Tempting the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 1)

Nat shifted, rock hard. His wet denim felt like a vice. Hope ached in his gut. He didn’t want the moment to pass, but Mae let out a gusty exhale that drew January’s attention and reminded him of the task at hand.

The donkey’s wound looked largely superficial, most likely the result of trying to breach the broken fence and failing. He pulled a bottle from the pack and reread the directions.

“Can you get me a cup of rainwater? This antiseptic has to be diluted.”

She reached into her pack for an unopened water bottle. “This is probably cleaner.”

“Thanks.”

After trimming as much hair as possible close to Mae’s wound, Nat drizzled the medicine into the bottle, capped and shook it, then poured the concentrated stream on the injury. All the while, January stroked the donkey and told Mae in cooing tones how lucky she was that she was cared for by the best cowboy around. Nat didn’t know who benefitted more, him or the donkey.

Once he had wrapped Mae’s leg, he stood.

January was close.

He brushed the back of his hand against hers, loose and drawn to her side. Both of their hands were dirty, a little damp, a little chilled. He wove his first two fingertips through hers.

Instant warmth.

An exhale past her lips told him everything he needed to know. He knew that landscape intimately: the shape of her not-quite-flawless teeth behind a bowed upper lip; the muted stain of her flesh there, close to the shade of a blood orange he once sampled at the farmer’s market; the slight pout of her bottom lip when she forgot herself; the taste of their union.

She adjusted his loose hold to something with intent. Her intent. A sensation reverberated low in his abdomen, fiery and thick, and he almost stopped caring that she would leave. His brain rewrote it all in a flash: ripping the raincoat from her shoulders, scooping her to his waist against the cabin’s weathered oak and feeling more wetness than just the storm press against the impossible strain his cock had become, her asking—no, begging—to feel him inside her again. Ten years of soul-snatching want, cresting to a finish that split the heavens more than the lightning. But at the moment of rewrite, Nat knew it wouldn’t be enough. Hot, mildly angry fucking was the furthest thing from what she deserved, from who he was. He pumped the brakes while he still recognized himself.

“Let’s find something to put that rainwater in,” said Nat.

He tugged her into the cabin. Night had come. Nat pulled out his phone and turned on its flashlight.

The one-room shack was musty and close and smelled vaguely like Clem’s pipe tobacco. Nat was certain the air he pulled into his lungs was the same that once breathed life into his grandfather. He felt him there—in the antlers holding threadbare cloth that was once a curtain to the cabin’s shuttered window, in the iron clips that used to hold his grandfather’s .22 Remington, in an old copy of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, one of Clem’s favorites, the pages yellowed with time. Most of the cabin’s contents had been salvaged to the main house or sold off but for a rocking chair with broken runners, an empty crate, a few old tools hanging on the walls, and a shelf near a frontier stove with a few chipped enameled pots and wooden boxes.

“This place is amazing,” said January.

Not the word he would have chosen. Rubble, more likely.

“Be careful. Floor might have wood rot.”

He might have said the floor was made out of military-grade steel for all she heeded his warning. She set down her pack and browsed the interior, exploring everything with a reverent touch and a thorough examination.

“Clem lived here?”

“Built it himself after the war.”

“Why didn’t you ever bring me?”

“I don’t know. Not really the kind of place you’d bring a girl to—”

“Have sex?”

Nat squirmed, given the recent foray of his mind. “I was going to say impress her. And that wasn’t all we did, J. Not to me.”

“I know,” she said, pausing her study of the room’s contents to study him. “To me, either. But you have to admit, we got pretty good at it.”

He was grateful for the darkness. His cheeks flamed like a fucking schoolgirls. Always the exhibitionist, always adventurous with her body—and his—always comfortable with her sexuality. She beamed. If she wiggled her ass and did a striptease to christen the place, it wouldn’t shock him. Put him in the grave trying to resist every urge pulsing through him? Definitely.

Wood. What they needed right now. The stove kind, not the kind siphoning blood away from the self-preservation part of his brain.

“I don’t see a lantern. We should find some matches. Light a fire.” Nat crossed the room gingerly because he was convinced some misfortune would mess with what was fast turning into a prospect far more enticing than a decade of nighttime acquaintances with his hand. A spilled box of matches lay behind the stove. He gathered the few dried out logs stacked near the wall, examined the stove pipe as best he could to ensure ventilation—another possible misfortune—and crafted a healthy fire. At last, he turned off the harsh artificial flashlight and shoved his phone into his back pocket.

A yellow glow illuminated the room’s surfaces, none more captivating than the soft curves of her face.