The wanting was one thing—I understood wanting, I knew what to do with wanting. But this was something that lived underneath the wanting, something I wasn’t the least bit familiar with.
I’d grown up without anyone to model this for me. The homes I’d moved through were decent, mostly, full of well-meaning adults doing their best with too many kids and not enough of everything else.
Nobody had covered this part.
The overpowering need to be with someone. It overrode everything.
I went to find her.
She wasn’t in her cabin. Or anywhere else that I looked. Until I went past the barn. There, the property dropped down toward a small creek that ran along the south edge of Wild Vista, cold and clear over the limestone, shaded by a row of pines. I rode along its banks most evenings, thinking. Deciding.
She was there.
Sitting on the bank with her boots off, her jeans rolled up, and her feet in the water. A book laid on her lap, unopened. She hadn’t heard me yet. I stopped and looked at her the way I hadn’t been able to when she was watching me back.
The Texas heat had gotten to her again. She’d splashed water on her chest and neck, and the damp fabric of her blouse clung to her, outlining, every generous curve I wanted to taste and touch. I stood there and let the want move through me like it did when I was about to ride a devil of a bull, the pull low and familiar, but so damn different.
Her hair was down, cascading over her back in a silky brown wave. She was staring into the water as if it could tell her something she desperately wanted the answer to.
I knew that look as well. It was the look of someone trying to put walls back up after they’d been completely shattered.
I must have made some noise. A boot on the limestone, a shift in the grass. She looked up fast and found me, and the color came up her face immediately. She was thinking about my hand between her legs in the barn.
I’d thought about it the entire night, too, tossing and turning, hard and aching with the memory of how she’d felt coming apart against my hand.
“I didn’t sign up for anything today.”
“Sometimes the best lessons aren’t on the calendar.”
The color went a degree deeper. She knew exactly what I meant, and we both knew she knew, and she kept her eyes on the creek and said nothing for a moment.
I came down the bank and sat beside her. Close enough that our shoulders were almost touching. I set my hat on my knee and looked at the water and gave her the moment she needed.
“I don’t know why I told you that,” she said quietly. “What Paige... I don’t normally—” She stopped. “I didn’t mean for it to go the way it—”
“I can’t say I’m sorry it did.” I wanted to reach out and touch her, but I didn’t want to scare her away.
She cleared her throat. Her chin came up—that particular lift she did when she was pulling herself together. “I need you to know.” She chose her words carefully. “I need you to know that I don’t normally do things like that. With someone I don’t know.”
“Then get to know me.”
That made her pause.
“Who are you, Slade, really? You’re more than a guest here. You act like family, but Carl and Lucinda don’t have any children.”
“I ride the rodeo.”
“Lucinda told me.”
She’d asked about me. Or Lucinda had tried to help me out. Either way, she hadn’t been put off by the information.
I knew she wanted more. Needed more. I looked at the water and knew she was waiting for me to say more.
“I grew up in the system. Group homes, mostly. A few foster homes.” It was the same way I always spoke about my past. Which was almost never. Flat, factual, no wrapper around it. “I aged out at eighteen. Carl found me at nineteen, living out of a beat-up old truck I’d bought hauling hay for one of the local ranches. I had just started doing local shows. He saw something he thought was worth developing. Him and Lucinda gave me the first taste of what a family could be.”
She was quiet. She didn’t say she was sorry for my misfortune. She didn’t rush to fill the space with words that would try and make me feel better. I noted that the way I’d been noting everything about her.
“He was right,” she said simply.
