CHAPTER EIGHT
Slade
I thought I had known want.
I’d been twenty-two and winning, and the women had been there—warm and willing and easy, the kind that showed up at the gate after a ride with their eyes on the buckle, completely ignoring the man.
I wasn’t proud of it, but I’d been young and stupid, and the attention had felt like something real when you’d grown up the way I had, passed between group homes and foster placements like something nobody could quite figure out what to do with.
I’d learned fast that people left. I’d learned faster how not to need them to stay.
So, I hadn’t needed them. I’d taken what was offered and moved on to the next town and the next ride and kept everything clean and simple and mine alone.
I’d gotten more particular over the years. Quieter about it. The circuit didn’t slow down, but I had, and it had suited me fine.
Nothing had prepared me for Jamie Parker.
She’d stayed in her cabin yesterday. Skipped dinner. Skipped breakfast this morning. I’d sat at Lucinda’s table with coffee I couldn’t taste and told myself I was a patient man, but believed it a little less with every passing hour.
My whole world had narrowed down to her.
The wanting was one thing—I understood wanting, I knew what to do with wanting. But this was something that lived underneath the wanting, something I wasn’t the least bit familiar with.
I’d grown up without anyone to model this for me. The homes I’d moved through were decent, mostly, full of well-meaning adults doing their best with too many kids and not enough of everything else.
Nobody had covered this part.
The overpowering need to be with someone. It overrode everything.
I went to find her.
She wasn’t in her cabin. Or anywhere else that I looked.
Until I went past the barn. There, the property dropped down toward a small creek that ran along the south edge of Wild Vista, cold and clear over the limestone, shaded by a row of pines.
I rode along its banks most evenings, thinking. Deciding.
She was there.
Sitting on the bank with her boots off, her jeans rolled up, and her feet in the water. A book laid on her lap, unopened. She hadn’t heard me yet. I stopped and looked at her the way I hadn’t been able to when she was watching me back.
The Texas heat had gotten to her again. She’d splashed water on her chest and neck, and the damp fabric of her blouse clung to her, outlining, every generous curve I wanted to taste and touch.
I stood there and let the want move through me like it did when I was about to ride a devil of a bull, the pull low and familiar, but so damn different.
Her hair was down, cascading over her back in a silky brown wave. She was staring into the water as if it could tell her something she desperately wanted the answer to.
I knew that look as well. It was the look of someone trying to put walls back up after they’d been completely shattered.
I must have made some noise. A boot on the limestone, a shift in the grass. She looked up fast and found me, and the color came up her face immediately. She was thinking about my hand between her legs in the barn.
I’d thought about it the entire night, too, tossing and turning, hard and aching with the memory of how she’d felt coming apart against my hand.
“I didn’t sign up for anything today.”
“Sometimes the best lessons aren’t on the calendar.”
The color went a degree deeper. She knew exactly what I meant, and we both knew she knew, and she kept her eyes on the creek and said nothing for a moment.
I came down the bank and sat beside her. Close enough that our shoulders were almost touching. I set my hat on my knee and looked at the water and gave her the moment she needed.
“I don’t know why I told you that,” she said quietly. “What Paige... I don’t normally—” She stopped. “I didn’t mean for it to go the way it—”
“I can’t say I’m sorry it did.” I wanted to reach out and touch her, but I didn’t want to scare her away.
She cleared her throat. Her chin came up—that particular lift she did when she was pulling herself together. “I need you to know.” She chose her words carefully. “I need you to know that I don’t normally do things like that. With someone I don’t know.”
“Then get to know me.”
That made her pause.
“Who are you, Slade, really? You’re more than a guest here. You act like family, but Carl and Lucinda don’t have any children.”
“I ride the rodeo.”
“Lucinda told me.”
She’d asked about me. Or Lucinda had tried to help me out. Either way, she hadn’t been put off by the information.
I knew she wanted more. Needed more. I looked at the water and knew she was waiting for me to say more.
“I grew up in the system. Group homes, mostly. A few foster homes.” It was the same way I always spoke about my past. Which was almost never.
Flat, factual, no wrapper around it. “I aged out at eighteen. Carl found me at nineteen, living out of a beat-up old truck I’d bought hauling hay for one of the local ranches.
I had just started doing local shows. He saw something he thought was worth developing.
Him and Lucinda gave me the first taste of what a family could be. ”
She was quiet. She didn’t say she was sorry for my misfortune. She didn’t rush to fill the space with words that would try and make me feel better. I noted that the way I’d been noting everything about her.
“He was right,” she said simply.
“He was.” I turned my hat in my hands. “I had my first title at twenty-two. Second one at twenty-five. Third at twenty-seven. Every one of them loud and fast and over by morning. I’d move on to the next town, next ride. Nobody in the passenger seat.”
“Is it how you thought it would be?” I realized she didn’t know anything about the rodeo and what I meant when I told her I’d won titles. She didn’t know about the fame and money. She just wanted to know my story.
“At twenty-two, it was everything. Now, it’s starting to feel like a very long road to nowhere.”
She was quiet for a long moment, missing nothing in my tone. The expression on my face. “What do you want? Now?”
Nobody asked me that. Not Carl, not Lucinda, not the reporters who’d been interviewing me for a decade. They asked about the next ride and the next title and the busted shoulder and the comeback. Nobody asked what I wanted.
“Something that stays in one place. Something that’s mine.” I looked at her. “Carl’s got forty acres adjacent to the south pasture. Good water. Good land.”
“You’d ranch.”
“I’d stay. That’s the part that matters.”
She looked at me for a long moment missing nothing, and I looked back, and the creek moved between its banks and the morning was warm around us.
“Now tell me your story, Jamie. What man didn’t appreciate you?” I kept my voice easy, though my chest tightened just thinking about it. “Who was he?”
I actually wanted to know his name. I wanted to find him and show him how a real man treated a woman.
She picked up a small rock and turned it between her fingers.
“My last relationship.” She set the rock down. “His name was Charles. He wasn’t a very nice man after I got to know him. He liked the idea of a quiet, polite librarian, but he didn’t like the reality of me.”
My jaw went tight with anger as I read between the lines. He hadn’t liked her sass or her curves. Some men were fucking idiots. “How long did it last?”
That made her smile, a small self-deprecating thing, and I frowned. What the hell had she had to endure? “Just a few months. Then Paige happened.”
“Did she come to your rescue?”
“More like slapped me silly until I rescued myself.”
“He was an idiot.”
“He really was.”
“A blind, fucking stupid idiot.”
That made her smile bigger, and happier.
I looked at her in the dappled shade from the pines. The swell of her breasts, the curve of her hip. The mouth I wanted to kiss again. The way she sat with her feet in the water like she’d been coming to this creek her whole life.
“For what it’s worth, I’m real glad I don’t have to get on a bull right now.”
“What?” She looked at me, her guard dropping another inch as she tried to figure out what I meant.
“You were mine the second you walked into my cabin. Thinking about having you underneath me would get me thrown in about two seconds flat.”
The color that climbed her face this time was slow, and she bit her lip, but the laugh came out anyway.
“That’s—” she started.
“True,” I said.
“Completely insane is what it is.”
“That, too.”
She shook her head, but the laugh had left something open inside her that hadn’t been there before, something softer and less managed, and I looked at her and thought about tomorrow night. Her last night here on the ranch.
“There’s a barn dance tomorrow evening. Lucinda does it the last night. String lights, live music.” I looked at her. “Come with me.”
“I’m not a good dancer,” she said immediately.
“I didn’t ask if you were a good dancer.”
“I’m telling you preemptively. I have the rhythm of a concussed giraffe.”
“I’ll manage.”
“Slade. I’m serious about the giraffe.”
“So am I about the dance.”
I stood and held my hand out, and she looked at it the way she looked at everything I offered—measuring, deciding—and then she took it, and I pulled her to her feet.
I didn’t let go. I used the momentum to pull her against my chest, feeling the soft, heavy weight of her breasts pressing into me.
She was close and warm and looking up at me as we stood there with the creek moving beside us and a brilliant blue Texas sky overhead.
A perfect day.
“Fine, but the giraffe is your problem.”
“Whatever gets you in my arms, City Girl.”
She took her hand back, stepping out of my space with what sounded like a sigh of regret. She picked up her boots and her unread book and looked at me with that look that told me she was still deciding what to do with me.
I had the answer for her.
She pointed a finger at me as if in warning. I caught her hand to mine and walked her up the bank. Barefoot through the Texas grass.
Tomorrow night couldn’t come soon enough.