Jake hadn’t disappointed her. With his big, tall frame, he muscled her over any way he wanted, fitting into her with an ease she hadn’t expected. She’d tried to hide that she’d been nervous, and realized after the fact that he’d gone slow because he’d seen it, even though she’d been impatient with him.
A delicious sting from Jake’s stubble burned as her thighs touched, and she stretched when she stood, hissing. If she got in the saddle today, that was going to be sore.
It was paired with other thoughts as she rubbed in some of the antichafe cream one of the barrel-racing boarders had given her to try. She paused, rolling the tube between her fingers. Jake had paid more attention to her than she’d expected, always making sure she came first, asking her if it felt good, if it was what she wanted. She palmed one breast, remembering how much time he had spent with his hands and mouth on them, how he had told her they were perfect as he had stroked and caressed her skin. Looking down, she noticed some whisker burn there too.
No man had ever complimented them before. She was called Barn Board in high school for a reason, and even now, years later, she assumed her small chest wasn’t exactly what a man looked for.
Not that it mattered, there were benefits to not having to strap herself down in a sports bra that cost more than her groceries for a week just to get on a horse.
As she rummaged in her drawers for clean clothes—which her mother had rearranged so she couldn’t find anything—she realized it did matter. His compliment made her feel good. Darren had never even so much as spared a glance at her tits, preferring to just go for the main act as quickly as possible, often not even waiting for her to remove her shirt, just a passing caress before he pushed her back onto the couch with aWant youmumbled in her ear.
“Fuck,” she swore quietly. That was a shitty thing to be thinking about right now.
Liz waved a hand in front of her face, her nipples pebbling automatically at the thought of all the ways last night had felt, Jake’s arms around her, encouraging her, their bodies moving in sync. They’d fit together, and that meant good things would happen while he was here.
However long that may be, she thought next, and pushed that line of questioning away, just like the memories of her stupid ex, which had tried to wiggle in.
After she pulled on her tightest pair of riding jeans to prevent more chafing, braided her hair, and disposed of the night’s wrapper evidence in the bathroom trash can, she made it into her kitchen to wolf down something and make instant coffee sludge to see her through the morning before she could go up to the main house for a real cup.
An old blue Thermos with a curled pink sticky note stuck to the top was sitting in the middle of her kitchen table. Liz recognized it as one of Brett’s, dents scattered over the surface, the big handle wrapped in bandage tape.
When she opened it, the aroma of coffee made her involuntarily moan in appreciation. She assumed it was her mother who had brought it over, unable to resist using Jake’s new coffee maker.
She eyeballed the note that had fluttered to the table when she’d opened the Thermos. It wasn’t her mom’s handwriting, so she squinted at the chicken scratching. It was as bad as Tan’s when he made lists for the feed store run.
Thought you could use this. Made extra this morning.
—J
“Well, shit,” she said into the empty room, and then laughed.
* * *
The ancient, rusty filing cabinet had exploded.
Jake started organizing papers slowly late in the morning, clearing off his dad’s desk to make piles, and then one of the drawers wouldn’t open. Blanking on ideas of how to fix the thing, he had yanked the offending drawer in frustration, and now he was sifting through a small tsunami of file folders spilled all over the floor. The drawer was now even more bent than before, and no longer in the cabinet.
“This looks like fun. Need a hand?”
Jake looked up to see Brady, his head poking through the door of the office. He hung his head, some old feed invoices in his hand, and let out the breath he’d been holding so he wouldn’t swear and throw them, creating further chaos.
“I . . . yes,” he replied, and stood up, wincing as his back twinged. He hadn’t gotten much sleep and definitely hadn’t used his back like he had last night for quite some time.
Brady stooped over to pick up a file folder, crumpled pink papers poking out of it at all angles, and tilted his head to read the label. “Auction records,” he muttered, and set it on the desk on top of another folder with identical pink papers. In fact, so many of the folders had pink papers, Jake wasn’t sure what was what; they all looked the same, even in the flurry of the moment as everything slid onto the cement floor. As Jake slapped a few more folders onto the growing—and only—pile he’d designated To Sort, it was plain on Brady’s face he thought this was funny.
“Go ahead. Get it out of your system,” Jake said peevishly. This was going to take hours to clean up, and was far less appealing than when he started into it.
“All right, all right, New York. It won’t take long to fix. Trying to make sense of Dad’s organization will drive you to drink, though. What were you trying to achieve? His method wasn’t clear to anyone, except maybe Tan, but even he hated looking through these,” Brady replied amiably, and bent down to pick up more paper.
Jake joined him, not sure how to answer that specifically, so he didn’t. Achieve? He was trying to stay on top of the ways all this inheritance bullshit was making his head spin. He was trying to be useful, and maybe help out in the long run, after the upheaval of his existence had long become a footnote in the history of this ranch.
He’d do anything not to feel useless in the never-ending reminders of how out of his depth he was. Lunchtime conversations about machinery that he’d never heard of, or crop or cattle terms that sounded like a foreign language, meant he often stuck to the kitchen cleaning when everyone tromped in. The odd time he’d seen any of the crew working, he’d realized that the idea that he could run an operation like this was ludicrous.
So sticking to what he knew was a good thing. The kitchen, and here, the paperwork end of things. But not even that was helping.
The other side of it was that he was desperate to understand a man he had never met, whose blood ran through his veins, and maybe it might help him figure all this out, too, because the confusion in his head about who he really was was getting louder every day he was here.
Brady held a bunch of blue and white papers that all saidFordat the top and waved them in the air, grinning as he did. “Don’t answer that. I’m just glad it isn’t me tackling this.”
