Chapter Two
C at was sure she hadn’t heard him right.
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t move back, or indicate in any other way that either he was kidding or she had completely misheard him, which was admittedly highly possible after she’d spilled out her whole life and all her existential angst at him.
At Wilder freaking Carey, of all people.
But if anything, he seemed to be… waiting.
Cat told herself she couldn’t possibly have heard him say what she thought he’d said. And certainly not in that voice of his. With that look on his ridiculously handsome face.
“Go ahead,” Wilder said, in that low, deep rumble of a voice that she could feel in every single, silly cell of her body. “Kiss me, Cat.”
So.
She hadn’t imagined it.
This wasn’t a figment of her imagination. She hadn’t blacked out in the Wolf Den, and she wouldn’t wake up from this in a rush in her bed at home, because it was happening.
This was really happening.
Wilder Carey was telling her to kiss him.
And Cat felt as if she was free falling. She had known Wilder Carey all her life. In the same way that she knew Copper Mountain—the peak that rose up between her tiny little hometown and Marietta—with its steep sides, pretty views, and weather patterns like moods. Meaning she had always seen him from afar. He and his twin brother Ryder had always been the subject of intense fascination in town, and no matter that they were older. That was the thing about a small place like Cowboy Point. No one was ever focused only on their own age group. There weren’t enough people for that.
Besides, all of the Careys were astonishingly good-looking. That was a simple, inescapable fact no matter how old they were. In a family of five boys it was reasonable to expect at least one or two to come up short in the looks department, in one way or another.
That was not the case with the Careys. Those high-cheekboned, chiseled-jawed genes ran strong.
But Cat, like every other female who drew breath beneath the Montana sky, had always had a soft spot for Wilder.
She’d heard him laugh and tell people, in his usual flirty way, that he liked to live up to his name. The wilder the better, he liked to say.
And everybody knew he more than lived up to his name and his reputation.
The sweet, good girl inside of her, who’d been in charge of Cat for her whole, entire life, cautioned her against being reckless here. This was almost certainly a dare. He likely expected her to back down, to put her tail between her legs and run back up the mountain, straight back into the soft, sweet little cage her brothers had made for her.
But that other part of her was louder.
The part that wanted something else—anything else. The part that couldn’t stand the cage any longer.
The part of her that had decided that even if it scared her, she had to get out there and do wild, exciting, potentially foolish things, just to see what it felt like.
Because she loved her home. She loved her family. But no one talked about the fact that that big sky up above them was more like a ceiling. Especially in a family like hers.
Cat was pretty sure it was because her own father had been such a waste of space. He had in no way lived up to the general Lisle family expectations. If it had been up to the late and unlamented Patrick Lisle—which was Cat’s preferred way of referring to the father she barely remembered, not like her brothers who remembered too much—the General Store would have closed. The oldest establishment in Cowboy Point would have gone away like he had, taking with it all the lore and legend—good and bad—that had always been attached to the Lisle name.
Cat’s mother Jenny had picked up those pieces, though Cat often thought they must have felt like glass shards in her hands, and she’d raised her children to respect what they had. Where they came from. And who they were.
And Cat did. She didn’t want to rip apart any legends, she just wanted to create a little lore of her own.
She wanted to live .
And the thing about Wilder Carey was that he was a very hot dream in boots and a Stetson.
He was the kind of fantasy that helped a girl drift off to sleep at night, though the wise ones knew enough to dismiss that sort of dream come morning. Because until Harlan Carey, the oldest of the Carey brothers, had gotten married a few months ago, it was an accepted fact that no woman around here was likely to land one of them.
And even if someone could land one of them—bets were always on Harlan and Boone, the nicest of the five brothers—no one expected that Wilder would ever be tamed.
He made her think of wild horses, running free, but he was far more dangerous. It was the way he could smile in that knowing way of his, making everyone around him wish they knew whatever it was he knew, too. It was the way the air seemed to crackle in his vicinity like even the atmosphere itself felt the need to primp and preen in his presence.
“You should thank me for pulling you out of that bar,” he said then, with no sign of that smile but entirely too much electricity. “Because I had the benefit of being raised by two separate mothers, both of them dedicated to making sure that their hardheaded sons know how to treat a woman and how to make sure she’s interested. And you might not say no, Cat, but your whole body is saying it for you. Now imagine if that was what happened in there with Easy Rider after he’d gone to all the trouble to buy you a drink and grunt in your direction.”
“My body is not saying no,” Cat corrected him. “And neither am I.”
But she got his meaning. Maybe she’d been faking her enthusiasm inside, and hoping the drink would make up the difference. Because it was easy to sit somewhere safe and dream about running wild. It had been significantly less dreamy inside that bar, from the bar itself—sticky, at best—and the men there—same—than it had been in her head.
She wasn’t sorry that he’d dragged her out, if she was honest.
But that did mean that this—here, right now, with him —might be her one and only chance to see what it was like to jump off of a cliff and find out if she could figure out how to fly on her way down.
So she pushed away from the door of the shop behind her and closed the distance between them, propping herself up with her hands on that frankly stunning chest of his that was hard and warm to the touch.
Up close, he was even more beautiful, what with that distracting arrangement of dark hazel eyes, dark blond hair that was more dark than blond, especially at night, and that mouth of his that could inspire a girl to do all manner of foolish things.
And that was what she wanted, so that was what she did.
Cat pushed herself up on her toes, then pressed her mouth to his.
For a moment, there was just the shock of that kind of contact. Mouth to mouth. Her closed lips against his.
It was… pleasant.
Okay, it was something more than pleasant .
She’d seen too many kisses to count. In real life, on screens. And watching people kiss was one thing, but Wilder was something else. He was warm like he was his own wood-burning stove in winter. His lips were… firm .
For some reason, Cat could feel that firmness wind its way down the center of her until it kicked into a kind of blooming thing deep in her belly.
He made a low sort of noise. And then he moved.
She wanted to analyze every second of what was happening, but she couldn’t quite hold onto a thought. Because Wilder angled his head, and then there was a strong arm around her back and a hand in her hair, and then he was licking his way into her mouth.
And it was scalding hot, everywhere.
Cat could feel everything , from the grip his fingers had on her head to the way he bent her back over that arm wrapped around her and yet somehow kept her body tight to his.
She had read enough about kissing to know what he was doing with his tongue, his lips, but that all seemed so clinical when what he was doing was a wildfire .
He tasted like whiskey and she felt an instant, overwhelming, contact intoxication. She was dizzy, and wild with it, and her body reacted like he had lit a match and held it to her. Everything was alight .
Like she was her very own blaze.
Cat didn’t know what to do, but her body seemed to catch on quick. She arched herself against him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and tried to match what he was doing. She let her tongue tangle with his. She angled her head when he did, matching him as best she could, tasting and exploring and letting herself burn and burn and burn.
She felt like she was flying, as if she’d hurtled off the side of a cliff and found herself some wings, and it was all wrapped up in him. The specificity of Wilder Carey. She could smell him all around her, leather and man. She could taste him . She was aware of his strength and that firm mouth and the way he held her.
Excitement flooded her veins. Everything got brighter and hotter and bloomed deeper and wider inside of her.
And all she wanted was more.
She wanted to get closer, to lose herself completely. So Cat went with that, riding that flash fire so when he straightened, he lifted her with him and she wrapped her legs around his waist. Then he tilted her back against the nearest wall and they both groaned.
He had one hand on her bottom, but better yet, more of them was pressed against each other.
And she could feel what she assumed was the enduring appeal of Wilder Carey, pressing hard against her belly.
It was too much. It wasn’t enough.
He taught her what to do with her mouth, and she mimicked it with the rest of her body, rocking herself against him until the next groan he let out sounded almost like anguish.
Wilder pulled away, tensing, but he didn’t put her down.
She didn’t like it the not kissing, but she was in no position to argue. She wasn’t sure she could speak. For a moment, everything was a wild storm of sensation and the rough sound of their breathing.
His hat was tipped back, so there was no pretending she couldn’t see his face. And the shattered look, hot and stunned, in his gaze.
She imagined she looked the same. Maybe even more wrecked.
And they were still pressed together. She could feel the wild racket of his heartbeat. She could feel how strong he was, how easily he held her.
He blew out a breath, and that look in his gaze changed.
But she wasn’t ready for whatever he was about to say, so she lifted one of her hands from around his neck and leaned back a little, so she could trace that devastating mouth with her fingers. And then, following some strange urge, as if her secret wish had always been to make sculptures, she traced the shape of his unfairly high cheekbones. The panes of his face and each dark eyebrow.
“How did you get down here tonight?” he asked, his voice so gruff and torn up that she couldn’t keep herself from smiling.
Wilder frowned back and set her down on her feet. But he held her for a moment, as if he thought she might topple over. That was a good call, because her knees felt as if someone had confiscated them and good luck to her finding balance without them.
She sagged back against the wall and it was only when his frown deepened that she remembered he had asked her a question.
“Some friends of mine were driving over to Bozeman and they dropped me off.” His frown was definitely taking on a disapproving cast, but if he thought that he was going to shame her, he was wrong. “Not only that, I told my brothers and my mother that I’d probably be staying in town overnight. So no one’s expecting me.”
“You lied to your entire family to come down here and get in trouble.”
“I think that a lot of people call that a regular Saturday night.”
“It’s the lie part that I’m having trouble getting my head around,” Wilder said in that dark voice, but she had tasted him. She knew what he tasted like and that really did take the edge off what sounded like an oncoming lecture. “Because you talk a big game about wanting to change your life and live the way you want, but it turns out that what you mean by that is lying like a teenager, sneaking out and breaking curfew.”
That, she could admit, got under her skin. She crossed her arms and glared at him. “That’s a lot of big talk from someone who had his tongue down my throat five seconds ago.”
“The difference between you and me is that I don’t lie about the things I do,” Wilder said, and that drawl of his seemed to crack over her like a whip. He stared at her a moment longer, and then shook his head. “Come on. I’m taking you home.”
Cat didn’t particularly want to go home. But she could also admit that having just kissed Wilder like that, and definitely not having processed it at all, the prospect of traipsing back into the bar held very little appeal.
But he didn’t have to know that.
“Are you volunteering to babysit me?” she asked him sweetly. “Is this what we’re going to do with our weekends from now on? I’ll sneak into bars and you’ll haul me out, then punish me by kissing me silly? Oh no. What a nightmare. Will I ever learn my lesson?”
“I keep forgetting you’re drunk,” he muttered.
“I’m not drunk at all.”
“You forget that I was there when you tossed back your drink.” He reached over and took her wrist, then tugged her along with them as he headed back out onto the street, down the block, and she could see the courthouse rising up down the way. But she couldn’t concentrate on landmarks. “And who knows what you had to drink to get up the courage to walk in there in the first place.”
“A fun fact about my mother is that she is under the impression that girls, particularly, need to learn how to drink. She thinks it’s a skill and that it can be taught. She made sure that I can handle myself.” He looked back at her over his shoulder and Cat shrugged. “No, I’m not drunk, Wilder. You didn’t take advantage of me. Does that make it worse or better?”
His expression darkened, but he didn’t let go of her wrist. And he kept walking. So she had no choice but to admire the form of the man as he led her alone. He was tall, and she had already thought that he was perfectly formed before she’d gotten such a close, personal experience of that form. Now she knew that the way he looked was no joke. That T-shirt wasn’t confusing the issue.
He really was made of muscle. Hard, ridged, and perfect.
His hips were narrow. He was… proportional.
Even thinking that word made her shiver, everywhere.
A block or so down, he stopped at a truck she recognized as his, the way she could recognize the vehicles of pretty much everyone in Cowboy Point. He opened the passenger door and when she didn’t move immediately to jump in, he dealt with it by lifting her up off the ground and placing her on the seat inside.
He had already slammed the door and walked around the truck by the time she actually processed that , and then he was sliding behind the wheel and starting up the engine.
Then another impossible daydream was occurring in real time.
Wilder Carey was driving her home.
Country music played softly from the speakers. Cat had the urge to snuggle herself deeper into the seat, or maybe stretch out along the bench and put her head on his lap. Such urges seemed to go along with the dark night pressing in and all around, the faint music, and the simple joy of riding with him.
It was a ten-mile drive up the side of Copper Mountain to get back home, but at this time of year that was no trouble at all. As they drove out of Marietta, there were fewer and fewer lights along the way.
And when they hit the single winding road that led to Cowboy Point, there were none.
Out the window, the Milky Way seemed to hang there, almost close enough to grasp.
And inside of her, Cat felt that same mess of stars. Too many to count, too many suns exploding, shining, building galaxies she could neither name nor entirely understand.
She could still taste him in her mouth.
It felt like its own North Star.
When they finally made it to the top of Copper Mountain, they crested the final incline just below the peak—that little breath of space on the road, poised forever between Marietta on one side and home on the other.
And this was the real trouble, Cat knew. Much as she wanted everything to change, much as she wanted to change, she loved it here. She loved the way their tiny little valley unfurled before them as he drove down into it, the stars making a meal out of the evergreens and dirt roads snaking off this way and that. There was no one around. Not even a glimpse of another car. There were some lights on peeking out from the trees in the hills, but they were few and far between.
The General Store was dark at this hour, sitting on the main street with its front part the same old bit of timber that had been thrown up almost two hundred years ago as a little outpost for the miners who didn’t want to go all the way back down into Marietta after looking for copper. Her oldest brother, Tennessee, lived there, in the tidy house out back that was only slightly newer than the store itself, separated only by a bit of yard and the seasonal creek that rose in spring and was more like a dry moat in the cold fall weeks before the snow came in.
The rest of them lived farther back on Lisle Hill. Cat still lived with her mother in the pretty Victorian house that Ebenezer’s oldest son had built about halfway up, to give the wife he’d imported from Boston the view he felt she deserved. And maybe she’d felt that she deserved it, too, because at the top of the hill she’d commissioned a lighthouse. Legend was, she missed the sea. Cat’s brother Dallas had been living there for a long while, though as far as Cat knew, he’d never seen the sea.
During the day, she liked to look up the hill and see those things. The lighthouse at the top, the house in the middle surrounded by all her mother’s gardens, and down at the bottom, the dirt road that led out to the store. Like a layer cake of Lisles.
She assumed that a Carey had a different thought process when he looked at Lisle Hill, and that amused her so much that she almost asked him—but stopped herself when he turned off on a narrow little dirt lane a bit before the one that led directly to her house.
Cat understood immediately. That was the thing about tiny places like this one. Usually, there was no one around at this hour. But if someone was around, they would absolutely recognize Wilder’s truck, the same way she had.
Obviously there was no way that Wilder could drive her up to her door.
But the fact that it wasn’t even a discussion between them sat oddly inside of her, like this was a secret. And somehow, the idea of being Wilder Carey’s secret wasn’t as thrilling as she wanted it to be.
Not that she would turn down the role. And anyway, it was too late for that.
Wilder turned off his headlights and slowed down. And then they were bumping along in the dark, down an old dirt road. Though this was less of a road and more the suggestion of one. The trees stood dark and judgmental all around them, and for a while he could have been driving her deep into the mountains that stretched all the way to Big Sky for all she knew.
But she could see the gleam of the stars. And she realized that she didn’t care where he was taking her. These quiet moments between them seemed precious. Possibly because she’d never known Wilder Carey to be anything but the center of attention.
This felt like a gift.
Eventually he stopped and climbed out of the truck, and she didn’t want to move—but she made herself. Cat climbed out and met him at the front of the truck, and only then realized that she was holding her breath.
“Come on,” he said in that low voice of his. “I’ll walk you as close to home as I can.”
“I’m sure I can find my way.”
Wilder sighed. “And I’m sure that my mama would rise up from her grave and haunt me herself if she thought that one of her sons was abandoning a girl in the woods in the middle of the night. It’s not going to happen,” he continued as she started to protest. “Even if that does mean I’m polluting myself on Lisle land.”
When Cat didn’t move because she was too busy glaring at him, he handled her with an easy grip on her elbow, guiding her along with him as he walked through the trees like there was a path there—on Lisle Hill—that he knew and she didn’t. She didn’t like it.
But she didn’t say anything, because that kiss was still working its way through her, making her bones feel brand-new and wrapped up in something sparkling.
And the night all around them felt close and warm, like something intimate.
He stopped walking at the edge of a clearing and when she looked around him instead of at him, she could see her house.
Though it was the first time in all her life that she wasn’t pleased to see it.
“Go on then,” he ordered her. “I’ll wait to make sure you’re safely inside.”
She turned and looked up at him, and he seemed to forget that his hand was on her arm. Or he knew it was, maybe. Because he moved his thumb back and forth in that crease of her elbow, just enough to reignite that lazy sort of heat inside her.
Cat let herself drift closer, pleased that her eyes had adjusted to the dark on the walk so she could see that he was looking at her with all the heat that she could feel deep inside.
“Darlin’,” he rumbled, low and hot. “You better not look at me like that. I’m not exactly known for my restraint.”
“Darlin’,” she drawled right back to him. “Please don’t develop any on my account.”
Then she pressed herself against him, going up on her toes so she could wind her arms around his neck again and taste him once more.
And she realized, immediately, that he’d been holding himself back on that Marietta street.
Because now they were in the dark woods, all alone, with nothing but the summer night sky to see that.
Wilder bent, then picked her up. Cat wrapped her legs around his waist again and then laughed with the thrill of it, right into his mouth, as he turned and pressed her up against the nearest tree.
And then, for a long while, there was nothing but the way his mouth moved on hers. The way she was pressed against that hard heat of him—that and the seam of her jeans making her whole body bloom into something bright and hot and perilous .
He pulled back and muttered something under his breath, then stepped away—letting her fall to the ground. But not too hard, not too fast.
“Enough,” he growled out.
“I don’t think it’s enough at all.”
“If we keep going, Cat,” he began, in a lazy drawl that was different from how he’d talked to her before. None of that concern and temper. This was something else.
This, she understood in the next moment, was a man who knew all the things she didn’t. All that physical magic that he worked in her so easily. All that wonder, all that need.
“Yes,” she said. “Was that a question? I vote yes, let’s keep going.”
“If we keep going,” he said again, something dark and reproving his voice, though she could see the fire in his gaze, “we’re going to squander your innocence in the dirt beneath a tree.”
“It’s mine to squander,” she argued.
“Then you’ll have to go ahead and do it without me,” he replied, something like steel in the heat of his voice. “And I don’t think you want that.”
She might have argued that she did, actually, want that—but she didn’t. And what was more, he already knew that. He had not one shred of doubt. She wanted to find that kind of confidence annoying.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she held his gaze for a long moment, aware that she was afraid that as soon as she turned around, all of this would disappear like it really was a dream after all. She would wake up to the same old life, no wildfires, no galaxies , and Wilder Carey would never look at her like this again.
So it felt like an act of extreme courage to turn around, give him her back, and run across the field toward the front of the house. Not to look back. Not to even glance over her shoulder, to trust that he really was there, watching, the whole way.
It was only when she got to the porch and then up to the front door that she turned around at last.
And saw nothing.
Her heart sank. Had she made the whole thing up?
But then, across the clearing, she caught the faintest hint of movement behind a tree, and she knew.
It was him. This was real.
And she knew he was going to stay there until she went inside. No matter that she didn’t want to go inside.
Cat was holding her breath again. It made her lungs ache .
But she did the hardest thing possible. She turned around once more, went inside, and closed the door behind her.
But she didn’t breathe normally for a long, long time.