Rubi laughed and lifted her hand to stroke his cheek. “Sounds like they expected you to buck the system. My very own rebel. ”
“I’ll be anything you want…as long as I’m yours. ” Grinning, he slid onto the bed, lying on his side, mirroring Rubi. “You impressed the hell out of my entire family—even the hard-to-impress. I have to know, what were you talking to my dad about? He’s usually a pretty stoic guy. ”
“I’m going to help him get his sensor software back online tomorrow. ”
Wes’s gaze glittered with a strange mix of emotions that lifted Rubi to the ceiling. Maybe a little awe? A little pride? A little joy? “Crap. You can do that?”
“Silly boy. ” Rubi scraped her fingers into his hair and stretched her neck to kiss him again. “I have all kinds of tricks up my sleeve. ”
“How did sensors come up, of all things?”
“Your mom. She suggested that I might be able to help him with some problem in the fields. I told them that the extent of my agriculture knowledge was my weekly stroll down the produce aisle at the grocery store. But then he told me about the sensors he’s installed that monitor the soil.
“After he explained how they worked, I knew I could help. The software is open source, free, and written in C. Coding at this level is just a matter of copying and pasting existing code to create what he really needs. Tomorrow, he’s going to watch me add pieces to monitor other things—soil temperature, ammonia levels, moisture levels, and barometric pressure. Then if he wants to add something more later or change the sensors for each crop, he’ll be able to do it himself. It will save him thousands of dollars every year in water and fertilizer and crop yield. ”
“Oh my God. ” Wes went all drama queen and fell back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, his voice one of the-world-as-we-know-it-is-over. “You’re going to be his new favorite. That’s so wrong. I’ve been vying for that spot for almost thirty years, and you tango right in and steal it out from under me. Or, well, actually Wyatt. ” He turned his head and pointed at her. “But I was getting close to nudging him out. ”
She shifted closer, sliding one thigh over his, pressing one hand flat low on his belly and sliding upward, feeling all the supple muscle, indentations, and planes of his chest. “That’s kinda cool. I’ve never been anyone’s favorite. ”
“Yes, you have. ” His gaze darted to hers as he grinned. “You’re my favorite. ”
Wes gripped her waist and flipped her in bed. Rubi squealed and laughed. Wes covered her mouth and cut a glance toward the door. “Shh. ”
When he lifted his hand from her mouth, she sobered and curled her fingers into the waistband of his shorts. “Why am I your favorite?” She tried to push back the insecurity brimming, but it overflowed into her voice. “I mean, really, Wes. I get the impression you’ve been choosing women like Melissa all your life. So…why me? Why now? A fling until you move on to your next good girl? If it is, it is,” she said as if it
wouldn’t matter. As if it wouldn’t jab a dagger in her heart. “I’m just kinda out on a limb here and would like to know what to be prepared for. ”
His expression sobered, and something came over his gaze—something tender and deep and so very loving. He shifted off her body and lay next to her, head propped on his hand. His other hand slipped beneath the T-shirt she’d put on for bed, and he spread his fingers wide over her belly. With his palm centered over her belly button, his fingertips brushed her rib cage.
“That night I saw you at the airport…something clicked for me,” he said, voice soft with a hint of vulnerability. “I didn’t know exactly what, but I knew the relationship I was in with Kayla didn’t have what I needed. She was…is…a beautiful person. A beautiful woman. I just needed something different and knew it would have been selfish for me to stay with her while I was trying to figure that out. ”
His gaze followed his hand as he caressed her stomach, then occasionally darted up to meet her eyes. “You had such a vibrancy about you that night. The Ferrari. Your flirty outgoing personality. Your friendship with Lexi. It just all kinda…I don’t know…hit me. I didn’t think it then, in that moment, but after I broke up with Kayla and gave it some thought, I knew that’s what I wanted in a woman. What I’d been missing in a woman. ”
Rubi lay quietly, listening. Every beat of her heart felt impossibly hard and deep. And a shiver of anxiety sizzled over her nerve endings. She’d never been this intimate with a man. A strange thought considering how many she’d given her body to. But this was different. So different. This was intimate in an emotionally risky way, and a coil of heat and cold mixed in her belly.
“When Jax told me about Lexi, God, I thought he was out of his ever-loving mind. ” Wes’s eye roll made Rubi laugh softly. It diffused some tension. “Then I met her and…shit…she was everything Jax ever wanted all wrapped up in one woman. And for the first time in my life, I thought, why can’t I have that too? You know, everything I’ve ever fantasized about in one woman? And then…you were back. In my life every day. And I got to see what you were really made of. Honestly, I was blown away. I expected you to be just another beautiful Hollywood brat. I expected to tolerate you because you were Lexi’s best friend. ”
He lifted his hand from her stomach, cupped her jaw, and turned her face toward his. “And before I knew what happened, you’d turned into my best friend. After a couple of weeks, I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything unless you were going to be there. For another couple of weeks, I spent every moment with you looking for some major problem, something to turn me off so I could get over what I thought was an infatuation and start looking for the right woman instead of focusing on someone who wasn’t right for me at all.
“But I couldn’t, because the fact is that you are to me what Lexi is to Jax—everything I’ve always hope for and dreamed of all in one mind-blowing package. And that’s when I realized that I’d been choosing the wrong type of women all my damned life. ”
Rubi tried to hold her emotions down, but her gut felt tight, like a growing fireball had lodged beneath her belly button. Her eyes watered and her throat thickened. She struggled to internalize the words—not believing. Not trusting. No one had ever seen her this way. Many men had seen her as a toy, had looked at her with lust. But even Wes’s most heated gaze always held deep affection—which was what had kept her at arm’s length so long.
The whirlwind of emotions embarrassed her until her face, neck, and chest felt as if they were on fire. She wanted to look into his eyes for the answer to her next question but couldn’t stand the intensity of the connection and lowered her lashes as she glanced down at his chest. “Women like Melissa. ”
Wes didn’t immediately answer. He reached up and stroked a hand over her hair. “I grew up with strict, God-fearing parents in a small Southern town, Rubi. Every moment of every day, I was being molded into a socially acceptable Southern boy—whether that was by my parents, my teacher, or the storekeeper on the corner. You can probably already see that I’ve had a habit of either falling a little short of that standard or simply veering off on my own path. By Hollywood standards, I’m as vanilla as they come. But by Missouri standards, I was trouble waiting for the wrong place at the wrong time.
“But I love my parents. I love my sister and my brother. And I’m the middle child—a peacemaker. So I found small ways to stay within the boundaries to make a portion of the population—and more importantly, my parents—happy. That involved choosing acceptable women to date.
“Melissa’s father had been a bit of a rebel in his younger days as well and saw it as a benefit, not a curse. Melissa and I dated from our sophomore year in high school through my junior year of college. I—obviously—never quite broke out of that mindset for how I chose my girlfriends. ”
Rubi waited, a million questions swirling in her head, in her heart. She knew she wasn’t up to either asking most of them or receiving the answers. But she really did need one answer now; otherwise, her mind would churn and churn and she’d never get to sleep. “And why did you two break up?”
“She wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. ” His answer came so quickly, with such surety and conviction, Rubi tensed, trying to take in the information. “After graduation, she and her father wanted me to join her father’s engineering firm. Her father generously offered to put me on a track to make partner in several years. But the thought made me claustrophobic. I couldn’t imagine living in a gray cubicle for the next thirty years. ”
Rubi winced. Wes in a cubicle? He’d have been happier in prison.
“When I declined,” he said, “Melissa broke off our engagement. ”