Claim Me, Cowboy

“Right.” He had grown up in one house. His family had never moved. His parents were still in that same farmhouse, the one his family had owned for a couple of generations. He had moved away to go to college and then to start the business, but that was different. He had always known he could come back here. He’d always had roots.

“Will you go back to Portland when you’re finished here?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, blinking rapidly. “I’ve never really had a choice before. Of where I wanted to live.”

It struck him then that she was awfully young. And that he didn’t know quite how young. “You’re twenty-two?”

“Yes,” she said, sounding almost defensive. “So I haven’t really had a chance to think about what all I want to do and, like, be. When I grow up and stuff.”

“Right,” he said.

He’d been aimless for a while, but before he’d graduated high school, he’d decided he couldn’t deal with a life of ranching in Copper Ridge. He had decided to get out of town. He had wanted more. He had wanted bigger. He’d gone to school for marketing because he was good at selling ideas. Products. He wasn’t necessarily the one who created them, or the one who dreamed them up, but he was the one who made sure a consumer would see them and realize that product was what their life had been missing up until that point.

He was the one who took the straw and made it into gold.

He had always enjoyed his job, but it would have been especially satisfying if he’d been able to start his career by building a business with his brother and sister. To be able to market Faith’s extraordinary talent to the world, as he did now. But he wasn’t sure that he’d started out with a passion for what he did so much as a passion for wealth and success, and that had meant leaving behind his sister and brother too, at first. But his career had certainly grown into a passion. And he’d learned that he was the practical piece. The part that everybody needed.

A lot of people had ideas, but less than half of them had the follow-through to complete what they started. And less than half of those people knew how to get to the consumer. That was where he came in.

He’d had his first corporate internship at the age of twenty. He couldn’t imagine being aimless at twenty-two.

But then, Danielle had a baby and he couldn’t imagine having a baby at that age either.

A hollow pang struck him in the chest.

He didn’t like thinking of babies at all.

“You’re judging me,” she said, taking a step back from the paddock.

“No, I’m not. Also, you can get closer. You can pet them.”

Her head whipped around to look at the horses, then back to him, her eyes round and almost comically hopeful. “I can?”

“Of course you can. They don’t bite. Well, they might bite, just don’t stick your fingers in their mouths.”

“I don’t know,” she said, stuffing her hands in her pockets. Except he could tell she really wanted to. She was just afraid.

“Danielle,” he said, earning himself a shocked look when he used her name. “Pet the horses.”

She tugged her hand out of her pocket again, then took a tentative step forward, reaching out, then drawing her hand back just as quickly.

He couldn’t stand it. Between her not knowing what she wanted to be when she grew up and watching her struggle with touching a horse, he just couldn’t deal with it. He stepped forward, wrapped his fingers around her wrist and drew her closer to the paddock. “It’s fine,” he said.

A moment after he said the words, his body registered what he had done. More than that, it registered the fact that she was very warm. That her skin was smooth.

And that she was way, way too thin.

A strange combination of feelings tightened his whole body. Compassion tightened his heart; lust tightened his groin.

He gritted his teeth. “Come on,” he said.

He noticed the color rise in her face, and he wondered if she was angry, or if she was feeling the same flash of awareness rocking through him. He supposed it didn’t matter either way. “Come on,” he said, drawing her hand closer to the opening of the paddock. “There you go, hold your hand flat like that.”

She complied, and he released his hold on her, taking a step back. He did his best to ignore the fact that he could still feel the impression of her skin against his palm.

One of his horses—a gray mare named Blue—walked up to the bars and pressed her nose against Danielle’s outstretched hand. Danielle made a sharp, shocked sound, drew her hand back, then giggled. “Her whiskers are soft.”

“Yeah,” he said, a smile tugging at his lips. “And she is about as gentle as they come, so you don’t have to be afraid of her.”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” Danielle said, sticking her hand back in, letting the horse sniff her.

He didn’t believe that she wasn’t afraid of anything. She was definitely tough. But she was brittle. Like one of those people who might withstand a beating, but if something ever hit a fragile spot, she would shatter entirely.

“Would you like to go riding sometime?” he asked.

She drew her hand back again, her expression... Well, he couldn’t quite read it. There was a softness to it, but also an edge of fear and suspicion.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“You seem to like the horses.”

“I do. But I don’t know how to ride.”

“I can teach you.”

“I don’t know. I have to watch Riley.” She began to withdraw, both from him and from the paddock.

“I’m going to hire somebody to help watch Riley,” he said, making that decision right as the words exited his mouth.

There was that look again. Suspicion. “Why?”

“In case I need you for something that isn’t baby friendly. Which will probably happen. We have over a month ahead of us with you living with me, and one never knows what kinds of situations we might run into. I wasn’t expecting you to come with a baby, and while I agree that it will definitely help make the case that you’re not suitable for me, I also think we’ll need to be able to go out without him.”

She looked very hesitant about that idea. And he could understand why. She clung to that baby like he was a life preserver. Like if she let go of him, she might sink and be in over her head completely.

“And I would get to ride the horses?” she asked, her eyes narrowed, full of suspicion still.

“I said so.”

“Sure. But that doesn’t mean a lot to me, Mr. Grayson,” she said. “I don’t accept people at their word. I like legal documents.”

“Well, I’m not going to draw up a legal document about giving you horse-riding lessons. So you’re going to have to trust me.”

“You want me to trust the sketchy rich dude who put an ad in the paper looking for a fake wife?”

“He’s the devil you made the deal with, Ms. Kelly. I would say it’s in your best interest to trust him.”

“We shake on it at least.”

She stuck her hand out, and he could see she was completely sincere. So he stuck his out in kind, wrapping his fingers around hers, marveling at her delicate bone structure. Feeling guilty now about getting angry over her eating his Pop-Tarts. The woman needed him to hire a gourmet chef too. Needed him to make sure she was getting three meals a day. He wondered how long it had been since she’d eaten regularly. She certainly didn’t have the look of a woman who had recently given birth. There was no extra weight on her to speak of. He wondered how she had survived something so taxing as labor and delivery. But those were questions he was not going to ask. They weren’t his business.

And he shouldn’t even be curious about them.

“All right,” she said. “You can hire somebody. And I’ll learn to ride horses.”

“You’re a tough negotiator,” he said, releasing his hold on her hand.

“Maybe I should go into business.”

He tried to imagine this fragile, spiky creature in a boardroom, and it nearly made him laugh. “If you want to,” he said, instead of laughing. Because he had a feeling she might attack him if he made fun of her. And another feeling that if Danielle attacked, she would likely go straight for the eyes. Or the balls.

He was attached to both of those things, and he liked them attached to him.

“I should go back to the house. Riley might wake up soon. Plus, I’m not entirely sure if I trust the new baby monitor. I mean, it’s probably fine. But I’m going to have to get used to it before I really depend on it.”

“I understand,” he said, even though he didn’t.

He turned and walked with her back toward the house. He kept his eyes on her small, determined frame. On the way, she stuffed her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders forward. As though she were trying to look intimidating. Trying to keep from looking at her surroundings in case her surroundings looked back.

And then he reminded himself that none of this mattered. She was just a means to an end, even if she was a slightly more multifaceted means than he had thought she might be.

It didn’t matter how many facets she had. Danielle Kelly needed to fulfill only one objective. She had to be introduced to his parents and be found completely wanting.

He looked back at her, at her determined walk and her posture that seemed to radiate with I’ll cut you.

Yeah. He had a feeling she would fulfill that objective just fine.

Four

Danielle was still feeling wobbly after her interaction with Joshua down at the barn. She had touched a horse. And she had touched him. She hadn’t counted on doing either of those things today. And he had told her they were going to have dinner together tonight and he was going to give her a crash course on the Grayson family. She wasn’t entirely sure she felt ready for that either.

She had gone through all her clothes, looking for something suitable for having dinner with a billionaire. She didn’t have anything. Obviously.

She snorted, feeling like an idiot for thinking she could find something relatively appropriate in that bag of hers. A bag he thought had scabies.

She turned her snort into a growl.

Then, rebelliously, she pulled out the same pair of faded pants she had been wearing yesterday.

He had probably never dealt with a woman who wore the same thing twice. Let alone the same thing two days in a row. Perversely, she kind of enjoyed that. Hey, she was here to be unsuitable. Might as well start now.

She looked in the mirror, grabbed one stringy end of her hair and blew out a disgusted breath. She shouldn’t care how her hair looked.

But he was just so good-looking. It made her feel like a small, brown mouse standing next to him. It wasn’t fair, really. That he had the resources to buy himself nice clothes and that he just naturally looked great.

She sighed, picking Riley up from his crib and sticking him in the little carrier she would put him in for dinner. He was awake and looking around, so she wanted to be in his vicinity, rather than leaving him upstairs alone. He wasn’t a fussy baby. Really, he hardly ever cried.

But considering how often his mother had left him alone in those early days of his life, before Danielle had realized she couldn’t count on her mother to take good care of him, she was reluctant to leave him by himself unless he was sleeping.

Then she paused, going back over to her bag to get the little red, dog-eared dictionary inside. She bent down, still holding on to Riley, and retrieved it. Then she quickly looked up scabies.

“I knew it,” she said derisively, throwing the dictionary back into her bag.

She walked down the stairs and into the dining room, setting Riley in his seat on the chair next to hers. Joshua was already sitting at the table, looking as though he had been waiting for them. Which, she had a feeling, he was doing just to be annoying and superior.

“My bag can’t have scabies,” she said by way of greeting.

“Oh really?”

“Yes. I looked it up. Scabies are mites that burrow into your skin. Not into a duffel bag.”

“They have to come from somewhere.”

“Well, they’re not coming from my bag. They’re more likely to come from your horses, or something.”

“You like my horses,” he said, his tone dry. “Anyway, we’re about to have dinner. So maybe we shouldn’t be discussing skin mites?”

“You’re the one who brought up scabies. The first time.”

“I had pretty much dropped the subject.”

“Easy enough for you to do, since it wasn’t your hygiene being maligned.”

“Sure.” He stood up from his position at the table. “I’m just going to go get dinner, since you’re here. I had it warming.”

“Did you cook?”

He left the room without answering and returned a moment later holding two plates full of hot food. Her stomach growled intensely. She didn’t even care what was on the plates. As far as she was concerned, it was gourmet. It was warm and obviously not from a can or a frozen pizza box. Plus, she was sitting at a real dining table and not on a patio set that had been shoved into her tiny living room.

The meal looked surprisingly healthy, considering she had discovered his affinity for Pop-Tarts earlier. And it was accompanied by a particularly nice-looking rice. “What is this?”

“Chicken and risotto,” he said.

“What’s risotto?”

“Creamy rice,” he said. “At least, that’s the simple explanation.”

Thankfully, he wasn’t looking at her like she was an alien for not knowing about risotto. But then she remembered he had spoken of having simple roots. So maybe he was used to dealing with people who didn’t have as sophisticated a palate as he had.

She wrinkled her nose, then picked up her fork and took a tentative bite. It was good. So good. And before she knew it, she had cleared out her portion. Her cheeks heated when she realized he had barely taken two bites.

“There’s plenty more in the kitchen,” he said. Then he took her plate from in front of her and went back into the kitchen. She was stunned, and all she could do was sit there and wait until he returned a moment later with the entire pot of risotto, another portion already on her plate.

“Eat as much as you want,” he said, setting everything in front of her.

Well, she wasn’t going to argue with that suggestion. She polished off the chicken, then went back for thirds of the risotto. Eventually, she got around to eating the salad.

“I thought we were going to talk about my responsibilities for being your fiancée and stuff,” she said after she realized he had been sitting there staring at her for the past ten minutes.

“I thought you should have a chance to eat a meal first.”

“Well,” she said, taking another bite, “that’s unexpectedly kind of you.”

“You seem...hungry.”

That was the most loaded statement of the century. She was so hungry. For so many things. Food was kind of the least of it. “It’s just been a really crazy few months.”

“How old is the baby? Riley. How old is Riley?”

For the first time, because of that correction, she became aware of the fact that he seemed reluctant to call Riley by name. Actually, Joshua seemed pretty reluctant to deal with Riley in general.

Riley was unperturbed. Sitting in that reclined seat, his muddy blue eyes staring up at the ceiling. He lifted his fist, putting it in his mouth and gumming it idly.

That was one good thing she could say about their whole situation. Riley was so young that he was largely unperturbed by all of it. He had gone along more or less unaffected by their mother’s mistakes. At least, Danielle hoped so. She really did.

“He’s almost four months old,” she said. She felt a soft smile touch her lips. Yes, taking care of her half brother was hard. None of it was easy. But he had given her a new kind of purpose. Had given her a kind of the drive she’d been missing before.

Before Riley, she had been somewhat content to just enjoy living life on her own terms. To enjoy not cleaning up her mother’s messes. Instead, working at the grocery store, going out with friends after work for coffee or burritos at the twenty-four-hour Mexican restaurant.

Her life had been simple, and it had been carefree. Something she hadn’t been afforded all the years she’d lived with her mother, dealing with her mother’s various heartbreaks, schemes to try to better their circumstances and intense emotional lows.

So many years when Danielle should have been a child but instead was expected to be the parent. If her mother passed out in the bathroom after having too much to drink, it was up to Danielle to take care of her. To put a pillow underneath her mother’s head, then make herself a piece of toast for dinner and get her homework done.

In contrast, taking care of only herself had seemed simple. And in truth, she had resented Riley at first, resented the idea that she would have to take care of another person again. But taking care of a baby was different. He wasn’t a victim of his own bad choices. No, he was a victim of circumstances. He hadn’t had a chance to make a single choice for himself yet.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.