Harvest at Mustang Ridge (15 page)

F
or a first date that wasn’t really a first date, Wyatt went upscale, Three Ridges style. The Fancy Place—that was its name, even—had cloth napkins, a decent wine list, and a low-key atmosphere that conveyed “around here, a nice night out still involves denim.” Damien’s crowd would’ve been split on whether the post-and-beam décor and faux oil lamps were kitschy enough to circle back around to cool, and Wyatt would’ve preferred the watering hole down the street, but the way Krista’s face lit when they walked in and the hostess greeted her by name told him he’d called it right.

“You come here much?” he asked as the hostess led them to a small table tucked in a little alcove, where an arched window overlooked the red-and-gold sunset.

“Now and then. Birthdays, big announcements, that sort of thing.” She pinkened. “Never before on a date, though.”

With another woman, he would’ve quipped something about being her first. With Krista, he pulled out
her chair and let his fingers linger on her nape, not entire sure of his moves. His usual dates, whether buckle bunny, artist, or connoisseur, were with him to see and be seen, with an expectation of some fun at the end of the night. Seeing and being seen meant something very different in a place like this, though, and Krista was nothing like his usual. She rode like a lithe blond centaur, juggled a big family and an even bigger business like it was nothing, and made room for animals—and, he suspected, people—that needed her. She humbled him, amazed him, made him want to step up and do what he could—with Jupiter, with the guests, with her. But the thing was, while she might be different, he was his same old self. And he didn’t want to screw this up.

As if he’d said that last part out loud, she looked up at him, squeezed his hand where it rested on her shoulder, and said, “Sit down, cowboy. As long as we keep talking and stay honest this time, we won’t get ourselves in trouble.”

And, just like that, everything was okay. Grinning, he moved around to take the chair opposite her, so their knees bumped intimately beneath the table. “When did you get so smart?”

“Rumor has it I was born that way.” She flipped open the menu. “Now. Where do you stand on red wine? I could use a glass after today’s ride.”

He chuckled. “I’m up for a bottle. I give our first timers an A for effort, though.” When it came to guided trail rides, there was nothing quite as hairy as two
dozen rank beginners, several of whom—including a couple of firefighter brothers from Yonkers—thought they already knew everything because they had watched both
City Slickers
movies. So when the waitress came around, Wyatt ordered a bottle of decent red and he and Krista shared a grin. And damned if his chest didn’t tighten at the sight of her smiling opposite him, with the fading sunset beyond the window casting her face in copper and gold. Suddenly, he wanted to sketch her smile, sculpt her laughter, capture the moment so it would always be like this—new and fresh. Instead, he leaned back and cleared his throat. “So, are you ready to give me some details about Jupiter’s freestyle? How’s the script coming along?”

When the waitress came back with the wine and took their orders, he went for a steak and potatoes, while Krista ordered a fussy-sounding pasta dish and asparagus mousse. Grinning, she said, “Don’t tell anyone back home what I ordered. Gran will talk trash about capers, Mom will pull out her Italian cookbooks, and one or both of them will try to make a mousse out of something that really shouldn’t be moussed. Like short ribs, or maybe popcorn.”

“Your secret is safe with me.” He poured with a flourish, then held up his glass. “To a night out on the town.”

“I’ll toast to that!”

They kept it light, laughing over his stories of Klepto ambushing Sam during his in-home business meetings and hers of dude mishaps ranging from poison ivy
cases dubbed “how exactly did he get it
there
?” to the little boy who, earlier in the year, had smuggled a barn cat home in his luggage. Now named Frequent Flier—Freak for short—the cat was living the life of luxury in New Jersey.

Dessert was more mousse—chocolate for him, berries for her, and a debate on whether the kitchen staff’s apparent fascination for whipping things extended to other parts of their lives. The conversation quieted on the drive home, but not in an awkward
we’ve run out of things to say
way. It was more that the undercurrents were suddenly doing the talking. Their eyes met and his body tightened with edgy anticipation; he brushed his fingertips over the back of her hand where it rested on the seat between them, and her breath caught, then quickened.

When he reached the twin pillars that marked the main entrance to Mustang Ridge, he rolled to a stop and looked over at her. “You ready to call it a night?”

She met his eyes, her lips curving. “Only if you are.”

“Not even close,” he said, and hit the gas.

Over drinks one night back in Denver, Damien had asked about Wyatt’s definition of a perfect date. At the time, he had said something about a smart, witty woman in a little black dress who wanted him but didn’t need him. Now, he thought it would be more along the lines of a beautiful blonde who knew that he could offer her only so much, yet still turned her hand over beneath his and twined their fingers together. He didn’t know where tonight was headed, exactly, and
that was just fine with him. Because right now, he was exactly where he wanted to be.

He parked in front of the bunkhouse, grinning at the sight of a fuzzy gray mug in the window. Figuring he should really give her some sort of formal invitation, he said, “You want to come in? I’ve been doing some work on the hot tub.”

Amusement lit her eyes. “Was that a ‘hey, baby, do you want to see my grout’?”

“Something like that.”

“How about you show me your setup out back?”

That brought a twinge. “There’s not much to see.” Just a few tools, a pile of scrap, and a whole lot of bad ideas.

“Indulge me.”

With anybody else, even Damien—especially Damien—he would’ve found a distraction, even if it meant getting creative. Instead, he came around and opened Krista’s door, then held out a hand. “You’ll have to use your imagination.”

“I can do that.”

He helped her down, then kept her hand as he let them into the steel building and flipped on the lights. Somehow the darkness made it look better than it usually did—the tools seemed mysterious rather than stark, and his junk pile suddenly looked like a halfway interesting mix of dark and light shapes. “I’ve just got a small forge and a welder with me,” he said, “and some stuff I salvaged from Sam’s neighbors.”

“Oh!” Her eyes warmed. “You’ve been working!” She
tugged him to the makeshift workbench he’d cobbled together out of leftovers from the bunkhouse reno.

At the time he’d knocked it together, he had feared that the ugly waist-high table might be it for his creative urges at Mustang Ridge. Now, though, it held a foot-tall structure made of curved metal pieces he had salvaged from the latches of old stall doors, topped with two ornate door knobs—one engraved brass, the other cut crystal.

“It’s just something I was fiddling with this morning.” After his face-to-face with her father, Wyatt had thrown open the steel doors, fired up his torch, and given himself permission to fool around for an hour. At first, he had been jazzed about the piece, which was the first thing he’d started from scratch in months. Now, though, he eyed it with zero enthusiasm. “I thought it was starting to turn into something cool, but it had other ideas. Now I think it wants to be bad hotel décor, or possibly a mutant jellyfish.” Or a total waste of time that reminded him why he should stick to sketches until he knew where he was headed.

“Not a jellyfish,” she said, studying it with an adorable intensity that did away with his frustration between one pulse-thud and the next, and put him in a very different mood.

“No?” He leaned in so his eyes were level with hers and her hair brushed his jaw, filling his senses with her flowery scent. “What, then? A daffodil?”

“Nope. It’s a man and a woman kissing. Don’t you see?”

“Not in a million . . .” But he trailed off, because suddenly he
did
see it, or at least a glimmer of it in the way the doorknobs bent together, nearly touching, one catching the light and the other blocking it off.

“But it’s not finished yet, is it?” She leaned in. “What comes next?”

He could almost see that, too, how the figures needed to be fleshed out, intertwined. Were they dancing? Kissing? As he stood there beside Krista, looking at the piece and seeing it through her eyes, he could almost remember what it felt like to be good at his job. But almost wasn’t good enough and over the past few years he’d learned that women and work didn’t mix, at least for him. So he said, “Next, we go in the house for a drink or something. Neither of us is dressed for welding.”

She poked him in the ribs. “I own a guest ranch. Everything I own is one plumbing emergency away from being barn clothes.”

“Oh, really? You do much riding in a skirt?”

“Well, there was that one Halloween. . . .” She didn’t push him on it, but a challenge glinted in her eyes.

Danged if he didn’t feel a stir of the same urge that had driven him into the workshop earlier that day. Not to mention that she was offering him an excuse to put his hands all over her, the way he’d been dying to for the past couple of hours. Days. Weeks. He let go of her hand to rummage a moment, grabbing goggles, earplugs, gloves, and a heavy apron. “Here. Put these on.”

Her face blanked in surprise, then she backed off,
holding up her hands. “Hang on. Wait a minute. This is your gig. I’m just cheerleading.”

“No way. This was your idea.” He advanced with the protective gear. “Put it on, or I’ll put it on for you.” He feinted, then made a grab.

She squeaked and dodged, laughing as her skirt flared around her ankles. “Okay, okay. Give it here.”

“Tuck your hair back. Sparks are going to fly.”
In more ways than one
, he thought as she donned the oversize gear, looking adorable and out of place.

When they both had their gear on, he guided her to the workbench and put his arms around her, so they were aligned with her back to his front and their bodies were snug together. She felt small against him, delicate, making him very aware that this was a first for him. Not just that he was letting her into his creative process—such as it was—but that he wanted her there.

Then again, Krista was different. She always had been.

*

Over the next hour, Krista went from warm to overheated to blazing, and not just because of the waves of heat radiating from the tabletop forge. There was hot, and then there was
hot
—in the snap and spark of molten metal, in the sharp taint of mask-filtered air, in the clang-bang of the heavy hammer against a waist-high anvil. And, most of all, in the way his arms wrapped around her, making her feel safe and vulnerable at the same time as he guided her in welding a joint here, adding a line of flux there.

And, as they moved together, with her hands wrapped in his, she had to lock her knees to keep from sagging. She had gone into tonight thinking she knew what she was getting. But she hadn’t expected anything like this.

“Beautiful.” Wyatt’s approving growl, coming from just beside her jaw, could have been directed at the sinuous twine of metal he held with a pair of tongs, but it went straight to her core, resonating with the greedy heat that surged there, stringing her tight with anticipation. And she wasn’t alone in that, she knew, because he said it again, closer to her throat, and then kissed her where the word landed.
Beautiful.

Shifting away from her, he grabbed a hammer and set the glowing metal on the curved anvil. The apron, goggles, and gloves protected her from the sparks, the earplugs from the onslaught of noise as she watched the play of his massive muscles. She had seen blacksmiths make shoes out of raw metal stock, had seen branding irons heated to that intense orange-red that almost seemed alive. But she had never felt the hammer blows in her core before, hadn’t ever been dry-mouthed as the metal came to life beneath gauntleted hands.

The sculpture didn’t just hint at a kiss anymore—it shouted in passion, from the curves of the intertwining metal limbs to the angles of the wrought-iron bodies.

“Here,” he said, coming back to her with a smaller soldering iron and a roll of flux that gleamed in the overhead lights. “They need faces.” He bracketed her,
guided her, making her feel vulnerable yet so powerful as together they touched lines of molten metal to the cooling surfaces, hinting at closed lids and curving lips. Until, finally, he whispered against her skin, “I think we’re done.”

“It’s amazing,” she said, knowing that wasn’t nearly enough. “Incredible. I’m blown away.”

He turned her to face him, gently lifted her goggles off and stripped her gloves and apron away, tossing them aside, then doing the same to his own. “I was thinking of you when I started it,” he rasped, “but I didn’t see what it was meant to be until I had you here with me.” And, bending his head to hers, he kissed her with all of the pent-up passion that had been building between them.

Yes. Oh, yes.
She gripped double handfuls of his shirt to anchor her when the world went white-hot around her, the heat of a thousand forges blasted through her, and she let him sweep her away. Because this was now, and now was very, very good.

*

Wyatt didn’t care that it was too crazy, too fast, too everything. In that moment, all he cared about was getting his hands on her. He was playing with fire, and wanted the burn.

He was done talking.

He cupped her waist and felt the play of long, lean muscles; tangled his tongue with hers and felt like he’d stood too long in front of the furnace. Without breaking the kiss, he scooped her off her feet and into the cradle
of his arms. His long strides carried them out of the steel building, across the moonlit yard, and up the porch steps two at a time.

The door was an effort when his entire focus was on the play of his mouth on hers and the drag of her fingers through his hair, but he got them inside, covered the distance to the sitting area, lowered her to the huge leather sofa and followed her down. The room was lit only by the digital displays in the kitchen and the blue-white moon outside, and the darkness heightened his senses, making him very aware of her soft, feminine body beneath him, the hitch of her breathing as he splayed a hand along her ribs, and the way her scent had deepened, going earthy and urgent.