14. Ridge
RIDGE
The thrill of victory put a pep in my step as we walked her out of the tunnels. It wasn’t just that we’d won.
It was that we’d won her.
Now she was ours, and we’d have three months to play with the luscious body that had been on display when she’d ridden the bull.
My dick got hard just thinking about her pale flesh, the press of her lush thighs against the bull’s saddle, her tits swinging in time to the bull’s rocking, dark pink nipples begging for my mouth.
My teeth.
She’d looked surprised when the orgasm took hold of her, like it had been a while. It only made me more eager to make her come, to show her how good we could make her feel.
She didn’t say anything as we backtracked to the holding room. She was back in her clothes, docile as a lamb, but I knew that was just a front.
I’d seen her fire in the holding room before the Hunt, had seen it when she’d argued with us about riding the bull.
She was going to be fun.
By the time we got back to the holding room, two of the teams — the Spiders and the Wolves — had caught their prey. Titus was there, sitting in a chair next to the first aid station, logging out the teams who emerged with their prey and keeping an eye out for the ones still in tunnel.
“What now?” Audrey asked, looking up at us.
Graham removed his mask first. “Now we go home.”
She took in his features, cataloguing them like she seemed to catalogue everything. “If you expect me to go with you, you’re going to have to give me your name.”
He hesitated. “Graham.”
“Graham,” she repeated it with a hint of surprise.
I took off my mask. “I’m Ridge.”
She nodded, studying my face like she was looking for clues about what the next three months might hold. “Audrey.”
I nodded, not wanting to be the one to break the news that we already knew her name, that one of the men who’d just captured her in the tunnels had been stalking her for the last couple of months.
She turned to Holden. “Take off your mask.”
There was something authoritative in the command, and I wasn’t surprised when Holden complied even though he could be a real pain in the ass when it came to taking orders from anybody but Graham.
Her eyes narrowed as she studied him. “Wait… I know you.”
“You patched me up a couple months back. Did a good job too.” He held out his right arm to show her the scar from his stitches. “Look, the scar’s almost invisible.”
Understanding washed over her features. “That’s how you knew I was a doctor.”
“Spotted you right away,” he said, like he’d seen her in a crowd at the mall instead of in an underground Hunt where men competed to take possession of a woman and her body.
She didn’t say anything, probably because she was exhausted and on overload. We needed to get her home, get her fed, let her get some rest.
If my unruly dick was an indication, she was going to need it for the next three months.
We gave Titus instructions to lock up once everybody was accounted for, then gathered our shit — including our shirts — from the back office before leading Audrey up the stairs and into the Orpheum.
It was almost noon and eerily quiet, the crowds from Fight Night — and all the other shit that happened at the Orpheum after dark — long since dissipated, like vampires worried the sun would turn them to ash.
We made our way down the long hall, past the concession stand, and through the lobby with Audrey between us.
Graham pushed through the lobby doors and we followed him outside.
Audrey squinted against the sunlight and removed her phone from her jeans.
A text was displayed on the screen, but I couldn’t make out the words.
She turned to us. “I have a daughter.”
The words rolled over me like a rogue wave taking me down.
I was too stunned to say anything, but Holden apparently didn’t feel the same way.
“I know,” he said.
“A daughter?” Graham repeated the word like it was unfamiliar, like he couldn’t quite place its meaning.
Audrey ignored him and scowled at Holden. “What do you mean you know?”
He shrugged, and Graham glared at him the way he did when Holden forgot to shut the gate in the east pasture.
I adjusted my baseball cap, picked up from the back office before we’d left the holding room. “You have a daughter?”
Maybe it was a dumb question, but I wanted to be sure I’d gotten it right.
Audrey nodded. “She’s six. I share custody of her with her father. And like your friend Holden here said, I’m a doctor. I have to work. So maybe it would be better — for you — if we called off this whole… three-months-living-with-you thing.”
There was a challenge in the tilt of her chin, and I realized she was hoping we’d cut her loose. Was hoping her daughter would make the debt she owed us too complicated to collect.
I looked at Graham, because while we all called the Calloway ranch home, it belonged to him, and he always had the final say when it came to the ranch.
Graham turned to Holden. “I’m going to kick your ass.”
Holden wasn’t fazed. “I’ll have it coming.”
“Maybe we just call it.” Audrey held out her hand, like she wanted Graham to shake it. “Easier for you, easier for me. You had your fun, I rode your bull, no harm no foul.”
Graham looked down at her hand, then met her gaze. “Not a chance in hell. Let’s go.”
She dropped her hand, disappointment written all over her face. “My car…”
“Where are you parked?” Holden asked. “I’ll ride with you to the ranch.”
Audrey lifted her eyebrows. “The ranch?”
“Ridge will ride with you,” Graham said. “Holden, with me.”
Graham started down the sidewalk toward his truck, a Ford 350 King Ranch in metallic black that made my Chevy Silverado look like a tricycle.
I didn’t mind the size difference. Everyone but Graham knew Chevy made the better truck.
I looked down at Audrey Sterling and was struck again by how fucking pretty she was. Bet she didn’t even know it either. “Where are you parked?”
She sighed and headed the opposite direction from where Graham and Holden were climbing into Graham’s truck. “This way.”
She didn’t sound happy about the fact that I was along for the ride, but it was a good deal for me. I had no desire to be around when Holden got his ass chewed by Graham.
We walked in silence for about two blocks before Audrey came to a stop at a silver Subaru Touring.
I looked over the car. “Surprisingly safe choice.”
She looked up at me, and I just about fell into her big brown eyes.
“Why is safe a surprise?” she asked.
“You just let us hunt you in the tunnels. You rode the bull.”
She blushed. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“For which one?”
“Either,” she said. “Both.”
I nodded, studying her.
Wondering who Audrey Sterling — a mother, a doctor, an upstanding member of society — could want dead bad enough that she’d join the Hunt.
I felt again the spark of chemistry that had arced between us in the tunnels. Then she tore her gaze from mine and walked around to the driver’s side of the Subaru
“It’s unlocked,” she said, getting in.
I got in the car and made note of the car seat in the back.
She really was a mom.
Maybe it was so hard to believe because I was still thinking about her perfect tits, her luscious thighs.
I pointed out Graham’s metallic black truck as he roared down Main. “That’s Graham there.”
She pulled away from the curb and followed the truck.
I wondered what kind of hell Holden was taking from Graham. Holden had known Audrey had a daughter. He hadn’t told us because he’d known Graham would have chosen another woman to hunt.
Graham didn’t do messy.
He’d fought long and hard to keep the ranch, had risked everything, even his freedom, to keep it.
He took care of the herd and the horses and kept track of what needed fixing (fences and structural elements went on my list, anything with an engine went on Holden’s).
Every now and then, we went into one of the local dive bars to pick up a woman, went to her place to fuck — we didn’t bring our casual hookups to the ranch, and all we had were casual hookups — and bowed out politely the next morning.
Nice and easy.
No mess. No drama.
And fucking Holden had blown it all to pieces by omitting the fact that Audrey Sterling had a daughter.
Not a big deal for a one-night stand. A very big deal when Audrey was going to live with us for the next three months.
“How often do you have your daughter?” I asked, breaking the silence as we left downtown Blackwell Falls.
Woods stretched deep and thick on every side, all the way to the Blackwell Preserve, the primary draw for the tourists who came to hike and kayak in the summer.
It was why we usually stayed clear of Main Street from now until November: too many people from the city crowding the streets, taking pictures for their social media, wearing shorts in the summer and sweaters in the fall when they came to pick apples from the local orchards.
“I don’t want to talk about my daughter.” There was a no-nonsense bite in her voice that probably came in handy with stubborn patients.
“All due respect, you belong to us for the next three months. We’ll probably have to talk about her.”
She tightened her grip on the Subaru’s steering wheel. “Mondays and Tuesdays, plus every other weekend.”
I wondered how that would work with Audrey at the ranch and hoped Graham had an idea because I was fresh out.
We passed Old Mountain Road, the main road leading up the mountain. Late spring sunlight shone through the trees, a bright green that spoke of new leaf and the long warm months of summer.
We’d been driving for about ten minutes when we left the woods behind in favor of a long stretch of road with open fields on every side, the granite cliffs of the Blackwell mountains rising in the distance.
“Where exactly are we going?” Audrey asked.
“The ranch.”
“What ranch?”
“The ranch where we live.”
“You live on a ranch.” She said it like it made perfect sense, which I guess after her ride on the mechanical bull was probably true.
“Yep.”
“Are you brothers?”
“Not exactly.”
She let it go and returned her gaze to Graham’s truck, still leading the way.
I tried not to stare at her tits spilling out of her T-shirt, tried not to think about how they’d looked when she’d been on the bull.
About how much I’d wanted to take one in my mouth, suck it until she moaned.
Her thighs were an even bigger temptation. Poured into her tight jeans, I wanted nothing more than to tug them off her body, reveal her pale flesh a little at a time, bury my face in her cunt until she screamed.
My dick stood at attention all over again, and I shifted in the passenger seat, trying to ignore that too.
I spotted the old barn almost a mile before Graham hit his turn signal. Graham’s grandfather had used the barn to keep hay dry for the east field back when the Calloway ranch owned a bigger herd. Graham rented it to Hawk Cruz for his birds.
A lot of the ranch was like that: repurposed over the years as it got harder to make a living with ranching alone.
Hence, the north barn.
Up ahead, Graham’s turn signal came on as we approached the ranch’s entrance.
“Here we are,” I said.
Audrey slowed down, then pulled into the wide gravel driveway after Graham.
We approached the wooden gate, and she peered through the windshield at the symbol I’d carved into the block of wood that rose overhead, a C with bars on either side of it, the same symbol on Graham’s belt buckle.
“What does the C stand for?” she asked as we passed under the ranch’s logo.
I watched the buildings of the ranch come into view: the big main house, the horse barn, the corrals and paddocks, my workshop, the tractor barn where Holden worked.
And in the distance, the fields and woods that surrounded the property.
“Calloway.”
“And the bars on either side?” she asked.
“The gate,” I said.
“Which gate?”
I looked at the gate, open on either side of the ranch’s entrance. The gate that kept everybody else out.
That kept what was sacred, sacred.
“This one.”