13. Wentworth
THIRTEEN
Wentworth
I smelled her. knew she was there, before I even opened my eyes. It sounds weird and borderline creepy but there it is. Horse and hay. Cool air and clean dirt mixed with something soft and intoxicatingly feminine. The smell of her hit me like a truck and that’s all it took. I was so hard it hurt before I even opened my eyes.
And then I did open my eyes to find her staring at it, mouth slightly parted, bright blue eyes wide and blazing down at me with a strange mix of anger, frustration and good, old-fashioned lust. I consider it a God-given miracle that I was able to stop myself from reaching out to pull her down on top of me so she could feel, firsthand, what I caught her staring at.
Instead of getting her under me, I played with my dick and embarrassed the shit out her while she hurtled insults at me. While I consider it a win, I don’t think Damien will agree if Ranch Girl decides to tattle on me.
Determined to figure out a way to apologize, yet again, for being me, I find the master suite at the end of the hall where I dumped my stuff last night. Digging a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt out of my duffle, I hit the shower where I give brief consideration to the merits of jerking off. Deciding against it because I barely know this girl and rubbing one out while she’s in the same house feels risky and more than just borderline creepy. It’s bad enough that she found me on her couch, mostly naked and rock hard. Doesn’t matter that I paid a small fortune for the privilege, I promised my brother I’d behave. That means no matter what my dick obviously wants, Ranch Girl is strictly off limits.
You didn’t come to the Montana sticks to get your dick wet. You came here to ride out the shitstorm Lexi tossed in your lap—now get it the fuck together and act like someone with some goddamned sense raised you.
Resolve fortified, I concentrate my efforts on scrubbing away the last day and a half. Clean and feeling like I’m back on solid ground, I get dressed and head back downstairs.
It’s barely 6AM but she’s already set up at the kitchen island, camped out in one of the stools, surrounded by books and notepads. A laptop that looks older than I am open in front of her, earbuds jammed into her ears to fend off the ambient noise so she can work without distraction. Golden brown hair piled on top of her head and secured with a pencil, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration while she writes something down in her notebook. And just like that, my dick and I are right back where we started.
Shit.
When she catches me watching her in her peripheral at the base of the stairs, her cheeks flush, even before she flicks a quick, guarded look in my direction, her eyes graze over the ink running down the side of my neck before falling to the tattoo on my forearm. Chewing nervously on the inside of her lip, she looks back to her computer screen. Again, if she recognizes it or me, she doesn’t show it.
“I made coffee if that’s your thing,” she says without bothering to pull her earbuds loose. “Half and half is in the fridge. Cups are in the cabinet to the left of the sink.” Eyes still glued to her laptop, while she writes something else in a completely different notebooks—this one has a dark blue cover—she dismisses me completely.
Opening the cabinet she indicated, I pull out one of the large ceramic mugs stacked neatly inside. Filling it with coffee, I forgo the half and half to turn around and lean against the counter directly across from her. Drinking my coffee, I stand here and watch her work, mentally drawing her, sketching out the lines and angles of her face in my head, until she finally reaches up to pull one of her earbuds loose to scowl at me in obvious frustration. “Don’t you have something better to do?”
I flatten my mouth and give her a headshake. “Nope.”
“Alright...” My answer ratchets her frustration up to full-blown annoyance. She goes back to studying but it only lasts for a minute or two before she gives up to scowl at me instead. “Is there a reason you’re standing there, staring at me?”
Damn, she’s even hotter when she’s annoyed.
Fighting off a grin, I give her a shrug. “Just returning the favor.” I say, taking a sip of my coffee. Gorgeous, smells amazing, and she knows how to make a cup of coffee.
I am in so much fucking trouble.
“Fair enough.” She gives me a jerky nod, cheeks blazing while she tries to refocus her attention on whatever’s happening on her laptop. Every once in a while, she chances a quick guarded look in my direction to see if I’m still watching her .
I am.
When one of those quick, guarded glances grazes across the front of my jeans, the grin I’ve been fighting back, finally breaks free. “I told you it would go away on its own... eventually.”
Her mouth falls open in shock for a moment before she snaps it closed. “Okay.” Gaze narrowed and jaw clenched, she yanks the other earbud loose. “Obviously, this isn’t going to work.” Closing her laptop, she stands up to start jamming her books and notebooks back into her bag. “I’ll come back tomorrow morning to pick up and to see if—”
Shit, she’s leaving.
“Wait.” Before I know what I’m doing, the coffee is down and I’m across the kitchen. “I’m—”
“a complete and total asshole and you just agreed to let me work here to make your brother happy,” she says, shoving her laptop into her backpack before zipping it up. “Yup—I got that, loud and clear.”
“You sure do like that word, don’t you?” I say the same thing she said to me yesterday when I wouldn’t stop saying fuck . When I see the corner of her mouth twitch, I take a chance and reach out to drop a hand on top of her bag to stop her from picking it up. “I was going to say sorry but yeah, that too.” When she doesn’t answer me, or slap the shit out of me, I keep talking. “Truth is, after my stellar first impression yesterday, Damien told me nevermind. That he didn’t want you anywhere near me so, I don’t think you being here now would make him particularly happy.”
That gives her pause. Probably because she thinks there’s something about me that Damien failed to mention that she should be afraid of, other than the fact that I like to play with my dick in front of strange women while I’m half asleep. Because I’m beginning to suspect that there’s plenty about me that this woman should be wary of, I change the subject, hoping to distract her. “I called my sister last night and then fell asleep on the porch—”
“I know.” Her brow furrows and she risks a look up at me. “I was here.” I must looked as confused as I feel because she gives me a look that says she thinks I might be crazy. “I woke you up.” She swallows hard and looks at the front door behind her. “I thought you were going to throw me off the porch, you were so angry.” When I don’t say anything, her frown deepens into a scowl. “You don’t remember?”
“No.” I shake my head slowly stomach suddenly scraping the bottom of my feet. “I don’t remember. Did I scare you?” Stupid question—of course I scared her. I’m roughly the size of a bus. Before I can apologize and try to explain, she unzips her backpack and pulls out a large can, the shape and size of a small fire extinguisher.
“If I can handle a bear, I can handle you.” Setting it on the counter, she turns it so I can read the label.
Bear spray.
Gorgeous, smells great, knows how to make coffee, and she’s ready to fight a goddamned bear.
“You fell asleep on the porch and....” she prompts me back into my account of last night’s events.
“And apparently almost got a face full of bear mace.” Laughing even though I’m pretty sure it isn’t funny, I shake my head. “After that, I came in and went upstairs but couldn’t fall back to sleep so I came downstairs to get some work done.” Remembering her dig about the lights, I sigh. “I need light when I work so I turned them all on—and must’ve passed out on the couch at some point.”
“And the mostly naked part?” She blushes when she says naked like she’s thinking about what I looked like without most of my clothes on.
“I can’t explain that except to say that I usually sleep all the way naked so let’s just be grateful I had the forethought to leave my boxers on,” I tell her, liking the way her blush deepens and spreads when I say it because now she’s thinking about what I look like without any clothes on. “Your turn. ”
Fingers still gripped around her backpack, I watch her jaw shift beneath cheeks stained with embarrassment. “I came in and every light in the house was on and the house runs on solar so... anyway, I started turning off lights, turned around and there you were. I wasn’t staring at you ,” she tells me, gaze fixed on her hands. “I was admiring your tattoos.”
Somehow, I manage miracle number two by resisting the urge to point out that, last time I checked, my dick wasn’t tattooed. Instead, I gently pull her backpack across the counter toward me, so she can’t grab it and run away. “My tattoos?” I resist the urge to cover my forearm when her gaze shifts toward the ink that covers it.
“They’re beautiful.” As soon as it leaves her mouth, she winces and squeezes her eyes shut like she just bit her tongue. “I mean—lots of hands around here have them but—”
“Hands?”
“Ranch hands—like your brother,” she explains. “Mostly either the brands they ride for or jailhouse tattoos. None that look like that.”
My tattoos are the first thing people notice about me. If I had a therapist, they’d probably tell me that I covered myself in tattoos so I can hide behind them. Inked armor into my skin to shield myself from prying eyes. Separate myself from the people around me. The expectations I’ll eventually be forced to live up to. They’ve been called disappointing and distasteful . Fucking hot and an obvious cry for help .
But I’ve never heard them called beautiful before.
“Look like what ?” My voice sounds weird. Like someone punched me in the stomach.
“Like art.” She says it quietly. Like it’s a secret and it knocks me off balance.
Jesus.
So much fucking trouble.
“I was watching you study because I’ve never seen someone do it before and I liked the way you looked while you were doing it,” I say, telling her the truth because I guess that’s what we’re doing now—telling each other the truth. I skip the part where I was mentally drawing her in my head because I already told her she didn’t have to model for me if she doesn’t want to and I regret it.
“You’ve never seen someone study before?” she says incredulously. “Didn’t you go to school?”
“My mother traveled a lot. I was homeschooled until I was fourteen,” I tell her, glossing over the fact that the Astrid Hawthorne version of homeschool involves opulent penthouse suites and a small army of tutors and instructors that traveled with us whenever she decided to pick up and move from one hotel to the next. “When I got old enough to tell my mom that my sister and I wanted to go to an actual school, we went to live with my grandparents so I could go to high school.”
She shakes her head, frowning slightly. “So, you have seen people study before.”
“Not like that, I haven’t,” I say with a shrug, suddenly embarrassed.
“Like what ?” she asks suspiciously, sure there’s an insult hidden in there somewhere.
“Like it matters.” There’s no way of explaining to her that I went to a private high school with a bunch of trust fund babies who never took their education seriously because it never mattered. Most of them were going to be multi-billionaires before they hit twenty-five. No one cared about their GPA. “Like you take it seriously.”
“Yeah, I did.” For some reason, my assessment, twists her mouth into a hard, bitter line. “For all the good it did me.” Before I can ask her what she means by it, she shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.” Reaching for her backpack, she pulls it out of my grip and I have the insane urge to fight her for it because even though I apologized, she’s still going to leave.
“You don’t have to leave, Sunshine,” I tell her, reluctantly letting her go of her backpack because I promised Damien to at least try to behave and even though I've done a shit job of it so far, I don’t think getting a face full of bear spray qualifies in his book.
“My name is Kaitlyn,” she informs me with a frown while she shoulders her backpack. “You can call me that or you can call me Kait.” It dawns on me that she thinks I either forgot her name or don’t care enough to remember it.
“I know what your name is.” I give her a crooked grin. “What’s the matter—no one’s ever given you a nickname before?”
She makes a noise in the back of her throat and shakes her head. “Not someone I barely know and they usually fit.” Before I can ask her what she means by that, she throws a quick look over her shoulder, aiming her gaze at the row of sketches I lined up on the couch last night. “I thought you drew.” Looking back at me, her eyes drop to my left hand, skimming over the tattoo that covers the back of it, finding the tips of my fingers that are perpetually stained black, no matter how hard I scrub. “When you said you needed a model, I thought you meant for drawing or painting—not photography.”
“Those aren’t photographs,” I tell her, the corner of my mouth kicking up when her features settle into a dubious frown. “And I’m still in the market for a model—” Forgetting every promise I made Damien yesterday, I take a step toward her, giving her a quick flash of teeth. “if you’re interested.” Like I knew they would, her cheeks flood with color and I feel my cock twitch in response. Making her blush is becoming my new favorite thing to do.
“You don’t need me.” Laughing a little, she drags her backpack off the counter and slings one of its straps over her shoulder. “You’re doing just fine in the model department.”
Need and want are two entirely different things, Sunshine.
Since saying it out loud would probably push me into bear mace territory, I somehow manage miracle number three and keep it to myself. “Okay, but you can keep studying. No more staring. I’ll leave you alone—” I hold up two fingers and give her a solemn nod. “scout’s honor.”
“I don’t know anything about you James Bravebird, but I know for a damn fact you were never a boy scout.” She gives me an exasperated laugh that loosens a knot I had no idea was tied in my stomach. “I downloaded the rest of the lecture. I can find a place to hide out and finish up later.”
Hide out?
Before I can ask, she gives me a cautious smile. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning,” she says, nervous fingers tightening and relaxing on the shoulder strap of her bag. “If that’s still okay with you.”
Sunshine, if you’re not here when I wake up, I’m liable to go looking for you.
Instead of saying it out loud, I give her a flat, low-watt smile. “Yeah—it’s still okay with me.”
“Okay...” She gives me a nod like the matter is settled before heading for the back door. “Do us both a favor—remember to turn off the lights and if you’re going to sleep on the couch, try to wear pants.”