Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
When she woke up, it took her a moment to realize what had happened. They were still in the truck, squeezed onto the bench seat, lying there in the cold.
Cody had her draped over his chest, and he was hot like a furnace, his heart beating steadily underneath her hand. Her body was nice and warm thanks to him, but her nose had a slight chill, and she rubbed the tip of it as she thought about last night.
Her body felt so sore in the most delicious way.
Like he had thoroughly worked her out, and he had certainly left her satisfied.
She breathed out, and something about the irregular breath made him stir.
His hand went to her hair, and he combed it with his fingers before tightening them into a fist.
She closed her eyes, let her arousal wash over her. Even now, in the early hours of the morning.
She had a strange feeling that she had forgotten something, or someone that she was accountable to. That there were going to be consequences or repercussions for staying out all night, for not telling someone where she was going, but there weren’t, because she was only accountable to herself now.
She had been afraid of this kind of freedom for most of her life.
Afraid of not having roots. Of not having somebody to…
To hold her back.
To hold her down.
Because part of her had always wondered if she was going to be like her father, an alcoholic who loved to drink more than he loved anything else. Or like her mother, an aimless wanderer who couldn’t even love the people who wanted her there enough to stay.
Marrying the first man she had ever dated had proven something to her. That she was stable. That she made good decisions. Staying and staying, even when the marriage hadn’t been great, had been evidence that she was good.
Good.
There was that word again.
This brand of good that she had tried to be all of her life, that no one had ever cared about except for her. And maybe it wasn’t even good that she was trying to be.
Just safe.
This thing with Cody wasn’t safe. Letting him fuck her in the truck like they were animals, that wasn’t safe. It was hot. It was experimental and new and bright and wonderful, but it was not safe.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to pursue that kind of safety anymore.
The kind that was born out of fear.
A fear of herself, which was one of the saddest realizations she’d ever had.
Maybe it was the conclusion of the thought she had had at the bakery the other day.
The one that she had been too afraid to take out and examine then. The one that she had begun to look at but hadn’t quite gotten a grip on.
“How are you feeling?”
His voice was rough, and the question was so unexpected that she buried her face in his chest and laughed. “I’m doing good. You?”
“I can’t feel my left leg, but otherwise, it’s all good.”
“Oh,” she said, rolling away from him and finding herself dumped onto the floor of the truck. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for,” he said. “Overall, I’d say I feel better than I have for a while.”
Well, she understood that.
If she thought too hard about how the hell they’d gotten here after he’d been such a jerk at the barn, she would only be disappointed in herself.
Or maybe not. Maybe this was her moment to be like other girls.
Not quite so rigid and well-behaved. But herself.
Desperate for this hot man and giving in to that desperation because it felt good.
“Yeah. Well. Like I said, casual sex isn’t really in my skill set. Though I guess it is now.”
He made a short sound in the back of his throat, and she wondered if she’d offended him by calling it casual sex. But what the hell else could she call it? He’d been the one to make it very clear that he didn’t want marriage and children or anything like that.
It was an annoying thing for him to say, but as annoyed as she was, she also knew she couldn’t be angry at him for trying to make the parameters of this clear.
It was important, especially because he was her boss.
And since they were playing with fire there, it was best that they both be very clear about who they were and what they wanted.
She trusted him in the sense that she didn’t think he would ever fire her if she wanted to quit sleeping with him.
But then, she didn’t know enough about herself in this kind of situation to know what she would do if she got done sleeping with him and they were working together. Or he got tired of her.
Moved on to somebody else.
The idea made her stomach turn, which wasn’t fair. She was still married, technically. And she was getting all sick to her stomach thinking about him with some hypothetical woman. After having sex with him twice.
“What is this place?”
“This,” he said, “is Painted Ridge.”
“Oh,” she said.
“When the sun comes up, you’ll see it.”
“How long until the sun comes up?”
“About… a half hour.”
He moved to the front seat of the truck, and he was still totally naked. She didn’t mind the view. As much as she could see.
She held on tight as he started the truck, and turned it around, backing up against what she assumed would be the view, sunrise.
“I’ve got some supplies with me,” he said.
“What kind of supplies?”
“Blankets.”
“Well, I like blankets.”
“Coffee.”
“You have coffee?”
“I travel with camp coffee fixings everywhere I go. I’ll start us a fire.”
He got out of the truck, then opened up the back door, the light from the cab bathing his naked body in a warm glow. She watched the shift and bunch of his muscles as he pulled on his jeans, his cowboy boots.
He looked up at her and waited.
Her cheeks went hot, caught staring at him like that.
“Well, if you don’t want me to ogle you, you should dress a bit more modestly,” she shouted at the open door.
He didn’t respond.
She slipped her dress back on over her head but didn’t bother with any of her underwear.
Didn’t bother with shoes. She stepped gingerly out of the cab of the truck into the darkness.
Cody was hunkered down, fire-starting equipment, she assumed, by his side.
She didn’t know anything about stuff like this. Survival, wilderness skills.
He was wearing a headlamp, the beam from the flashlight giving her a view of his hands. The ground was cold, the rocks sharp under her feet, so she simply stood a few feet away from him, motionless, arms wrapped around her midsection.
He managed to get his tinder to catch a spark and set it beneath an arrangement of wood he’d laid out.
Then he took out an old, metal pot and put it right in the flame.
“That works?”
“It’ll do,” he said.
He stood up and walked back toward her, then grabbed hold of the tailgate on his truck and lowered it.
“I have my blankets and things back here.”
He grabbed a bundle of blankets out of a closed box in the back of the truck, and she stared at this whole arrangement with a gimlet eye. “Do you do this often?”
“In the last fifteen years? No.”
“Did you bring girls up here in high school?”
“No. I didn’t. I went parking, sure. But not here.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you may have realized, Marlowe, that this is a place that gives me a view of my deadbeat dad’s ranch.”
Her stomach tightened. “Right.”
“Not a place I personally wanted to go get frisky.”
“I guess not.”
“No, I used to come up here and look down there and think about how much I hated him. That someday, somehow, this place was going to be mine. That I deserved it. I like to think sitting up here hating him like that is what got him to leave the ranch to me.”
“Why did he leave the ranch to you in the end? Because everything you’ve said about him makes me feel like it… must’ve been a surprise.”
She lifted herself up onto the tailgate and scooted into the back of the truck, sitting on one of the blankets, wrapping herself in another. The early morning air was cold, frigid, and she could just sort of see a little bit of pink pushing up the edges of the velvet black sky down below.
“It was,” he said. “But also, not as much as you would think. In the end, he was alone. And a man with his kind of pride, his ego, that’s not a good thing for him.
I can’t claim to understand that man. He’s my father genetically, but I don’t know him.
Now I never will. But I really believe that he thought he was immortal.
That all the shit that he did all of his life was never going to come back around on him, because what could possibly take him down?
You know, standard narcissistic stuff. For a standard narcissist. In the end, though, not even he could outrun death.
And I think the idea of having no one to leave the ranch to, I think that got to him.
So suddenly it mattered that I was his son. ”
“Did it have anything to do with how well you did in the rodeo?”
“Probably.”
He went back over to the fire and, using a mitt, grabbed the kettle back out from the flame.
“It’s a percolator. You put the grounds in the basket and the water in the bottom. Good old cowboy coffee.”
“I thought cowboy coffee had grounds in it.”
“I think you’ll find there are more grounds in this than you might like.”
He set two tin mugs on the edge of the tailgate and poured dark coffee into both of them. The lack of milk or cream was going to be a problem for her, but his preparedness was so hot that she didn’t want to ruin it by whining about not having a latte.
She leaned forward and took hold of a cup. It was so warm it nearly burned her hands, but it was comforting in the chilly air.
“Yeah, I expect one of the reasons that he called me in was because of that. I was the one he talked to. He never saw Walker or Lila. Which isn’t fair to them. They deserve a chance to tell him what they thought of him.”
“Did you do that?”
He shook his head. “No.”