“I’m sorry,” he said instead, his gaze disarmingly direct.
That was all. No clever joke. No misdirection or attempt to charm her.
And the fact that he didn’t gloss over it the way her family had, or act as if she were better off without Philip—no matter how true that might have been—made her feel … warm.
“I don’t know if I’m sorry or not,” she found herself telling him. Him, of all people. Connor Kittredge, who had been an absolutely terrible boyfriend, something he had acknowledged gleefully at the time and years after too. Connor, who had been her first. And she his. And no matter what else had happened between them, the joy and reverence that had marked that particular milestone was what she most remembered about him. Maybe that was why, even all these years later, she felt safe when she was near him the way she had in the back of his pickup beneath a warm spring sky. “It’s funny when something is over and when you look back you don’t really know why you put up with it in the first place.”
Again, he surprised her. Connor didn’t look away. He didn’t shift uncomfortably or change the subject. “I don’t think anybody gets through life without a few regrets. Wouldn’t be much of a life if you did.”
“I couldn’t wait to get out of this town.” Missy laughed. “I hated every minute I was here. You remember.”
“I do.”
“I wanted to shake up the world. I was going to show everybody what I was made of, and I didn’t care what names they called me behind my back. It was worth it, as far as I was concerned.”
He shook his head. “Missy, you started half the rumors that went around about you.”
Laurel had often said such things to her, but Laurel always sounded condemning. Pitying, even, which never went over well. Connor’s dark gaze bordered on admiring.
She’d never been able to resist a look like that in this particular pair of dark eyes. “If I recall correctly, Connor, you contributed to the other half.”
Her sixteen-year-old self had been so certain about everything. So puffed up with pride and attitude and sheer, unfocused determination that no matter what her life turned out to be, it would be different from this.
And yet this was the only place she’d wanted to be when the life she’d thought she wanted fell apart.
“I never started any rumors about you,” Connor protested.
She rolled her eyes. “You told the entire church congregation I was a woman of loose morals.”
“I did no such thing. You turned up one fine Sunday in a low-cut shirt that, I won’t lie, has haunted my dreams ever since.”
Missy remembered that shirt being shocking. Her father had been disappointed in her, the worst possible punishment, but her mother had been appalled. Back then, that was what Missy had lived for.
“It was your fault I wore that shirt.”
“I don’t remember it as a fault, so much as a gift.” Connor lifted his beer, those dark eyes gleaming. “And besides, you didn’t have to take the dare.”
“Of course I did. And they all believed, 100 percent, that I was scandalous and flaunting my low morality for all to see. My mother informs me that to this day, when people ask about me, they call me that Missy.”
“A fate worse than death,” Connor said with a laugh. “The Cold River version of a scarlet letter.”
“A scarlet letter?” Jensen interjected from across the table. Missy had forgotten he and Zack were there. “Was that a literary reference? Connor, buddy, are you trying to convince this poor woman that you read?”
“We took English together in high school,” Connor replied easily. “She knows I copied off her paper.”
Missy felt the urge to rush to Connor’s defense. To tell his older brother to be nicer to him when she knew that doing anything like that would be … not good.
While inside—and hopefully not plastered across her cheeks—that warm feeling didn’t go away.
And later that evening, it seemed almost natural to let Connor Kittredge drive her home from the bar.
“What about your car?” he asked her when they headed out into the dark. “Or did you sled here?”
“Tessa picked me up,” Missy said, brightly enough. This was not the time to offer the man a dissertation on how she’d had to trade in the fancy car Philip had insisted she buy, even though she could hardly afford the payments, because they had a certain reputation to uphold. He meant he did—and she’d had to default on those payments after he left her and took her job with him, since it was his hotel. That was all a little too much for a happy little December night in Cold River, where there were holiday lights draped across all the Old West brick buildings and the town tree was already bright and shining. “She likes a little company while she’s tending bar. And she has to stay until closing, anyway.”
Connor drove a much nicer pickup than the one he’d had in high school. But it still felt the same, sitting there on the bench seat in the dark as he took a back road out of town. Not the one that led out to where his family had been breeding horses for over a century but in the opposite direction. Into the part of the Longhorn Valley on the other side of the actual town of Cold River, where people lived on little bits of acreage—three or five, depending—and the farming wasn’t any good, so folks concentrated on things like their gardens. Beekeeping. Hiking trails and ATV tracks.
He didn’t ask for directions to her mother’s house, and that felt good too. He hadn’t driven her home in some thirteen years, but he still remembered the way.
“Are you staying through the holidays?” he asked as he navigated the long dirt driveway that led up to the house she’d grown up in.
It felt a little more intimate than it should have, there with only the light from his dashboard to provide any break from the thickness of the cold Colorado night.
“Yes,” she said. And then, because she felt the need to be honest with him, “I don’t actually know how long I’m staying. All I know is I’m not going back to Santa Fe.”
“No?” She could sense his grin. “But what about all that magic?”
She could feel his gaze on her for a moment. Her cheeks got hot.
“I really did try. But after six months of putting on a good show while Philip and his new, improved fiancée flaunted themselves in my face, I gave in. I’m not proud of it, but I decided it was better to leave them to it.”
“You know that sometimes retreat is strategic, right? I don’t know why you stayed six months.”
Nobody knew why she’d stayed, including Missy.
“Because I thought I was building something. Because I thought that was more important than whatever relationships were involved…” She sighed a little as he took the last curve and the house came into view, lights on and waiting for her. “And because, I guess, I still wanted to prove my mother wrong. How pathetic is that?”
And then it all came out of her like a flood. To the most inappropriate person possible, but maybe that was why it didn’t feel as crazy as it should have. “My mother hated Philip. I knew she would hate Philip. Just like I knew she would hate my life. All flash and no substance, she likes to mutter, because it’s hotels and hospitality. Not honest work. And I did everything I could to convince myself that she was wrong. I really did.”
“Missy.” Connor stopped his truck in the clearing below the house and took his time looking over at her. As if he knew she could feel it everywhere. “You don’t have to tell me about expectations. There’s not one place I can go in this town where people don’t know me and figure what they know is the sum total of who I am. I’ve had the urge to fight against that a time or two myself. Proving your parents wrong is a time-honored rite, in my opinion. It takes guts that you went out there and tried it. And more guts that you weren’t too proud to come home.”
To her astonishment, Missy felt her eyes fill with tears.
“This is going to sound crazy,” she said when she was reasonably sure she could keep her voice even. “And don’t read anything into it. But
I’ve been home since last week and this is the first time it’s really felt like it.”
“I am the man who relieved you of your virginity, as I recall,” Connor drawled, heat and laughter in his voice and the dashboard lights making his gaze seem even more wicked than usual. “On command.”
A wild burst of joy ricocheted through her like a sudden fire. “On command? Please. My recollection is that your argument was that the whole town already thought my morals were highly questionable, if not downright dubious, thanks to the shirt incident. Why not see what all the fuss was about?”
“It was a reasonable argument.”
“It was ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous, maybe, but it worked.”
“It did work.” She felt that same sense of safety again. The way she always had with him because he’d always been like this. Easy. Intense. And somehow, she’d never gotten whiplash going back and forth between the two. “But I still think that in retrospect, I ought to fight you for my honor.”
Connor’s grin faded into something else. Something that sent more of that fire spiraling through her. He reached over and tugged on the ponytail she’d fastened beneath one ear, tugging it gently. She found it hard to catch her breath.
And suddenly, everything was bright and hot, safe and him.
“We can fight, if you want,” he said, his voice low. A sweet drawl that made her feel anything but sweet inside. “But I can think of better ways to welcome you home, Missy.”
So could she.
Missy did what she thought she might have been wanting to do for some thirteen years, ever since the day she’d broken up with Connor Kittredge in high dudgeon in the Cold River High cafeteria. Because she’d been so sure she was going places and just as sure that he was staying put. And he’d been flirting with that cheerleader.
She leaned over, got her hands on all that strength and heat, and kissed him.
3
Connor hadn’t imagined he’d ever have the opportunity to kiss Missy Minton again.
He told himself that was why it haunted him.
Days later, he was still trying to come to terms with what had happened in the front seat of his truck, there in the dark outside her mother’s house.
He felt like a kid again.
And then again, not like a kid at all.
Because there were so many things he’d forgotten, or chalked up to the fact that whatever else she was, Missy had been his first. Not his first kiss but his first opportunity to practice. They’d gotten together at homecoming and had broken up before prom, and in that time, they’d had long months to perfect their kissing. Something they’d both dedicated themselves to with fervor.
Kissing her again felt both brand new and deliciously familiar.
Just like back then, he’d found himself hauling her into his lap, digging his hands into her hair, and losing himself in the sheer perfection of the way her mouth fit his. The way she tasted. The way she moved against him.
The way she was Missy after all these years.
And like back then, he’d found himself laughing against her mouth, then setting her back into her seat again when they were both good and hot.
“Your mama is right inside that house, probably calling in my truck to the sheriff’s office,” he’d managed to drawl. “I’ll remind you that my brother is the sheriff these days, and unlike his predecessor, who mumbled something at me about being a gentleman, Zack will torture me.”
“You can handle it,” she said in that raspy way of hers that, sure enough, made his entire body ache.
He’d watched her run into the house, and it could have been any night from his junior year of high school all over again.
But he wasn’t a kid anymore. He hadn’t gone off to college like Missy, then carried on with a fancy life in a far-off city, working in world-class hotels. He was a Kittredge, and that meant horses. Unless, of course, you were Zack—in which case, you thumbed your nose at the family legacy as oldest son and announced that you felt you needed to dedicate yourself to law and order. Or take off every summer to risk death, like Jensen.
It was only Connor and his brother Riley who’d gone ahead and dedicated themselves to the Bar K full-time. Riley was magic with fractious, too-wild horses. Connor had an eye for breeding that had already made him a bit of a name.
He’d always thought it was a gift that he liked where he’d found himself.
Connor liked his life. He liked being a part of the family business and the sweep of history that went with it. He liked living on land that was his, or would be one day. In a house he might not have built with his own hands but had made his own, even if Amanda claimed it looked like a fish-and-game magazine had vomited all over the place. It was his.
He liked the flow of the seasons, he thought one cold morning as he set about his chores. The Colorado Rockies stood sentry over his life, his father’s life, and his grandfather’s too. His brothers annoyed him half to death, but they were also his best friends, and when he went into town, he was on good terms with everyone he met.
Connor was an easygoing, happy-go-lucky kind of a guy.
Except when it came to kissing Missy Minton. That made him feel just about anything but happy-go-lucky—something else he remembered from junior year.
That same evening, he finished up at the ranch, showered off the day in his house, and then headed into town. It was another perilously cold December night, but it was clear all the way up to the stars. The drive from the foothills into town could often be treacherous in winter, but the last major snow had been on Thanksgiving night. Connor found himself driving a little faster than he should. He parked his truck on Main Street, and told himself the sense of anticipation inside him was for the well-earned beer he planned to indulge in tonight. That was all.
He knew himself to be a liar when he walked inside, saw Missy at the bar, and accepted that she was what he’d wanted all along.
“You’re starting to look like a Cold River barfly,” Connor said as he slid onto the seat next to her.
She threw him a look filled with laughter, and he felt it in places he didn’t need to acknowledge while out in public, surrounded by his friends and neighbors.
“It takes one to know one, Connor.”
“Fair enough.”
He ordered a beer and clinked his bottle to hers when he got it. Then they both sat there, in what he figured was a companionable silence. If he ignored that kiss layered in between them like a shout.
“Settling in?” he asked. Sedately.
When he felt nothing at all like sedate.
The look she shot him was as hot as it was amused. “I have an interview at the Grand Hotel here in town. They’re looking for a manager now that old Douglas Fowler is thinking about retirement. I also have some feelers out in all the ski resorts. Aspen, Vail. Breckenridge. The usual.”
“You don’t waste any time.”
Connor chose not to pay attention to that strange, curling thing inside him that wanted to tell her in no uncertain terms not to consider Colorado’s famous resort towns, all of which were close enough to home. Closer than Santa Fe anyway—but not in the dead of winter. Not when a Colorado snowstorm could make any road impassable in a flash and usually made the passes actively treacherous.
Just like he opted not to ask himself why he was acting like he’d be seeing more of her than a few happy, random, holiday bar sightings.
Missy was playing with tonight’s IPA. “I’ve already wasted enough time. We’re thirty, Connor. Most of the people we went to high school with are on their third kid.”
“You could have settled down and had kids right out of high school if you wanted,” he reminded her. “What was that guy’s name again?”
She laughed at that. “You know his name.”
He did. “Wyatt Hall. One of those Halls.”
“Just because a few members of the Hall family have had their skirmishes with the law doesn’t make—”
“He was a delinquent,
” Connor protested with a lot more feeling about ancient history than should have been kicking around inside him, surely. “He still is a delinquent.”
“You only think that because he had visible tattoos and that car.”
“I have nightmares about that car.”
And not because Wyatt Hall, problem kid from a problem family, had rebuilt it and roared it around town like a maniac. But because Connor had hated imagining Missy in that car. Doing with Wyatt what she’d done with him—
It turned out he still didn’t want to imagine it.
“Me too, actually,” Missy said, grinning. “And before you ask, he was way more interested in driving fast enough to irritate the church ladies than in anything else. As an attempt to annoy my mother, he was great. But other than that? A waste of time. Even if I’d wanted to stick around and have babies, he wasn’t going to help with that.”
Connor would have to be a sad, sad man to enjoy that bit of information. He told himself he absolutely was not biting back a smile.
“Instead of joining the Hall family criminal organization, I opted for a different road,” Missy told him. “I thought it was a freeway. It turned out it was a dead end. Now I have to start over, preferably without the driving metaphors.”
He shouldn’t have touched her. Especially not here at the bar when anyone and everyone could have been watching. But he leaned closer and pressed his arm against hers. Just a little.
“There’s nothing wrong with starting over. It’s not a reset button. You get to come to it a little bit wiser.”
She shook her head at him, but she didn’t move away from the press of his arm. “What would you know about that, Connor? When have you started over?”
It was hard to keep his hands to himself, but he figured their arms against each other was enough. “I’m not just a pretty face, Missy. I have thoughts, no matter what my brothers might tell you. And empathy.”
Missy actually snorted. “If you say so.”
“I’m not a kid anymore,” he continued, feeling not exactly … upset. That would be a strong way to put it. But something about the way she looked at him scraped a bit at his honor. Or pride, more like. “I’ve learned a couple of things in the past thirteen years.”
Secret Nights with a Cowboy Page 29
