Mud Season
LILA
Slade decides our “first date” should also coincide with the next entry on my “country education” syllabus: learning how to ride an ATV.
Now that my ankle is healed, he announced he’s taking me out on a gorgeous autumn morning to get a tour of Wild Rose on wheels.
This is exactly what I asked for. Exactly what he promised. Something that would make my family clutch their pearls, documented thoroughly for posterity. The truth is, I don’t care about proof anymore. I’m having way too much fun.
Slade took his time with showing me the basics. Throttle, brake, weight distribution on turns. He positioned my hands on the handlebar himself, adjusting my grip, making sure it was right before he let go. Showed me the brake twice.
“If you’re unsure about anything—” he starts.
“I’ll stop,” I say.
“You’ll stop,” he agrees. He looks at me for a moment, helmet in hand. “We don’t have to go fast.”
“I want to go fast.”
“Now who’s the speed demon?” he teases. But his gaze turns sober right after. “These are serious machines, baby. I want you to be safe.”
He’s got his hand resting on one denim-clad thigh of mine, those green eyes dark and tender. I pull him in by his jacket lapel for a kiss, savoring the taste of mint on his breath. “I’m not gonna make you a widower, either. I promise.”
His hands cup my cheeks and he pulls me in for a longer kiss. There’s something different about this one, not just hunger in it but something deeper, something searching and vulnerable.
When we pull back, his eyes roam over me, dark and serious. “I can’t let anything happen to you.”
I run my fingertips along his stubbled jaw.
He’s looking at me with those green eyes and I can see it there, the thing he doesn’t say.
The thing he’s been carrying since his mother died, the part of him that knows exactly how much it hurts to lose someone you love and has been trying not to love anything too much ever since.
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I reassure him.
“You’ve shown me how to do everything. How to be safe.
” Knowing he could use a little mood-lightening at this moment, I drop my voice into a sultry register and bat my eyelashes at him.
“Stern Daddy Slade is a very good instructor and I promise, I’ll be a very good girl. ”
Something shifts in his expression. The tension breaks.
“Is that right,” he murmurs.
“Mm.” I trail one finger down his jaw to his throat, feel his pulse jump under my fingertip. “I’ll be so good for you.”
I’m straddling the ATV and he steps in close between my knees and cups the back of my head in his hand as he kisses me again. His mouth is warm and certain and tastes like mint and coffee.
I grab his jacket with both fists and kiss him back. His free hand finds my thigh, warm and heavy through the denim, and his teeth catch my lower lip and I gasp against his mouth and grip his jacket tighter.
I pull back.
“Let’s ride, cowboy.” I smooth his jacket lapels with both palms, mostly to give my hands something to do. “Or we’re never making it past the front yard.”
He shakes his head slowly, that almost-smile still there, and picks up my helmet from the seat beside me. He puts it on me himself, intent and careful as he adjusts the chin strap, his fingers brushing my jaw when he’s done.
“Too tight?” he asks.
“Perfect,” I say.
Then he swings his leg over his machine with the easy grace of a man who has been doing this for decades.
“Stay close,” he says.
“Always,” I say.
And I mean it more than he knows.
“Try to keep up,” I add, with a saucy smile.
In return, I get a smile from him. Brief and bright and mine. Or at least that’s how I’ve started thinking of them. Slade doesn’t really smile for anyone else, and those smiles are still rare, but I’m pretty sure they’re becoming more frequent. And I’m the only one who pulls them out of him.
We ride side by side, which means I get to watch him in my peripheral vision the whole time.
He’s easy and relaxed on the throttle, completely at home.
Occasionally he catches my eye and points at something worth seeing: two foals cantering around each other playfully, a bald eagle soaring on a thermal above us, an elk with majestic antlers drinking water from the the creek in the far distance.
I look where he points and try to absorb all of it.
There’s beauty in every season at Wild Rose, including in the way one shifts to another.
We’re at the moment where autumn is frosting slowly into winter, and the stark beauty of the landscape is breathtaking.
The gold leaves are still clinging to the cottonwoods, the mountains now heavy with snow in the background.
We drive along the trail, the ground iron-hard under the wheels. Then, suddenly, the trail becomes mud. One moment solid ground, the next my wheels are sinking and spinning and throwing great arcs of brown mud in every direction and I’m going nowhere fast.
Stuck.
“Oh, crap,” I mutter.
Slade’s engine cuts.
He’s off his ATV right away, helmet off, boots hitting the ground, moving toward me with that quick purposeful stride he has when something needs fixing.
“Ease off the throttle, baby,” he says. “You’re digging yourself in deeper.”
I do what he says.
He wades in without hesitation, boots sinking into the mud, and gets his hands on the back of the ATV.
“On three, now you’re gonna give it a little throttle. Just a little. One, two—”
The ATV lurches free and the mud goes absolutely everywhere as I pull up to a stop outside the mud pit. I take my helmet off and shake my hair free.
We are both utterly, spectacularly, head to toe filthy.
“Well. You got unstuck,” he says, wiping a glob of mud away from his face.
“I’m sorry.” I start laughing. “You look…” I bite my lip. “Like a very handsome swamp monster.”
His eyes rake over me and his mouth curves into a smirk. “Plenty of monsters have a bride, you know.”
I pretend to be outraged. “Are you saying I look like the bride of a swamp monster?”
“A gorgeous one.” A smile plays at the corners of his mouth as he gets back on his ATV. “And a very dirty one.”
In that tone of voice, I can’t help but take it in a dirty way, too.
Then I put my helmet back on, gun my engine, and ride a tight circle around him, close enough that my wheels kick up a spectacular arc of mud directly at his legs.
“Catch me if you can,” I call out, already riding away.
I hear his engine roar behind me.
What follows is the most fun I’ve had in years.
Tearing across Wild Rose with my husband in hot pursuit, pretending like he couldn’t absolutely catch me and overtake me if he wanted to.
The fact that he’s letting me play with him, giving me that playful side of him I’ve never seen with anyone else, makes my heart skip faster.
We’ve gone all over his family ranch on horseback. He’s driven me around the thirty thousand acres on his truck. It’s all been wonderful.
But the ATV is a fucking blast.
There’s something about the cold November air rushing past and the engine vibrating under me and the land opening up in every direction that makes me feel like I’m sixteen and just got to drive by myself for the first time.
By the time the sun is setting, both of us are dirtier than ever. My cheeks hurt from smiling.
We pull up outside the house mud-streaked and breathless.
“Wait,” he says, pulling out his phone. “Helmet off. We gotta document this.”
I pull my helmet off and shake out my hair and strike a pose. Butt sticking out as I hover over the seat, peace sign, biggest grin I’ve got. It might as well be a giant middle finger to my family.
He snaps it. Looks at the screen. Smiles.
“Let’s send that to your mother,” he says.
“Already planning on it.” I lean over to look at the photo. I’m head to toe muddy, grinning like a fool, never looked happier in my life. “She’ll have it framed and hung on the wall, I’m sure. Right between my debutante portrait and the oil painting of Remington Sherwood the Third.”
“I say we put it on the wall here at home,” he says.
Home. Like it’s truly ours. Like we’re a real couple that would have pictures of ourselves strewn around the house.
Except in less than a year, I won’t be living here anymore. It seems silly to have pictures of us all over the place. Silly, and painful.
“Not sure there’s room for it,” I say with a crooked smile.
I swing my leg over to dismount and my ankle twinges, sharp and sudden enough that I hiss.
Slade is beside me before I’ve finished the sound.
“Don’t put weight on it,” he says simply, and scoops me up.
Both arms, one under my knees and one at my back, like I weigh nothing, like this is just the obvious solution to everything. I definitely don’t weigh nothing, but he carries me like I’m made of feathers.
“Your boots,” I say, as he heads for the door.
“What about them?”
“You’re going to track mud through the house.”
“I’ll clean it.”
I give him puppy dog eyes. “But I just put down that rug, honey. It’s an antique.”
He grumbles something under his breath that I choose to interpret as agreement and somehow, still holding me, manages to toe off both boots on the porch. It takes some doing. I press my lips together, hiding my laughter.
He carries me over the threshold. Like a husband does his bride. The house is warm and smells like cinnamon from the coffee cake I made this morning. He kicks the door shut behind us and keeps walking.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
He doesn’t break stride.
“Shower,” he says.
My breath hitches.
“Together?” I ask.
He looks down at me. Something in his eyes that makes my belly swoop.
“We’re both covered in mud,” he says.
Which is not a no.
My heart rate picks up as he carries me down the hall. He sets me down just inside the bathroom and we look at our reflection in the mirror simultaneously. We look like hell, muddy and hair mussed, but Slade makes it sexy.
“Strip,” he orders.
One word and my whole nervous system lights up.
We reach for our own clothes at the same time. Jackets first, dropped without discussion. Then flannels. His eyes are on me as he undresses and mine are on him. There’s no pretending we’re not openly admiring each other. We’re past that.
The muddy clothes hit the tile in wet heaps.
He reaches back and grabs the neck of his thermal, pulling it off.
Slade Rhodes without a shirt is something else. The thick biceps, the broad shoulders, the back muscles that shift and move under his skin when he reaches to set the thermal on the counter. But it’s the ranch work layered on top of it that makes him something else entirely.
His forearms are corded and veined, suntanned from where he keeps his sleeves rolled up.
His chest is broad and his stomach is hard, rigid with muscle all the way down.
There’s a line of dark hair below his navel that disappears into his waistband and I want to trace it all the way down with my tongue.
He has scars. The surgical one on his shoulder, thick and still pink, that I know the story of now.
The thin one along his ribs he’s never explained.
His knuckles, which I’ve traced in the dark.
A body that has taken hits and kept moving, that has been pushed to its absolute limit season after season.
I’ve seen him shirtless before. Namely, the honeymoon hot tub, when I spent the whole time telling myself I wasn’t staring.
But there’s something different about this. About standing two feet away from him in his bathroom with the steam rising and nothing fake between us anymore. I’m allowed to look now. I’m allowed to want.
And what I want is standing right in front of me, those green eyes of his watching me with pure hunger.
My gaze runs down his body. He’s built like a god, with those thick muscled thighs from years of playing hockey. That thick, hard cock jutting up between those thighs.
I realize I’ve stopped undressing.
“You have a lot of mud on you,” I say faintly.
“Hm.” His eyes move over me slowly, those green eyes darkening as he takes in the sight of me in nothing but my bra and panties. “So do you. Better get in the shower.”
I follow him into the spacious stone-clad space. It’s an open shower, no door, with an incredible view of the mountains out the window beside us.
He reaches past me for the handheld shower, turns it on, and runs it slow and warm over my shoulders, my collarbone. Steam rises around us. His other hand follows the water, unhurried, spreading the warmth across my skin.
He hands me the shower head.
I run it over his chest, his stomach, watching the mud rinse away in rivulets. He stands completely still and lets me until the water runs clear.
His thumb finds a streak of mud along my collarbone and drags slowly across it.
“Missed a spot,” he says. Low. Almost a murmur.
“You missed a few yourself,” I say.
My hands find his stomach.
I let my palms skim up slowly. His muscles shift under my touch, hard and warm, and he watches me with those green eyes and doesn’t move.
If I didn’t know him, I might think he was unaffected. But I do know him now. I catch the the almost imperceptible clench of his jaw, the way his breathing is just slightly too controlled. The way his hands aren’t hanging loose at his sides but curled into fists.
I trace the long scar along his ribs with my fingertips.
“Puck,” he murmurs.
I press my palm flat against his chest, feel his heartbeat.
Faster than his usual metronome, a hard pounding beneath my hand.
This man who doesn’t flinch at anything, who rode out into the pitch black during a windstorm without hesitating, who faced down my family without blinking, is standing in his shower with his heart hammering just because my hands are on him.
My hands drift lower. His abs contract hard under my fingertips as I move down, a small shudder moving through him as he lets out a controlled breath.
Perfect self-control on the outside. Stone-cold Slade. Ice in his veins.
Only his eyes give him away.
There’s a naked hunger there that makes my stomach drop. Raw and dark and barely leashed, his green eyes almost black.
He’s going to have me now, finally. We both know it.
I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.