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“I think it’s more like the other thing you said we could become.”
“Frenemies?”
“That’s it. I’ll pick you up tomorrow around two. I have some work to do on the ranch before then. But for now, we both need to get some sleep.”
Yes, they did, she thought, each of them in his or her own bed. “I’ll see you.” Libby bid him a hasty goodbye, opened the passenger’s-side door and darted off, clinging to the shadows, trying to be less visible. She sensed that he was watching every move she made.
Was he still thinking sexy thoughts? Did he wish that he’d kissed her? That he’d pulled her body close to his? That he’d put his mouth all over hers?
She ascended her porch steps without glancing back. Self-conscious, she fumbled putting the key in the lock. She went inside, and as soon as she closed the door, she crept over to the living room window and peered through the blinds.
Matt remained in his truck, a lone figure behind the wheel.
She kept spying on him, holding her breath, anxious to see him walk to his door. He finally got out of the vehicle, taking long determined strides. She watched, absorbed by his rugged movements, breathless for every dizzying moment until he entered his cabin and turned on his lights.
Leaving her alone in the dark.
* * *
The next afternoon, Libby waited on her porch for Matt. She’d dressed down a bit, wearing a plaid shirt, blue jeans and a pair of traditional brown boots. Of course, her belt buckle was shiny and so was her jewelry. She never left the house without a touch of glamour.
She removed her phone from her purse and checked the time. Matt wasn’t late, but he was cutting it close. And now, in the light of day, with nothing between them except last night’s convoluted hunger, she was concerned that he might cancel their outing.
She frowned at her phone. They hadn’t even exchanged numbers. She couldn’t text him to see if he was on his way.
He hadn’t told her what type of work he had to do on the ranch today, and when she’d awakened this morning his truck was already gone. She hadn’t seen him at the lodge during breakfast or lunch, either.
Funny how she missed him already. She’d known him all of three days, and her interactions with him were shaky, at best. There was no logic in missing him.
Missing Becker made sense.
She kept tons of pictures of her late husband on her phone. Her son loved looking at them. He adored chatting about his daddy and asking Libby questions about him. Chance was three when Becker died. He didn’t have many memories to rely on.
She plopped down on a barrel chair to wait for Matt. She hadn’t mentioned her son’s name to him. Maybe she would do that today. Of course, she doubted that Matt was going to like that she’d named her son Chance Mitchell after a fictitious character, a legendary outlaw, in one of Kirby’s most famous songs.
She looked up and saw Matt’s truck. It appeared out of a cloud of dust, and she popped up from her seat. The man certainly knew how to make an entrance.
She glanced at her phone before she put it away. He was right on time. Not a minute late, not a second early. Somehow he managed to get there at 2:00 p.m. on the dot.
He pulled into her driveway and kept the engine running. She raced down the porch steps, her hair flying. She’d washed it this morning with her latest favorite shampoo. She changed her toiletries nearly as often as she changed her clothes. She liked trying new products. She wasn’t nearly as adventurous about trying new men. Yet here she was, getting swept away by Matt.
She climbed into his truck, and he said, “Hey, Libby.”
“Hey, yourself.” She noticed that his hat was sitting in the back seat, as it were along for the ride.
Off they went, with the sun shining in the Texas sky. She gazed out the window, watching the landscape go by. The drive was long and scenic, with roads that wound through the hills.
“This is the back way,” he said.
“I gathered as much.” They weren’t on the main highway that led to and from the ranch.
In the next bout of silence, she studied Matt’s appearance. His hair looked mussed, spiky in spots from where he’d probably dragged his hands through it. He seemed dangerous, forbidden. But why wouldn’t he, with the way he made her feel? Last night she’d slept with her bedroom window open, letting the breeze drift over her half-clothed body. She’d gone to bed wearing the panties he’d wondered about. She’d even touched herself, sliding her fingers past the waistband and down into the fabric, fantasizing that he was doing it.
Matt shot her a quick glance, and her cheeks went horribly hot. He couldn’t know what she’d been thinking, but she reacted as if he did.
“You okay?” he asked.
Not in the least, she thought. “I’m fine.”
“You’re usually more talkative.”
She adjusted the air-conditioning vent on her side, angling it to get a stronger flow. “You don’t know me well enough to say what I usually do.”
“All right, then. Based on my experiences with you, you’re usually more talkative.”
“I’m just enjoying the ride.”
“You don’t seem like you are. What are you thinking about?”
She couldn’t stand the tension that was building inside her. And now she wanted him to suffer, too. He was being too danged casual. “That they were pink.”
“What?”
“My panties. They were pink, low-rise hipsters, silk, with a see-through lace panel in front.”
He nearly lost his grip on the wheel, and she felt a whole lot better. She even managed to toss a “got ya” grin at him.
“Don’t you flash your dimples at me, woman. You could have gotten us killed.”
“Over an itty-bitty pair of panties? You’re a better driver than that.”
He focused on looking out the windshield.
She tortured him some more. “I have a similar pair on now. Only they’re blue.”
His breath went choppy. “I’m going to strangle you. I swear I am.”
“I’m just getting you in the mood for the cookie you were hankering for.”
“Knock it off.” He took a bend in the road. “Just stop yapping about it.”
She sat smugly in her seat, grateful her tactic had worked. She needed to take charge, to feel strong and powerful in his presence. “You wanted me to be more talkative.”
“You think I’m kidding about strangling you?” His tone turned feral. “Or maybe I ought to kiss you instead.”
Oh, my God. Now she’d gone and done it. She’d awakened the predator in him. His lips, she noticed, were twisted into a snarl. “You look more like you’re going to bite me.”
“That’ll work, too. But I’m not going to do either.”
Libby didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. Her heart was practically leaping out of her chest.
“We’re almost there,” he said, changing the subject.
“Almost where?”
“At my old house. You asked to see it.”
“It’s way out here?” She’d assumed it was on the outskirts of town, but she hadn’t expected it to be this far out.
He veered onto a dirt road, and she craned her neck to get a better look. A lovely stone house, a miniranch of sorts, sat in a canyon all by itself.
He stopped at the top of the road, where a private gate blocked them from going any farther.
“Who lives there now?” she asked.
“The people Mom rents it to. They raise paint horses. We had a little breeding farm, too. Mom called it Canyon Farms then.”
“It’s so isolated.”
“Kirby built it for Mom when I was a baby.” His tone turned pensive. “Mom was originally from Austin, and her parents had passed away about three years before, so she was alone, except for me. She liked this area. Her folks used to bring her here on camping trips. It held nice memories for her. So when Kirby offered to buy her a place, she asked him if it could be in Creek Hill.”
“Did she want to be this far from town?” Libby glanced around again. “Just the two of you, in the middle of a canyon?”
“Not necessarily. It was Kirby who chose this location, so he could visit without anyone seeing him coming and going. It was mostly at night since that’s the schedule he was used to keeping. It continued on that way, even as I got older. I remember how Mom would fuss over him on the nights he came by, as if he was royalty.” Matt made a disgusted sound. “What did he tell you about his relationship with my mother?”
“He said that she’s the longest mistress he ever had. That it ended when you were around twelve.” A clandestine affair for over a decade, she thought. Libby couldn’t fathom subjecting herself to something like that. But it wasn’t her place to judge Kirby or Matt’s mother or anyone else.
“She was foolish enough to remain faithful to him, even when she knew that he had other mistresses or girlfriends or whatever. And then there was his wife and other children. The family he was protecting.” Matt’s expression went taut. “In the beginning I didn’t know he was my father. Mom just told me that he was her friend. I was too young to recognize him or know that he was famous.” He roughly added, “I’m not telling you this so you can feel bad for me. I’m telling you because I want you to know the kind of man Kirby really is, to get a better idea of who you’re working for.”
“I know who he is.” She wasn’t going to hold Kirby’s mistakes against him, not when he was trying, with all of his heart, to repair the damage he’d done. “And I know how badly he wants to make amends with you.”
Matt squinted at her. “I started to suspect that he was my dad even before Mom told me that he was. This tall, bearded man in a long black duster, this larger-than-life guy. He never got up before noon, but Mom would still cook him breakfast food, treating the afternoons as if they were mornings. Sometimes he would even sit at the table with his sunglasses on. I’d never seen anyone do that indoors before. I knew he was different from other people. I just didn’t know how different. But either way, he was just too important to my mother, too revered, I figured, for him to be someone other than my father. Once I learned the truth, I accepted it as the status quo.”
“You must have been a highly observant child.”
“Yes, but I was ridiculously impressionable, too. Kirby told me once that I looked like I was part wolf, and I figured my eyes were this color because I was supposed to be nocturnal, the way he was. But I’d get so sleepy when he first arrived at night and I was waiting up to see him. I didn’t understand how I could be part wolf if I couldn’t stay up at night.”
“Your eyes are beautiful.” Mesmerizing, she thought. Hypnotizing. She could stare at them for hours.
He scoffed at her compliment. “They’re weird, and you’re missing my point.”
“No, I’m not.” She understood what he was trying to convey. How lonely Kirby had made him feel. How he needed to be part of the daylight, where fathers took their sons out in public, where there were no secrets, where normalcy existed. “It was wrong, what he did to you. I’m not denying that.” And neither was Kirby. He knew, better than anyone, how terribly he’d hurt Matt.
“I was taught to tell people that my daddy was a cowboy drifter and that my mom never even knew his real name.” A sharp laugh rattled from his throat. “Even now, if someone asks about my father, I still recount that same fake story.”
“Does your mother’s husband know the truth?”
“She couldn’t bear to keep lying to him, so she told him right before they got married. Of course, it’s only been a few months, so they’re still in the honeymoon stages. But he would never betray her trust. Or mine. He stays out of our personal business.”
“What about your ex?” Libby thought about his marriage and how quickly it had ended. “Did you ever tell her?”
“No.”
“Did you ever want to tell her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because being Kirby’s son doesn’t matter to me, and I didn’t want it to matter to her, either. Besides, we had other things to contend with.” He searched Libby’s gaze, as if he were searching for someone’s grave. “Did you know that she was a widow? Like you?”
“It came up in my research.” But Libby hadn’t expected him to make a comparison in such a disturbing way. “According to what I uncovered, her name is Sandra Molloy, and she and her first husband had two kids and owned the dry cleaner’s in town.” It wasn’t much to go on, but it was the only information she had.
“She went by Sandy, and she sold that business when she married me. She cried about her husband nearly every day. Do you still think about your husband?”
“Of course I do.” Libby glanced away, wishing that Matt would stop staring at her. “But I’ve come to terms with my grief.” With the tears and pain, with waking up alone. “I’m not letting it rule my life.”
“Then why can I see him, like a ghost inside you?”
“You don’t even know what he looks like.”
“I didn’t mean it literally.”
She thought about the images of Becker on her phone. The happy, smiling, easygoing father of her child. He was so different from Matt. “You’re just seeing what you want to see.”
“Why would I want to see something like that when I look at you? When I’m this close—” he created a tiny space between his thumb and forefinger “—to giving up the fight and kissing you?”
“Then do it, damn you. Just do it.” She didn’t want to keep fantasizing about being kissed by him. She just wanted to lose herself in the feeling, no matter how wrong it was.
He leaned into her, his gaze challenging hers. Was he baiting her stop him, to push him away?
Libby challenged him right back, staring him down, daring him to go through with it.
Heaven help them.
He kept coming toward her, until his hands were tangled in her hair and his mouth was fused passionately to hers.
Just the way she’d imagined it.
Three (#u25809746-fe3f-5a0e-b0d1-4ed52950be4a)
Matt cursed in his mind. He was getting consumed with this woman in ways that were driving him mad.
He undid his seat belt and so did she. The straps were too confining, and they both needed to be free.
With his eyes tightly closed, he deepened the kiss, craving the taste of her. He pushed his tongue into her mouth. She reacted just as uncontrollably, pressing closer to him, her hunger equal to his.
Hellfire, he thought. He was getting hard beneath his jeans. From a kiss. From one soft, slick, wet...
