Chapter Five
W ilder thought he was handling the entire situation with Cat beautifully.
Nobody knew, and that was the main thing. No discussions of ancestral feuds, no run-ins with her brothers. And he wasn’t actually sleeping with her, so he was clinging to that little shred of decency in this thing.
He liked to tell himself that a slight bit of restraint made all the difference.
Likely because restraint really wasn’t his thing.
But the first night she didn’t show up at the usual spot at the usual time—not that they’d agreed on those things, that was just how it had been since the beginning—he had to get more honest with himself.
Because he didn’t like it.
He didn’t like that she wasn’t there. That he was standing there alone in the woods with nothing but his thoughts for company.
Maybe it was the reality of this thing that wasn’t sitting well.
Wilder told himself it was a blessing. She hadn’t shown up and maybe that meant she was done with this, and he should be pleased. She was a young, pretty girl, and he was certain that she had a thousand better prospects than him.
In a truck.
Off in the woods.
But as he sat there contemplating those prospects, he found himself feeling… murderous.
And he could admit that was a new one.
Truth was, Wilder couldn’t remember ever being particularly bothered with what the women in his life were doing. There were always more women. And he didn’t mean that the way some men did, like it was all tallying numbers on bedposts and that kind of nonsense. He wasn’t big into math. He enjoyed women when they were with him but he didn’t think much about them when they weren’t, that was all.
But it was different tonight. Because it was Cat.
And then, just in case he needed to make his situation clear to himself and the watching stars, he proceeded to… act like a fool.
When he had been many things in life, but never a fool.
And certainly not over a pretty girl.
But there he was, sneaking up to the house and circling all the way around the place so he could look in the windows, fully aware that this was not appropriate behavior by any measure, but there was nothing to see. The only lights on in the whole place were on the ground floor, where he could see Jenny Lisle sitting on her couch and watching a program on her television, alone.
That meant he had a nice long creep back to his truck to think about his behavior. Except what he really kept thinking about were those prospects of hers.
He could name every male between the ages of eighteen and eighty around here. He could also list a thousand reasons each one was absolutely wrong for Cat, and he did.
Back in his truck, he drove himself back out of the woods, though it was earlier than usual and he knew he needed to be careful. He had to wait in the shelter of the woods until he was certain no one was coming from either direction. Because he had to make sure no one could see that he was pulling out of the woods here , at the base of Lisle Hill, where everyone knew Wilder Carey wasn’t welcome.
Especially on a holiday weekend. And particularly when it was this holiday, that marked off the end of summer—something that mattered this far north when he could already feel the coming fall season in the air.
He told himself that was why he was so edgy.
And livestock on ranches didn’t cater much to holidays, so he’d never been much for celebrating them the way some folks did, but when he drove into the main part of town he noticed a lot more people wandering around the place than usual. And to add to this night of weird new reactions from him, Wilder found himself irritated that Cat could walk from her house to both the Copper Mine and the only other place open this late, Mountain Mama, and therefore he couldn’t civilly drive to see if her vehicle was parked somewhere, thereby giving him a better idea of where he might find her.
Not that he was looking, he told himself. He just wanted to know.
The fact she’d likely walked meant he was forced to pick an establishment, so he went with the Copper Mine because that was where he’d seen her a lot lately, but it was the wrong choice. She wasn’t there. And unfortunately for him, a whole lot of other people he knew were.
It would look strange if he didn’t stay for at least one drink, so he did. He smiled and he laughed and told tall tales with the Starks—some of his closest friends, despite the fact that they were far more feral than he would ever be and seemed dedicated to remaining that way—and the whole time he did, he wished that he could extricate himself.
Quickly.
When he finally managed it, he walked down the main road to Mountain Mama, waiting for the hint of crispness in the air to set him straight. But it didn’t.
Down at the pizza place, there was music pouring out into the night. He walked past the entrance to the big, red barn and looked in on the big, wide patio area that flowed all the way inside in the warm months. And there was a decent-sized crowd, adding fuel to the fire that Zeke liked to stir up around the Carey family dinner table. About the changes here. About the fact that some folks wanted this place to be a whole lot more than the remote little refuge it always had been.
Wilder’s knee-jerk reaction to that was that he didn’t like it, because when had change ever done anything for him? But on the other hand, he liked what he saw tonight. One of the last summer nights, filled with good cheer, dancing, and happy people moving around beneath strings of light.
Or maybe he liked it because Cat was there in the middle of it all with a few other women, her hands in the air and her head tipped back, dancing to bring the stars down to her level.
Something in him seemed to catch. His ribs ached.
He felt like someone punched him straight in the face, and yet somehow he was still standing.
Something in him seemed to blare, then, like some kind of alarm. He had the deep, instinctive urge to turn around, to melt back into the shadows, and get the hell away from here.
Before it’s too late, something in him whispered.
But before he could act on that, Cat twirled around and her gaze caught his.
Wilder wanted to tell her to stop, immediately. That everybody would know what was going on between them at a glance. That she was making it obvious—but he thought that actually, he was the one doing that.
He reminded himself that this place was crowded tonight. No way could anyone tell who she was looking at, or who he was looking at, for that matter. She was dancing with a bunch of women and he could have been looking at any of them. Or more likely, all of them, like everyone else. Not because they were making a spectacle of themselves, but because they all looked so happy and like they were having fun.
But it was like all of that was noise and it was happening somewhere else.
Because she caught his gaze, and the silence that went through him was electric .
She looked at him and Wilder felt the punch of it. And he thought he really would have preferred it if it had been an actual fist straight into his mouth. Or his eye. The center of his nose, maybe, so that he could black out and wake up without this longing in him that he didn’t know what to do with—
But she didn’t do any of that.
She just looked at him and she wrecked him.
And he understood in that moment that he was kidding himself.
The music kept going. She twirled back to her friends.
And somehow, he managed to get a smile on his face, even though he thought it should have been obvious that he was ruined. He made himself nod at the folks he knew, and told himself he was leaving. They’d think he’d parked down the road and was walking by. He’d salvage this whole night by going home and pretending it hadn’t happened.
But somehow he didn’t turn around and leave the way he should have.
He told himself it was no good for the unexpected wounds she’d inflicted on him, but that didn’t stop him from capitalizing on an opportunity. And so when she stepped around the side of the building, likely heading for one of the bathrooms that were set apart from the barn, he followed her.
Because that tracked with the rest of his choices tonight.
He followed her around the side, took her arm, and pulled her deep into the shadows behind the barn where no one could see them.
Wilder didn’t even know what he meant to say. Once he had his hand on her, he steered her around to get her back up against the side of the barn, back here no one would find them or see them, and then his palms were on either side of her head as if by their own devices.
“I waited for you,” he told her.
“Did you?” There was a look he’d never seen before in those blue eyes of hers, and he didn’t like it. Like she was hurt. Like he’d done that. “Then maybe you shouldn’t have looked right through me like I didn’t exist.”
“What did you want me to do?” He didn’t pretend he didn’t know exactly what she was talking about. “Tell my brother to stop the car so I could come over and treat you like this in the middle of the main road?”
And then, even though they knew entirely too many people just a short few steps away, he kissed her.
It was stupid.
It was spectacular .
It was very, very hard to remember that they were not alone, stranded out in the middle of the woods the way they normally were. That they were only a breath away from entirely too many people they knew.
There were no real secrets in a small town. There were only lies a man told himself to make him imagine he could keep things to himself.
Wilder knew all this.
But still he kissed her, keeping his hands flat against the barn at either side of her head. She made matters worse by reaching over and hooking her fingers in the waistband of his jeans, then tilting herself up.
Closer, then closer still.
He knew that he should stop this. Now. He knew it, but he didn’t.
Instead he took one hand off the wall and slid it to her jaw, so he could move her mouth where he wanted it and plunder it to his satisfaction, except none of this was satisfying, precisely—
There was a sound, much too close, and both of them jumped.
Wilder moved instinctively to block her with his body, looking back over his shoulder—but no one came into their dark little alley. And a few moments later, somewhere past the racket of his own heartbeat, he heard the clang of metal and realized what was happening.
“I think they’re taking out the garbage,” he said in a low voice, to Cat.
She didn’t say anything. Her eyes fluttered closed and she tipped her head into his chest. And they waited like that, otherwise completely still, until they both heard the back door to the restaurant slam shut.
“Look,” he began.
She tilted her head up and glared at him. “I didn’t like how that made me feel,” she told him, and there was something so frank and direct and innocent about it. No game playing. Straight to the point. She was going to kill him. “It hurt my feelings.”
His breath left him against his will. “Cat. Don’t go saying that kind of thing. There are men who prey on admissions like that.”
“I don’t feel that way about men . I feel that way about you , specifically.”
“That’s not how you go about it.” And he couldn’t help the surge of something almost tender inside him, very different than the one that had pushed him here tonight. When he would have said he knew very little about tenderness. “You’re practically begging for someone to take advantage of you.” But she only looked at him, clearly not comprehending what he was trying to tell her. “Don’t make yourself vulnerable, kitten. Not to me, not to anyone. That’s not how this works.”
“How would you know how it works?”
Her eyes were so blue it made him feel like he hardly recognized himself. “I’m the only one standing in this alley who does know how it works.”
“I’m not talking about sex, which you may or may not know how to do, I wouldn’t know.” And she glared at him when she said that. “But vulnerability? What does the great Wilder Carey, famous for leaving before dawn, know about vulnerability ?”
He decided this was not the time to explore why Cat talking about his preferred behavior when it came to nights out hit him like a blow. Why it left him feeling something like empty. He told himself she didn’t know what she was saying.
“I’ll have you know that I’m perfectly secure in my masculinity and therefore more than happy to be emotionally vulnerable at the drop of a hat,” he told her.
But he realized as he said it that he would usually say something like that as a joke. With an ironic inflection, or a smirk. Tonight, on the other hand, he simply said it baldly. And it didn’t sit right with him.
Or with her, clearly, because she laughed. “The difference between you and me, Wilder, is that I’m not embarrassed that you know my feelings. What I’m fascinated by is that you would be. I’m the one who feels it. I already know how it feels. Why would it matter if you did too?”
“Because, Cat, if you tell me something like that, if I was less of a standup guy than I am, I might use it against you.” He couldn’t help the way his fingers moved over the soft expanse of her cheek. “It gives me power over you.”
“I don’t think that it does,” she said. And then her chin lifted. “And anyway, I want you to have power over me. I have literally asked you, a thousand times, to have a particular kind of power over me, and you won’t.”
“It’s one thing to mess around, it’s another thing—”
“That’s what I’ve been telling myself all night,” she shot back at him. She leaned forward, a serious look in her gaze, and he let his hand fall to his side. “Why do you think I’m an idiot? I don’t have to have had four hundred boyfriends to figure out that when a man only wants to see you in private, won’t even commit to having sex with you, and ignores you on a public street, you should probably take to heart what he said about the fact that we were only ever messing around .” She shook her head. “But then you show up here like this tonight. You drag me into this alley. And then you kiss me like that, like I’m doing something wrong while I’m out here living life and keeping our secret. Which is it?”
“You shouldn’t expect anything from me,” he said, feeling something grim settle over him, and he shifted back away from her.
“Which is it?” she asked again. “If there are no expectations then why are you waiting for me in the woods? It sounds to me like there were expectations and they weren’t met, and that’s why you’re here, roaming around Mountain Mama late at night when everyone knows you prefer it over at the Copper Mine.”
“Maybe everyone doesn’t know me as well as they think they do.”
“You don’t want them to,” she said with a certain quiet, matter-of-factness that he felt like a spear through his heart. “You don’t want anyone to know you. That would actually be vulnerable and real, and I don’t think you know how to do that.”
And it wasn’t as if these sort of things had never been said to him before. They were usually shouted. They were usually words to mark the end of a situation that the other party had wanted more from than he did.
But Cat wasn’t shouting. She didn’t even seem particularly angry. Or even resigned, which he’d also seen before.
She leaned back against the side of the building and eyed him. “Your tragedy is that I already know all about you,” Cat said. “I heard my brothers complain about you in high school. I heard every girl who ever met you do the same. I’ve watched you do your thing on both sides of Copper Mountain. I’m sure that I could go pretty much anywhere in the Rockies and all the way east into the Dakotas and there’d be someone to tell another story about Wilder Carey and the things he gets up to. But I’ve already heard all the stories. I know the lore.”
Again, she delivered all of that so calmly. He couldn’t understand why it felt worse than if she’d punched him.
“For example, I know it’s really out of character that you stepped in to rescue me from the Wolf Den,” she continued, and laughed a little bit. “I don’t have to take a poll to know that’s not the sort of thing you normally do in a place like that.”
“Good thing I’m such an open book,” he growled.
Or maybe that was vulnerability he felt, after all. If so, it sucked.
“Good thing that I don’t want to read you,” Cat retorted with a roll of her eyes. “I know exactly where the library is located, thank you. That’s not why I’m sneaking out of my mother’s house in the middle of the night.”
“Maybe you’d better set the expectations, then,” he said.
Wilder realized immediately that that wasn’t the sort of thing he should have said at all. He was the one who made the rules. With a smile, generally, but they were his rules. And he always followed them. He never, ever allowed anyone to set terms for him.
And yet here he was. Standing here, staring down at this maddening woman as if he was the one who was—
But he couldn’t finish that. The thought alone made him too… precarious on his own feet.
“I don’t like feeling like your dirty little secret,” Cat said, quietly.
“I get that.” He wanted to put his hands on her, and he really didn’t like how difficult it was to keep himself from doing that. “But what’s the alternative? You think we should go have dinner with your brothers? How would that go? You think I should come buy you a drink in the Copper Mine one night? Just roll up, get to talking, then take you out to my truck afterward? What could go wrong?”
She blew out a breath, a frustrated sound. “Just say that you’re afraid of my brothers. It’s okay. Everyone else is too.”
Wilder laughed at that, and realized that he’d forgotten where he was when she looked over at the entryway to the alley, alarmed. “I’m not afraid of your brothers,” he told her, and it was hard not to keep laughing. “I already know what they think of me. I can imagine that they’d have some more intense thoughts about me if they saw me with you. But mostly, I’m thinking that you don’t need the aggravation of your brothers knowing about this.”
He watched her blow out a breath and how she didn’t seem to want to meet his eyes. “It shouldn’t matter what my brothers think about anything.”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but your brothers happen to be two of the most ornery people in Cowboy Point, which is saying a lot.” Wilder found himself smiling, though he couldn’t think why. “And besides, there’s a blood feud to consider.”
“Yes, the blood feud really keeps me up at night,” she threw back at him. “Two grizzled miners playing a card game in a wooden shack over a hundred years ago really sits on my heart.”
But she had told him her feelings and that made it impossible to ignore his. And the most noticeable of them at the moment was the need to protect her, when he knew better than that. He was a charmer, sure, but not a protector. Ask anyone.
Still, he couldn’t seem to help himself. “Cat, it wouldn’t surprise a single person in Crawford County if it turned out that unbeknownst to everyone, I was sneaking around with another pretty girl. But you have to ask yourself if that’s the kind of reputation that you want. There’s a reason that I usually contain my damage to tourists.” She looked at him again in that way of hers, big and blue like she didn’t get what he was trying to tell her, and he sighed. “Everybody thinks of you as a good girl. You should let them keep thinking that.”
“They think I’m about sixteen.”
“What they think is that you’re sweet and lovely,” Wilder said gruffly. “They think you’re pure and untouched, and that your brothers are scary enough that you’ll stay that way.”
“No one’s bothered to ask me if I want to stay that way.”
“That’s because any man who’s ever looked at you twice gets an eyeful of Tennessee or Dallas the next time he looks around, and that’s not a bad thing. That’s a safety net.” Wilder shrugged. “You shouldn’t throw all that away for someone like me.”
She looked at him again then, something quizzical and sad in her gaze. And he didn’t want to hear what she was going to say. He didn’t want to know what she thought, because he wasn’t sure how many more blows he could take.
Not tonight.
“You’re not my dirty little secret, Cat,” he finally said. He reached over and tucked a piece of her dark hair behind her ear, because he couldn’t stand not touching her, but that was a problem for another time. Another night. “Don’t you get it? I’m yours.”