Wrangling The Rich Rancher

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

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...

She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he pulled her, like a rag doll, right over the center console and onto his lap.

He envisioned how they must look, parked on the road that overlooked his old place, with her straddling him in the driver’s seat, the steering wheel butting against her back.

Matt felt like a teenager, making out in the middle of the day, his hormones jerking and jumping.

He wound his hands more fully in her hair. He liked how wild and wavy it was. She rocked forward, rubbing him where it hurt, where it felt good, where his zipper made friction with hers.

They kept kissing, mindless and carnal. She mewled, then moaned, hot and sweet, and he suspected that she would make those same fevered sounds if he was deep inside her.

When they came up for air, she asked, “Is the truck still running? Is that the vibration I feel?”

“I think it’s us.” He’d shut the engine off earlier. Hadn’t he? Just to be sure, he double-checked. “It’s not running.”

“It’s not? Are you sure?”

“I’m positive. But we should stop now.”

“You first.”

“You want me to end it?” He didn’t appreciate her leaving it up to him. “You’re the one who’s sitting on my lap.”

“And you’re the one who put me there.”

Touché, he thought. “Yeah, but you can climb off me and get back in your own seat.” His frustration was building, at himself, at her. He wanted to strip her naked, right here, right now.

“I could.” Her eyes were glazed over and her hair was totally mussed, maybe even knotted in spots. Her frustration was mounting, too. “Or you could make me.”

“Screw that.” He kissed her again, harder this time, making good on his threat to bite her.

“Ouch.” She flinched, then kissed him right back.

A heartbeat later, he said, “It was only a nibble.”

“Says you. My lips are going to be swollen.”

“They already are.” And she wore it insanely well. “Now get off me before I do something I’ll regret.”

“You’re already regretting this, and so am I.”

“So go back on your own side of the truck.”

She didn’t budge. She stayed there, desire bristling from her pores. She snared his gaze, her eyelashes long and fluttery. “You owe me a cookie.”

Seriously? She was going to hold him to that? “Fine. As soon as I can take the wheel, we’ll go to the bakery.”

“I want coffee, too.” She crawled over the console and nearly kneed him in the nuts, missing him by mere inches. But she didn’t even notice that she’d almost done it.

Matt snarled to himself. He deserved a swift kick, but the entire situation still made him angry. Everything about it ticked him off. Especially what he couldn’t have—like Libby sprawled out beneath him.

He wanted to take her home and make hot-blooded love to her, to be rough and animalistic, to bite her again a hundred more times.

She settled onto her seat, lowered the visor and gawked at herself in the mirror. “Oh, my goodness. What did you do to my hair? I look like a blowfish.”

Since when did fish have hair? Spiny things coming out of their heads, maybe. “You liked it when I was doing it.”

She finger-combed her way through the mess. “We’re never kissing again. Not ever.”

“I know.” He tugged at his jeans, trying to make his bulge less noticeable. “It was awful of us.” Awfully hot, awfully barbaric, awfully amazing. He could think of a hundred mixed-up ways to describe what they’d done.

She kept fussing with her hair, struggling to tame it.

“You’re making it worse,” he said.

“What?” she asked. “Your hard-on or my hair?”

“Your hair, smarty.”

She glanced at his lap. “Not from where I’m sitting.”

“Don’t start.” But it was too late. They both burst into a quick, crazy laugh. The situation was too disturbing to keep it bottled up.

She raised the visor, giving up on her hair. He gave up on adjusting his jeans, too. Then he went serious and asked, “Are you going to tell Kirby that we kissed?”

“I would never do that. This was a private moment between you and me. It’s no one else’s business.”

“So what happens between you and me is private, but the rest of my life isn’t?”

“Your relationship with Kirby is the only part of your life that I’ll be writing about.” She glanced down at the canyon house. “Yours and your mother’s. And that’s why it’s so important for me to get your input, and hers, too. I have lots of interview questions, for both of you.”

“No doubt you do. But I’m not signing a release or answering them. If I tell you anything, it’s going to be the way we’ve been doing it, off the record.” He followed her line of sight to the house. He remembered his mom crying on the night Kirby had ended their affair. How she’d sat outside and bawled in the moonlight. Matt had been old enough then to understand what was going on. He’d sensed it was over for him, too, that his dad’s sporadic visits would become even less frequent. He’d even worried that Kirby would eventually stop coming around at all. And he’d been right on both counts. So painfully right.

“Please, just think about it,” Libby implored him.

He blew out a breath. “I can’t willingly be part of your book.” He didn’t want to bleed all over the pages of his old man’s self-serving biography. “I just can’t do it.”

“If you were involved in the book, I would get to know you, better than I am now.”

He laughed, as foolishly as before. “You’re getting to know me just fine.”

“That’s not funny.” She rolled her big blue eyes, frowned, smiled, shook her messy-haired head. “Well, maybe it is.”

He noticed that her lips were still sexily swollen. “Buckle up.” He reached over and pulled the strap across her body, doing it for her. “I’ve got to back out of here.”

And try to forget that he’d ever kissed her.

* * *

Libby couldn’t believe that she’d taunted Matt to kiss her. That she wouldn’t get off his lap. That she let it go that far.

She needed to be flogged, tortured for her idiotic behavior. What part of professionalism had escaped her? She’d been acting up since the moment she’d met him, being so coy and cute, pushing her attraction to him in directions it wasn’t supposed to go.

When they arrived at the bakery, he parked directly in front of the small, pastel-colored building. The town itself was quaint, with its Main Street simplicity and homespun vibe.

“Maybe I should order a tart,” she said.

“Those fruit-filled things?”

“Yes, but that was a joke.” She pointed to herself. “A tart, get it?”

He didn’t laugh. “Don’t call yourself names, Libby. I’m just as responsible as you are. We’re just lucky that we stopped when we did.”

“It wasn’t luck. It was restraint.”

“You know what I mean.”

She most certainly did. She’d never kissed anyone that ferociously before, not even Becker.

They got out of the truck, and she glanced at the bakery window. A big, frothy, three-tiered wedding cake was showcased. The bride and groom on top looked a bit like her and Matt. It was their coloring, the bride being blonde and the groom having black hair. She doubted that Matt noticed the cake, let alone the topper. He headed straight for the front door.

“Let’s go get those cookies,” he said.

She nodded, and they went inside. A middle-aged woman in blue jeans and a crisp white apron greeted them. She smiled and acknowledged Matt by name. The bakery lady knew him? This piqued Libby’s curiosity.

But soon she discovered that he’d gone to high school with the woman’s son. In a town this size, Libby shouldn’t have been surprised. Most of the locals probably knew each other. It did make her wonder about Matt’s experiences in high school and if he was as much a loner then as he seemed to be now.

He chose the cookies randomly, four dozen of them, in every shape, size and color they had.

“What are we supposed to do with all of those?” Libby asked as they left the bakery and set out on foot, heading for the little coffee joint across the street.

“You can take them back to your cabin later.”

“Chance would love them if he were here.”

He stopped midstride. “Chance?”

“Chance Mitchell Penn. My son.” She watched the troubled emotion that crossed Matt’s face. She hadn’t meant to blurt out Chance’s name, but at least she’d gone ahead and said it.

“You named him after Kirby’s song?”

“Initially, it was Becker’s idea. But I thought it was a brilliant choice.” She was going to stand by her child’s name, no matter how uncomfortable it made Matt. “If we had a girl, we were going to call her Lilly Fay, after the saloon girl in the song. The one Chance Mitchell loves and leaves.”

“I don’t like any of Kirby’s songs, least of all that one. It came out when...”

“When what?” she asked. They stood on the sidewalk, with Matt clutching the pink bakery box.

“When I fell off the roof of our house and broke my arm. It was just after my ninth birthday, and I was pretending to be Chance Mitchell. I was crawling around up there with a toy gun, a six-shooter, strapped to my hip. I was hiding from the law.”

Libby reached up and skimmed his jaw. She knew she shouldn’t be touching him, but she wanted to comfort him somehow. “You must have liked the song then, or else why would you be pretending to be Chance?”

He took a step back, forcing her to lower her hand. “Sure. I liked his music when I was a kid. But it started to grate on me later.”

She tried to draw more of the story out of him. “Did they put your broken arm in a cast?”

He nodded. “Kirby never saw it, though. He was on his Outlaw at Large tour, promoting the Chance Mitchell album, and my arm healed before he stopped back to see us.”

“I’m sorry he didn’t make more time for you then.”

“I don’t care anymore.”

That was a lie, she thought. He cared far too much. “Kirby told me that he was impressed with your junior rodeo accomplishments. That you were just a little tyke, riding and roping like the devil was inside you.”

“What does he know about it? He never attended any of my events. All he saw were the videos Mom showed him.”

“He remembers those videos. He thinks about them when he’s feeling guilty and blue. He wrote a song about you, too, but he hasn’t recorded it yet.”

“Holy crap.” Matt tightened his grip on the box. “That’s all I need, to be immortalized in one of his frigging songs.”

“He’s not going to record it until the two of you become father and son.”

“Then he’s never going to put it out there.” Matt approached the crosswalk and stepped off the curb.

She followed him. “The song is called ‘The Boy I Left Behind.’ He played it for me. It’s beautiful, raw and touching.”

“That’s a low blow.”

“What is? Me telling you how good it is?”

“No. Him playing it for you. He’s using you, Libby. He’s pushing you around like a pawn.”

“He’s sharing his life with me. That’s my role in all of this, to document his life, to write about his feelings.” After they made it to the other side of the street, she said, “I know you don’t believe that he ever loved you, but in his own tortured way, he did. You were the part of himself that he couldn’t control. He promised his wife that he would never father a child from any of his affairs, and then you came along. The baby that wasn’t supposed to exist. His secret. A sweet little boy who needed more than his daddy knew how to give.”

“I’m well aware of what he promised his wife. It’s the reason I had to stay in the shadows, the excuse that was drilled into my head. My famous father had another family, and it would hurt them if they knew about me. But his wife found out and divorced him, anyway.”

“She’s over it now. She and Kirby are friends again. I haven’t met her yet, but I’ll be interviewing her for the book.” Her name was Melinda, and she was a former fashion model who used her celebrity to create a cosmetics and skin care line. Her face, her brand, were featured in TV infomercials. “She agrees with Kirby that everything should be out in the open now.”

“Of course she does. He always gets women to forgive him. And can we please talk about something else? I’m sick of my dad.”

“Okay. We’ll work on other topics.” She sent him her best smile, even if he was still scowling, much too fiercely, at her.

* * *

Matt and Libby sat outside at a café table. He drank his coffee black. She put sugar and an artificial sweetener in hers, along with cream and milk. He’d never seen anyone mix so much stuff together in one cup.