Chapter 20
20
Natalie
A s dusk turns to dark that night, I lower myself into the Hott Spot springs with a groan of pleasure.
Celebration time.
Yes, we have a long way to go. But today went incredibly well, and there’s every reason to believe we’re going to meet the terms of the will, get the Hott Springs Eternal activities program off to a strong start, and return Preston to New York in time to meet his ridiculous deadline.
I deserve a long, hot soak.
Plus I need time to think about things.
Like what happened in the Jell-O pool.
I should never have taken Shane’s place. I guess I got caught up in the moment. Everyone was having fun. It all seemed harmless.
Lesson learned: It’s all fun and games until someone gets poked in the thigh by Preston Hott’s big, hard cock.
All of a sudden, I was wanting things I had no right to want. I imagined opening my arms and spreading my legs and letting his weight pin me to the ground. I wanted?—
God, I wanted .
I still want.
And, if the…sturdiness of his arousal was any indication, I am apparently not the only one.
“Hey,” a voice says from the gate.
A deep voice, slightly roughened from a long day, rasps over my overheated, oversensitive skin like the stroke of a calloused hand.
“You, um, mind company?” Preston asks.
I shake my head.
“I came down for a soak, but if you’d rather—I don’t want to intrude.”
“You’re not intruding. There’s plenty of room for both of us.”
I’m not sure that’s true. There might not be enough room in the world for the two of us and my body’s reaction to him.
He sets his towel on a table, then pulls his T-shirt over his head. It’s almost completely dark out now, except for small landscaping lights and the fairy lights that ring the enchanted space, but I can see well enough. And all the breath leaves my body, because he’s beautiful. Renaissance statue beautiful, romance novel cover beautiful. Sculpted pecs, ridged abs, sturdy shoulders, and God’s gift to arms.
He slides into the springs, and my nipples tighten at the sight of him and the tease of the rippling water.
He sits a couple of feet away from me. A theoretically safe distance. And he submerges himself to his chin under the surface of the water, which lets me draw a few full breaths.
“It was really nice to meet your family,” I say.
“Thanks.”
“You and your brothers—you seem to really love each other. Despite the shit they give you.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Hey. Thanks for, um, saving me from the third degree with Shane and Quinn.”
“They were asking you about Kali, huh?”
He nods. “I didn’t want to talk about it with them.”
“You probably don’t want to talk about it with me, either, then,” I say lightly. Because I want to know, but I don’t want to force him.
But he shakes his head. Shrugs. And—I don’t think it’s my imagination—moves closer to me along the ledge submerged beneath the steaming surface of the water.
“I met her at college,” he says.
My pulse kicks up. He’s confiding in me, and I want to take his words and tuck them into a treasure box and keep them safe.
“My granddad—” He stops.
“You and your siblings all were raised by your grandfather?”
“My mom and a series of husbands—we have three different dads, which is why we don’t all look alike—but yeah, my grandfather was this kind of—I don’t know. Patriarch? Titan? He was always there for us, but he was also…” He hesitates. “Always an asshole. Had to be right. Had to win. Knew what was best.”
“That sucks,” I say because—sometimes that’s all you can say. And I worry for a second that it’s wrong, but he nods, and the corner of his mouth curves—his not-quite-smile.
Someone who didn’t know him might not even catch it as it flits by. But I know him.
“He didn’t want me to go to college on the East Coast. We got into a pissing match about it, and I dug in. He’s a stubborn son of a bitch, and…” He stops again.
“And so are you?”
His eyes flash to mine, the corner of his mouth curving higher. “Yeah. So I went. Studied finance because I thought it would help me when I went home to run the ranch. Except I fell in love with Kali.”
His voice is low. Rough. Vulnerable. I’m peeking into the heart of this gruff, self-contained man, and my own heart constricts at the gift of it.
My heart’s pounding. I think of Sonya saying This is how it starts. You start out wanting to understand what makes them tick.
Now I want to ask her, And then what? What happens once you find out what makes them tick?
“I came home with her, and he—he hated her.”
“Because—”
“He was already angry at me for leaving. And Kali’s dream life was in New York, and that’s where she wanted us to live. But also, she was an artist and a social butterfly, which were two things he couldn’t understand at all. He said if I went to New York with her it would end badly. He threatened to disinherit me if I did. We got into a huge fight. He said I wasn’t cut out for New York finance, that it would eat me alive. That I’d regret leaving the one thing I was actually good at. That I’d end up back in Rush Creek, begging to run the ranch.”
I wince.
“Yeah. It was ugly.”
“You’ve proved him wrong,” I tell him.
I want to say, You don’t have to keep proving yourself. But I don’t want to make him shut down, either. I want more of this. More Preston.
“Not yet,” he says. “But when I get this promotion, I will have.”
“Why that?”
“Because everything else I’ve done, a lot of people do. But this promotion I want—not a lot of people ever get this far. It’s rarefied air. This is the hard part.”
This. This is what makes Preston Hott tick. This is why he was so angry at getting called back here, why he was so combative that he tried to have me fired. Why it’s been so hard for him to comply with the will. Because to him, it still feels like his grandfather is trying to take away what’s important to him.
He sighs heavily.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Feels, um, good to talk about it.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“Yeah. Of course.”
But we both know there’s no of course about it.
“It went well today,” he says, and I know if he wants to talk about activities planning, he must really want to change the subject. It makes me smile.
“It did.”
“People seemed like they were having fun.”
“Did you have fun?” I ask him.
Creases form between his eyebrows.
“That’s not supposed to be a hard question,” I say, laughing.
He looks away. “I don’t know if I know how to have fun.”
Oh, Preston. But that makes sense, too.
“What about when you were a kid?” I ask.
He runs his hand over the surface of the water, and his fingers nearly brush me. I’ve been moving closer to him all this time, drawn in by his story. “What about it?”
“Did you have fun then?”
“Someone had to watch out for Hanna,” he says. “Someone had to make sure Shane and Quinn didn’t kill each other. Someone had to call 911 when Tucker decided it would be a good idea to try to jump from one tree to another like Tarzan.”
So he could never let down his guard. Never be a kid. My chest tightens. “So, basically, you were the grown-up.”
“I guess I never thought about it like that—but yeah, kind of. Not when we were really little. Back in those days, we played capture the flag and tag and all those kinds of games. And yeah. It was fun. We’d run and play, and there was so much space and so many hours before we’d get called to dinner.”
He’s got a faraway look in his dark eyes, staring at memories over my shoulder. A smile tugs at both corners of his mouth now, and I have to make myself stop staring at how beautiful it makes his chiseled face. At some point, he’s drifted even closer to me. I’m breathless.
His eyes snap back to my face. “We made a pact,” he says abruptly. “The five of us brothers. That when we all grew up, we’d stay or come back, and run the ranch together.” He holds out his hand to show me a scar at the base of his thumb. “We swore a blood oath.”
I reach for his hand. He lets me cradle the back of his hand against my palm. The heat of his skin singes me, in the best possible way.
“And you?—”
“And I broke it. We all broke it. But I was the first one.”
I haven’t known him long, but even I understand that when he broke that oath, something in him broke, too. I ache for him.
I can’t help myself; I run a fingertip over his wet skin along the scar, and it’s like touching a live wire. For him, too, I think because he rasps out something between a sharp exhale and a grunt. My breath catches, a quieter echo.
My eyes find his, dark and frank and pleading, and I can’t look away.
His gaze drops to my mouth.
“Preston,” I murmur, and my voice doesn’t even sound like mine. “Maybe you need to do something just for fun.”
“Maybe I do,” he murmurs back, right before he takes another step closer and his mouth comes down, hard, on mine.