CHAPTER TWENTY
I GO STILL at the intention I read in them.
I know what he means to do. I know. So I already start shaking my head, I already start backing away from him as he grabs the fence, heaves himself up and over it.
All in one graceful, athletic, holy shit impossible motion.
After that, there’s nothing between him and me, not that the fence was any obstacle whatsoever.
His steps are purposeful and his jaw is set.
His eyes are telling me he won’t let me escape, but even so, I keep backing away from him.
As soon as he reaches me, he grabs my arm and pulls me toward him. I collide with his hard torso, and leaning down, he growls, “If you don’t want me to chase you down, don’t run from me.”
“I’m not—”
“And now you’ll tell me exactly why,” he continues, his eyes flashing. “You look like I’ve asked you to jump from a fuckin’ cliff instead of go for a ride.”
I fist his shirt. “I-I don’t… I, uh… I can’t… It’s just—”
“Why?”
I swallow and then I swallow again. I try to catch my breath and then I try to breathe. But he doesn’t stop staring down at me. He doesn’t stop holding me to him.
“This ’cause of what I did,” he asks, his jaw pulsing, “at the cliff that night?”
“No,” I say quickly, loudly. “No, what you did sort of… distracted me from it.”
Anger flashes through his features then and his grip tightens. He pulls me toward him even more, as if I’m a hundred feet away instead of being plastered to him already. “What is it?”
I twist and twist his shirt in my grip as my lips tremble, and I don’t think I’ll be able to say anything at all, let alone tell him what he wants me to.
That is, until he lets my elbow go and puts both his arms around me.
Until he presses me into his body and starts stroking my back.
He tucks my head into his chest and I go up on my tiptoes as I close my eyes and put my arms around his neck, hanging on to him like a lifeline.
He whispers in my ear, “Tell me, darlin’.”
My breaths are still choppy, but somehow I manage to whisper back, “I-I’m… scared.”
His arms tighten around me and he asks, “Of what?”
I lick my dried lips and hug him back tighter. “Of f-falling.”
He squeezes his arms around me again, telling me he’s listening. He’s here.
And tears pricks my eyes as I continue, “And dying.”
At this, he squeezes me so hard that it should be suffocating and it is, but it’s the good kind of suffocating where I get to smell his scent and be surrounded by his heat.
“It’s like… it’s like a ph-phobia. I-I think.
I’ve never… got it tested, but…” I burrow my face in his chest even more.
“It’s not like the fear of heights or fear of falling per se.
But like, f-fear of falling from a horse.
And I don’t think”—I shake my head, tears squeezing out of my closed eyes—“I can ride with you. I-I want to. God, I want to so badly, Radisson. I want… But I can’t… can’t go, and…”
“Shh,” he says softly, gently in my ear as he rubs circles on my back.
I silently cry against his chest, spoiling his new shirt, but I don’t care.
I’ll wash it for him. Just like cooking, I’ve never done laundry either, not with my own two hands, except if you count dropping off and picking up laundry from the laundromat, but I’ll learn.
I’ll learn everything and anything for him, just as long as he keeps holding me like this.
“Want you to trust me,” he says after a while. “Yeah? For this.”
I stiffen in his arms.
But he keeps rubbing my back, stroking my spine, massaging my head even as he goes on, “Just trust me for this. Can you do that for me, darlin’?”
I trust him for this and for everything else.
Still, I don’t answer him for long, long moments and he doesn’t seem to mind.
He’s patient and good with his hands, a true cowboy.
But in this moment, I know that’s not why he’s doing any of those things.
He’s being this way for me, and even though I have no idea what he’s got planned or why he’s asking me to trust him, I simply nod.
It’s tiny and I’d think he wouldn’t catch it, but he’s so deeply attuned to me—more than any human being in this world—that there’s no way he doesn’t.
And I know he’s thankful for it because his chest shudders and his body loosens up a bit.
Then he squeezes me again before pulling away.
He grabs my face, runs his eyes over it, and wipes my tears with his thumbs.
His jaw is still pulsing in anger, and there’s something akin to violence lurking in his green eyes.
But when he leans down and places a soft kiss on my forehead, it’s his tenderness that threatens to break me.
Besides, I know those darker emotions aren’t for me. It’s for my distress.
Then, just as abruptly as he’d stopped me from leaving, he hauls me up his body.
He makes me climb him like a tree, my thighs going around his hips and my arms going around his neck, and he carries me somewhere.
My face settles in the side of his neck as he strides across the dirt path.
He rounds the fence and uses the gate to get in.
I’m a rock in his arms, and it’s taking supreme amounts of effort not to struggle.
Not to twist free of his arms and run away.
But he told me to trust him, and I will.
I do. It’s just that I’m going to throw up any second now.
Just as the thought flashes through my head, he stops and I clench my eyes shut, locking my limbs around him in a death grip.
I know what he’s going to do. I know and I hate him for it.
I hate myself for being so deathly afraid of it.
Just as I’m about to tell him that I’ve changed my mind, that I don’t trust him; I can’t do this, he goes ahead and places another kiss on my forehead.
Followed by one more on my wet cheek. Then, “Trust me.”
He doesn’t give me time to respond before he grabs my waist, picks me up—how does he keep doing that with an injured shoulder and without breaking a sweat, I’ll never know—and sets me down on the saddle.
My stomach bottoms out and I make a keening sound.
But it only lasts a second because in the next, he’s up on the horse, too, and my hands fly to him, to his chest to hold on to his shirt.
Then he dips his face down, his Stetson casting us both in the shadow, and commands, “Wrap your legs around me.”
I do that.
“Now, your arms.”
I do that too.
“Good,” he rasps, and I squeeze him.
Then he goes ahead and puts his hand on the small of my back to scoot me even closer, plastering me into his body. I hear him snap the reins, and wide-eyed and afraid for my life, I breathe out, “W-wait.”
He brings his attention back to me and does exactly that; he waits.
“Um, I think”—I swallow—“I’m kinda… s-sitting wrong. I mean…” He is silent while I gather my words and I continue, “Shouldn’t I be sitting the other way around?”
It’s so ridiculous that it’s only occurring to me now, but instead of facing out, I’m facing him.
I’m practically sitting on his lap, wrapped around him like a vine or a chain.
A rope. Our chests are moving in tandem and our mouths are so close to each other, I’m not just breathing in his air, his scent; I may as well be eating it.
I may as well be eating him. Kissing him.
“No,” he replies, his eyes intense.
I pull at his hair. “But I don’t think… people ride together this way.”
His own hands are in my hair, my braid wrapped around his wrist. “They don’t.”
“So then—”
“You and I, though?”
“Yeah?”
“We do.”
A breath leaves me in a rush, and this time, I say the words. The ones I kept inside of me the night I went to his barn, thinking it was the last time I’d see him. “The Phantom and the Princess.”
His eyes heat up and his hold tightens. “His Princess.”
My heart skips a beat at his correction, and I thank God he stole me again that night, instead of letting me go like I thought he was going to. “Your Princess.”
“And my Princess, she gets the best seat in the house.”
I clench my thighs around him and swallow, wordlessly.
“His name’s Tulip,” he tells me, looking me in the eyes.
“T-Tulip?”
“The horse you’re about to ride on.”
“Oh.”
“Named after my sister’s horse. We had to put him down a few years ago. Which is when I got him,” he keeps going.
“O-okay.”
“He’s gentle, yeah? Warms up easy. All you gotta do is hold on to me.”
I realize what he’s doing, putting me at ease. I lick my lips and whisper, “What’s the name of your horse? The white one.”
“Milly.”
I can’t believe I’m doing this, but my mouth pulls up in a tiny smile. “Pretty name.”
“Lynnie named her too.”
“Good choice.”
His eyes warm and he asks, “Ready?”
Pursing my lips, I shake my head, clinging to him.
But he snaps the reins anyway and goes up to my forehead to place yet another kiss on it.
And then we’re off and I tuck my face in his neck and just breathe.
Or try to. My impulse is to scream, but something about how I’m sitting, tucked so safely in his lap, the best seat in the house, keeps my panic contained.
I’m still shaking, though. I’m still sweating and holding on to him like I’m going to plunge to my death at any second.
Especially when Tulip has to hop over something or there’s a particularly jarring movement.
But overall, I’m proud of myself for not throwing up.
All of that changes, however, when Radisson snaps the reins again and Tulip speeds up.
And when I say speeds up, I really, really mean it.
Tulip is going faster than the first horse, Milly, that he forced me to ride on.
I don’t know what he’s trying to do, but I’m scared. I’m so fucking scared. No, I’m angry.
I’m furious.