on a reasonably painless exit, she saw Flynn walking out of the barn. He paused, looking curious and then stilled, his brows drawing down into a puzzled frown as he spotted her sitting in the back of the cab.
She forced herself to wave, nonchalant and non-committal, forcing a smile to her lips as her heart threatened to choke her.
At last he raised his hand, and waved back. But he wasn’t smiling.
The smile dropped from her face as she forced herself to turn around and focus on the road ahead.
She couldn’t make the mistake again of hooking her hopes to a man, to a relationship that wasn’t real. She needed to keep her emotions in check, along with the romanticism that had crippled her once before when she’d invested in a sterile relationship with Dan because she’d convinced herself that a baby would be the answer to all her woes. Flynn was the opposite of steadfast, sensible, dull Dan—because he was smart, funny, cool, and sexy beyond belief, but how was this situation really any different?
She’d been seduced by the idea of marrying Dan because she’d wanted constancy, stability, and a baby, and he hadn’t really wanted the same things. And she’d been seduced into believing she was falling in love with Flynn because he was completely gorgeous—and she’d lapped up the cowboy charm, the care and attention he showed her, not to mention all the hotter than hot sex. But they were still only talking about a three-day fling. Their circumstances, their goals and motivations couldn’t have been more different. Plus he had a plan for his life that did not include her and wishing for something again that she couldn’t have would break her, just when she was finally starting to find her way out of the wilderness.
