Chapter Twenty-three – Losing Sleep
Chapter Twenty-three
Rafe
LOSING SLEEP
Performed by Chris Young
I didn’t know what to think …to feel…as my arms banded around Sadie, pulling her tighter into my chest. The wild pounding of our hearts and the frantic breathing of our lungs made it impossible to grab hold of the restraint I normally craved. Instead of pushing her off and rolling away as I would have with any other woman, I buried my face in her neck and let her dark, silky strands surround me. I’d never lost myself like I had with her. Never given up those last few moments of control. My pleasure had always come in being the one to lead that final, frenzied drive. Instead, Sadie had taken it from me, ripped it out of my hold with her fevered plea and those damn blue siren eyes.
Liar , my devil screamed. You happily handed over the reins. You liked giving her the power in those final thrusts. You liked letting go.
Ever since she’d thrown out her dare to me in the bar, I’d tried to tell myself that once I had her, the craving I had for her would dissipate, even as my devil had laughed at me. And he’d been right once again, because we’d barely finished, and I was hungry to begin again.
The feel of her naked body draped over me, the smell of her, the taste of her on my tongue, only caused the yearning to beat more chaotically inside my chest. I didn’t want anyone else to ever have her this way. What she’d given up in those last few moments, those pieces of her she’d handed over, needed to belong solely to me. But how the hell was I supposed to make that happen?
I finally moved, dragging a hand into her hair and tugging so she was forced to share those deep, blue pools with me. Instead of reading her emotions as I’d intended, I lost myself completely, found myself drowning in them. Every breath I took belonged to her.
I loathed it. And loved it.
From the moment I’d first seen her, I’d been captured by her beauty, but she was especially stunning like this, with her dark locks tousled, lips swollen from my kisses, and skin flushed from coming apart multiple times at my demand.
My body responded to that look, tightening and hardening beneath her.
I captured her mouth, and the heat of her burned through me like the very best bourbon. In one swift move, I picked her up and carried her to the dresser. Taking a step back, I dealt with the first condom and slid on another.
“You’re ready to go again, Slick?” Wonder danced over her face.
In response, I stepped between her thighs and slid a thumb along her center. She gasped. It was sexy and beautiful and mine.
I swallowed it, mouth pummeling into hers, taking ownership, claiming her as much as she’d claimed me. I slid into her with a barely controlled thrust. As I bottomed out, pleasure rippled through me. The world grew hazy until there was nothing but the blaze burning between us and the honeyed taste and smell that was Sadie.
I’d told her I wouldn’t be gentle, and I hadn’t expected to be. The need in me, the anger and frustration spiraling through me when she’d walked into the room, had me expecting to be anything but. And yet now, watching the need crest over her face, I wanted every move to be a caress. Every thrust an adoring worship.
It was Sadie who took the mellow edge and turned it wild and rough once more. She dug her heels into my ass, easing forward on the dresser until there was no space between us. Until our bodies seemed forged together. One entity engaged in a feral search for another release. This singular mating dance was all that mattered. The promised heaven the only call we could heed.
Her sweet moans and whimpers were quiet, and I suddenly hated we were in a house full of people, because I wanted to hear her scream. I wanted to hear the sound she would make when there was nothing but moonlight and bluebells and water rushing around us.
“Rafe… God… Rafe.” It was a frantic plea.
I picked her up and moved so her back was up against the wall, so the force was full and intense as I slammed back into her. She went off like an untamed mare sensing freedom, a quiet, beautiful cry escaping her that sounded like chimes on the gates of heaven, and I followed her through the pearly expanse, my body and heart and soul all landing deep inside her.
Our chests heaved, our breathing labored, but when she pushed the lock of my hair that had fallen over my brow away, I saw her lips were tilted upward. A softness surrounded her I vowed to keep. Our lives weren’t anywhere near suited, but I was good at problem-solving, and I’d figure out how to blend our worlds together. That forging I’d felt as we’d gone over the edge together would be the base of a beautiful future.
I kissed her, slow and deep, saying with my lips everything I couldn’t quite find the words to verbalize yet.
She’d ripped away my anger and frustration, leaving behind nothing but goddamn tenderness. Caring. Love . Goddamn it, I loved her. It should be impossible to feel so much for someone in such a short span. And yet I did.
I slowly eased her to the floor, and our eyes met again, a mix of emotions swimming between us. I tucked her hair behind her ear, finger stroking her cheek. Then, I twined our hands and led her back to the bed.
I left her there to step into the bathroom and dealt with the condom, and when I came back, she’d picked up her torn tank top and was trying to figure out how to put it on.
I ripped it from her hand and threw it over my shoulder.
“Rafe—”
“No. I’m not done with you,” I told her and dragged her onto the mattress with me. I landed on my back with her sprawled over my chest and our legs tangled.
She propped her chin on a hand, watching me as she said, “I’m happy you weren’t all huff and bluster. You backed up those promises pretty damn well, Slick.”
I tugged a single lock. “You rushed me, Tennessee. I wanted to take my time.”
She laughed softly. “That wasn’t you taking your time? I thought I was going to explode. I think I actually might have.”
I felt the grin from the bottom of my stomach all the way to my lips.
She touched my mouth with a look of awe on her face. “You’re stunning when you let go. When you let yourself feel.”
My throat constricted.
She closed her eyes briefly before meeting my gaze again. “We said we’d talk.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to now. Wasn’t sure I wanted to know what additional hurdles lie between us, but ignoring the elephant in the room wouldn’t do us any good either.
“You go first,” I told her.
“When I first contacted your family, it wasn’t about weddings and dude ranches.” She inhaled a shaky breath, but she didn’t stop. Once Sadie decided something, she went at it with everything, and that was how she treated this. As she slowly unwound the story about her great-grandmother, and the stolen Harrington jewels, and why Adam had asked her to keep it all quiet, the constriction in my throat grew to my chest and my heart, frustration boiling once more, but not at her.
“I swear, we didn’t know they were real until recently. At first, I was going to use them as a down payment for a performing arts center I want to build in Willow Creek, but then I realized I couldn’t create a legacy on something that seemed a bit hinky. So, I started researching…and that led me here.”
I could tell she was nervous, because she was talking fast and furious.
“You want to build a theater?” I asked, almost more stunned by that than the other things she’d revealed.
“Not just a theater. A center with spaces for art and music lessons as well as a stage. It might be silly. But I just really wanted to find a way to make our community better and maybe draw more visitors to the area.” Her words were strong, but there was worry behind them, as if she was reaching for something too big. But all I could think was how much I admired her goals and how Spence and my dad would have liked her, would have liked her ideas about community and paying things forward.
When I’d stayed silent for too long, she shifted, looking away and trying to pull herself from my hold. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was embarrassed by what she wanted or worried I was upset about the jewels, but I didn’t let her go. I tightened my grip and held on.
“Wanting to do something for your community is never silly.”
She stilled. “Are you angry about the jewels? You’ve barely started to trust me. I don’t want this to get in the way of that.”
“You’re not responsible for what happened back then any more than I’m responsible for my great-grandfather winning the ranch in a hand of poker. The only person I’m upset with right now is Adam.”
Relief coasted over her face, and I couldn’t stop myself from stroking her cheek. The wild animal in me longed to forever have a hand on her, to never stop molding our skin together.
“Did you find anything in the ranch accounts?” she asked.
I shook my head. The cursory look I’d been able to give it after helping Steele with the cameras hadn’t shown me anything. The expenses were high, but then again, the cost of running a business like the ranch required heavy expenditures. In the past, the diamond mines that had turned into granite mines had been enough to offset the expenses and leave a hefty profit, but those endeavors had stopped mid-century. In the last decade, Spence had slowly depleted nearly a century’s worth of savings.
As much as I detested admitting it, Puzo had brought the ranch additional revenue. Boarding horses and renting slots at the dock were easy ways to make money off practically nothing. The cell tower was an eyesore, but it brought in a steady annual income just like Fallon had said. Even the wedding business Lauren had started brought in a small net income. But none of it was enough to keep the ranch afloat for more than another year or two.
But if Adam had done something underhanded to speed the ranch’s demise, I hadn’t caught it at first glance. In the morning, I’d hand over the chores and the protection of the women in my life to Steele and our team while I peeled back more layers of the numbers. I’d still worry about Sadie and Fallon, even with a team who was more qualified than I ever would be protecting them. But none of my men would let anger or past wounds interfere with the job of keeping them safe.
While I’d already failed to do just that with both of them.
“Puzo had you followed,” I told her through gritted teeth.
Her mouth dropped open. “What?”
I explained how we’d seen Nero Lancaster leaving The Fortress at the same time as her and what we’d learned about him working for Puzo. “It was why I thought you were more involved than you are. I thought Nero was your muscle.”
She forced herself up and away, sitting crisscross next to me with the sheet pulled up around her breasts. “Why would he have me followed? I didn’t tell him about the jewels, and he basically dismissed me when we were at The Fortress.”
“It might simply have been because of the way I reacted when I saw the two of you together.” Putting her at the center of Puzo’s scope was one more thing I regretted. “I should have told you as soon as I realized it.”
As if hearing the remorse in my voice, she leaned in and stroked the scars Puzo’s men had left on my chest. “It’s not like you had my phone number. We hadn’t planned on our one night turning into anything more, Slick.”
She was right and wrong. That may have been our intention, but if Fallon hadn’t shown up and we’d tangled ourselves together on Sunday as we’d planned, I knew now that it wouldn’t have been enough. I would have wanted to see her again. I would have wanted more. Even without having seen her selflessness and generosity this week, that spell she’d woven around me the minute she’d walked into my club would have branded me.
“You seemed disgusted when you saw me with him in the café. I thought you hated me,” she said softly. While there was no anger in the look she gave me, not even a trace of frustration that I might have put her in danger, I had plenty for both of us.
“What really irritated me,” I said, “was the fact that I didn’t hate you at all. That I wanted to drag you back to the penthouse and finish what we’d started. I couldn’t understand it.” I gripped the sheet she was still holding up and yanked it down so I could see her sweet curves. “Now, I hate that I wasted minutes we could have been together almost as much as the asshole who put these marks on you.” I brushed gently along her scars, a loving caress.
A little breathy gasp left her mouth—one I wanted to claim all over again.
“I’ve never felt this way, Rafe,” she said, brows furrowing. “I’m confused and scared on the one hand, and clearheaded and sure on the other.”
I knew exactly what she meant. The certainty she was mine was an absolute truth. She’d stormed into my life right when I’d needed her. But even knowing I loved her, I wasn’t sure how I could keep her. The future was cast in a foggy haze like an early spring morning mist settling over the fields. So, instead of trying to find my way through the unknown, I did what I could with this moment. I dragged her back to me, kissed her forehead, and said, “I know exactly what you mean, Tennessee. But we don’t have to figure it out tonight. We’ve talked enough for now.”
And I spent the next few hours showing her what I couldn’t yet say, proving to her the only truth that mattered at the moment was the way we blended together.
? ? ?
When I woke, the body I expected to have tucked up next to me was missing, and the shadowed gray light of the predawn hours filled the room. I was more pissed she wasn’t there than I was at the morning having found us.
I sat up and discovered her sitting on the floor next to the bed with my computer in her lap.
A hint of trepidation flew through me—old wounds and old doubts about those I could and couldn’t trust returning like the baggage it was—before it faded just as fast. Sadie didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. I wasn’t sure if she even hated the man who’d shot her.
I fisted her hair, dragging her head back against the bed so I could lock my gaze on hers.
“What are you doing?”
She smiled at me, and somewhere deep inside me, the last wall I hadn’t even known I’d left standing between us crumbled down, vanquished with that singular, stunning look. She put her hand over mine and squeezed.
“I think I found something.” Her voice was full of excitement.
I leaned over her shoulder, looking at the screen. “What?”
“When I woke up, I was thinking about how messed up Uncle Phil’s accounts were after he died. At first, I couldn’t make heads or tails out of them. All I knew was they didn’t reconcile. Then, Mama told me Uncle Phil was dyslexic, which meant he reversed numbers a lot. It was a pain in the ass to straighten it all out, but we did it in the end.”
My brows furrowed, and her smile widened at my obvious confusion, saying, “You said nothing in the accounts looked off when you took a quick glance at them. That was what happened with me too. It was only when I started lining up every invoice and every deposit that I found the differences, the inverse numbers scattered through them. If Uncle Phil had hired an accountant instead of insisting on doing it himself, it would never have been so screwed up—which made me wonder what an accountant who wanted to steal would do so it wasn’t obvious? Wouldn’t they just invert a few numbers here and there in places no one would notice?”
With my head full of her scent and that dazzling smile capturing me, it took an enormous effort to tear my gaze from her and turn to the screen.
“I didn’t have access to all the invoices,” she explained. “But looking at the ones I did find, I saw a few differences in what he said he paid compared to the actual amount due.”
She scrolled down through a spreadsheet she’d created. The first few columns were entitled bills and had both the actual amount on the invoice and the amount paid side by side. Next to those columns were ones listing the invoices the ranch sent to clients and the amount received. I slid out of bed, planting my naked ass next to her T-shirt-clad one. It distracted me, seeing her in my shirt, but then I forced myself back to the screen in her lap. I pulled the computer onto my knees, swiping through the document.
It was a handful of bills and invoices, nothing compared to the full scope of the ranch’s books, but even in that small amount, she’d found twenty thousand dollars of discrepancies.
Fury burned through me.
He was stealing from his sister. From his niece. From my brother.
On the heels of that thought came a much worse realization. What if this was what Spence and Adam had been arguing about? What if he’d confronted Adam about the embezzlement, and it was the reason my brother was dead? Because of goddamn money.
“Is Adam dyslexic?” Sadie asked, but I barely registered her voice through the guttural roar and pain consuming me.
I tossed the computer onto the bed and headed for the dresser as red filled my vision, and anguish tore through my veins like an insidious poison, tainting every molecule. My body was rigid, muscles straining against skin and bones as I pulled on a pair of jeans and dragged a clean T-shirt over my head.
I threw open the door, and it hit the wall with a bang that echoed like a gunshot through the silent house. The stairs were cold as I took them two at a time, but they did nothing to cool the raging inferno inside me.
“Rafe!” Sadie called after me, but I didn’t stop. I leaped over the last three steps and barreled down the hall to the butler’s quarters where Adam had been staying.
Through the blood pounding in my ears, I heard her call my name again, heard her telling me to wait, that she wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure, and that we needed to do more research.
I wouldn’t wait. I wouldn’t be in control or stay calm.
I would strangle him until the breath left his body. Until he admitted the truth.
I half expected the door to the butler’s quarters to be locked, but when I spun the handle, it opened easily. The door flew into the wall with the same ferocity as mine had, shaking a shelf where dainty tea cups were on display.
The room was dark and quiet.
I flicked on the light and found a sitting room stuffed to the gills with Harrington heirlooms. The once plain and functional servant’s furniture had been replaced with a collection of items from around the house, including priceless art, antique Victorian chairs, and an irreplaceable escritoire desk.
Motherfucking thief!
I stormed through the pieces of my family’s history to the bedroom door and found it wasn’t locked either. The bedroom was fitted with more things that belonged to my family, including a beautifully carved bed that had once been in my childhood bedroom. He wasn’t even afraid of being caught with the items that didn’t belong to him! Didn’t even have the goddamn decency to hide them behind bolted doors.
My hope of dragging him from it, of slamming my fists into his flesh, evaporated at the sight of the neatly made bed. He’d either woken even earlier than us, or he hadn’t slept there at all. Through my simmering, blood-thirsty rage, I remembered him talking about a girlfriend. Some mysterious person no one seemed to have met.
I spun around, heading back toward the hallway, and came face-to-face with a breathless, wild-eyed Sadie. My shirt hung down past her thighs, baring long legs I loved, and I immediately despised the idea of anyone, especially Adam, seeing her like this. But even that torturous thought didn’t stop me. I was determined to find him and take him apart limb by limb, both physically and financially. There wouldn’t be anything left of him.
As I brushed past her, she latched on to my arm and spun me to face her with a strength that caught me off guard.
“Rafe. You need to calm down before you do something you regret.”
I gripped her shoulders and shook. “He killed Spence. He killed my brother because he found out Adam was stealing. He killed my brother for goddamn money.”
She squeezed my arms with the same desperation. “You don’t know that for sure, and if you go flying at him now, with only the handful of items we’ve found, before we have all the proof stacked up against him, he’ll be able to pass it off as a mistake.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” The sharply snapped question had us turning down the hall. Lauren was dressed for the day in jeans, a plaid shirt, and work boots, looking more like the woman I’d grown up with than ever before. But the shock on her face was new.
“Did you know he was stealing from us?” I demanded, letting Sadie go and heading for Lauren. She took two steps back. “Did you suspect Adam killed Spencer? Is that why you’ve been losing yourself in sleeping pills and painkillers?”
“What? What are you saying?” She shook her head violently. “No. He wouldn’t!”
“We’ve only found twenty thousand right now, Lauren. That’s in just a handful of lines Sadie was able to explore. How much you want to bet I find more? Hundreds of thousands more. How much does he owe Puzo?”
Lauren turned a violent shade of red and moved toward me instead of away this time, slamming her hand into my chest. “Nothing. He doesn’t gamble like that. Not after everything the Hurlys have lost because of it. He wouldn’t steal from family. And he’d never hurt Spence! He couldn’t.”
But I knew he had. A thousand memories shifted through me like a kaleidoscope turning. Adam’s anger whenever Spence or I got something he wanted and couldn’t afford. His rage when his daddy and his granddaddy died in a crash while driving our cattle to auction. The way he’d pummeled me when he’d found out Lauren was carrying my child.
Instead of doing anything about Adam’s rage, instead of addressing it head-on, I’d walked away from the ranch. I’d left the door open, practically inviting all the monsters in at the gate, and hadn’t cared what had happened. I’d abandoned my family.
The violent fury turned inward, accompanied by a clawing, desperate anguish, a brutal sorrow that wove through every fiber of my being.
Everything my father had ever called me rang through my ears.
Selfish. Closed-minded. Arrogant.
A piece of my soul I’d thought long buried screamed in protest. Fought to toss off the blame. And instead, it landed with a bitter, unforgiving truth in the pit of my stomach.
I’d played right into the wedge my father had driven between me and my brother. I’d hammered it permanently into place by taking what I thought I was entitled to and brought the ranch to its knees. I’d left my family to suffer the consequences because that was what I had been trained to do. I’d been taught that only one person could win, and I’d been determined it would be me.