9. Zack
9
ZACK
Dad:
The drain in the training barn is clogged. Can one of you get on that?
Adam:
Not it
Brax:
Not it
Zack:
Dammit
Adam:
It works out better this way. You have the longest arms.
Zack:
Yeah, it goes with having the longest dick.
Brax:
Doesn’t matter how long it is if it’s only the width of a pencil.
Dad:
I don’t need to be here for this.
Dad has left the conversation.
Zack:
Hey, don’t worry about it, Brax. Essie seems like the type who knows how to help herself.
Brax:
Keep my wife’s name out of your mouth, asshole.
Zack:
No :)
T he urge to smash my fist into someone’s face was overwhelming.
Fourteen fucking years old.
Hannah had dropped that bomb, and I’d responded with the stupidest thing possible. Are you sure? Jesus fucking Christ. A day later, the memory still made me flinch. She should have kicked my ass out right then and there and thrown my clothes after me. I would have deserved that. But she’d just smiled and told me to sit down. I’ll tell you everything , she’d said, but I need to keep my hands busy. Just sit there, okay? It will be easier for me to get through it if you don’t talk.
Which, yeah. Fair enough.
Fuck.
So I’d sat there like a useless piece of shit while she made us breakfast and told me all about her childhood trauma.
And then I’d eaten the whole damn omelet because I couldn’t not eat it, right? Not after that. But I didn’t taste a single bite.
Hannah had grown up in a polygamous compound, one of the offshoots of the Mormon religion that had broken with the main church after they abolished polygamy. They didn’t call themselves Mormons, though, Hannah had explained with the wryest little smirk and scrunch of her nose. They called themselves saints.
The fucking audacity .
She’d grown up in a desert town in Nevada, in a house with her mother and two other women who had married her father, and a pack of kids. There had been no connection with the outside world. No phones or television. No one came into town, and even high-ranking men needed permission to leave. The town had its own grocery store, but mostly each family had grown their own food and raised livestock. They’d been homeschooled in basic reading, writing, math, and scripture. No history. No science.
It was fine , Hannah had said with a careless shrug. I didn’t know any better. I loved my mom and the other women. I loved my dad. I loved my brothers and sisters . I knew my future would look like my mom’s and that was fine, too .
She just hadn’t expected the future to come quite so soon.
At fourteen fucking years old.
He hadn’t been fourteen, of course. He’d been fifty-two and looking for a fourth wife who was still young enough to give him more children. Because apparently three wives and seventeen kids weren’t enough for him.
I really wanted to hit something.
Hannah had glossed over the three weeks she’d been married. She hadn’t wanted to be a fourth wife, much less to the man she’d been given to, so she’d managed to sneak a message to an older brother who had left the compound years before. He came and got her, and he brought her to his ranch in Wyoming. She’d lived with him until college, when she got a full ride to the University of Colorado at Boulder.
And now I’m here , she’d said.
Like all that shit was over now, and everything was fine.
But it wasn’t fine, was it? If everything was fine, we wouldn’t have been having that conversation the morning after sex. She didn’t think she was fine. She thought there was something wrong with her. That she was a problem.
The only problem I could see was that somewhere in bumfuck Nevada was a man who needed his balls shoved down his throat, and I wanted to make that right.
But instead of putting my fist down his throat, I was going to stick my hand in a drain clogged with horse feces, horse hair, and who knew what else but my guess was bubble gum and dip because there was always bubble gum and dip, and clean it out.
Fuck that guy, and fuck Adam and Brax, too.
I made it over to the training barn late afternoon. From the smell of it, cleaning it out was going to suck. Since there was no way I was going to stick my bare arm in that death trap, I headed to the supply cabinet in the tack room to grab a pair of breeding gloves.
Before James had come to Lodestar Ranch as the head trainer, the cabinet was a disaster. Expired medicine, unraveled leg wraps, sticky bottles of fly spray were shoved on shelves without any real order. Hell, even opening the door was a hazard, as something was likely to fall out. But a month or so after her arrival, things started shifting into place at Lodestar. James had a system for everything.
And right now, her system was telling me that we were out of breeding gloves.
Because right there on the shelf where the breeding gloves belonged was a note taped to an empty box, telling Adam to order more.
I slammed the cabinet door shut with a metallic clang that reverberated through the tack room.
Fucking Adam.
I found him in the old barn we used for hay and feed storage, tidying up with the old push broom. Whistling. Adam had been a grumpy, non-whistling asshole before James came into his life. Normally I’d take his whistling as a good thing because it meant my oldest brother was finally happy again. Right now, I took his happiness as a personal affront. People who forgot to order breeding gloves didn’t deserve happiness. Fuck his whistling ass.
Adam paused with his back to me, leaned his weight against the broom handle, and surveyed the barn with the air of a man proud of his work.
So I kicked that broom right out from under him.
“Hey!” He fell forward but caught himself before hitting the ground. Dammit. “What the hell, Zack?”
“You didn’t order breeding gloves, jackass.”
“Breeding gloves? Sure I did. I…” His voice trailed off as he tilted his head, eyes sliding to the left, remembering. “Oh. Shit.”
“Yeah. Shit is exactly what I’m going to have to put my bare hand into, thanks to you.”
“I’m sorry. James put that note there a month ago when she opened the last box. I meant to order more, but I got sidetracked by something or other. I didn’t think we’d go through them so fast.” He looked sincerely apologetic, but I wasn’t having it.
“That’s the thing about breeding gloves,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “See, they’re called breeding gloves because they protect you when you need to stick your arm into a pregnant mare, but because they’re disposable gloves that go up to your elbow, they’re actually used for all kinds of nasty barn chores. Like cleaning out floor drains.”
Adam’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah. I know. Unlike you, I didn’t get out of chores by running away to the rodeo. I’ve worked on this ranch damn near every day of my life, and I’ve been running it for the last four years. So don’t fucking lecture me on how to do my damn job.”
“How about you do your damn job so I don’t have to fucking lecture you?” I smirked, standing with my arms spread wide, all but daring him to throw the first punch.
He gave me a long, calculating look like he was actually considering it. But then he shook his head and turned away. “You’ve been a real ornery son of a bitch ever since that horse stomped you, you know that?”
I laughed. Then I shoved him into a hay bale.
It didn’t take him long to recover. With a string of curses, he grabbed a flake of hay by the twine and smacked me in the head with it. I wrestled him down to the ground with every intention of making him eat that fucking hay, when I felt myself hauled off him.
“What the hell is going on here?” Brax demanded, keeping his arms between me and Adam to hold us back from each other.
“He didn’t order breeding gloves!” I shouted, still mad enough to consider fratricide a viable outcome.
Brax caught on immediately to the significance of that. “Dammit?—”
“Like you never screw up?” Adam asked me. “I do the work of three people around here. You didn’t even show up today until after noon.”
“Shut up, both of you,” Brax snapped. “It’s not worth fighting over. Zack, tie a garbage bag around your arm. You won’t have as much movement with your fingers, but you should still be able to get the job done. And, Adam. For fuck’s sake. You can’t hit him. You need to be gentle. He’s still—ooof!”
His words ended on a shout as I dropped my shoulder to his ribs and used his body as a battering ram to push both my asshole brothers into the hay. We all fell together in a heap of kicking limbs and curse words.
And then it was on .
I didn’t have a clue who I was hitting or who was hitting me. Frankly, I did not give a shit. There wasn’t a damn thing I wasn’t pissed at right then.
Hurricane Red, for stomping me.
Every goddamn person in the rodeo circuit who didn’t protect Hurricane Red from the repercussions of stomping me.
The piece of shit who dared to call a fourteen-year-old girl his wife.
Adam, for not ordering breeding gloves a month ago.
Brax, for telling Adam to be fucking gentle with me.
I couldn’t do anything about Hurricane Red or the shithead who married Hannah—I refused to call him her husband, even in my head—but I could damn sure make my brothers hurt as much as I did.
Voices floated through the red haze of rage, sounding far away and close at the same time.
“Should we do something?” James asked.
“Like make popcorn, you mean?” Essie said. “Oh, my god . We should make this a rodeo event. Three hot brothers wrestling in the hay. Do you think we could convince them to do it shirtless? Maybe oil them up a little? People would pay good money for that, I guarantee it. What do you think, Hannah?”
Brax snickered, the sound of his wife’s voice making him lose focus and miss an easy shot, which I took full advantage of. Pussy-whipped sucker .
“Boys.” Hannah didn’t even have to raise her voice to get my attention. My whole body froze instantly. She clapped her hands three times. “Stop that right now.”
I pushed through my brothers and rolled to my feet with a smile. Hannah was flanked on either side by James and Essie, but she was the one I greeted. “Hey, there, duchess.”
She blinked like I had caught her off guard, but then she adjusted her glasses and pursed her lips. “You’re bleeding.”
“You should see the other guys,” I drawled.
“I’m looking right at them,” she said crisply. “No one else is bleeding.”
But she wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes never strayed from me. All that red-hot rage that had set my blood boiling a moment ago eased to a warm, friendly simmer.
“ I’m bleeding,” Brax protested. “I think the hay scraped up my cuticle.”
Essie sniggered softly. “Poor baby. Come on, husband. Let’s get you patched up.”
James gave Adam a quick once-over and then, apparently satisfied, turned to me with concern in her big brown eyes. “Are you okay, Zack?”
I laughed, already steering Hannah out the door. “What, this? Brothers roughhouse, honey. See to your man, and don’t you worry about me. Hannah has me in hand.”
Hannah gave me an adorably befuddled frown. “You have me in hand, actually.”
“Exactly, duchess. Now take me to my cabin so I can get cleaned up.”
“This is the second time you’ve bloodied your lip in less than two weeks, and both times it was for a stupid fight that wasn’t worth it.” Hannah’s voice was sharp, but her hand was gentle as she held a paper towel to my lower lip.
“Now, that’s not true,” I said. “Adam won’t ever forget to order breeding gloves again, so I’d say that was worth it.”
Unimpressed, she arched her brows. “And the first fight? The one at the Painted Cat?”
“Who’s to say? For all I know, a great injustice had been done, and I was doing my part to rectify that.”
“Hmm.” She pursed her lips.
With a lazy grin, I leaned back against the counter and widened my legs so she pitched forward between my thighs.
“Zack!” She huffed, exasperated, and pushed against my chest with one hand, her other hand still occupied with stemming the bleeding. “Your belt buckle is?—”
I grabbed her hand and turned it to kiss her wrist. “I’m not wearing a belt, duchess.”
“Oh.” She looked down at the unmistakable bulge in my jeans. “You’re…hard. How are you hard right now?”
I laughed. “Fighting with my brothers got my blood up, and then you wearing that librarian costume moved that blood down south.”
“It’s not a costume,” she huffed. “It’s my clothes.”
“My point is that the combination of violence and women makes a powerful aphrodisiac.”
“Even after yesterday?” The way she made eye contact with my throat made my chest feel tight. “Even after…what I told you?”
“Darlin’, I would give you the title to my truck and the keys to my cabin if you let me in your pussy right now. Hell, I’d give you almost everything I own. Last night only made me more desperate for you. Now I don’t have to wonder what it would be like to fuck you. I already know.” I pressed my jaw to her temple. Let my unshaved stubble scrape against her silky skin. Felt her unsteady inhale of breath. “Heaven, Hannah. You feel like heaven.”
She pulled back slightly, still not meeting my eyes. I had left a smear of blood behind when I kissed her wrist, and now she slowly rubbed it away with her thumb. I don’t know why that turned me on even more, that she had rubbed my blood into her skin instead of washing herself clean of me, but it did.
And then she raised her chin, meeting my gaze with flushed cheeks and blown-out pupils, and I realized she was every bit as turned on as I was.
“Don’t try to make me come,” she warned.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, duchess.”
I wrapped my hands around the back of her thighs and hoisted her up, then spun us both around and set her down on the countertop. Her dark blue skirt draped loosely around her legs, the hem hitting the top of her ankle boots.
“Look at you, so prim and proper in that skirt, but underneath you’re soaked for me, aren’t you? Mmm.” I bit my knuckle. “Are you going to show me?”
“If you want me to,” she whispered, looking up at me from under her pale lashes.
“Fuck, yes, I want you to,” I groaned. “Please, Hannah. Lift your skirt for me.”
She went slow, lifting her skirt one excruciating, delicious inch at a time, because my prim and proper librarian was a fucking tease. First her shins, then her knees, then her thighs. I was damn close to exploding in my jeans by the time she gave me the smallest glimpse of her white cotton panties.
“Spread your legs,” I begged. “Show me.”
She opened her knees, then slid two fingers inside her underwear. When she pulled them out, they glistened. “Wet,” she said.
I growled, hooked my hands behind her knees, and dragged her to the edge of the countertop. “Condom is in my wallet. My left back pocket.”
I unsnapped my jeans and pulled down the zipper while she fished out the condom and tossed my wallet to the floor. She paused, about to rip it open, and watched me free my cock from my underwear. I gave myself a quick, rough tug and she licked her lips.
“Hannah, if you don’t stop licking your lips, I’m going to fuck your mouth instead of your pussy,” I gritted out. I was so hard now it hurt. “Condom. Put it on me.”
“Oh! Right.”
She rolled it over my length and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from coming from the pressure of her hand.
The second we were both protected, I pushed her panties aside and slammed into her so hard her ass slid back an inch on the slick laminate countertop. I looped an arm around her waist to keep her where I wanted her and stretched my other arm to the far side of the counter.
“Hold on to me, honey,” I murmured against her lips, and she did, wrapping her legs around my hips and her arms around my neck.
I fucked her hard and rough. Sweat beaded on my forehead, my thighs shook, and all I could hear was the sweet little moans Hannah made and the sound of flesh slapping against flesh. Pleasure crested fast, but I didn’t even try to fight the wave of it. I let it take me, stifling my shout against her neck.
It took me a second to catch my breath after that, and when I did, I realized Hannah was still clinging to me, every muscle in her sweet body strung tighter than a guitar string.
“You want a little more, duchess?” I nuzzled her neck. “I’ll stay just like this. And if you want to, you can put your fingers on your clit and give it a rub. Wouldn’t that feel nice?”
She didn’t say anything, but I felt her shift. She left one hand on my shoulder and slid the second down to where we were still joined. I remembered what she said about she said about eye contact and feeling breath on her neck so I held mine in tight. I needed Hannah to feel good more than I needed air.
It only took a second before her nails dug into my shoulder and her body shuddered. I let out the breath I’d been holding in a slow exhale and pulled fresh air into my lungs. Then I did it again.
It felt like the first full breath I’d taken in months.