Chapter Three
W ilder woke up the next morning in a wholly uncharacteristic foul mood.
He stared up at the ceiling of the bedroom in his cabin, scowling, and couldn’t pretend he didn’t know why he wanted to chew off his own arm. He knew why. It was the first time he’d gone out in as long as he could recall with the express purpose of scratching an itch and… hadn’t.
Truth was, his body wasn’t used to abstinence of any kind.
He rolled out of bed, threw on a pair of jeans, and then prowled his way into his kitchen, cursing at how long it took to make his coffee—but then, coffee was one of the few things in this life that he wasn’t the least bit laid back about. There was grinding the beans that he’d selected. Preparing the water, fresh from the ranch’s well. He had to take his time with the pour into the French press his brothers mocked—though they sure liked the coffee he made—because he wanted the grounds agitated the correct amount. This was difficult, he could admit, when he was agitated himself.
Likely this was why, as a rule, Wilder didn’t allow himself to get worked up about much.
It was his ritual to wait the optimal two minutes and thirty seconds of soaking in silence, but today it was torture. He could still taste her. He could still feel her legs around his waist. He could still remember his astoundingly virtuous decision to walk away.
Him. Virtuous. He let out a hollow laugh and poured himself his coffee early, not at all surprised that it was slightly sour on the first, too-hot sip.
It seemed to fit the moment.
He cursed his impatience as he headed out of the kitchen. And then added on to it as he went, cursing the fact he’d tossed and turned all night long, to add insult to injury. He was cursing himself, and the entirely too tempting Cat Lisle herself, and everything else he could think of until he made his way out to his wide, simple porch.
Then he sat there as the dawn gathered itself around him, glaring out at the land until it worked its usual, inevitable magic on him and he felt himself… relax.
The coffee still wasn’t perfect, but it was hard to be mad about that when he was looking out at nothing but pure beauty.
He had chosen this plot almost entirely because of the view. His cabin sat on a small rise that looked out into the trees and the hills, with the peak of Copper Mountain pretty much framed there in the far distance. There was a hint of snow at the very top this morning, but everything else was that big, blue, cloudless Montana sky. The green pines stretched high and proud with a hawk soaring overhead. There were wildflowers in the most unlikely places, pops of yellow and purple. Everything smelled like summer, still, despite the tiny hint of a bite in the air.
This was how Wilder usually spent his coffee time in the morning—looking out at that mountain and reminding himself who he was. Telling himself that life would go on, no matter what happened to his father, or to him, or to any of the rest of the people he loved.
One way or another, life endured.
Like it or not.
He’d learned that as a kid when they’d lost his mother and Wilder didn’t reckon it had changed any since.
But today, all he could think about was Cat.
A grade A catastrophe if ever there was one.
Sitting here, on the porch of his peaceful little cabin, he couldn’t understand how he’d let himself get so caught up in her. Maybe that whiskey he’d tossed back in the Wolf Den had been more potent than he’d realized, because that wasn’t the way he operated.
He was no one’s savior, that was for damn sure.
Wilder was about a good time and that was it. He didn’t get mixed up with anything too complicated. He certainly didn’t do consequences of any kind. And Cat Lisle was nothing if not both.
His phone buzzed beside him and he picked it up to find his brothers already texting about the work that needed to be done in various parts of the ranch today before their usual Sunday dinner. He volunteered to ride the fences in the north pasture, the better to stay away from everyone until he could make certain he was back to his usual, charming self. And, if he was lucky and the cattle did what cattle always did, he’d get to throw in a little manual labor to boot.
There was nothing like the vastness of Montana to get a man’s head on straight.
And if he’d wasted his opportunity to exhaust his body in a pleasurable way, well, there was always a fence post that needed hammering.
He showered, dressed, then swung into his truck—
But he sat there a moment before he got the engine going, because it smelled like her. Rosemary and lavender, damn her, and spun sugar besides.
That put him in an ornery enough mood that instead of heading out to the pasture he took the dirt road that branched off from his and drove it around to the plot of land where Ryder had yet to build anything.
Ryder, too, had a view of Copper Mountain, but his land was a little bit higher. He could sit here and see the lodge and a slice of the valley beyond, all of it sparkling in the morning light, a lot like Cowboy Point was something off a postcard.
Or someone could sit here and see all that, because Ryder was off trying to match wits with bulls that outweighed him by some fifteen hundred pounds.
Might put up some condos here , he texted his twin. Seems like a shame to let a view like this go to waste when I could upsell it to Californians who will decorate with antlers, wrap themselves in Pendleton blankets, and write bad poems about mountain magic.
I see you woke up and chose violence today , Ryder texted back. What’s the matter? Didn’t get laid last night?
That his twin could tell that little detail from a text—and Wilder didn’t kid himself, he knew it wasn’t a lucky guess on Ryder’s part—did not improve his mood any.
But the day was bright and beautiful. And the sky was without a cloud, breezy and blue… and, he couldn’t help noticing, the precise shade of Cat Lisle’s eyes.
Good thing there were a whole lot of fence posts that needed his attention.
And maybe a little bit of his aggression, too.
By the time he rolled into Sunday dinner at the main ranch house, he was tired and showered and so heartily sick of himself that he welcomed the opportunity to gather round and poke at his brothers a while instead.
He started with Ryder, always his favorite target—a sentiment he knew his twin also held, and closely.
Heading into Sunday dinner now , he texted. Wonder how many of those we’ll have left? But make sure you say hi to today’s bull for me.
Ryder texted back immediately with an anatomically impossible suggestion that made Wilder grin.
He was infinitely more cheerful when he found his way inside, walking into the house that in some ways, he knew better than his own.
This was the house that he’d grown up in. He’d wrestled in every single room with Ryder, taking part in their lifetime game of cheerful one-upmanship that continued to this day. They’d driven his father and his sainted mother, Alice, to distraction. Pretty much daily.
But he didn’t like to think about what pains in the ass he and his twin had been.
After his mother had died and gruff Zeke Carey had somehow convinced the vibrant Belinda to marry him, there’d been even more noise and chaos when the two youngest Careys, Boone and Knox, were born. And now they were all grown and all much too big for their own good as they shouldered each other around in Belinda’s kitchen, pretending they didn’t hear her when she ordered them to stop.
“I will take this meal and give it to the wolves,” she threatened them, as she’d been doing since they were kids. There had never been a single donation to the wolf population, as far as he knew, but the threat worked the way it always did.
In that it brought the din down… a little.
Wilder scanned his dad the way he always did now, looking for signs that it was really happening, this unimaginable thing that no one talked about directly. But Zeke looked the way he always did. Big, brawny, and grumpy as he stood at the counter and carved the roast that Belinda had made. If he was sick, he didn’t look it.
There was a comfort in that, though Wilder didn’t trust it.
Still, the old man looked good today. And that was something.
He looked over to find Harlan beside him, and they exchanged a look that said pretty much all of that in a single straight shot.
And Wilder wasn’t sure he liked the fact that they were all running these same diagnostics, all the time, but that was what he kept trying to come to grips with every morning. Life went on. The sun rose, the dark receded, and then the world put on the same show again tomorrow.
This was comfort or curse, depending.
Today was a Sunday and his dad looked good. Reason enough to call it a comfort, by his measure.
They all jostled into their usual places around the table as Belinda and Zeke started delivering platters of food. There were the usual rapturous comments about how good everything was, because it was. It always was. Belinda went all-out with her Sunday dinners and claimed that she did so because at least she knew they were fed properly at least once each week.
Wilder knew that he and Harlan were perfectly capable of feeding themselves well, and he suspected solid, dependable Boone was too. There was no telling what Knox did, as the baby of the family and all around reprobate.
And Ryder, of course, existed entirely on pain and panic—but at least he had the decency to do it away from the rest of the family, who might have felt honor-bound to intercede. They discussed his latest winning rides over everyone’s first helping.
“You tell him we’re all cheering him on,” Zeke said.
“I will do no such thing,” Wilder replied with a drawl. “He’s bigheaded enough already.”
Dad can’t remember what you look like , he texted his twin.
That’s a funny way to admit you’re the ugly one , Ryder texted right back.
By the time Wilder finished a creative stream of insults involving a few childhood secrets and ruminations on Ryder’s longevity, everyone else was good-naturedly arguing about whether or not they supported the new clinic that was coming in Cowboy Point, saving folks that drive down the hill.
“How is this up for debate?” Knox asked with a laugh, piling another huge serving of meat and mashed potatoes onto his plate. “We need medical services here. All it takes is one bad snowstorm and we have to act like we’re independent of Marietta anyway. Might as well be prepared for it.”
“Like those loons out in the way far hills,” Zeke said, nodding at Belinda like she knew them, personally. “The ones who want Cowboy Point to claim independence from Marietta altogether.”
“I would personally like independence from the people who live closer to Big Sky than here, come in once a season, and want to tell us how to do things,” Belinda said with a sniff.
“We need a clinic here,” Knox argued, as if she’d said otherwise. “It’s ridiculous that there’s any other opinion on it.”
“And this surprisingly passionate take on local medical facilities has nothing to do with the fact that the doctor opening this clinic is awfully pretty, I’m sure,” Boone added.
Knox gazed at him, the very picture of offended dignity. “I am deeply invested in the health of our community, Boone. I’m not trying to fatten them all up with artisan dairy like some.”
“Just say you’re lactose intolerant and have the hots for the new doctor, man,” Boone said not taking the bait about his new dairy enterprise. “This is embarrassing.”
“You seem extra quiet,” Kendall, Wilder’s still-new sister-in-law, murmured from beside him. When he looked over at her, she smiled and offered a shrug. “Not that you’re loud, generally. But you’d normally be more in the middle of things, I would have thought.”
By things , he assumed she meant that he would normally have been riding Knox on the doctor thing the way everyone else was.
“Sometimes I like to listen,” he told her, and that wasn’t untrue. “The better to build up ammunition for later. Besides, I like to report back to Ryder like I’m some kind of stenographer. Just so he knows what he’s missing. On an hourly basis.”
Kendall smiled. “Both worthy pursuits. You just looked so sad there, for a minute.”
Wilder made himself grin. “Me? Sad? I didn’t think that was possible.”
But he could feel Kendall’s gaze on him long after he threw himself into the rowdy conversation, so he did his level best to make it even rowdier—until Belinda ordered them all out of the house.
“You’re worse than a pack of wild dogs,” she told them as she shooed them off. “It’s like you were raised in a barn when I know better.”
Pretty standard Sunday dinner, all told.
He had tired himself out that morning and the big meal didn’t help, but by evening he decided that he might as well head on down to the Copper Mine. Have a beer and take in a local band, out there in one of the last summer evenings with all the food trucks in a line near the road and the lights strung up. Because yes, it was still August. But this was Montana. Winter came in fast and when it did, it stayed put.
It wasn’t unusual for Montanans to exhaust themselves out there in all the summer light, enough to feel slightly relieved when it got cold and dark again and there was nothing to do but rest.
But tonight it was still light and warm. Wilder drove down from the ranch as the light faded and the sky seemed to hum with late-summer blues and the brightness of the stars. He knew this old dirt road as well as he knew the lines of his own land and the map of his face in a mirror. He liked the gentle incline on the way up toward the lodge, then the easy descent into pretty Cowboy Point itself.
This early on a late-August night, the place was hopping. It looked like the Lisles had kept the diner open into the evening, something Tennessee Lisle only did on weekends, even though the store was closed—though, little as Wilder liked the Lisle family, it had to be said that even if the store was closed, they were always happy to open it in a pinch and help people out.
That didn’t make them good people or their ancestor any less of a card cheat, mind you. That was just how folks operated out here, because they lived a whole lot closer to the elements than some.
He parked his truck and walked to the Copper Mine. He could hear music from down the way at Mountain Mamas, a pizza restaurant with an outdoor patio where they tended toward more family-friendly acts. When he crossed the creek, he could hear that the band at the bar trended more toward rock than anything that would invite dancing.
Good , he thought, since Wilder wasn’t much for dancing, It wasn’t that he didn’t know how. It was that, if he was going to hold a woman that close, why do it in public and with clothes on? He’d rather listen to guitar licks and gestures toward Led Zeppelin and imagine things a whole lot hotter than dancing .
Then he reminded himself, piously, that he was here to have a quiet beer with friends and neighbors. Not to imagine anything.
Once he made it to the bar he ordered his favorite beer and headed out back to the outdoor picnic tables that were a hallmark of summers here. Out here by the creek, beneath the stars, it was hard to imagine that a better life was available anywhere. He sat at a table with some of his oldest friends, listening to Wyatt and Logan Stark tell ridiculous stories about their fishing adventures while their brother Noah chimed in from time to time to make it clear which one of them was the bigger liar.
The same way they’d been doing since preschool. He took a little video and sent it to Ryder, making sure to indicate the empty seat at the table that he could have been sitting in, if he was here.
The same old Stark nonsense is not the lure you think it is , Ryder replied a few minutes later, when the lies had turned to tall tales about encounters with much scarier wild animals in the mountains.
Wilder told himself he was perfectly content.
So much so that he absolutely didn’t notice the very moment that Cat Lisle appeared. He didn’t notice the friends she was with, or the way she looked at him, then away.
He told himself he was hardly aware of her. Of the way she laughed, tipping her head back so that the late evening lights illuminated her face and found those coppery accents in her long, dark hair. He didn’t notice the magic she worked in a T-shirt and a plaid button-down thrown over a tiny pair of shorts. He didn’t notice that her legs had the touch of the summer sun all over them, and were even more shapely than he’d imagined they were when they’d been wrapped around him.
*
Looking at her dressed like a summer dream come true made him feel absolutely nothing at all. He told himself this again and again, hoping it might take.
Wilder then proceeded to go out of his way to pay her absolutely no attention at all.
And when she got up and left, she didn’t look back at him. Not even a glance.
Not that he was looking, of course.
So there was no particular reason that he made his own excuses not long after that, and drove around the big Rocky Mountain pines and the winding dirt roads out behind the feed store and around the little square where the library and the elementary school sat. He drove until there was nobody to see him turn down a road he had no business being on.
Then, once again, he bumped his way through the woods with the headlights off, stopping where he’d parked the night before.
A place he’d vowed to himself he wouldn’t come back to, but here he was.
And he made it worse, because he didn’t turn around and get out of there. He waited instead, having all kinds of arguments with himself to no avail.
Because the con list was ten miles long. The pro list was just: her. Cat.
So then there was nothing for it. He got out, and made his way through the trees until once again he could stand there like the kind of man he’d never been, looking up at the house.
Until he could see Cat sneak out the side door, then start pelting across the field, straight to him.
She hurtled into the cover of the trees and threw herself straight into his arms, as if she’d known for a fact that he would be there.
Right here, waiting for her.
Wilder wanted to ask her how she knew. He wanted to demand that she tell him what magic this was. What spell she’d cast on him.
But she was in his arms and Wilder didn’t bother asking questions he wasn’t sure he wanted the answers to. He pulled her deeper into the woods with him, not in the mood to set her down—though he did. Only so he could grab her hand and tug her with him, back through the trees to his truck.
Once there, he threw down the tailgate, jumped up, and hauled her up with him.
She still hadn’t said a word, but she smiled then. Wide.
And Wilder knew he was making a mistake as he spread out a blanket and lay down with her in the back of his truck, out here with no one around and only the night sky to see them. As he stretched out beside her and she pressed that body of hers up against his.
He was making a mistake, there was no question about it, but he didn’t stop.
Maybe he couldn’t, but that was a worry for another time.
He pulled her on top of him and let his hands wander where they liked. He tested out her curves, got his hands in her hair, and found his way beneath those layers she wore.
And sure enough, he found the answers to questions he didn’t know he’d desperately wanted to ask.
Like whether or not Cat Lisle found it necessary to wear a bra. The answer was no, and he understood in that moment that knowing that answer meant he was changed forever.
That he could never not know.
That there was no going back from the information because she shuddered when he found those breasts she let do as they liked, and then let his thumbs do what they liked with her hard little nipples.
She went to push his T-shirt up and maybe off, but he didn’t let her.
“Clothes stay on,” he told her, like an order. “And we’re not having sex.”
She pulled back then, glaring at him, and he could see the temper mixed with the longing that was all over her, as bright as a whole new summer. “Why do you get to decide?”
“Because I do,” he replied. When her scowl only deepened, he shrugged. “Because I’m the one who knows better. And I say so. And you can’t do anything about it, kitten, so you might as well enjoy it.”
“That does not sound like the recipe for enjoyment.”
“Doesn’t it?” He grinned at her, lazy and sure, and watched her melt. “And one other thing. This? Whatever this is? It stays between us.”
Her lips parted at that, and she looked confused in a way that made his chest hurt, but he didn’t take it back.
“Like a secret,” Cat said, but like she was sounding out the words because they were unfamiliar, not because she agreed. She looked away for a moment, and he saw her bite her lip, just a little. Just enough, because when she looked back her gaze was direct and blue again. “Blood feuds and obnoxious brothers sound like the very opposite of a recipe for enjoyment, I’ll give you that.”
“Let’s see about that enjoyment,” Wilder murmured.
And then he rolled her over so she was beneath him at last. And settled in to have himself a banquet.