Montana Desire

Chapter 20

Cori

My phone chimed and then chimed again.

The morning light was still pale and gray in the room. Barely past dawn. Who the hell was texting me this early, and could I kill them?

I reached for the phone and stared at the screen with blurry eyes. A name I hadn’t seen in forever. Kevin Bridges. Frankly, I’d forgotten he even had my number, but he was one of the vets I’d emailed yesterday about Sunrise.

The text was just one sentence.

Check your email.

I did, still sleepy and bleary. His reply was at the top of my inbox.

Cori,

Good to hear from you, but I’ll spare the pleasantries for later. If you suspect even for a second that the horse is being poisoned, you need to get a blood sample. Now.

There have been rumors for years about the Pearsons and the way they treat their horses. And more rumors about other people they might be involved with. You already know the amount of money that’s involved with racing. It leaves the way open for fraud.

At this point, I don’t want to put anything more in writing. But get a blood sample if you can. Because this could go a lot deeper than the one horse, and you could help a lot of animals. But please, be careful.

-Kevin

Shit.

I’d known that it was bad. Deep down, I’d known. But there was a fraction of my brain that was hoping that I was overreacting and that Sunrise simply had some kind of wasting illness I hadn’t encountered before.

It was early enough now that if I went, I could get the sample and get out before anyone ever knew I was there. Grant was behind me, arm draped over my hip. I didn’t want to leave. Being warm in bed with him was complete perfection. But this was important.

Slowly, I started to pull my body out from under his arm, and he tightened it around me. “What’s going on?”

“I didn’t know you were awake.”

“Light sleeper,” he said. “Something most of us Resting Warrior guys have in common. Are you okay?”

I sighed. “I have to go. Even though I don’t want to.”

“Come here.” He tugged me back toward him, rolling me under his body. In seconds, my wrists were pinned to the bed, the rest of me pinned with his body. Though his hair was tousled with sleep, his eyes were clear and his smirk was enough to bring me all the way awake. “See?” he asked. “I don’t need rope to make sure that you can’t move.”

He kissed me, every bit of me melting and going liquid. I was sleepy, but I wasn’t tired, and I wanted more of what he’d given me last night. More. I wanted to see what else he could do—how far he could take me.

“Mmm.” Grant made a sound that was pure lust. “I should eat you for breakfast.”

“I wish you could,” I said. “But I need to go. It’s a bit of an emergency.”

All playfulness disappeared. “What happened?”

I explained the email. “I need to get that sample. And now is the best time to do it.”

Grant still had me pinned under his body, and I felt how hard he was against my stomach. I had no chance to move, and I wanted nothing more than to just stay here and let him have his way with me. But he nodded. “Then I’ll go with you.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “It’s early. It will be fine.”

“Cori,” he said. “I already agreed that I would go with you whenever you needed me to, and at the moment, I don’t feel like letting you out of my sight. Especially with something that’s dangerous. Now on multiple levels. I am going with you.”

Relief flooded me. I wanted him with me. “Thank you.”

“You need clothes from home?” he asked.

“Yeah.” The shirt and shoes I’d worn last night wouldn’t work for going to the ranch. “It won’t take long.”

He released me after kissing me one more time. “Ten minutes. I’ll meet you at my truck.”

“Okay.” I was still reluctant to move, but I did. My clothes from last night, my phone. The shirt was still on the couch where he’d tossed it last night.

Now that I was away from Grant and the intoxicating feeling of his touch, I was moving faster. I didn’t need much. I grabbed my medical bag—we’d need to stop fast at the clinic for what I needed. But I put on clothes that would work, threw my hair into a ponytail, and was out at the truck in eight minutes.

“We need to go to the clinic first,” I said.

“Sure.” Grant opened the passenger door of the truck and helped me up into it. The way his fingers grazed me, the small extra touches, they weren’t lost on me now. My stomach gave a tiny thrill.

Other than that, we were quiet. He reached over and held my hand all the way to the clinic, and he was a solid, silent presence as I gathered what I needed.

“Thank you again,” I said as we got back into the truck. “I know it’s early.”

He laughed and laced our fingers together. “There’s almost nothing worse than what I’ve already done when I was a SEAL. Hell, this is still better than BUD/S training. Waking up early with a beautiful woman in my bed is not a hardship.”

My cheeks turned pink. I expected that was exactly what he wanted.

I gave him directions when he needed them, and soon we were pulling near to the ranch itself. “I don’t think we should actually take the truck in.”

“Agreed.” Grant kept driving until we found an adequate patch of trees to park the truck where it wouldn’t easily be seen, but it would also be easy to hop one of the fences.

God, I hoped everyone would still be asleep. I knew the Pearsons had guns, and if they were into some kind of deep shit, knowing what I knew about Joel, I didn’t think they would hesitate to use them. At least I had Grant. He knew how to be stealthy. Right?

“You know how to do stealth?”

He grinned. “Yes. Though if we were doing real stealth, we’d need more camouflage and less daylight.”

“Right.”

Opening my door, he hooked his arm around my waist and swung me to the ground. “I would like you to let me go first.”

“You won’t know where to go.”

“You’ll be right there to tell me. But the fact that this is serious enough for us to hide?” He took my face in his hands. “I don’t want to take chances with you.”

My stomach swooped. No one had ever said anything like that to me before, and I didn’t hate it. Even in my own mind, that was an understatement.

We were standing there, wrapped up in each other, and it was so easy to get lost in him. The words bubbled up, and I couldn’t hold them back. “Can we stop pretending that either of us wants this to be slow? Deliberate? Whatever the word we’re using.”

“God, yes.” There was fire in his eyes seconds before he backed me against the truck and kissed me. A raw, hungry kiss that was everything both of us needed. I didn’t want to hold back with him, and I didn’t want him to hold back with me.

“Let’s do this,” he said, voice ragged. “So we can get through it and I can have you back in my bed.”

“Yes. Please.”

It took effort for both of us to separate, but there was no chance I was letting go of him. There was a simple, small comfort in holding hands that I hadn’t felt in ages. Joel and I had barely gone anywhere together. When we did, he “wasn’t the hand-holding type.” He thought it made him look weak.

Grant was holding my hand as firmly as I was holding his.

The sun was about to peek over the mountains, but in the cool morning, mist still hovered above the ground. That was an advantage as we walked toward the fence. Right now, I was grateful that ranches—with Resting Warrior being the exception—didn’t put a high emphasis on security. At least in terms of fencing.

It was nothing for Grant to hop over it, take my bag, and then help me hop over too. This field was empty, which was good. I knew enough about the layout to know this wasn’t used much. The very edge of the property. I thought that I’d walked out here once on one of my visits.

“That way,” I said quietly. “Next field should connect to the stable.”

“Got it.”

The mist let us move more freely. It was getting late enough that ranch and stable hands might be showing up. We would have to be careful. The adrenaline I’d felt last night was coming back to me, and I was a little shaky.

I doubted Joel would be awake at this hour, but I was hoping against hope that we wouldn’t run into him. Grant wouldn’t hesitate to protect me if Joel tried anything, and I wouldn’t be angry about it.

“Are you armed?” I asked softly.

He looked over at me sharply. “Should I be?”

“I don’t know.” It was the honest answer. “I figured I’d ask.”

Grant squeezed my hand. “I’m not carrying, no. But in most situations, I won’t need to.”

He was so gentle with me that it was easy to forget he was practically a living weapon. All the Resting Warrior guys were. And given what had happened with my friends already, I was glad they had all the training that they did. Even if each of them had demons they wrestled with.