18. Audrey
AUDREY
I stretched in the big bed, the sheets crisp and cool on my naked skin.
Forty-eight hours ago I’d been waking up in my apartment, second-guessing my decision to participate in the Hunt, hoping Ella was okay at Dean’s house.
Now I was living under the same roof as the three masked men who’d claimed me in the tunnels, wondering why I was thinking more about fucking them than escaping them.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten so much sleep. Ella was always up so early, and I tried to stack my shifts at the hospital during her days with Dean so I could be off the rest of the time.
My stomach twisted with hunger. I hadn’t had a meal since before the Hunt.
I got out of bed and used the bathroom, then pulled on the coordinating sweats the Bulls had left for me in the bathroom. They were soft against my skin, and I sighed with pleasure as I pulled them on.
I used my hair tie from the Hunt to pull my hair into a messy bun, slipped my phone into the pocket of my sweats, and opened the door to the hall.
The smell of fresh-baked dough and hot bacon hit my nose, and my stomach twisted again as I made my past the closed doors of the other bedrooms and down the stairs to the first floor.
The smell of the food got stronger as I made my way through the house. I let it lead me back to the great room and found Ridge in the kitchen behind the island, flipping bacon in a cast iron pan.
“Morning,” he said, pulling a sheet of biscuits from the wall oven. “Coffee?”
I crossed the living area into the kitchen and sat at the island. “Yes, please.”
He wore a flannel button-down over a black T-shirt and the same kind of black work pants he’d worn in the Hunt, but the layered shirts did nothing to hide his muscular chest.
He looked even more delicious than the bacon smelled.
A dish towel was flung over one of his broad shoulders, and he seemed completely at ease in the kitchen moving between the bacon on the stove and the oven.
He set a second sheet of biscuits on the granite counter and pulled a mug down from the cupboard.
“Sleep okay?” he asked, putting the cup under a fancy coffee machine.
I waited until the beans stopped grinding to answer. “Like the dead.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, pulling a bowl of eggs from the fridge.
“I’m going to need to get some things,” I said. “From my place, I mean.”
“Figured you would.” The coffee finished brewing and he set the steaming mug in front of me. “Cream? Sugar?”
“This is good,” I said, wrapping my hands around the thick ceramic mug.
“You pick up Ella tonight?”
Hearing my daughter’s name emerge so casually from his mouth was a shock to my system. Or maybe it was the fact that he seemed so at ease with it. That it sounded so natural for him to be talking about Ella.
I nodded. “At six.”
“We’ll sort something out,” he said. “Why don’t you take your coffee to the porch? Graham and Holden should be in soon, then we’ll eat.” He pulled a piece of bacon off a plate next to the stove and handed it to me. “Take this for the road. You must be starving.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I plucked the bacon from his fingers and took a bite, closing my eyes as the salty, fatty meat melted in my mouth.
When I stopped chewing, Ridge was staring at my mouth, lust flaring in his eyes.
“I’ve never wanted to be a piece of bacon, but I think I’d like to be one now.”
I picked up my mug and turned around, hoping he didn’t see the lust flaring in my own eyes.
I shoved the rest of the bacon in my mouth and crossed the living room to the front door, hyper aware that Ridge was probably staring at my ass and not at all mad about it.
Stepping out onto the porch was like entering another world.
Horses nickered in the corrals to one side of the house, cows grazing in the field beyond them. Clanging metal sounded from the tractor barn, and chickens clucked their way over the ground, pecking at the grass and dirt.
The gravel driveway stretched toward the distant road, but here it was possible to believe I’d stepped back in time to a world without cars.
A world without cell phones or computers, one where the pace was slower, the days filled with sunshine and hard work, the nights with fireflies and a starlit sky empty of airplanes.
I sat in one of the chairs on the porch and sipped my coffee, bristling against the strange feeling in my chest. Not the dread I should have felt at the prospect of being owned by three strange men for the next three months but a kind of relief, an exhale of tension I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying.
I’d been sitting there about five minutes when a figure on a sleek, black horse appeared on a distant knoll with Blue trotting at its side. It wasn’t until the horse got closer that I realized Graham was in the saddle.
My chest constricted at the sight of him, a sensation that was even more disconcerting than the sexual hunger I’d felt with Ridge in the doorway to my room, the unbridled lust I’d felt watching Holden shower.
I didn’t know this man — Graham Calloway — at all. So why did the sight of him approaching on a horse make me feel like I was home?
His face was partially hidden by a black cowboy hat, but there was something familiar about the set of his jaw under his beard, dark and dusted with silver.
Something that comforted me as much as it excited me.
His shoulders stretched the seams of his green henley, his thighs muscular against the horse’s rib cage, his boots resting easy in the stirrups.
He tipped his hat as he rode past me to the big barn, Blue still by his side, and I don’t know what was worse, the fact that my pussy clenched with desire or the way my heart skipped a beat.
I was still trying to calm my panic at my unexpected reaction when Holden emerged from the metal barn where the tractor was parked.
He ambled toward the house, and for a minute, I had a chance to watch him unobserved.
His face looked more tan in the morning sunlight, his hair, pulled back in its ponytail, even more gold.
He moved as easily as Graham and Ridge, but where Graham moved like he had all the time in the world, and Ridge moved like he was considering every step, Holden rushed forward like he was afraid life wouldn’t wait if he showed up late.
His faded jeans were slung low on his hips, giving me a thrilling glimpse of flat abs under his white T-shirt when he pulled a scrap of fabric from his pocket and reached up to swipe the sweat from his forehead.
He was almost to the porch when he spotted me.
Was it my imagination that his eyes lit up?
“Morning, doc.” He climbed the steps to the porch. “Sleep well?”
I nodded. “You?”
He leaned against one of the porch’s posts. “Would have slept better if you’d been in my bed instead of yours.”
I rolled my eyes even though the thought of it — of being in Holden’s bed, of having him between my thighs — sent desire coursing through my veins.
I cut my gaze toward the tractor in the distance because it was easier than looking at him and trying to convince myself I felt nothing. “That tractor the one that gave you the cut on your arm?”
I remembered him now, remembered the day he’d come into the ER, a blood-soaked dishtowel wrapped around his right arm. I’d been all business then, the problem of Dean ever-present, no time to lust after the hundreds of patients who came and went in the ER every week.
“That’s the one,” he said. “Although it wasn’t the tractor’s fault.”
“Sheet metal right?”
“You remember.” He looked pleased.
“I do now.” He’d told me about it while I’d stitched up the cut: the way he’d been using a piece of sheet metal to repair the old tractor, the way it had slipped in his gloved hands and sliced across his arm.
He held out his arm. “You did a good job.”
I glanced at the raised white stitch marks. “You’ll have a scar.”
He grinned like we shared a secret. “That’s what you said when you stitched it up.”
His gaze drifted from my face to a spot just beyond the porch, and I followed his line of sight to see Graham approaching from the barn.
He took off his hat as he climbed the steps to the porch with Blue on his heels.
And damn.
How could a man — an older man — look so sexy fully clothed? And why did I suddenly have a thing for cowboy hats?
And cowboy boots.
And cowboys.
“Morning, wildcat.” he said to me.
“Good morning.” I dropped my hand so Blue could sniff the remnants of my bacon. “Your horse is beautiful.”
“Can’t take credit for Cash.” He scuffed at the porch with the toe of one black cowboy boot. “But you’re right: he’s as beautiful an animal as god ever created.”
Cash. So that was the black horse’s name. It suited him.
“I smell bacon,” Holden said to no one in particular. “Do you smell bacon?”
“Ridge was cooking breakfast when I got up,” I said.
“Then we best get to it,” Graham said, heading for the door to the house. “It’s rude to keep the cook waiting.”