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He grunted and shook his head. “Come on.” Then he walked away from the house toward a mammoth, pristine white barn.
“This is Cletus,” he said opening a box stall.
Inside was what Christine considered to be a very big—strike that, an exceptionally huge—brown horse.
“Does he bite?” She could have kicked herself, but the question was out before she could stop it. Talk about sounding green.
“Only blondes,” Jake said, leveling her a look. “But since you’ll be on his back, you should be safe.”
Her stomach sank toward her knees as she looked up the broad length of him. But she smiled. “Oh. Well. Good.”
Jake studied her face. “You have ridden, right?”
“Sure. Lots of times.” Why was she playing this game? What did she think it was going to net her?
A broken neck, probably, but something about his smug attitude just wouldn’t allow her to let him see that she was scared senseless.
“You two get to know each other,” Jake said. “I’ll go get my mount.”
“Good. Great. I’ll be fine,” she said, lying through her teeth. “Nice…horse,” she whispered when Jake was out of her line of sight. “Be nice, okay? I brought you something.”
Again, because she’d figured a ride might be what Jake had in mind, she’d hedged her bets. She fished into her hip pocket and pulled out a sugar lump. She’d heard that horses like sugar.
She’d heard right. Cletus went for the sugar like a bear after honey. It was icky feeding it to him. He snuffled all over her palm before finally lipping the sweet treat into his mouth. When he was finished, he lowered his head and nudged her hip pocket where she’d tucked the rest of the sugar, evidently smelling it there.
“Okay, okay,” she said, laughing in spite of herself, and gave him another hit. “Now we’re friends, right?”
In answer, the horse nipped at her pocket.
“Hey,” she sputtered, stepping back. “Easy on the jeans.”
“They as new as your boots?” Jake asked, startling her as he walked down the aisle of the barn, a big buckskin in tow.
She manufactured a smile. “You’re right about the biting thing.”
His blue eyes pinned hers in the dimly lit barn. “Any guy is liable to bite if a woman has something in her pants that he wants.”
Oh. My. This must be where the walk on the wild side came in. He was letting her know. You came out here to learn, and I’m just the man to teach you.
“Busted,” she said, conceding that he’d caught her with the sugar but not going anywhere near the sexual innuendo. “Who knew he’d be such a glutton?”
“Offer me sugar. See what kind of a glutton I become.”
He gave her another one of those long, smoldering looks that held undertones of all kinds of gluttony, along with shades of warning. She actually thought about turning tail and running as fast and as far as her new red boots would take her.
The old Christine would have run. The new one followed him as he led the two horses out of the barn and into the moonlight.
“Come on. I’ll help you up into the saddle,” Jake offered. “Cletus is long on leg, and you’re just a little short on one end. Um, you always mount from the left, Chrissie.”
Face flaming red, Christine walked back around to the horse’s left side. “I knew that. I was just checking out the, um, stirrup.”
“Sure you were,” he said. “Now grab the saddle horn. It’s that tall thing right behind the mane and in front of the seat,” he added with another shake of his head.
“Well, if I could reach it, it would help,” she sputtered, angry with herself for not being better informed and angry with him for knowing it. “Oh, whoa.” The next thing she knew, she was airborne.
Jake’s strong hands had gripped her around the waist, lifted her up and deposited her on the saddle like a sack of potatoes.
“Here are your reins,” he said when she’d managed to push herself to a sitting position. Problem was, she was gripping the saddle horn for dear life and didn’t have any intention of letting go, even if it was to take the reins.
“What’s he doing?” she asked, near panic when the big body between her legs seemed to pitch and roll like a ship in a rough sea.
“Shifting his weight from one back leg to the other,” Jake said, grinning openly now. “You ready to give up the pretense?”
“Yes,” she all but whined. “Am I going to get hurt?”
He chuckled. “Not on Cletus. He’s a pussycat. And you nailed his soft spot with the sugar, so he’s not going to take a chance of dumping you because you have his sugar stash. Just sit easy, rock with the motion and trust him to take you where we want to go.”
Trust. There was that word again. And that was what this was all about.
“Well, then, yee haw,” she said and smiled when it made him chuckle.
Jake mounted up and they were on the move. The night was warm. The wind that usually kicked up during the day in this part of Texas had mellowed to a breeze. It played gently with her hair, cooling her skin yet somehow warming the night.
Or maybe it was the fear of falling off the horse that made her so warm. More likely it was the prospect of what the evil twin had in mind. Cletus proved to be a real gentleman as he plodded along beneath the stars. So far Jake had been a gentleman, too. Despite the temperature of the night, despite the blanket of stars shining down, she shivered in anticipation of what he had in mind for lesson number two. In all likelihood, being a gentleman was the furthest thing from his mind.
“Greenhorns,” Jake sputtered good-naturedly an hour later when he helped Christine down out of the saddle. “How can you live in Texas and be such a greenhorn?”
“Not all of Texas is yippee-yi-yo-ki-yay land, you know,” she grumbled. “I grew up in Houston. We had cars.”
Cute. She was too cute. And a little sore, if Jake didn’t miss his guess. But she was game, he’d give her that. Once she’d found her seat, she’d taken to the midnight ride like a trooper.
Of course, he never would have paired her with a horse that would have placed her in any danger. Old Cle-tus was pushing twenty-five, and if a random thought of bucking ever did cross the old boy’s mind, Jake was confident it would get lost somewhere between Cle-tus’s head and the execution. So, no, Christine had never been in any danger.
At least, not from the horse.
Not for the first time he told himself that what he had planned was not a good idea. But it would work, if it didn’t backfire on him.
“So, is this like a rest stop?” she asked, tugging down on the thighs of her jeans as if they’d crept up and into places they didn’t belong.
Places he’d noticed. Places he’d been thinking about way too much as he’d ridden in relative silence beside her, a silence broken only by his limited advice on the finer points of riding and his reassurances that no, Cle-tus had no intentions of bucking.
He’d noticed other things, as well. Like the way the starlight shined on her silver-gold hair. Like how cute she looked in those ridiculous boots and how tiny her waist was with her white tank top tucked into her jeans.
Who knew that Miss Chrissie was the complete package? Who could have possibly known? If he hadn’t seen her dressed to kill Saturday night, if he hadn’t felt all those sexy curves against him when they’d kissed—twice now—he never would have guessed it. She’d seemed to make it a mission to disguise that she was even remotely feminine—even though he’d seen glimpses of the china doll lurking beneath all that starch.
Hell, it had crossed his mind a time or two that, as prickly as she was toward him, maybe she played for the other team. He’d never seen her with a guy, never heard of her dating. In fact, when he did see her, she was either alone or with a friend. So, yeah, it had crossed his mind that maybe it wasn’t just him that turned her off but that women turned her on. Not that there was anything wrong with that. But, man, what a waste, he thought, watching her now as she stretched her arms above her head and worked out some of the kinks.
Now he knew for sure that she definitely liked the opposite sex. No woman could kiss him the way she had and not be totally into it. It shouldn’t have made him so happy because tonight, after all, wasn’t about seducing her. Tonight was about scaring her back to where she didn’t want to come within ten feet of him except to hurl insults.
Yeah. Tonight was about reestablishing distance, because distance was the best thing he could give her.
“Come on,” he said, leading his gelding by the reins. “Let’s walk over this rise.”
“Oh,” she said when she saw what was on the other side of the small hill. “It’s beautiful.”
The little man-made lake was, for a fact, pretty in the moonlight. But Jake had confidence that what he was about to suggest was going to put the prissy back in Chrissie and that there wasn’t enough “pretty” in the world to entice her to do it.
And then life, as he knew it where she was concerned, could get back to normal.
“So, Chrissie,” he said oh-so casually, “let’s lose the duds. We’re going skinny-dipping.”
He could have sworn he heard a teeny, tiny “Help” from her as he hung his hat on a low-hanging branch of a nearby tree.
And when he reached for his belt buckle, he knew he heard one.
Her eyes were as big as dinner plates when he turned toward her.
“Skinny-dipping?”
“As you ordered,” he said, undoing the buckle and the metal button on his waistband. “Lesson number two.”
He almost felt sorry for her—almost—as he slid down his zipper then tugged his shirttails free. “Any walk on the wild side has to include a midnight dip.”
“N-n-nude?” she squeaked out as he shucked his shirt and tossed it to the ground.
“Naturally,” he said, sitting on the ground to tug off his boots and socks. When he stood again, he was wearing nothing but his jeans and a smile. “You’re falling behind, sweet cheeks,” he said and dropped the jeans.
Her little gasp was punctuated by a small, lingering “Oh” that escaped like a sigh.
He gave her a good eyeful, liking a little too much the way her nervous gaze flitted from his face to his chest to his face again, then to his groin—which was liking the way she looked at him a little too much, too. Mixed in with the fear and surprise in her expression was a very female appreciation.
“Time’s a-wastin’,” he said and showed her his back—just a little too late to hide what her hot looks had done to him. He walked to the bank, waded to midthigh before executing a shallow dive. Like it or not, he needed cooling off. The look in her eyes had heated him to the point of boiling.
When he surfaced, she was still standing on shore, looking exactly the way he thought she’d look—ready to bolt. Which was exactly what he wanted her to do. Nip this nonsense in the bud, that’s what he planned on. A little more goading ought to do the trick.
“How come you’ve still got your clothes on?”
“I…um…isn’t it cold?”
“Nah.” He wiped his wet hair out of his eyes. “Just right.”
She glanced toward Cletus and he thought, Go for it. You know you want to.
“Tell you what,” he said, standing chest-deep in the water. “I’ll count to three, then you make your choice. Either ditch the duds and join me, honey, or hightail it on back to the house and we’ll forget this ever happened. Cletus knows his way back to the barn.”
“One,” he said and watched her bite her lower lip between her teeth.
“Two.” Go ahead, darlin’. Get out of here.
“Three.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and he thought, Bye-bye. Until she reached for the hem of her top.
“Oh, hell,” he muttered when the shirt came off. And then all he could think was, Oh, hello.
Skinny-dipping. It always sounded so…playful. But what it was was intimate, Christine thought as she sat on the bank in her bra and jeans and tugged off her boots. It meant getting naked. In this case, it meant getting naked with a man.
Not just a man. A beautiful, well-conditioned, amazing specimen of a man who didn’t think twice about stripping to the skin and flaunting himself in front of her.
Well, she wasn’t a flaunter. Heck, sometimes she still undressed in the dark. And it may be well after midnight, but with the cloudless sky and the full moon and complement of stars shining down, it was far from dark out here. As a matter of fact, she felt as though she had a spotlight shining directly on her body.
Don’t think about it, she told herself. Just do it. It’s what you want. It’s what you need to do if you’re ever going to break the pattern.
Mouth pinched in determination, she finished pulling off her boots and socks, then stood and, with her back to the pond, unzipped and stepped out of her jeans. At the last minute, she reached into a pocket of her jeans and took out one of the packets of protection that Alison—dear, sweet, conscientious Alison—had pressed into her hand earlier today with a smile and a “Just in case.”
With a deep breath Christine turned to face Jake and slowly walked toward the water.
“Nope,” he said in that gruff, velvet drawl. “All of it or it doesn’t count.”
So much for hoping he’d overlook the underwear.
“Turn around,” she said.
“Not on your life.” His voice was sexy and low.
Another deep breath and she reached behind to unhook her bra. She couldn’t look at him, but she knew he was watching. It was so quiet, she could hear the soft ebb and flow of his arms as he glided them slowly back and forth through the water. So quiet, she could hear her heartbeat and the soft snuffle of the horses where they grazed on the grass nearby.
She let her bra drop to the ground by her jeans, but she held her forearm over her breasts. She couldn’t help it. One-handed, she tugged down her panties, stepped out of them, then tried to look casual as she covered the important parts below her waist with her other hand.
If he laughed, if he so much as snickered, she was going to drown herself.
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t snicker. He didn’t make a sound.
In fact, even the sound of his arms skimming the water had stopped.
She took another deep breath and looked up. Met his eyes. And almost lost her breath.
He was just standing there. Not even smiling. His eyes were hooded with shadows, but even so, she knew his gaze was locked on her. Only when he swallowed and she saw the muscles work in his throat did she realize that he was as riveted by the moment as she was. She felt a power surge sweep through her again.
Feel the power, girl. Use it.
Buoyed by the memory of Alison’s words, she stood straighter. And slowly lowered her hands.
This time it was his breath that caught. This time it was Jake doing the appreciating, as she’d appreciated the fluid muscle, the lean lines, the impressive part of his anatomy that distinguished him as a man.
She knew that he liked what he saw. When he took a step toward her as though it was involuntary, she knew that he loved what he saw. For the first time in her life she felt like celebrating the fact that she was a woman—a woman who intuitively sensed that this moment with this man was going to change her life.
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