Rugged Cowboys (Western Romance Collection) Page 8

  He groans into her throat as her hand finds the hardness inside his jeans, his hips pressing mindlessly into her palm in an animal effort to find whatever pleasure that his body can take.

  The strap of her dress gets shifted off her shoulder and he pulls out a plump breast, pulling the tight nub of her nipple between his teeth. The pressure of arousal inside her, already too much to bear, continues to grow until it's all that she can think about, consuming all her thoughts and her entire world.

  And then, as suddenly as she realizes her need, and as incapable as she is of fighting it, he stops. His breaths come hard and ragged, and she leans in to take his lips back. His hand presses into her chest and holds her back.

  "No," he says. She stops.

  "What's wrong?"

  He looks down at her. She can see the arousal still in his eyes. She can see the way that his eyes linger on her bare breast, the way that he toys with the idea of picking right back up where they left off.

  And then, very carefully, he pulls the strap of her dress back up, slips the fabric back into place.

  "I'm sorry. We shouldn't have done this."

  Her teeth grind together. "What's wrong?"

  "All of this. We shouldn't have done any of it."

  Her body wants to scream. Her mind wants to scream. And more than that, her pride isn't exactly enjoying it, either.

  "So, what, then?"

  "Nothing. You should go."

  She takes a step back. "Yeah, I guess I should."

  "Are you alright to drive?"

  "I'm fine," she says. She never wanted anyone's pity. Pity makes her sick. But worse than that is pity from him. Pity right as she's being told that she can't be trusted to make her own decisions.

  She stalks off to her car. The door slides open easily, and she lowers herself into the seat.

  "Morgan, I—"

  "I get it. Don't worry about it. I understand completely."

  And the truth is that she does understand. There's no part of her that doesn't get why he's pulling back. But that doesn't change how she feels, and it doesn't change how badly the need had effected her.

  She was an idiot for putting herself in this position. An idiot. But at least she was an honest idiot, right? That's what counted.

  "I'll talk to you tomorrow, maybe. In a couple of days." Her voice sounds hard. She sounds like she's being a bitch, and if she could stop it, then she would. But she can't.

  "Okay. Drive safe."

  She will. Or she won't. "Sure."

  The car growls softly as she drives it away. It seems so easy when she's doing it. When the car moves, it moves on its own. It doesn't back off at the last second. It doesn't leave her in a frustrated mess in the middle of god damned Wyoming.

  But he's made his decision, and she's going to respect it. Regardless of whether or not she likes it.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It's not like they were going to get another chance to screw around trying to ride that horse, and the more saddle-broken the Black was, the better for the final sale.

  And since Philip Callahan was in no mood to do any real work today, they might as well be allowed to have their fun. James was up on the horse this time. The Black tried to kick him off for a minute, but the attempts were getting fewer and shorter by the minute. Soon, no doubt, it wouldn't fight them so much as ignore them to start off.

  Callahan leaned up against the fence and watched. Too old to be doing that kind of crazy shit—if he got knocked off the way they kept getting knocked around, he'd have a broken rib in no time flat.

  James gets the stallion running. His hair whips back in the wind. The look on his face is sheer enjoyment. That's how it is, though, when you're riding a horse that's fast as lightning.

  He does a couple quick, easy laps around the yard, then draws the horse up back near the stables and hops off.

  Randy's turn again. He scrambles up, a little taller than his brothers and his legs a little longer, so he sits higher in the saddle. The black jogs a little sideways. Maybe if he can just, slip the saddle a little, it'll come right off.

  But it doesn't. Of course it doesn't. If he wasn't a horse, and built with a horse's mind, there wouldn't have been any question.

  The youngest gets the horse going. Faster. He carries his weight low, but with his hips raised off the saddle, to cushion. Apparently, now that it's not a rodeo every lunch hour, it's time to move from rodeo star to professional jockey. Though, who ever heard of a six-one jockey—that much he apparently wasn't thinking too hard about.

  Not that Callahan would blame him. You want to have fun, you have fun. Doesn't matter if you're in a position to seriously make an attempt at doing it professionally, after all.

  If you had to be a pro at something to do it, well… Callahan would probably still be working this ranch, to be honest. Those boys, though, they'd be doing something else entirely. Took them almost a year to be real good at what they were doing.

  They followed orders, from what he could see, almost as well as Morgan did. She was a fiery woman, and she had real trouble with authority. Then again, when you're the boss, it's easy to ignore trouble with authority. She is the authority, and anyone questioning her is the one with an authority problem.

  Like that kid, whatever his name was. Brad or something. Problem with authority. He seemed for all the world to think that he was in charge of the place. Well, the minute that the trucks say 'Brad or Whatever' on the side of 'em, he can be in charge.

  Until then, he can do his job. Which is exactly the lesson that the brothers had learned. Not that Callahan made learning easy on them.

  It's easy to work for someone who's a hard-ass. Philip's father had been that way, before he passed. Ranching was a hard life, and he'd been a man who didn't want to shield anyone—least of all his son—from that.

  No, he'd come right out and tell you, and if you couldn't cut it, he'd tell you that, too. Which made him a hard man to have as a father, but he was an easy man to work for.

  You never got confused about where the line was between the work and his personal feelings. In his case, because there was nothing but the work. You don't joke around, you don't laugh with the guy. You get to work, and he gets to work, and in the end you get a lot done.

  And then, twenty years later, you bury him in the ground with not much to say about the man except for the good work he did, and that he left behind a solid ranch.

  Phil wasn't that kind of boss, though maybe he should have been. After all, the boys weren't his sons. Someone else's, though he'd never met their father and likely never would. They weren't in that kind of position, after all.

  Nobody was, not when the man was outside of anyone's reach as far as Callahan was aware. They'd never mentioned him and if he didn't miss his guess, they never would mention him.

  Callahan closes his eyes a minute. He's got way too much on the brain today. Too many thoughts running through his head on repeat. And the biggest one is trying to figure out what in the hell he was thinking last night.

  What in the hell Morgan had been thinking. They weren't dating. They weren't even really seeing each other. They'd fallen into bed together by accident, one time, and now he'd let things go too far at a dinner that was, by all accounts, only there for them to discuss business plans.

  She'd come to him with something she needed done, and he'd apparently decided that it was open season on the poor woman.

  If she wasn't happy about the way things had gone—and from all he could tell, she most certainly wasn't—then it was only because he'd given her the wrong idea. Because he'd let things get that far.

  But it was one thing to be able to say, well, I made a mistake—I was a little drunk.

  It's another to take advantage of a woman's situation and do it knowing full well what you're doing as you're doing it.

  That's another thing entirely, and Philip doesn't want to see himself as that kind of man. Maybe he had made a mistake. Maybe he'd make plenty more mistakes in hi
s time.

  But he wasn't going to go to bed with a woman who'd just want to forget about it in the morning. Worse, though he doesn't want to think about her that way, is the idea that she wouldn't want to forget. She'd want to remember, but not because she was looking for a relationship.

  After all, she had told him why they were going out. It wasn't on a date, it wasn't to get to know each other. She'd wanted to go out to talk about business.

  Business. It was something that he knew pretty well. He'd had to deal with it for a long time. Now he'd done a real good job fucking that up.

  Business and dating aren't the same thing. What's worse, they rarely mix. When they do mix, they mix to everyone's detriment. So in the first place, he's barking up the wrong tree. But the temptation is just a little too real.

  Callahan takes a deep breath. he made a mistake last night, but he's not going to have a woman finishing off a business dinner with the first part of his payment.

  If it's because she wants him, then she can want all she likes. But if it's anything else—he'd rather not.

  And there's never been any sign that he's anything other than fooling himself thinking there's going to be anything else on her mind.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Morgan Lowe isn't thinking too hard about what she's doing. It's an old trick that she's learned over the years. As long as she doesn't think it through, she doesn't have to face the fact that she's making a big mistake.

  Maybe going to the ranch was a mistake. There were plenty of reasons that she hadn't gone sooner after their last… interlude. Plenty of reasons.

  And yet, here she was now, and here she was going to be as long as she could.

  Her stomach twists and flips in her gut. Once she got home—and, she adds surreptitiously, after she took care of her little problem—it was dead easy to understand what had happened. She shouldn't have expected any different.

  How sketchy was it, exactly, to be looking into buying a man's land, and then try to slot yourself right into his bed? With an objective lens, it was easy to see that she must have seemed like she was trying to seduce him.

  The problem was, she hadn't been looking at it objectively before that. It was actually the first time she'd even considered the idea for a moment. Which is to say, it was a big surprise, even if it shouldn't have been.

  Morgan's head feels light from the embarrassment. You always make mistakes. That's true in business, and it's even more true in life. But you get over them—eventually, if you're lucky.

  Well, Morgan wasn't lucky, but she was prepared to deal with the fallout from her actions. And thanks to her business career, she was also prepared to make the first move.

  She wanted the land, and that wasn't going to change. But the days spent with Philip Callahan were among the better days since her father left the company and left her alone almost six months ago.

  Was she willing to trade that for a business win?

  Morgan's throat tightens and her breath catches in it. She eases the car onto the old dirt road that leads past the Callahan ranch. If she gets the land, she'll have to renovate it, put in a blacktop road surface.

  The place isn't busy. It never is. Who would come here? Maybe someone looking to buy a horse, but it's doubtful that there would be a good deal of media attention, and it's doubtful that you would have more than one or two people coming at a time.

  Which means that, fundamentally, it's never 'busy,' not in the sense that places in Vegas are busy. There's work being done, but it's not the kind you see from the street.

  What is less usual, though, is the fact that there's nobody visible from the front. Neither Philip nor the boys are working in the yard. The horses aren't out in the yard.

  And, more noticeable, none of the vehicles are there. It's easy to jump to conclusions, to say that they must be out. That there must be some other place that they've gone. Maybe they're picking up feed.

  Not likely that anyone would need four people to do it. Probably, it just gets forklifted up into the bed of the truck, and they unload it at their leisure when they get back.

  It's possible, though, that there's something else going on entirely. Maybe they're doing work with heavy stuff, in the back of the yard. Where she can't see. The property is ten acres or more; she's not going to see the whole thing from the seat of a sports car, her head no higher than a man's waist.

  She slips out. Either she's the only one here, and they're off somewhere mysterious, or all she has to do is just look around and she'll see them. Either way, it can't hurt to get out and stretch her legs.

  From higher up, she's able to get a little angle on the rest of the ranch. And again, she's able to confirm—there's nobody here. At least, nobody that she can see.

  Morgan lets out a breath. Well, if higher can see better, it doesn't take long to figure out where the best vantage point is going to be. The hill. The one with the little sapling on top of it. That's where the best view is going to be.

  It's not a long walk. It's only a hundred feet past the house, after all. Five minutes. The soft grass beneath her feet crackles a bit, a little dry from the lack of rain the past couple days.

  As she gets closer, the hill looms a little larger. It seemed like a real small hill from far away, but it might be twenty feet up. She scrambles up the side, the last little bit steep enough that her shoes threaten to slip off with little or no purchase.

  But once she's up, she's got a good view of the ranch. She can see all the way down the road, all the way to where the country road turns off the main road and breaks suddenly through the Callahan land.

  She follows that line with her eyes. She can almost make out, a few miles down, a second house. That one is owned by Lowe, now. It's not going to mean a hell of a lot without Callahan's ranch, but when they've got the entire block…

  Well, it's something for later. The road disappears behind the house into a speck too small to see clearly from this distance.

  The view is amazing, from up here. Anything a person can see, she can see that far. Like the entire hill captures all the nature around her, and captures the way that the Callahan ranch works with it, around it, and sometimes, against it.

  The entire thing is a little humbling. As it always is, but this time is special. This time, she's not thinking about how she can make this space into hers. Not right now.

  Once the papers are signed and the ink is dry, she can think about how she's going to set this land up. But right now, all she's doing is admiring the natural beauty. And oh, how abundant it is.

  Morgan turns further. No matter where she looks, there's no one there. A whole lot of nothing going on. Something below her vision, though, catches her eye. A pair of stones, set into the ground. There's no dirt or dust on them. Last time it rained, some mud would probably have splashed on them, which means that more than likely, they've been cleaned.

  The larger reads "Sara Callahan, beloved wife." A pair of dates thirty-two years apart. Morgan's stomach twists up. She shouldn't be here, after all. She should be out of here. She's not just trespassing on Philip's land. This is a private place. A sick, twisting worry in the pit of her stomach forces her to look at the second plate.

  "In Loving Memory," the top line reads. The second, in larger letters: "Roy Callahan." The first and the second dates are the same. It tells her all she needs to know. And it tells her something else.

  It tells her what she should've known all along. What her father must have known, whether by doing his research or on instinct or by sheer luck—

  She shouldn't be here at all. No matter what she does, Philip Callahan's not going to sell the land. This is his place, and he's not going to leave for anything.

  And more than that, she shouldn't come back.

  Because as much as she's liked the time that she's spent with him, she's already intruded enough.

  Her stomach twists up and for a moment she has to check herself before she loses her fight against panic.

  And then she's sl
ipping down the side of the hill and taking her footing, and going back where she belongs. Anywhere but here.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Randy looks strange, lying there in the bed. He's got three inches on Phil Callahan, who'd never thought of himself as short, and he's as strong as the ranch owner ever was. He's got the advantage in terms of age, though, after all.

  And yet, now Callahan stands over him, broad-shouldered and stable and he has to keep his face a from getting a little twisted up, because Randy looks like he's practically withered since they were horsing around that morning.

  Horses can kick like a son of a bitch, and that Black was always a danger. He was a smart kid, and knew better that to get behind an ornery stallion. But sometimes, it happens, even when you make your best efforts to avoid it. And that's what had happened this time. Nothing to be done about it.

  Callahan's gut feels like it's threatening to turn itself inside out, right there on the floor in front of all of them, but there's nothing else that he can do but do but watch. He's no doctor, after all.

  It could have been worse. It could have been so much worse. It could have been his head. It could have been his neck. A kick in the back, it could mean any number of things.

  It was tempting to tell himself that the kick missed the kid's spine. It was awful tempting indeed. He re-played the scene in his mind, over and over again, and it looked like it did. Looked like it hit below the shoulder blade. Right in the meaty part of his back.

  But what if he was wrong? What if he was just a little bit wrong, off by a couple of scant inches?

  Well, then it is a very different thing. The boys sit. Whatever their nerves are telling them, whatever they're thinking, they've both settled into their chairs, like stony-faced twins.

  Except, of course, that it'd take an idiot not to see that James is taking it worse. He's hiding it as best he can. His jaw tightens and he keeps it tight. By itself, that helps to hide the panic in his eyes.