Tangled (Steele Ranch 3)

We waited for her to get it all out, for the tears to run dry. When they did, Lee took over. He didn’t like to spank; it wasn’t his thing. I was the Dominant of the three of us, but I knew he wasn’t going to let her get up without telling us what was going on.

“Feel better?” he asked. She nodded, turned her head into his chest. “Hey, don’t wipe your snot all over me.”

She laughed at that, then sniffled. “Sorry,” she murmured.

“No, you’re not,” Lee replied, a smile turning up the corner of his mouth. “Okay, baby. What’s so bad that you’re ruining my shirt?”

“I…messed up.”

“We all mess up,” he replied. “Sutton messed up when he didn’t get your number.”

I clenched my jaw, but remained quiet.

She took a deep breath, sniffed once again.

“Baby, don’t make Sutton pull you over his knee again,” Lee continued.

“I borrowed money from the wrong person,” she said, her voice defeated.

My gaze lifted to Lee’s. His eyes were a pale blue and there were crinkles at the edges from being so damned happy all the time, but his smile slipped from his face at her words. His eyes narrowing.

“My car needed fixing and I had to use my tuition money to get it done. There would’ve been no way for me to get to class otherwise. So I got it fixed and borrowed the money for the class. One class, one semester, that’s it. I work two jobs so I don’t have to do financial aid and it’s taking me forever to get my degree, but the car thing messed it all up.”

She was older than the normal college kid. Archer had said she was twenty-five. Based on what she said, she’d been working her ass off to pay her own way.

Kady, the first Steele heiress to show up on the ranch, had had been raised by parents, her mother and a man she’d married and who Kady had thought was her dad. The way she spoke of them, they’d been real nice people and had set aside money for her to go to college before they’d died. And Penny, the other woman to inherit, her family was rich and put her through college, even a Master’s program, but solely for her mother’s own personal career gains, not because Penny really wanted to be a subsurface geoscientist. I’d met Nancy Vandervelk last month, heard how she’d used Penny’s need for affection against her—and she was a stone-cold bitch. But that was another story.

Cricket sat up, looked to all three of us. Her face, even splotchy and red, was earnest.

“I paid him back. All of it and the interest, too,” she told us, her words almost desperate. Obviously, it was really important she made her own way. “I won’t be in debt to anyone. But he said I owed him more. Compound interest. I don’t have two thousand dollars.”

“Two grand?” Archer said, running a hand over the back of his neck. He was pissed, but was good at hiding it. The way his jaw ticked I knew he was ready to go track down the fucker.

She sighed loudly. “They came to my house today, made me go to this strip club, to pay the money back on stage. He even said I could pay off the money faster by doing private dances, which weren’t dances at all.”

Archer stood, began to pace.

Fuck, the thought of Cricket being forced to dance for strangers…fuck. If she wanted to do a little strip tease, even a lap dance, it would be all in play and it would be with us. No one else would see her that way. “Did they hurt you? Make you—”

She shook her head. “No. Not then, but I was supposed to put on this slutty nurse’s outfit and then strip.” She spit out the words, her anger flaring. “That was so not happening. They threatened…well, you can imagine.” She turned her head up to look at Lee. “I never stripped before. And as for us, I know what we did last year was really wild, really kinky, but I’m not like that, at least not with anybody else. I’m not,” she vowed, as if it was crucial we understood that.

“Shh,” Lee soothed, gripping her face in his palms. “Of course, you’re not. We never thought you were. Hell, baby, if you’d left your phone number, you’d have known how much we wanted you, that one night wasn’t enough. How much we want you now.”

Her mouth fell open and her eyes widened. Shit, she’d thought we’d only wanted her for the weekend, for a fling.

“Really?”

“Really,” Archer added as he sat back down, making sure she knew we all felt the same way. “Lee and I never even saw your face. We’ve been wanting you ever since. I just couldn’t find you.”

Tears slipped down her cheeks as Lee dropped his hands, but she was calm.

“Why did you go?” I asked. “Why didn’t you at least say goodbye?”

“I had my clinical shift at the hospital. I took the clinical rotation over the summer. For class credit, I had to take a certain number of shifts. I only expected to stay in Poulson for the rodeo, but you…you changed my plans. But I couldn’t call in sick. I had to go and I had to leave early to make it there in time.”

“Even if you weren’t interested in more with us, you still could have said goodbye,” Sutton said.

She glanced down, averting her eyes. “You’re right. But…I guess I just didn’t want to hear that ‘It had been a wild time, but see ‘ya’.”