Stripped Down

“She’ll get here when she gets here. Our Rose never was an early bird. Plus, if she knows how badly you want her to come, she’ll just take twice as long.”

That’s true shit, right there. Rose is a tease. I considered calling her on it, but even more than the age gap, there was a look in her eyes when she was flaunting her tits and her ass that reminded me of some of the US Navy SEALs I’d served with. Her boobs were weapons she used, and I couldn’t tell if she was setting an ambush or defending her territory. Something happened to my dirty girl before she got to Lonesome, and that something fucked with her head. I’d needed to leave her alone until she got things straight.

Didn’t stop me from fantasizing, though. I fucking wore calluses on my dick whacking off to the dirty thoughts of what I could do to her. With her. The Jordan women were like a master class in how to tie the Mendoza males into fucking knots, because while Rose was tormenting me, her mother proceeded to do a job on my dad.

Honestly, I’m not sure Rose had a clue what she did to me. What I wanted to do to her. She saw me as a loaner brother, as temporary, safe, and older. The words bossy, boring, play-by-the-rules, and too-strict also got tossed around a whole lot. The boobs may have been weapons, but I couldn’t tell if she knew that. She could have been reacting on instinct. Later, after shit went down on that second tour of duty in Afghanistan, I understood where she was coming from better.

I have so many lessons to teach my Rose.

“This can’t wait any longer,” I growl. Fuck, I sound like an animal.

“We’ve still got a couple wells left,” Axel points out, laughter gone from his voice. That’s another side effect from Afghanistan, although I prefer pretending it doesn’t exist. I’m not fun anymore. People respect me or they fear me, but Axel is almost the only one left who laughs when he’s around me. That’s one thing I never want to kill.

“Two. We had four.” The prospect of even one inch of the ranch becoming a dustbowl makes me grit my teeth. This place, this land, is my family legacy. I’ll damn well hold on to it, keep it together. My cowboys and their families depend on me for a living, and since I’ve come home, I’ve poured myself into building the ranch one acre at a time. No one can take us down because I’ve created a fucking empire. If I could build a wall around the place like the Chinese emperor did, I’d probably do that, too.

The truth sucks, but my father took and took, bleeding cash from the ranch and giving nothing back. After my mom (who was not Rose’s mom, who was the arm candy and bonus woman in my dad’s life) died in a car accident, the levels in our bank accounts resembled the water levels in the wells. For all his whoring around, Mendoza Senior apparently loved my mother, because he threw in the towel after she died, at least ranch-wise. He knocked back beers with his cowboys, pointed his horse aimlessly around the ranch, and didn’t give a fuck what happened next. Rose’s mom was one of those don’t-give-a-fucks. She came, he enjoyed her, and then she left. My dad repeated the whole pattern again. And then again.

The heart attack was one of those blessings in disguise. Afterwards, I came home from Afghanistan and I was in charge.

I held things together.

Axel and J.J. played backup when I asked, but my brothers had their own lives off the ranch. That was okay. Not everyone finds everything he needs on fifty thousand acres or from horseback. I do and that’s enough.

Rose Jordan doesn’t get to undo all that work now.

She procrastinates. She leaves the important things undone, rushing in at the last minute when someone rides her ass. In other words, she’s pure trouble.

“She’ll turn up, Angel,” Axel repeats. “She always did. Eventually.”

“She’d better.”

Just remembering Rose drives me crazy, and I need to be in control when I meet her again. I point the quad toward the closest road. The raw power of the ATV motor matches my mood, the primal vibration devouring the sound of Axel’s curse. Another day, I’d have ridden a horse out to the drill site because it’s easier to feel that connection between the ranch and myself when I’m on horseback.

“Rose won’t like it,” Axel bellows from behind me. Dust puffs up in small clouds as he takes the lead. “She’s always had a thing for that crazy little house.”

Yeah. I tug my Stetson down farther as the ATV crests a lazy roll of field. No fucking surprise there. I’ve ranched all my life, and sometimes that means watching as good men are forced to give up the land their families held for generations because they can’t make the note and can’t force a living out of their place. In her own way, Rose Jordan is every bit as passionate as those men—and the best spot to drill for water on Auntie Dee’s ranch is right smack underneath the house. I’m gonna have to knock it down to get at my water.