Chapter Twelve
W ilder prepared for war.
He decided not to think too closely about what was riding on this particular card game. He told himself it was the metaphor that mattered, and that it was high time for a Carey to win back the family honor.
Not that this particular story was one he could imagine telling over Thanksgiving dinner.
Still, he would know that he’d avenged Matthew Carey.
But first, he went out to his truck and got her suitcase. When he hauled it in, he set it on the floor.
“I’m going to need you to start wearing the same amount of clothes that I am,” he drawled. “Just to keep it fair. Assuming Lisles know what that means.”
Cat only smiled. “If you insist.”
In the end, they both wore jeans, socks, and T-shirts. She had panties on underneath that. He had on boxer briefs. She put on a flannel shirt because he was wearing his.
“Winter coats?” she asked mildly, though her blue eyes were gleaming. “Hats and scarves?”
“I think we’re good,” he muttered.
Then they resumed their positions on either side of the wooden coffee table.
“Five card draw?” Cat asked.
Wilder nodded and she dealt. Five cards to each one of them, and then it began in earnest.
And Wilder realized quickly that he should have expected that Cat wasn’t bad at a poker game. Not just because she was a Lisle, and he presumed it was part of the family tradition to play cards.
But card games were also something that could be done in the middle of winter when the storms took out all the power and it was candlelight and the camp stove until the weather cleared. He never met a Montanan who wasn’t good at games.
Luckily enough, he was also a Montanan.
She took off her socks first. One and then the other in different hands. He took off his outer shirt, throwing the flannel onto the couch next to her.
Then, when she won two more hands, Wilder went over to get the woodstove going again, because it was properly cold out there today. Colder than he could remember it being pretty much since he’d met her.
He expected there to be shit-talking, as in any other proper poker game, but he realized pretty quickly that her strategy was to go in the opposite direction.
Cat said nothing.
She sat there, looking like a feral goddess, while he tried to deal with the fact that he was the reason her hair looked like she’d just rolled out of a man’s bed after a long, hot night.
Because she had.
Her eyes were a little bit sleepy and every now and again when she shifted position, she would freeze for a second. Then her gaze would get a little bit bluer.
And he knew. He knew that she was feeling sensation, everywhere, which was only to be expected after a night like the one they’d had.
Cat didn’t speak, but she studied him. Especially when they were both down to T-shirts and drawers. Hers, of course, being that frilly white pair that he’d taken off with his teeth last night.
He was sweating.
And it wasn’t because he was hot.
He was trying to focus on the damned cards, but all he could seem to pay attention to were the things she’d said, circling around and around in his head.
Her insistence that what his mother’s cousin had said was wrong. That his mother had chosen her suffering, out of love.
Wilder told himself that Cat was too young. That she didn’t know what she was talking about.
But he couldn’t quite make himself believe that.
Because she made him feel like that perfect jump from that rock, high over the water. There had been that moment where he and Ryder had been suspended between the two—not falling, not flying.
The next moment had been the shock of the water, cool and deep. And the rush of sensation, fear, and excitement, all mixed together until they were indistinguishable, one from the other.
That was what it felt like now.
She threw him headfirst into that flight. And she could do so anytime she wished, with all the blue in her gaze.
But out there on the porch, she had dumped him in that water, too.
Wilder remembered another part of the story, the part he usually blocked out. That when he and Ryder had gone in and crawled into bed with their mother, she hadn’t cried out. She hadn’t shooed them away, or passed out from the pain.
On the contrary, though she had been frail then—with strange machines standing sentry beside her bed—she had sat up anyway. And she’d taken them in her arms, one of them on each side like always. She’d kissed their heads in that way of hers that he could sometimes feel even now, from across time and memory.
The poker game continued.
And now here they were.
They were getting close to the final moment, and he thought both of them knew it. He lost and removed his T-shirt.
But on the next round, Cat lost her T-shirt and she sighed, as if that was a hardship.
She stood then, but not without looking at him. A lot.
Then she peeled that T-shirt up and over her head, pulling her hair up behind it, so that suddenly, the storm inside of him was lost somewhere in the swirl of rosemary and lavender, and the sweetest sugar there was.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think.
And damn her, she needed to wear a bra so he could have access to his rational mind once again.
But instead, Cat, his brand-new wife who he wanted to divorce, stood there before him in absolutely nothing but a pair of white panties.
He looked up the length of her sweet, gorgeous body and he wondered why it had taken him so long, just as she’d asked him before.
Because he had seen a great many women make regrettable decisions in bars. In the Wolf Den itself, for that matter. He had never felt compelled to involve himself. It had never even crossed his mind, unless he was the regret in question.
He had never driven a woman home unless he’d already known that he’d be spending the night—or at least, a few hours—inside.
But the key point that he’d somehow gotten himself to miss all this time was that he kept going back.
Night after night after night.
He’d known it was a problem. But he hadn’t stopped.
And he hadn’t told Ryder about it either.
Wilder had kept her secret even from his twin. Almost as if he knew that if he mentioned Cat, someone he would be far more likely to listen to than himself would state the obvious.
Up to and including that night when Tennessee and Dallas had come upon them in the woods.
And maybe that was the real truth that he found only as he stared at Cat, now.
His wife.
As she stood there almost completely naked before him.
Her hair was dark with those bits of shiny copper that made him deeply sympathetic to all of his ancestors who’d trudged across the country to get their hands on a little bit of that precious metal. His wife, with those small, upthrust, perfect breasts that he’d spent a lot of time on last night, and it hadn’t been nearly enough.
His wife who looked at him with challenge and longing, hope and love, making the blue of her eyes all the brighter.
His wife.
And that was the final straw.
Wilder stood, the cards forgotten, and he moved around the coffee table to put his hands on her at last.
Maybe he vaulted it.
Because there was no way that any force on earth or in heaven could have compelled him to marry this woman if he didn’t want to.
If it hadn’t been his goddamn idea from the start.
“Look at that,” she said, tilting her head back as he moved closer and put his hands on the sides of her face, then up into her hair. “History is repeating itself. You know this means you lose, Wilder. Are you going to pretend that I cheated?”
“Of course you cheated,” he said, bending down to put his mouth close to hers. “You knew exactly how I would lose this.”
“I hoped,” she corrected him, solemnly.
“I accepted your terms,” he told her, in the same tone. “And I’ll meet them.”
And then he kissed her. Over and over again, he kissed her and he kissed her, and there was nothing lazy about it. There was nothing held back.
It was raw and wild and he thought that if it wasn’t them—if it wasn’t this —they might have burned down the cabin all around them.
As it was, they ended up on the deep rug that stretched across the hardwood floor. He took off those white panties once again. Then Cat crawled all over him, using the tricks he’d taught her to bring him so close to the edge that he nearly lost it.
But not quite.
Wilder pulled her astride him and gripped her hips, then watched her ride him. Her head thrown back, her arms wide.
Until they both got lost somewhere in the stars.
And when she collapsed into his arms, he wrapped her up tight and pressed kisses all over her face.
“I love you,” he told her, though the words seemed rusty in his mouth and he wasn’t quite certain if he could get them out right. She smiled, her eyes still closed, so he tried them again. “I love you, Cat.”
And he kept saying it, again and again. Through that night and all the days that followed.
Because she was the one who put the wild in his name now, and he aimed to keep it that way.
And since he’d only ever told one woman that he loved her in his entire adult life, it was clear to him he had no option but to dedicate the rest of his life to proving it.