Surrender: A Bitter Creek Novel

by Joan Johnston

  Her parents’ behavior had left Taylor feeling like a person without a lot of worth to anybody. Was it any wonder she expected a man to take off when the going got tough? Consequently, she always made sure she found a reason to leave first. She couldn’t face the thought of being abandoned—yet again—by someone she loved.

  Because Taylor was always ready and willing to walk away, she’d been careful never to let her feelings get too engaged. What Brian was doing to her now brought back memories of the time they’d spent together and reminded her that she’d given more of herself to him than she had to anyone else before or since. All those teenage feelings of wanting to be loved and seeking to belong were surging over her like a tidal wave, threatening to drown her with needs she’d shoved aside for far too many years.

  She had to do something to end this. Now. Before things got completely out of control.

  Taylor reached for Brian’s hardened shaft, but her fingertips merely grazed the heat of his throbbing flesh, before he laughed and angled his body away, forcing her to let go.

  “Back off, lady. I’m enjoying myself too much to want this to be over anytime soon.” He continued kissing her mouth, letting his hands work their magic on her body.

  In the end, she didn’t let him have things entirely his way. Her hands roamed his back and shoulders, caressing and gently scratching, reveling in the play of muscle over bone. She could feel and smell—and indulged herself enough to taste—the faint layer of slick, salty sweat that coated his shoulders. Her fingertips dipped into the tiny dimples at the top of his sinewy buttocks and then slid down to lovingly cup them. She caught him off-guard when she captured the delicate, soft sacs below, caressing until his breathing was ragged.

  Trapped as they were in the darkness, time ceased to have meaning. Every time Taylor thought she couldn’t endure another moment of pleasure, Brian would find another place to kiss, another place to tease, another place to touch with greedy hands that demanded her attention.

  When Brian finally entered her, she rose to meet him. Their bodies came together joyfully, with the sucking sounds of thrust and parry. She wrapped her legs around his hips and arched upward to urge him deeper inside. Their tongues mimicked the dance of their bodies below, as each sought the pleasure to be found in the other.

  She had never felt so full. Never felt such yearning to be closer to another human being. Never felt such a need to give—and to take. Never experienced such wonder and joy and sheer carnal desire. Taylor didn’t think she could survive it. Her glass was full and spilling over in torrents of exhilarating, almost excruciating, pleasure.

  Their bodies continued to plunge and escape until, at last, their guttural grunts and agonized groans of satisfaction filled the dark void.

  Afterward, Brian lay atop her, slick with sweat, his lungs heaving. She slid her arms around him to hold him tight, loving the feel of his solid weight on her body.

  Too soon he said, “I’m too heavy for you,” and slid to her side.

  She felt bereft. But only for a moment, because he reached out and slid his arm around her, pulling her close, as he murmured, “Come here.”

  She snuggled against him, her nose at his throat, smelling his piney aftershave, the faded scent of which must have been released by their exertions, and the pungent scent of sex. Once they were lying still, Taylor quickly became chilled.

  When she shivered, Brian said, “You must be cold.” He snatched up the parachute, and dragged it over them.

  “You ready to sleep now?” he asked.

  “It’s too dark to sleep.”

  He chuckled. “Don’t you usually sleep with the lights out?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Why not? Oh, right. The whole ‘scared of the dark’ thing.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of? Now I’m curious. Spill.”

  “Aren’t you sleepy?” she asked, unwilling to keep him awake, if he was tired, to hear something she wasn’t sure she should share in the first place.

  “A little. Go ahead and tell your story. You can give me an elbow in the ribs if I nod off.”

  “I wouldn’t do that!”

  “My brothers have done a lot worse. I’m listening.”

  She pursed her lips, trying to decide whether to reveal another piece of herself to him. But she was too keyed up to sleep, so she might as well talk.

  “I was already scared of the dark by the time I got to that boarding school in Switzerland where King sent me.”

  “Let me interrupt.”

  She laughed. “Already?”

  “Why do you call your dad ‘King’ instead of ‘Dad’?”

  She shrugged, realized he couldn’t see the gesture and explained, “Since King was gone so much of the time, Leah was the only parent my sisters and I had growing up. She called my father King because she was five years old when he married our mother and became her stepfather. We followed her lead and called him King, too.” Taylor thought of times when she’d referred to her father as “Daddy” or “Dad” and amended, “Well, most of the time, anyway.”

  “Do you ever hear from your mother?”

  “No. I have no idea what happened to her.” She was tempted to add, “And I don’t care!” But that would have been a lie. Not knowing was awful. Wondering was even worse. With the Internet, she probably could have tracked her mother down, but when all she felt was animosity toward the woman, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea.

  “Sorry I brought it up,” Brian said. “Go on with your story.”

  “As I said, I was already afraid of the dark when I arrived at that Swiss boarding school.”

  “Did you like it there?”

  “Vick loved it. I did everything I could to get myself kicked out.”

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Except it was thousands of miles from home. I begged King not to make me go. Leah said she’d take care of me, but he wouldn’t budge. Being at that school was proof that I was merely another problem my father had to solve. Most of the shit I pulled was just a way to get him to pay attention to me.

  “It didn’t work. He never came to visit. Not once. He just kept paying for the damage I caused, along with a bit more for the inconvenience I’d become, and I was stuck there for three long years.”

  “How did you finally get him to let you come home?”

  “I set a fire that nearly burned down the dormitory.”

  She’d forgotten he was a firefighter, but his appalled voice reminded her of that fact when he asked, “You’re an arsonist?”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose! It was an accident.”

  He made an accusatory sound in his throat.

  “Honestly, it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Sounds to me like a lot of folks, including you, could have been killed.”

  “I would rather have been dead than stuck where I was,” she muttered, resentful of his judgmental tone.

  “It couldn’t have been that bad.”

  “You weren’t there,” she retorted. “The other girls were tired of all the trouble I was causing and decided to teach me a lesson. Vick had told a friend I was scared of the dark, to explain why we always had a small light on in our room at night. The story must have been passed around, because they fixed the light switch in the cellar so it wouldn’t turn on and locked me in there all alone in the dark.

  “It was my worst nightmare come to life.”

  He reached out to brush her shoulder with his hand but didn’t speak. Why couldn’t her father have done that, just that, when he’d learned about her terrifying experience in the cellar? King hadn’t been sympathetic when he’d heard what she’d been through. He’d been livid.

  “What happened next?” Brian asked.

  “It was bitterly cold, and I didn’t have a coat. And, of
course, it was dark enough to be the setting for some monster movie. They imprisoned me down there shortly after Vick left to spend the weekend with a friend. The other girls told the headmistress that I’d gone with Vick to Paris.”

  “Those little bitches,” Brian muttered.

  “I yelled and banged on the cellar door, but it was thick, and besides, there was no one around to hear me. I was down there, alone in the dark, when I accidentally started the fire.”

  “How could you start an ‘accidental’ fire in the dark?”

  “I found a candle on Friday. I didn’t find the matches until Sunday afternoon. Those were the darkest, longest, loneliest three days of my life.”

  “I’m so sorry, Tag. That must have been awful.”

  “It was.” Her throat clogged in response to Brian’s sympathy. She swallowed over the painful lump and continued, “I must have put the candle too close to the straw used to pack the wine stored down there, because I woke up choking from the smoke. It never occurred to me that such an ancient cellar would have sprinklers, but I suppose they put them in when they started using the building overhead as a dormitory for wealthy young ladies.

  “At any rate, the sprinklers went off, the fire engines showed up, and I got myself thrown out and sent home. Vick was pissed off because she got kicked out right along with me.”

  “And you showed up at Jackson High in the fall, where I took one look and fell hard for you.”

  “You didn’t do that.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  She heard Brian’s jaw crack when he yawned.

  “Sorry to be keeping you up,” she said.

  “I haven’t had much sleep over the past two weeks while we’ve been fighting that fire.”

  “Believe it or not,” she murmured, “I forgot about the fire.” Making love with Brian, and then lying in his arms, had made their circumstances fade away. At least, for a little while. “Go to sleep, Brian.”

  “If you can’t sleep, count some sheep.” His voice was slurred, as though he were already half asleep.

  Taylor lay there for a long time, staring into nothingness. She shouldn’t have let Brian talk her into that last “low and slow” survey of the fire. Then none of this would have happened. But she was the pilot. She could have refused. She was more to blame for the hopeless situation in which they found themselves than he was.

  Her stomach growled. Taylor hardly ever thought of food. She ate to nourish her body, plain and simple. Now, all she could think about was how great an enormous bison cheeseburger and a plate of Big O rings at Liberty’s would taste, followed by a huge, homemade huckleberry ice-cream cone from Moos.

  Taylor’s mouth filled with saliva. For heaven’s sake, she was drooling! She stuck her head under Brian’s chin and squeezed her eyes, just to make sure they were closed, then sighed in disgust. She might as well try counting sheep. Tomorrow was liable to be a very long day.

  One sheep. Two sheep. Red…sheep…Blue…sheep…

  AIDEN FLYNN LOOKED from one dog-tired, soot-blackened face to the next along the fire line. His heart hurt when he saw the look of despair in his two younger brothers’ eyes. They were all suffering as a result of Brian’s disappearance. His heart sank to his feet when he considered how the loss of her sister was going to affect the woman he loved.

  In a miracle of cooperation, Grayhawk and Flynn had been working side by side for the past sixteen hours fighting the Yellowstone fire. Connor and Devon stood nearby with Pulaski tools slung over their shoulders, their eyes bleak, their hips canted in exhaustion. Matthew Grayhawk’s nose and eyes dripped clear fluids in a useless effort to rid themselves of smoke, and the blond ponytail that ran halfway down Leah Grayhawk’s back beneath her hard hat was peppered with ash.

  The grueling, backbreaking, mind-numbing effort to curb the fire, beating back flames with tree limbs, digging furrows in the earth with a Pulaski tool—with its hoe on one side of the metal head and ax on the other—and cutting down trees with a chain saw to make a firebreak, gave them a way to fight back against the fear and worry they all felt at the disappearance—without a trace—of Brian Flynn and Taylor Grayhawk.

  Within the past hour, word had reached them that the fire-breathing dragon had been curbed. The flames weren’t completely squelched, but the Yellowstone fire was no longer burning out of control. Now a more thorough search for the missing plane, and possible survivors, could begin.

  As Aiden approached Leah, his heart began thumping erratically. He tried to look casual. He felt anything but. His voice was raspy from smoke. He coughed to clear his throat and said, “You look beat.”

  Instead of admitting to fatigue, she focused her red-rimmed eyes on him and said, “I’m just thirsty.”

  He handed her the canteen from his PG bag.

  She opened it and drank before handing it back to him. She sighed, then removed her hard hat and used the back of her wrist to shove the bangs off her forehead. She pursed her lips and shook her head as she eyed the blackened cuff of her khaki shirt. “I need to go to the command post. I promised to find something for us to eat.”

  Aiden took a step to block her way. “You haven’t said two words to me since we got here. You didn’t say much more than that on the drive here from Jackson.”

  “Not now, Aiden.”

  “When, Leah? When are you going to believe I love you?”

  She glanced around to make sure no one was close enough to hear and rounded on him, her eyes fierce, her voice a harsh whisper. “Leave me alone. Stop harassing me.”

  “Give me a chance to explain. If you’re still determined to be rid of me, I’ll walk away.”

  “I know everything I need to know. You bet Brian you could get me to fall in love with you. You won. End of story.”

  “You’re my wife.”

  Her nostrils flared with anger. “Not for long. The minute I find the time to fly back to Vegas, this marriage is over.”

  “Catholics don’t believe in divorce.”

  “Brian got a divorce.”

  He saw the flash of regret in her eyes that she’d mentioned his missing brother. He swallowed the knot of raw pain in his throat and said, “I’m not Brian.”

  It was Brian who’d talked him into the bet. When he’d told his brother to stop moping over his broken marriage and move on with his life, Brian had countered that Aiden hadn’t even managed to get a woman to fall in love with him, let alone marry him. He was in no position to lecture Brian on his love life.

  Aiden remembered bragging, “I can get any woman I want.”

  “Any woman?” Brian had countered. “How about Leah Grayhawk?”

  “Who’d want her? That female’s nothing but piss and vinegar.” In fact, Leah could be downright vicious when it came to defending her sisters against Flynn pranks. Aiden had the scars to prove it.

  In retaliation for Connor cutting Eve’s cinch before the barrel race competition at a junior rodeo, causing Leah’s youngest sister to break her arm when the saddle came free, Leah had cut the cinch on Aiden’s saddle before the calf-roping competition at the same event. He’d ended up breaking his leg. It still ached on cold days.

  “You said any woman,” Brian jibed.

  Aiden eyed his brother sideways. What was Brian’s game? He rubbed his thigh and said, “Not Leah.”

  Brian made clucking sounds. “You’re afraid to try because you know you’ll fail. Leah isn’t likely to fall for your tricks. She knows too much about your exploits with women.”

  Leah was the same age as he was. They’d been in most of the same classes in high school. They hadn’t had much to do with each other since, but Jackson Hole was a small place, and he was sure she’d heard whatever gossip there was about him. “I could have her swooning at my feet”—he snapped his fingers—“like that.” Even as he said it, Aiden realized how silly the whol
e conversation had become. At thirty-three, he didn’t need to prove his prowess with women. He’d had plenty of willing partners over the years. Getting involved with one of King’s Brats was a dumb move.

  “I have no doubt you could charm Leah into a date or two,” Brian said. “But could you get her to fall in love with you?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Brian bent his elbows and flapped his arms. “Like I said, cluck, cluck, cluck. You think it’s easy to get a woman to trust you enough to give you her love? Put your money where your mouth is. I’ll bet you my Harley that you can’t get Leah Grayhawk to fall in love with you.”

  Aiden had been coveting Brian’s Harley-Davidson ever since his brother had bought it. He could have bought a motorcycle of his own, but that would have felt too much like he was copying Brian. As the firstborn, he always had been, and always would be, the leader in the family.

  “I have to admit I’m tempted,” he told Brian. “That’s a fine ride.”

  “If you lose,” Brian said, “you never say another word about me getting on with my life.” Brian then extended his hand. “Do we have a bet?”

  It had seemed harmless enough at the time. All Aiden had to do was put his best foot forward with Leah. He’d never seen her date, even in high school. He supposed she’d stayed home to keep an eye on her sisters. She wasn’t as pretty as the twins or Eve, but she wasn’t bad-looking, either. She had really beautiful golden brown eyes that reflected what she was feeling. At least he would have that much of a head start figuring out what was going on inside her. He liked a challenge, and he was sure Leah would give him a run for his money.

  He put his hand in Brian’s and said, “You’re on.”

  Even making contact with Leah hadn’t been easy. Both of them worked on their fathers’ ranches. The Flynn ranch, the Lucky 7, and the Grayhawk ranch, Kingdom Come, had a few common borders, but both ranch houses sat in the middle of thousands of acres of land. Unless he and Leah happened to be in Jackson Hole at the same time shopping for supplies, or showed up at the same cattle auction or rodeo, there was no reason for their paths to cross.