His for the Taking

“What?” She had gone still. Her eyes never left his face. “Let me go!” Her voice was shallow.

“You don’t want me to do that, and you know it.” In the grip of a need too fierce to deny, his voice was raspy.

His gaze moved hungrily lower. She had soft, lush breasts. Hell, he wanted way more than a kiss, and he wanted it very badly. She was Jesse Ray’s daughter, so she probably wanted it, too.

Feeling justified in testing a girl of such easy virtue, he gripped her shoulders and pulled her closer. Before she could react, he lowered his mouth to hers so he could take his first taste of her. His lips were hard and demanding because he expected easy compliance. And for an instant she responded just as favorably as he’d imagined, by gasping and sighing and clutching him closer. Her lips did part, and he felt her tongue, if only for an instant. Then almost immediately she stiffened. Recoiling, she balled her hands and began to pound at his chest, thrashing wildly.

When he didn’t immediately let her go, her face flushed with anger. “You wouldn’t treat Lizzie like this! You wouldn’t try to take her in a barn like she was something cheap and easy without ever even having a single conversation with her!”

“Well, you’re not Lizzie Collier, are you? You’re Jesse Ray’s girl.”

“And that makes me too low to have feelings like you and your kind? Well, I do have feelings! And I’m not like my mother, you hear! So, go find your precious, saintly Lizzie Collier, and leave me in peace! She’s your girlfriend. Not me! And I wouldn’t ever want to be!”

But the last was a lie. The quick tears of shame and desolation in her lovely eyes and the thick pain in her ravaged tone told him so. She wanted him, but on equal terms. She didn’t want to be someone cheap in his eyes. Her pride, as well as her longing for him, tugged at his heart and made him feel ashamed even as it made his desire for her increase a thousandfold.

He hadn’t misread her. She had wanted him, badly. But Jesse Ray’s daughter had as much self-respect as Lizzie Collier did any day.

For a long moment, she gazed at him as if pleading for something he was at a loss to give even as her look tore his heart. Then, with a desperate cry, she pushed free of him and ran out of the barn. As he watched her retreating across the pasture, he was stunned by her grace and vital beauty and by how much more he wanted her than he’d ever wanted Lizzie. He was baffled by how low and ashamed he felt by that fact. She was just Jesse Ray’s girl. Why the hell should he feel such an overpowering need for her, such a need to apologize to her?

For weeks afterward, he’d tried to put the scent and softness and taste of the spirited and unsuitable girl out of his mind, but she’d been too lovely, too passionate, too brave, too forthright—too sexy. He’d dreamed of her, dreamed of making love to her.

He tried to forget her, but then his friends began to tell him stories about Maddie—marvelous stories he’d hungered to hear. How Maddie raced with the other kids, mostly the boys, in the pastures outside town. How she always won on the back of that prancing demon, Wild Thing. They said that she’d tamed him, that she was fearless, that she would ride bareback, that the pair could jump anything.

Why, one day after school when Cole’s friend Lyle had been smoking in his vintage Mustang with the top down, she and Wild Thing jumped over him and the car.

“Crazy horse came so close to my head I dropped my cigarette in my crotch. Burned a hole in my best pair of jeans,” Lyle had complained.

Such stories had impressed Lizzie, but they’d merely proved to Cole that Maddie was a headstrong fool—and brave, stubborn and determined. Even if the older generation in Yella wouldn’t change their minds about her because of her mother, some of the kids began to think she wasn’t as bad as they’d been taught. Maddie was smart in school, too, and Miss Jennie, whose approval was hard to win, thought she was as good as anybody.

For all that, Cole knew his mother would never approve of Maddie as his girlfriend. After his mother had married into the legendary Coleman family, she felt her children had a position to uphold. Still, despite his better judgment, his fascination with Maddie began to consume him. Thus, it hadn’t been long before Cole started coming home from the university every weekend to seek her out.

He’d go to the barn and watch her train Lizzie’s horses, especially Wild Thing. Maddie worked hard, giving more than she should to that monstrous beast, who now behaved like a docile pet to please her. Not that she said “I told you so” when Cole admitted he’d been wrong about her horse-training abilities. She simply basked in his praise, and he’d realized how much she enjoyed being admired rather than scorned. She was sweet when he apologized for kissing her, too.

Cole broke up with Lizzie and, with immense determination, began to court Maddie—but secretly.

He decided the gossips were wrong. Although she resembled her mother physically, she had a different character. Yes, mother and daughter shared the same jet-black hair, the same smooth, pale skin and the same lavender eyes that could turn blue when impassioned. Yes, their curvy bodies and sensual natures had been designed by God to drive men wild. But unlike her mother, Maddie was sweet and true.

Then she’d jilted Cole for Vernon Turner and left town, proving his assessment wrong. She was just as feckless and promiscuous as her mother.

If she was trash, why couldn’t he forget her? Why did he care if she was back in Yella?

She doesn’t matter anymore. Hell, she never should have mattered.

So why did every nerve in his body feel taut? Why was his heart racing at the possibility of seeing her again?

Women like Maddie Gray, women who roared into a man’s life and then left him like so much roadkill when they’d finished with him, were a dangerous breed. A smart man learned his lesson the first go-round and steered the hell clear of them.

So why was he standing up and slinging his jacket over his shoulders?

Cole had about a million things to take care of on the rig, like dealing with that crooked driller. He didn’t have time for an unscheduled trip to Yella. Nevertheless, he scooped his cell phone and the keys to his Ford Raptor off his littered desk. Then he grabbed his sweat-stained beaver Stetson and rushed out of his trailer. Scanning the well site, which reeked of acrid fumes, he hollered for Juan.

After the air-conditioned trailer, the thick summer heat felt suffocating. Briefly he informed Juan that there was a problem at Coleman’s Landing, his family’s legendary ranch on the southern tip of the Texas Hill Country. Cole said he had to get down there fast, but that he’d be back soon. He told Juan to get the water well drilled and to damn the expense.

Then Cole was in his truck. Tires spinning, gravel and dust clouds flying, he set off for Yella.

After three miles of graded dirt road, his tires hit the main highway. He drove down that straight stretch of asphalt through parched, open country of scrub oak, mesquite and huisache like a madman, hating himself for being so all fired up to see her. She’d ruined his life…or at least several years of it, and she’d hurt sweet Lizzie, too.

Lizzie had loved him with every bone in her body, but because of Maddie haunting him, hard as he’d tried, he hadn’t ever been able to love Lizzie as he should have. Or at least he’d never craved her, if that sort of cravin’ counted for love—not the way he’d craved Maddie, with every fiber of his being.

Even Lizzie’s dying words had been about Maddie, and he’d hated Maddie for distracting him at a time when he should have been concentrating solely on Lizzie.

But he had to see Maddie again. Hopefully all he needed was closure to get her out of his system. Something about the way she’d left him six years ago—without even so much as a goodbye—bothered him.

He had to know how she could have been so unfailingly thoughtful and kind during their long-ago summer romance, how she could have loved him so sweetly that final afternoon in August—and then run off with trash the likes of Vernon Turner that same night.

Who was she: The bad girl her own mother and the town claimed she was? Or the sweet, pure girl he’d fallen in love with?

He hoped to hell he wasn’t fool enough to chase after a dream again.

Two

If Maddie felt nervous and out of sorts just being back in Yella, she felt even worse to be chasing Miss Jennie’s dog onto Cole’s wooded land. What if Adam was wrong? What if Cole came back to town before he was supposed to?

She dreaded seeing him more than anyone else in Yella, which was ridiculous. How could his rejection and contempt still hurt so much after six years, when she’d told herself repeatedly that the past—that who she used to be—no longer mattered?

Maddie hadn’t been back to Yella since the night she’d run away because there were too many memories here, both good and bad. For years, she’d made the future her focus and only rarely looked back. Besides, coming here meant she’d had to leave Noah, who was enrolled in a summer day camp on Town Lake, with a dear friend. She missed him, but she wouldn’t have people here judging him because of her—or noticing how much he resembled Cole and putting two and two together.

She’d only come back now because she owed Miss Jennie for everything good in her life.

Maddie wiped her damp brow with the back of her hand. Had Yella always been this suffocatingly hot in the summer? Of course it had. She just hadn’t noticed when she’d been a skinny, fearless kid wearing a thin T-shirt and shorts, running wild in the woods.

Today, with the sun beating down out of a bright sky, the heat felt thick and ferocious, and it wasn’t even noon yet. Strands of her long black hair had come loose from her ponytail and stuck to her cheeks and neck. Her T-shirt and cutoff jeans felt as if they were glued to her perspiring body.

Still, despite the oppressive heat and humidity and a faint sense of uneasiness, she loved the scents and sounds of the woods. The smell of grass and dust, the chorus of insects that hummed along with the birds, made her remember some of the brighter moments of her youth. Long ago she’d ridden in these woods. Here, on horseback, a slim, despised girl had acquired the magical power that riding a powerful horse could bring. Riding had taught her to be brave and strong.

Most of all she remembered riding here with Cole.

Don’t think about him.

Better to fret about her company’s fundraiser than Cole. Even though she dreaded the annual event and the stress of dealing with wealthy donors, especially the women who knew how to dress and where to shop and where to lunch, she preferred worrying about all of that to thinking about Cole.

He’d rejected her, had made her feel more unworthy than anybody else here ever had. Why couldn’t she simply forget him? Even after Greg had come into her life last spring—solid, reliable Greg, who didn’t know her secrets, who approved of her and wanted to marry her because of who and what she was now—she remained confused about her obsession with Cole, who’d never seen her as his equal.

He’d rejected her soundly—so why couldn’t she let him go? Why was she so afraid of seeing him?

When she’d fled Yella six years ago, she’d been too traumatized to ever imagine coming back. In Austin, she’d tried to better herself, tried to live down the mother who hadn’t wanted her, the sorry trailer in Yella where she’d been raised, the terrible night that had driven her away. Most of all, she’d fought hard to be a better mother to Noah than her mother had been to her.

Not that juggling single motherhood while working full-time and going to college had been easy. Especially not when the nagging fear that she really was what everybody here had believed—no good—had remained.