by Kait Nolan
“Well, Logan apparently short-circuited that wiring because he bailed on grad school entirely. He was done with his Master’s coursework and had been accepted to a PhD program. All he had left was defending his thesis. Our parents were furious. I think they’d have been furious either way because we were taught from a very early age that you finish what you start, and he walked away without ever defending. But the fact that he chose to become a farmer—that just killed my Dad. He came from humble beginnings, and he always wanted more. He worked his ass off, and he got it. The idea that Logan would choose something he considers lesser is, as you’ve observed, a massive bone of contention.”
It would probably be rude of him to point out that her dad sounded like a snobby, entitled douchebag. “Yeah, I got a sense of that.”
“So right in the middle of all that, I announced I intended to pursue the law. Part of it was hoping to take some of the heat off Logan and part was because…I wanted to be the golden child for once. And I was. Dad noticed, and he loved that I shared that interest with him. I loved the praise and attention. When I got into Vandy for law school, he was over-the-moon excited. So was I, to start. I loved the challenge. That sense of competition and drive took me a long way. But Vanderbilt is one of the best law schools in the country. I’ve had to push so fucking hard to keep in the top one percent of my class. Which…really, was fine. I don’t mind hard work. But as it’s getting closer and closer to the actual reality of getting out of law school and really being a lawyer, that’s when the anxiety started to take hold. And it all came to a head when I got offered that position up in New York.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“It’s with one of the top five firms in the nation. That I got interviewed at all was a huge honor, and that they offered me the job…it’s essentially the pinnacle of my academic achievement. On the surface, it sounds amazing. Insane starting salary, a deal on a swank condo near the office. A gym and dry cleaners in the building. Runners to pick up any food you could desire. It sounds like a lot of perks, right? But it’s because you’re basically selling your soul for eighty-hour work weeks and a shot at partner.”
Equal parts impressed and appalled, Sebastian leaned back to look into her face. “You’ve done all this to earn your father’s approval?”
Laurel winced. “Pretty much, yeah.”
He understood exactly the kind of toll it took to push yourself to the limits in the name of pleasing someone else. “It’s impressive as hell. You’re impressive as hell. But this is your life, Laurel. If you really wanted this, wanted that life, that would be one thing. But it’s obvious you don’t. And you can’t do this to yourself for someone else. That’s a really terrible reason.”
She stiffened, straightening to look at him. “I don’t have a choice.”
There was always a choice. But she didn’t want to make it. Sebastian recognized she wasn’t in a place where he could convince her to stand her ground and take a page from her brother’s playbook, so he’d let it go. For now.
“So what exactly do you want while you’re here?”
Frowning, she made a long, wary scan of his face. “I want to relax. I want to not think about next semester. I want to get back in the saddle again.” She paused. “And I’d like to get you know you better. Whatever that might entail.”
He’d started this conversation intending to explain as best he could why getting tangled up together was a bad idea. But she was standing at a crossroads in her life, still primed to go headlong down the wrong path. Saving her from herself felt like something that would help balance his personal scales, paying forward the kindness and compassion he’d received from her brother. And, he selfishly wanted to get to know her better, too. He wanted to give in to this attraction. To take what she was offering for this liminal time before they both went back to their normal lives.
So he brushed a stray lock of hair back from her face. “Okay.”
Laurel frowned. “Okay?”
“I can handle all that.” What the hell. In for a penny… “And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to handle you.”
Her pupils sprang wide and the pulse in her throat began to hammer. Sebastian indulged himself, stroking a thumb over that sensitive point, feeling it flutter against his touch. She didn’t close the distance. He realized that he’d have to make the move this time. So he did, leaning in to close the scant space between them.
He meant for the kiss to be sweet. He really did. But at the first brush of their lips, the heat between them exploded. Her hands dove into his hair, gripping his head so she could angle for a deeper kiss, and damn, her taking what she wanted was hot as hell. Heart knocking against his ribs, he licked into her mouth, loving how she met him stroke for stroke. On a growl, he skimmed his palms beneath her sweatshirt, up her torso to cup her breasts. Laurel moaned, arching into his touch. He devoured her mouth and wondered how fast he could strip her naked and plunge into all that softness. Apparently entirely on board, Laurel tipped back, dragging him with her. All but drunk on the taste of her, he twisted to follow…and rolled right off the sofa.
He crashed to the floor with an ooph, cracking his head against the hardwood.
“Oh my God. Are you okay?”
Sebastian sucked in a breath. “Fine. I just had a little sanity knocked into me.” He was about to take her with no finesse, no forethought, and more importantly, no condom, on her brother’s living room couch. Shit.
“Please tell me you didn’t just change your mind about all this.”
No. He hadn’t changed his mind. He wanted her more than he wanted his next breath. But he also wanted to help her make a better decision than he had. To do that, their relationship had to be about more than just sex on every available surface—as appealing as that thought was. He needed to be her friend, not just a holiday fling. And if he was honest—and damned, he’d better get used to that since Laurel demanded nothing less—it was also about protecting himself. The only thing worse than never having her would be to have her knowing he’d never get another chance at that kind of perfection. So he’d have to set himself some limits. But only some. He was human, after all.
“No. I’m going to want to get my mouth back on you at the earliest opportunity.”
She blew out a breath. “Thank God.”
“But—”
“I hate ‘but.’”
He dragged himself into a sitting position. “We’re going to slow this down a little bit.” Now that the fog of lust was starting to clear a bit, he could see the sense in that.
“Slow it down? You do remember we only have ten days, right?”
“We aren’t going to spend all of them in bed.”
Her gaze sharpened on his face as she neatly stacked the paperbacks he’d knocked off, back on the coffee table. “The corollary of that is that we’re going to spend some of them in bed.”
God, this woman. “I’m gonna go ahead and tell you that the lawyer speak, when you’re looking all mussed from my hands, is hot as hell.”
She flashed a wicked grin. “I have so much more where that came from. But you didn’t answer my question.”
“Pardon me, counselor.” He scrubbed a hand over his face to hide his smile. “Yeah, I expect that’s going to be a foregone conclusion at this point. But right now, you’re going to find some boots.”
“Boots?”
“Yeah. We’re going for a ride.”
“It’s so beautiful here.” From the back of her mount, a sweet-tempered mare named Blossom, Laurel tried to look at everything at once. Her brother’s land stretched far as the eye could see, with pastures giving way to cultivated fields. Even in the early winter, it made a picture. One that was rapidly imprinting on her heart. “I can see why Logan fell in love with it.”
“He picked a helluva a spot, that’s for sure.”
“I can’t even remember the last time I was really out in nature for an extended period of time. Maybe right after Logan bought the place, when I ca
me out to visit for a week that summer. But that was before he turned it into all this. Before I started law school.” And that was a dim, distant memory, buried under hundreds of hours of lectures and thousands of pages of reading. “You know, it’s lowering to admit, but this is the first thing I’ve done for pure pleasure in years.”
“When was the last time you were in the saddle?”
“Oh man.” She thought back. “High school.” Horseback riding wasn’t precisely like riding a bike, but she’d found her rhythm quicker than expected.
“Why is that? Did your parents make you quit?”
“No. Not overtly, anyway. I gave up riding when I started buckling down and getting serious about my future. I’ve been so driven and focused, always with my eye on the prize. I haven't taken the time just to breathe, to enjoy something for the sake of enjoying it, to get out in the actual world.”
“And how does it feel?”
“Amazing.” The ease and freedom were such a contrast to how she’d been living. It really brought home exactly how unbalanced her life was. Was that what had driven her brother to walk away from everything? She’d never asked him, maybe because she was afraid of the answer. But she could see the seduction of that kind of radical change.
Bo and Peep bounded ahead, pausing to sniff here and there before racing off again with cheerful barks. Sebastian rode abreast of her on a big, dark brown gelding named Brego, looking perfectly in his element. Still, even though they were in motion. How the hell did he manage that kind of Zen? Was it the land? The horses? Some combination of both?
“I’m really envying you right now.”
One dark brow winged up as Sebastian glanced over at her. “Why?”
“To get a chance to do this all the time. That sounds like paradise.”
His eyes crinkled at the edges. “It’s not all trail rides all the time. Running a stable, even a small one like this, is a lot of work.”
“You call sixteen horses small?”
“Well, I grew up on a farm with closer to a hundred, so yeah.”
Laurel couldn’t even imagine the true scope of that kind of operation. Whoever his mother had worked for had some very serious money. “My inner tween girl just had a major squee. What was it like?”
“Pretty fucking awesome. I mean…work. Always work. There was basically never a chance to sleep in, which sucked a lot in high school. And I have shoveled a lot of shit in my lifetime. But the horses…they were always worth it. Getting to see them run. Or better—being on their back when they did. There’s nothing like it.”
“No. No, there’s not.” She grinned at him. “Race you.”
Before he could answer, she kicked Blossom into a canter, suffering a few bone-jarring strides before she found her seat. Sebastian and Brego caught them fast, but they stayed neck-and-neck as they raced across the pasture, toward the edge of the valley. The wind whipped her hair and stung her cheeks, and she felt more alive than she had in years.
By the time they eased their mounts back, she was laughing with unfettered delight. “That. Was. Awesome!”
“You’ve got a pretty good seat for someone who hasn’t ridden in the better part of a decade.”
“Are you checking out my ass, Sebastian?”
“It’s an excellent specimen of God’s artwork.” Taking the lead, he headed for a trail between the trees.
They rode in silence for a while, slowly making their way up the mountain, with the dogs trailing behind, all canine smiles and wags. It was easy to be silent with Sebastian. There was no pressure or expectation for conversation. He was a man who only spoke when he had something to say. Laurel liked that about him. It made their conversations seem more important.
“Careful of the switchback. That fork there is more dangerous, with more difficult footing,” he warned.
“Got it. What’s up there anyway?”
“Way on further up, there’s a ramshackle bootlegger’s place. Hasn’t been used in years, probably because the trail collapsed. But there’s a cabin. It’s not much to see, though.”
Something about the idea that moonshine had been run out of these hills delighted her. “Really? How’d you know it was there?”
“I was in the area for a search-and-rescue training exercise and stumbled across it.”
“You do search and rescue?”
“Stone County doesn’t have a paid SAR team, so it relies on volunteers. I’ve got a certain skillset that’s useful there, so it seemed like the thing to do.”
And his hero points were just racking up. “You were military.”
He grunted in acknowledgement. “Rangers.”
Her interest sharpened. “You were Special Forces?”
“75th Ranger Regiment. Eight years.”
“So, like, jumping out of planes and stuff?”
“Among other things.” There was a wealth of possibility in those simple words.
“Wow. That must have taken an amazing amount of work.”
“It did. I liked the challenge.”
She could respect that. “Why did you get out? Why not career military after all that?”
He released an audible breath. “The challenge was no longer adding value to my life.”
That set her back in her saddle. She’d spent most of her life chasing one challenge after another because she thrived on them. But had she ever given any thought to what value those challenges added to her life? The attainment of the goals at the end of those challenges, sure. But the value of the challenges themselves? She’d been so busy throwing herself whole-heartedly into them, the idea of questioning what she got out of it never occurred to her.
Not quite sure what she thought about that, she kept the focus on Sebastian. “Do you miss it?”
The silence stretched out so long, she didn’t think he’d answer.
“The brotherhood, the purpose. Yeah. The job itself, no.” The air between them was weighted with the things he didn’t say about what he’d seen. The things he’d probably done.
His tone didn’t leave the door open for more questions, so she lapsed into silence. Blossom was content to follow Brego, so Laurel let her have her head. The evergreens got thicker as they climbed, muffling the sound of the wind and blocking all view of the farm. It was easy to imagine they were alone, in the middle of nowhere. With that certain set of skills, Sebastian was exactly the kind of guy she’d want to have with her in that eventuality.
Her mind turned over what he’d said. She understood the need for a purpose, that desire to feel useful. His military skills had little place in civilian life, and it seemed in the absence of the Army, he’d fallen back on the skills he’d been raised with. Maybe there was a way to help him turn that into something more formalized.
“So you grew up around Thoroughbreds. Are racehorses where your passion is?”
“No. Not particularly. I love riding, and since I started working for your brother, I’ve remembered how much I love training. But I’m not competitive. Not with these horses, anyway. I find it far more gratifying to work with rescues to overcome abuse or neglect.”
“That’s very noble of you.”
“Nothing noble about it. They saved me, so it only seems fair that I return the favor.”
“I have a hard time imagining you needing saving from anything. You’re always so in control and sure of yourself.”
“I wasn’t always.” He dropped into another of those silences she wasn’t sure she should interrupt. “Horses are prey animals, so they’re extremely sensitive to their environment. They tend to mirror whatever mood or behavior they see from us. When I first started working with them again, the stuff they reflected back showed me I was volatile. Angry. I had a switch, and it took very little to flip it. To get anywhere with them, I had to earn their trust, and to do that, I had to turn that switch into a dial and learn how to turn it down so I could focus on them and what they needed. When I managed that—really managed it—I found the stillness I needed.”
&nbs
p; She wanted to learn how to do that. To be able to draw on that stillness in herself rather than always seeking it out from him. Because he wouldn’t always be there. But that was a question for later. He was usually so reticent, and she wanted to keep him talking about himself as long as she could.
“So now you pay it forward.”
“As much as I can, yeah. It’s tough, though. Not being able to save them all.”
“There are more?”
“Always. But even if we weren’t out of space, the riding school, such as it is, doesn’t pay enough to cover any more than we already have. It’s a helluva thing having to turn any animal away.”
No, he wouldn’t be able to do that. He couldn’t walk away from any creature in need—be they two-legged or four. That kind of compassion was beyond appealing. So was he.
Laurel opened her mouth to say so, but just then, they emerged from the trees at the top of a ridge and the view struck her momentarily speechless.
The whole world seemed to stretch out beneath them. From here, she could see the two branches of mountain that wrapped like arms around the tiny valley that encompassed Maxwell Organics. Other than the house and outbuildings, and a few other houses far distant, there were no signs of civilization. If she had her directions right, the town of Eden’s Ridge ought to be on the other side of the ridge to the west. But none of it interrupted the magnificent view. In this moment, it felt like they were the only two people in the world.
“I needed this,” Laurel murmured. “God, I had no idea how much I needed this.” Her soul simply sighed. “Going back to Nashville, to law school, to the never-ending grind is going to kill me.”
“You made the choice to step on that path. You can make the choice to step off it.”
That was reductivist thinking at its finest. But it was a lie. She’d been lying to herself. She thought she’d been in charge, in control of her life. But everything she’d done had really been reactionary, driven by her father’s approval or disapproval.
“I don’t know how,” she whispered. “The idea of taking a leap off that road, into the unknown, is just as terrifying to me as staying on it. I mean, at least as an attorney, I have a plan. I know what’s coming. And it feeds the challenge I crave. If I don’t have that…then I have nothing. A wasted education. Wasted talents. A wasted brain.” Not to mention her father would probably disown her. “I was raised to believe that I have a duty to serve the gifts I was given. And regardless of whether I agree with my dad on the nature of my career, I do believe in that. So until or unless I figure out some other way to serve those gifts, I can’t see doing something else.”
