Barbara Dunlop - In Bed With The Wrangler

“What? You’d threaten to break my legs?”

He smiled and leaned closer. Self-preservation told her to shrink away, but the chair back kept her in place. His sweet breath puffed against her skin. “Violence? I don’t think so. But there are other ways to be persuasive.”

She struggled for a tone of disbelief. “What? You kiss me and I swoon?”

His grin widened. “Maybe. Let’s try it.”

And before she could react, he’d swooped in toward her. She gasped as his smooth lips settled on hers. They were warm and firm, and incredibly hot, as the contact instantly escalated to a serious kiss.

It took her only seconds to realize how much she’d longed for his taste. His scent filled her, and his hands settled on her sides, surrounding her rib cage as he deepened the kiss. Her head tipped back, and her mouth responded to his pressure by opening, allowing him access, drinking in the sensation of his intimate touch.

She clutched his upper arms, steadying herself against his hard, taut muscles. He flexed under her touch, and she imagined she could feel the blood coursing through his body. She could definitely feel the blood coursing through her own. It heated her core, flushed her skin and made her tingle from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes.

His hands convulsed against her body, thumbs tightening beneath her breasts. Her nipples hardened almost painfully as arousal thumped its way to the apex of her thighs. She gave him her tongue, answering his own erotic invitation. A river of sound roared in her ears as he drew her to her feet, engulfing her, pressing her against his hard body.

His touch was unique, yet achingly familiar, as if she’d been waiting for this moment her entire life. Her palms slid across his shoulders, around his neck, stroking the slick sweat of his hairline as their kiss pulsed endlessly between them.

His hands slipped to her buttocks, pulling her against the cradle of his thighs, demonstrating the depth of his arousal and shocking her back to her senses.

She jerked away, hands pressing against his chest, putting a barrier between them. He leaned in, trying to capture her mouth.

“I can’t,” she gasped.

He froze.

“I’m…uh…” She wasn’t exactly sorry. That had definitely been the best kiss of her life. But she couldn’t take things any further. They barely knew each other. She’d only just left Hargrove. And she hadn’t come to Montana for casual sex.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

She tried to take a step back, but the damn chair still blocked her way. “This is too fast,” she explained, struggling to bring both her breathing and her pulse rate back under control.

He heaved an exasperated sigh. “It was a kiss, Amber.”

But they both knew it was more than a kiss. Then, to her mortification, her gaze reflexively flicked below his waistline.

He gave a knowing chuckle, and she wished the floor would swallow her whole.

“Are you blushing?” he asked.

“No.” But she couldn’t look him in the eyes.

“You seemed a whole lot more sophisticated when we met in the lounge,” he ventured.

She couldn’t interpret his flat tone, so she braved a glance at his expression. Was he annoyed?

He looked annoyed.

She hadn’t intended to lead him on. Nor had she meant for the kiss to spiral out of control.

Surely he could understand that.

Or was he always so quick to leap to expectations?

Then, an unsettling thought hit her. What if Royce hadn’t leaped to expectations in the past two minutes? What if his expectations had been there since their meeting in the lounge?

Had she been hopelessly naive? Did he consider her a one-or two-night stand?

“Is that why you brought me here?” she asked, watching closely, giving him the chance to deny it.

“Depends,” he said, cocking his head and giving her a considering look. “On what you mean by that.”

“Because you thought I’d sleep with you?”

“It had crossed my mind,” he admitted.

Her embarrassment turned to anger. “Seriously?”

He sighed. “Amber-”

“You are the most egotistical, opportunistic-”

“Hey, you were the one who was dressed to kill and insisted on ‘taking a ride in my jet plane.’”

“That wasn’t a euphemism for sex.”

“Really?” He looked genuinely surprised. “It usually is.”

Amber compressed her lips. How had she been so naive? How could she have been so incredibly foolish? Royce wasn’t some knight in shining armor. He was a charming, wealthy, well-groomed pickup artist.

Her distaste was replaced again by embarrassment. She’d proposed paying her way here by doing office work. He’d had a completely different line of work in mind.

She pushed the wheeled chair aside and moved to go around him. “I think I’d better leave.”

She’d have to call her parents to rescue her, head back to Chicago with her tail between her legs, maybe even reconsider her relationship with Hargrove, since, as the three of them so often told her, she was naive in the ways of the real world.

At least with Hargrove, she knew where she stood.

“Why?” Royce asked, putting a hand on her arm to stop her.

She glanced at his hand, and he immediately let go.

“There’s obviously been a misunderstanding.” She’d hang out in the upstairs bedroom until a car could come for her. Then she’d head back to the airport, home to her parents’ mansion and back to her real life.

This had been a crazy idea from beginning to end.

“Clearly,” said Royce, his jaw tight.

She moved toward the door.

Royce’s voice followed her. “Running back to Mommy and Daddy?”

Her spine straightened. “None of your business.”

“What’s changed?” he challenged.

She reached for the doorknob.

“What’s changed, Amber?” he repeated.

She paused. Then she turned to confront him. No point in beating around the bush. “I thought I was a houseguest. You thought I was a call girl.”

A grin quirked one corner of his mouth, and her anger flared anew.

“Are you always this melodramatic?” he asked.

“Shut up.”

He shook his head and took a couple of steps toward her. “I meant what’s changed on your home front?”

“Nothing,” she admitted, except it had occurred to her that her parents might be right. She had been protected from the real world for most of her life. Maybe she wasn’t in a position to judge human nature. They’d always insisted Hargrove was the perfect man for her, and they could very well be right.

“So, why go back?” Royce pressed.

“Where else would I go?” She could sneak off to some other part of the country, but her father would track her down as soon as she accessed her bank account. Besides, the longer she stayed away, the more awkward the reunion.

Royce took another step forward. “You don’t have to leave.”

She scoffed out a dry laugh.

“I never thought you were a call girl.”

“You thought I was a barroom pickup.”

“True enough,” he agreed. “But only because it’s happened so many times before.”

“You’re bragging?”

“Just stating the facts.”

She scoffed at his colossal ego.

“You’re welcome to stay as a houseguest.” He sounded sincere.

“Are you kidding?” She couldn’t imagine anything more uncomfortable. He’d been planning to sleep with her. And for a few seconds there, well, sleeping with Royce hadn’t seemed like such a bad idea. And he must have known it. She was sure he’d known it.

Their gazes held.

“I can control myself if you can,” he told her.

“There’s nothing for me to control,” she insisted.

He let her lie slide. “Good. Then it’s settled.”

“Nothing is-”

He nodded toward the desk. “You organize my office and pay my bills, and I’ll keep my hands to myself.” He paused. “Unless, of course, you change your mind about my hands.”

“I’m not going to-”

He held up a hand to silence her. “Let’s not make any promises we’re going to regret.”

She let her glare do the talking, but a little voice inside her acknowledged he was right. She didn’t plan to change her mind. But for a few minutes there, it had been easy enough to imagine his hands all over her body.

Royce felt the burn in his shoulder muscles as he hefted another stack of two-by-fours from the flatbed to a waiting pickup truck. The two ranch hands assigned to the task had greeted him with obvious curiosity when he joined the work crew. Hauling lumber in the dark, with the smell of rain in the air, was hardly a choice assignment.

But Royce needed to work the frustration out of his system somehow. How had he so completely misjudged Amber’s signals? He could have sworn she was as into him as he was her.

He slid the heavy stack across the dropped tailgate and shifted it to the front of the box, admitting that he’d deluded himself the past few months in the hotel fitness rooms. High-tech exercise equipment was no match for the sweat of real work.

“Something wrong?” came Stephanie’s voice as she appeared beside him in the pool of the yard light. She tugged a pair of leather work gloves from the back pocket of her jeans. “You looked ticked off.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Royce denied, turning on the dirt track to retrace his steps to the flatbed, passing the two hands who were on the opposite cycle. “Where’d you come from?”

Stephanie slipped her hands into the gloves, lifting two boards to Royce’s five, balancing them on her right shoulder. “I drove down to join you for dinner. I wanted to see how Amber was doing.”

“She’s fine.

“She inside?”

He shrugged. “I assume so.”

“You have a fight?”

“No. We didn’t have a fight.” An argument, maybe. In fact, it was more of a misunderstanding. And it was none of his sister’s damn business.

“Something wrong with Bar-”

“No!” Royce practically shouted. Wait a minute. His sister might have changed topics. He forced himself to calm down. “What?”

“With Barry Brewster,” she enunciated. “Our VP of finance? I talked to him earlier, and he sounded weird.”

Royce slid his load into the pickup then lifted the boards from Stephanie’s shoulder and placed them in the box. “Weird how?”

It was Stephanie’s turn to shrug. “He yelled at me.”

Royce’s brow went up. “He what?”

They stepped out of the way of the two hands each carrying a load of lumber.

Stephanie lowered her voice. “With Jared gone. Well, Blanchard’s Sun, an offspring of Blanchard’s Run, took silver at Dannyville Downs, and-”

“S-o-n son?” Royce asked.

“S-u-n. It’s a mare.”

“You don’t think that will get confusing?”

Stephanie frowned at him. “I didn’t name her.”

“Still-”

“Try to stay on topic.”

“Right.”

The temperature dropped a few degrees. The wind picked up, and ozone snapped in the air. Royce went back to work, knowing the rain wasn’t far off.

Stephanie followed. “Blanchard’s Run is proving to be an incredible sire. With every week that passes, his price will go up. So I called Barry to talk about moving some funds to the stable account.”

“Did you really expect him to hand over a million?”

“Sure.” She paused, sucking in a breath as she hefted some more lumber. “Maybe. Okay, it was a long shot. But that’s not my point.”

“What is your point?”

The first, fat raindrops clanked on the truck’s roof, and one of the hands retrieved an orange tarp from the shed. Royce increased his pace to settle the last of the lumber on the pickup, then accepted the large square of plastic.

“You two get the flatbed,” he instructed, motioning for Stephanie to move to the other side of the pickup box.

“My point,” Stephanie called over the clatter from the tarp under the increasing rain, “is Barry’s reaction. He went off on me about cash flow and interest rates.”

“Over a million dollars?” Royce threaded a nylon rope through the corner grommet of the tarp and looped it around the tie-down on the running board. It was a lot to pay for a horse, sure. But there weren’t enough zeros in the equation to raise Barry’s blood pressure.

“I felt like a ten-year-old asking for her allowance.”

“That’s because you behave like a ten-year-old.” Royce tossed the rope over the load to his sister.

“It’s a great deal,” she insisted as lightning cracked the sky above them. “If we don’t move now, it’ll be gone forever.”

“Isn’t that what you said about Nare-Do-Elle?”

“That was three years ago.”

“He cost us a bundle.”

“This is a completely different circumstance. I’m right this time.” She tossed the rope back. “You don’t think I’ve learned anything in three years?”