by Stacy Gail
She lost track of time as she sported about, loving the unique freedom of the silken, cool water gliding over every exposed inch of her. The sensation was exquisite, to the point where she wished she could swim until the sun came up and she’d have to do the socially appropriate thing and put clothes on again. But fatigue slowly began to have its way, so she rolled onto her back and looked up at the stars, her nipples puckering in the gentle night breeze.
Yes.
Serenity at last.
“Winsome!”
Water snarfed up her nose as she straightened with a jolt of surprise a nanosecond before a huge splash hit no more than ten feet from her. She squealed and kicked away from it, not sure what the hell was now in the water with her. She would have thought maybe a meteor, but since she doubted meteors yelled out people’s names before they hit, the only other thing it could be was a person.
In the lake.
With her.
Didn’t Jason in a hockey mask pop in and out of a lake?
With that nightmare-fuel blazing through her head, she arrowed through the water faster than a gold-medal swimmer to clamber up the wooden ladder to the dock, freaking out and not even trying to hide it. Snatching up her clothes and boots, she started to hoof it back to the house when the voice called out again. She froze in the darkness as that voice finally registered, and she slowly pivoted back toward the lake.
No.
It couldn’t be…
“Winsome!” Des Brody’s dark head surfaced, and he swung around wildly while splashing around like a kid playing Sharks and Minnows. “Where the fuck are you?”
“Here.” It was out before she thought to stop it. Immediately she wished she could suck the word back in when he swiveled around and zeroed in on her—standing there wet and naked and huddled behind the flimsy shield of the clothes and boots she clutched to her body. “For God’s sake, Des Brody, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Saving your ass.” He wiped a hand over his face and stared up at her, and only then did she realize that unlike her, he was fully clothed. “How the hell did you get up there so damn fast? Three seconds ago you were floating dead in the water.”
Was he for real? “I swim better than the Little Mermaid. And I was hardly dead.”
“You looked dead to me. Dead and naked.”
Winnie gasped as the blood drained from her face, before it slammed back so forcefully it was a wonder her head didn’t explode. Oh God, he saw her. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of skinny-dipping.”
“Sure, I have. In fact,” he muttered, messing with the front of his shirt, “that sounds pretty good right about now. Hold on a sec.”
“For God’s sake, keep your clothes on!” Even as she heard the screeching freak-out in her voice, part of her couldn’t help but wonder just how often this gorgeous billionaire bachelor had ever heard that phrase. Probably never. “What the hell are you doing here? This is Smiley land. You shouldn’t be here. No one should be here.”
“A little bird told me you were staying here overnight.”
“A little bird?” Hating that he’d dodged the answer, she feverishly sifted through the possible suspects, from her grandmother—who would never willingly talk to a Brody—to Rufus and the Goddard family. Knowing her best friend, Cleo, Winnie wouldn’t put it past her to jump at the chance to chat it up with the Brodys. “Yeah, I’ll just bet.”
“What matters is that you’ve got no one out here keeping an eye on you.”
“So what?” Being alone was the only reason she’d felt comfortable enough to strip down to the altogether in the first place.
“So, a pretty young woman out here all on her own could attract all sorts of attention.”
“At this point that’s kind of obvious.” Frantically she rearranged the boots in her hand to make sure her southern girly bits were covered, while her discarded PJs were clutched to her breasts. “It attracted you.”
“I’m not the bad guy here, Winsome.” To her everlasting surprise, he treaded water while holding a conversation with a naked woman like it was the most normal thing in the world. “Today was your father’s funeral. No matter how you felt about him, you shouldn’t be alone. You might say I was doing the neighborly thing and dropping by to make sure you were all right.”
“At midnight?” she hissed, torn between outrage and being weirdly touched by the remote chance he might have actually been telling the truth. “News flash, pal. If a person has a yen to be neighborly, they don’t drop in at freaking midnight. What they usually do is pick up a phone.”
“I don’t have your digits. By the time I got to the dock, I thought you’d gone belly-up.”
“Belly-up.” Again her cheeks burned, and she had to dig deep to make herself ask the question clanging in her head. “Uh, I know it’s dark, but how much did you, you know…” Just ask him, idiot. “See?”
“Are you asking how much of your nakedness did I see?”
Silently she willed him to be sucked underwater and down to the center of the earth. Sadly, it didn’t happen. “Yes.”
“Well,” he said slowly, as if giving the matter some thought, “I didn’t see all of you, sad to say. But what I could see I won’t soon forget.”
Damn it. “Do me a solid, pal. Try.”
“Not gonna happen, Winsome. No man in his right mind would ever try to forget perfect tits like yours. If anything, I’m going to try to keep that image front and center in my mind every damn time I cross your path from this point on.”
A snarl of outrage escaped her. No doubt he saw everything all the way down to the trio of freckles in her cleavage that resembled a surprised-face emoji. “How dare you?”
“What, you want me to lie? I told you, I thought you were drowning.”
“I was face-up, not face-down in the water. Anyone could have figured out I was far from drowning.”
“Do I look like a fucking detective? In the heat of the moment, all I cared about was saving your damn life. Hell, I didn’t even pause to wonder if those epic boobs of yours were more than even my hands can handle. But now that the danger has passed and I’ve calmed my shit down, you should know that I think my hands would be just about perfect to handle your curves.”
For the first time in her life, Winnie fully understood why crimes of passion were a thing. “I cannot believe you’re talking to me that way when you’re the asshole who’s trespassing on my frigging property. If I had a gun, there isn’t a jury in Texas that’d convict me for shooting you.”
“Lucky for me, you don’t have a gun.” With a faint splash, he executed a smooth freestyle stroke toward the ladder. “In fact, I think it’s safe to say that at this moment in time, you don’t have a single fucking thing at all. Or have you forgotten that you’re standing there naked?”
Oh, my God. “Don’t you dare come up that ladder while I’m standing here.”
He made a sound of exasperation. “Woman, make up your fucking mind. Do you want me to leave your property, or don’t you? That is, if it even is your property. I didn’t hear anything about your old man’s will today.”
She’d completely forgotten about that. “Maybe that’s because it’s none of your business.”
“Everything that happens in Bitterthorn is Brody business.”
“Wow.” Though she knew retreat would be the better part of valor—and locking all the doors and windows for good measure—she couldn’t help but shake her head. “I’ll bet you have no idea how arrogant that sounds.”
“Oh, I know. I also know it’s the truth. Brodys always get what they want, whether it’s information, or land… or something else entirely.”
There was something in his voice that changed, a velvety roughness around the edges that made the water still beaded on her skin all but evaporate into steam. “Such as?”
“Such as a prim little miss who secretly loves to go skinny-dipping. I’m coming up,” he added before she could figure out what to say to that. With a surge of water,
Des climbed up to the dock. Hastily she danced out of the way, almost turning around before realizing she didn’t have anything to discreetly cover her bare backside. He’d gotten enough of an eyeful of her already. “Damn, no wonder you went for a swim. I feel better than I have all summer, though I think my boots are pretty much done for.”
She could hear them squelching from where she stood. “Serves you right for trespassing.”
“Considering how things turned out, I have no regrets. I got to see the Texas version of a mermaid—Winsome Smiley, skinny-dipping. Life doesn’t get much better than that.”
Grrrr. “And that’s all you’re ever going to see. Now get out of here, and don’t ever come back. Or call me Winsome.” There. That should do it.
He grinned at her. “Winsome.”
Or maybe not. “I don’t answer to Winsome. It’s Winnie, or nothing at all.”
“You seem to enjoy the water. Maybe I’ll call you my little mermaid.”
“Try it and die.”
“So violent. I shouldn’t find that cute, but I do.” A low laugh rumbled from him, and a strange, achy heat bloomed between her thighs as his gaze moved over her like a caress. “I’ll admit, I didn’t even know what winsome meant until today. I mean, it’s not exactly a word that comes up on the rodeo circuit.”
“I’m not surprised. Not a lot of winsome bulls out there.”
“After I talked with you earlier, I went and looked it up.”
It was all she could do to not cringe. “I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“‘Attractive in appearance and/or character,’” he recited as if reading straight from the dictionary. “I’m not too sure about the character part. You seem more like a natural-born prickly pear to me. But to look at you…” Through the starlit darkness his heavy-lidded gaze brushed over her once more, and suddenly she was aware of how little distance separated them. “Damn, woman. You are definitely winsome to look at.”
Why was her heart trying to hammer its way out of her chest? “You need to leave.”
“Now that’s downright unneighborly, Winsome. I ruined my boots trying to save your life.”
“That’ll teach you.” Feeling her way with her bare feet, she started shuffling backwards down the dock, all the while wondering if she looked as stupid as she felt. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
“I’ll try to remember that. You could always turn around and walk away,” he added helpfully as she continued her awkward, protecting-her-naked-butt backward-walk toward the house. “It’d be a lot safer that way.”
“I’ll turn around when you go away.”
“I’m not going away until I see you’re safely inside.”
“Why are you trying to make like you even care?” She winced as she stepped on a sharp rock, but didn’t stop her slow backward march toward the dubious safety of her dead father’s house. “We’ve lived next door to each other our whole lives, but until today you refused to acknowledge my existence. Why the big concern over my welfare now? Worried I might sell the Smiley homestead to anyone other than the Brodys?”
“Worry is something other people do,” came the staggeringly confident reply. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about when you claim I never knew you existed. Remember, we shared the same bus stop when we were kids.”
The mere mention of that made her burn with remembered humiliation. “You never even spoke to me.”
“You didn’t speak to me, either. Not once. No matter how many times I sat near you, you wouldn’t even look my way, like you were too perfect to even breathe the air of Bitterthorn’s most infamous bastard.”
She paused, shocked. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
Even in the dark, she could see the cynicism in his smile. “Wasn’t it?”
“If I didn’t talk to you or Fin, it was because I was a Smiley, and always dressed in rags. I was the one who got mocked for wearing a skirt I’d made out of a ‘70s-era flour sack.”
“I never mocked you.”
“That’s not the point.” Then again, maybe it was. She was right in saying he’d never spoken to her, but that also meant he’d never taunted her like the rest of her tormentors in school. “You ignored me.”
“I’ve never been able to ignore you,” came the surprising reply. “I just never spoke to you because my father warned us to not talk to the Smileys, unless they spoke to us first. I kept giving you opportunities, but you never took me up on it.”
With every word he spoke, the written-in-stone way she remembered things shifted. “I… I wish I’d known that. Then again, maybe it’s best that I didn’t. My father would have lost his mind if I’d even dared to say hello to a Brody.”
“Now that I believe,” he drawled, dragging his hands through his wet hair to get it out of his face. The move showed a widow’s peak in his hairline, symmetrically perfect just like everything else in his too-gorgeous-to-be-real face. “There were a few times when I glanced at you at the bus stop, and old Able was always right there, yelling at me to keep my eyes to myself. Crazy old coot.”
That kicked off a cascade of memories of her father taking his perpetual hateful mood out on Des, and that one memorable moment when she’d almost turned to Des and Fin to ask them if she could go home with them instead. To this day, a part of her was sorry she hadn’t had the nerve. “I thought he acted that way with you because you were a Brody. He hated the Brodys.” To be fair, Able Smiley had hated everyone, but now wasn’t the time to speak ill of the dead.
Des shook his head. “That man would’ve burst a fucking blood vessel if I’d so much as said boo to you, and at that point in my life I didn’t need that kind of added hassle. But it didn’t stop me from sitting right next to you every bus ride home, giving you that chance to say hello to me. You never did.”
“I wanted to.” She heard the words come out of her mouth in complete shock. She hadn’t expected them to pop out all on their own. “I wanted to say hello to you every day.”
“But because I was a Brody, you couldn’t?”
“Exactly.”
“Does that still matter to you? Wait, don’t answer that.” With a shake of his head, he waved a hand at her. “It doesn’t matter what your answer is because it’s not going to change a damn thing. Go on and get yourself inside, Winsome.”
“Wait.” Only minutes ago she couldn’t wait to make her escape, but now his words had her digging in her proverbial heels. “What do you mean, it’s not going to change a damn thing? What are you talking about?”
“None of your business, woman. Just know that when I make up my mind, it stays made up. Now don’t make me tell you again to get inside.”
“Des—”
“I’m going to swing by here around noon or so to pick you up for lunch, unless you’re going to head back into town. Then I’ll pick you up at your place there. Which do you prefer, Mexican food or barbecue?”
“Mexican, though it probably depends on my mood,” she answered absently, staring at him as if seeing him for the first time. And in a way she was. Had she ever noticed Des as anything other than a Brody, a member of the family that had a crazy-long history of trying to get their hands on her family’s land? “I’m planning on being here throughout the day, cleaning out the house so my grandmother can move in. Listen—”
“Then get your ass inside,” he repeated, and the hard edge in his tone had her eyes widening. “Before I do something about those boner-making tits that I can see, because you’ve dropped your arms.”
With a horrified squeak, she whirled and ran the rest of the way into the house. It wasn’t until she slammed the door behind her and heard his whistle that she realized she’d shown her backside to him after all.
Chapter Three
“I keep having to remind myself that this eyesore is going to add thirty thousand gallons of water to this section of the property. Otherwise I’d say fuck it all and let nature take its course.” Irritated, Des rubbed at his scratchy, sleep-deprived eyes, wish
ing like hell he’d gotten some sleep instead of lying awake thinking about a bare-ass naked Winnie skinny-dipping in the heavenly cool waters of Smiley Lake. With a rough sigh, he squinted up at the cylindrical vat hanging from a crane. The well that had been sunk a few yards away from it looked like an unfinished erector-set project. “How the hell is this going to work again?”
“Damned if I know.” Slamming his truck’s tailgate, his brother Fin also squinted up at the whitewashed tank. “But facts are facts, man. Fact one—we haven’t seen a drop of rain for eight fucking months. Fact two—demand for Green Rock Ranch’s Black Angus beef is going through the roof. We need to open up new areas to avoid overgrazing the pastures we do have. Making sections of existing property habitable is the only option we’ve got.”
“What about The Bottoms over at Armadillo Gulch?”
“Not only did we lose over a hundred head of cattle when we got hit with all those storms two or three years ago, my woman almost drowned out there. There’s no point in putting anything of value out there when a flash flood could wipe it all out in a blink.”
“Yeah, I guess there’s a reason why it’s always been called The Bottoms. Fucking place swamps every time it sprinkles.” A rough sigh escaped him, and he rubbed his eyes once more. “We need to expand, Fin.”
“No shit.” His brother leaned against the side of the truck and watched the workers soldering thick I-beams in preparation for the water tank’s placement. “Able Smiley couldn’t have chosen a better time to kick off, in my humble opinion. Bastard never put the property to use the way it should have been. Great pastureland, decent fencing, and acres of water.”
“The survey I commissioned showed around seven acres, to be precise.”
“Damn, can you imagine? Our cattle would think they’d reached bovine nirvana if we could get them there.”
“I went back last night to take another water sample to make sure it’s still clear of contaminants like e. coli, pesticides and parasites. Even in the moonlight it’s a beautiful piece of water.” Especially when Winnie was swimming butt naked in it.
