The comeback cowboy, p.15
The Comeback Cowboy, page 15
Violet glided over the yard, keeping to the shadows even though she thought it highly unlikely that anyone inside would be looking out. She’d worn her favorite black dress, just in case.
Lincoln parked his big old truck a ways down from the house, tucked up under some trees. He’d told her only yesterday that was deliberate, so he could back in and out without disturbing anyone in the house. That meant Violet wasn’t likely to disturb anyone tonight, either.
“I don’t know why you think there will be something in his car that would be meaningful to him when he could keep it in his house,” Kinley said in an undertone as they all gathered near the hood of the truck.
“It wouldn’t be hard to find his house,” Clementine chimed in. “All I have to do is call a friend on the force down in the Rogue Valley.”
“Maybe you haven’t met Lincoln,” Violet said, feeling that same unfortunate wild current ramping up inside her again. “Does he strike you as a man who puts down roots? No. He wanders around, tracking fugitives. He’s the very definition of a rolling stone.”
“You know this from your extensive study of him, of course,” Bree murmured. “A burning hate study, that is.”
Violet slid her a glance. “I’m very observant, Bree.”
“That’s one word for it, sure.”
Not choosing to dignify that with a reply, Violet tested the driver’s door handle. She looked toward the house, but still saw nothing. Then she threw the door open, tossed herself inside and disabled the overhead light. As quick as she could.
It took maybe ten seconds, and then she was sitting in his seat, her feet dangling in front of her and nowhere near the pedals, because that was how tall he was. But she opted not to concentrate on that. Because they were all frozen in place, staring up at the house and waiting for the doors to explode open and all the men to come charging out, like the good lawmen they were.
But everything was quiet. One breath, then another. Violet started to feel just the tiniest bit full of herself.
“We had to move some brush out of the chapel the past few days,” she told the others. “That’s how I know that he likes to keep the things that are important to him close to him.” She reached up and told herself her hand wasn’t shaking at all as she unhooked the chain that hung down from the rearview mirror. She pulled it off, then held the locket attached to the chain in her palm. “Lincoln comes from a very long line of lifelong criminals. According to him, there’s only one other person in his direct line who ever chose the path of righteousness.”
She turned as she said it, sliding out of the truck to plant her feet back on the ground. As if sitting where Lincoln sat...did something to her. As if it was some kind of unearned intimacy, almost as impossible to catalog as that kiss.
Stop thinking about that kiss, she ordered herself.
“I can tell my own stories, darlin’,” came an unmistakable drawl from the trees behind them.
And then everything seemed to happen both too fast and too slow. Yet all at once.
Her allies shrieked, then bolted, each in a different direction. Two of them laughing.
Violet herself stood still. And watched, as if she’d anticipated this very moment all along, as Lincoln emerged from the darkness to lean against that tree, those eyes of his glittering.
And fixed on her.
Not just on her, but on the locket she still held in one fist.
Yet Violet refused to back down and apologize like she surely would have, if she were smart. She was supposed to be smart. “Your great-grandmother succumbed to a touch of grift in her youth. Isn’t that how you put it?”
“Some say it’s a function of poverty. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s just in the Traeger blood. Still, she thought better of her thieving ways. Tried her best to straighten out the rest of her kin, though that didn’t take.”
“And that’s why you carry her picture in the locket.” Violet’s voice felt like a scrape against the dark. Or deep inside her own gut. “To remind yourself that she’s your kin just the same as the rest and it’s not blood that makes them do what they do. It’s the choices they make.”
“I’ll confess that I’m touched.” Lincoln sounded...hungry. Not touched. “I could have sworn you didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention to that story. And there you were, gathering intel all the while.”
“People think that being a good lawyer means knowing how to argue,” Violet said, as if the darkness they stood in was some kind of confessional booth. As if she could say things to him here, beneath the stars and the high trees, that she resolutely avoided even thinking in his presence by day. “And, sure, I’m not afraid of confrontation. But the reason I’m good at my job is because I listen. I listen well and I know how to use what I hear to get results.”
“And I imagine you’re about to tell me what results you intend to achieve with my family heirloom?”
She looked at her hand as if it wasn’t connected to her. Then back at him, and she didn’t need daylight to make him out. His wide shoulders. That breathtaking height. That intensity that seemed to blaze at her, brighter than any of the stars above.
“This is proof,” she told him. “Of how much I hate you.”
He didn’t laugh. Not quite. The sound he made was too dark, too targeted, to be a laugh. “You don’t hate me, Violet.”
That seemed to land in her like a punch. Like a deadly wallop. She thought she staggered back. She thought she tripped again and, this time, tumbled head over heels to the ground. She thought that, surely, one of those West Coast earthquakes had finally come and the earth itself was opening up beneath her feet.
When the truth was, neither one of them moved an inch.
Not one inch.
“I do,” she whispered, in a scratchy voice that sounded nothing like her own.
“No,” Lincoln said, and the look in his gaze was far more dangerous than any tectonic shift. “You don’t.”
And for a millennium or two, all of it hot and tight and breathless, they stood right where they were. Like they were planted there. Violet could hear that his breath was no smoother than hers, though that wasn’t the comfort it ought to have been.
Not when she felt like nothing more than a panicked little vole, possibly terminally odd, facing down a giant hawk.
An image that did absolutely nothing to keep her calm.
“I’m going to need you to hand over that locket, princess.”
Violet looked at the locket again. “And if I don’t?”
“Then I’ll have to take it from you, darlin’. One way or another.”
And Violet had spent more than half her life tamping down all the things in her she considered unwelcome inheritances from her family. Yet, standing out here in the dark, with the stolen locket in her hand, she felt as wild and uncivilized as if she’d rolled out of the Chesapeake like a storm. As if she was as untamable.
“You can try,” she whispered. “I hope you do.”
And something in her, something far more dangerous than that wildfire mess she knew too well, began to hum.
Especially when Lincoln pushed away from the tree, suddenly looking like he’d never known a moment’s laziness in all his life.
She knew, deep down, that this was the real Lincoln.
Which maybe meant that this was the real Violet looking right back at him.
But she didn’t care about that. She couldn’t. She kept her eyes on his and slowly, deliberately, stepped out of one high-heeled sandal, then the next. She lifted up his locket next. Held it up, then dropped the chain over her head so the locket slid between her breasts.
“I won’t warn you again,” Lincoln said, and his voice was so low. It moved over her like sex and silk, winding around and around, then sinking through her skin. Becoming part of her.
Changing her. Challenging her.
“I hate you, Lincoln Traeger, and I always will,” she whispered, even though she knew as the words left her tongue that each one of them sounded like its own endearment. Like love poems, sighed out to the summer night.
But she didn’t care.
Because it was time.
So she turned on her bare feet, gathered the skirt of her dress in one hand and ran.
And felt a deep kind of gladness roar open inside her when she heard him follow right behind her, like night followed day, deeper on into the woods.
CHAPTER SIX
LINCOLN LET HER RUN.
Hell, he encouraged it because there had always been a wildness in him. He’d been tamping it down for most of his life, pretending it wasn’t there, pretending the simple fact he made different choices than the rest of his family meant he didn’t have that same hectic call in his blood.
But something about Violet and the dark night all around them, that fire in her eyes and his great-grandma’s locket around her neck, made it impossible to pretend.
He went after her, racing through the night, through these woods they both knew so well.
It felt elemental.
It felt right.
It felt like the natural culmination of everything that had happened between Violet and him, this dance they’d been doing since they’d arrived here and all the stories he’d heard about the lengths she’d gone to back in the day, determined to prove how much she hated him.
She didn’t hate him.
Hate had nothing to do with this.
He could feel her all over him, like he’d already caught her. Like he’d already laid her out before him and drunk deep of her, the way he’d been imagining night and day since they’d started working on the chapel together.
Violet Cook was a major disruption. She woke him from a sound sleep. She was every last one of his idle daydreams. She worked beside him all day long, never seeming to notice that she was fast becoming his primary, overwhelming obsession.
She might not notice. Sadly, his friends did.
And weren’t the least bit shy about calling him out on his distraction, either.
But none of that mattered tonight.
Because despite all his fancy words and that call in his blood he’d learned to ignore before Violet had made it impossible, here in these dark woods, he felt like nothing at all but a man.
Flesh and blood and that pounding need within him.
She darted between the trees and he kept to her heels, everything inside him a kind of bright, molten heat and song.
He could have caught her at any time. But instead he drank his fill of Violet running, drenched in starlight, her black hair flowing behind her like she was some kind of ancient goddess. He basked in it as she shot down Hollyhock Hill, ran in a zigzag pattern through the cabins that were slowly being brought out of their dilapidated state, then out onto the bluff. She skirted the far edge of the tents set up there, a passing shadow in the dark, and he followed.
She could only be headed to the very trail that they’d spent the past week clearing and cleaning up. That was what waited in the woods on the far side of the bluff.
But then, something in him knew they’d been headed there all along.
He hung back just enough so she could keep her lead and that head of steam that had her vaulting over that old tree trunk, which they’d decided might as well remain across the trail, for a little rustic color.
Lincoln hopped the tree. Violet kept running up the trail until she finally reached the chapel. She didn’t hesitate at the high end. She ran down the center aisle until she stood between the madrone trees with only the steep drop-off and the lake before her.
Only then did she stop.
And he was sure he could feel her heart going wild inside his chest as surely as he could feel his own.
Lincoln made himself stop at the edge, right there at the top of the aisle. He could feel the heat of the run in him. He could feel the night air against his face. And he could feel it like her hands all over his body when Violet turned to face him.
A dark, wild joy on her face.
He felt that beat in him, its own drum, as he slowly made his way down the aisle toward her.
And he expected her to taunt him, the way she did too well. To say something, anything, to change what was happening between them. To make it less than it was. To make it...digestible.
But she didn’t.
Violet only waited there, barefoot and flushed and more beautiful to him in this moment than anything had ever been.
Ever.
And Lincoln thought, This is alive. This.
Violet.
As if it had all been worth it, these hard years, his even harder childhood, all of it leading him inexorably to this moment. To this woman.
It was more than puzzle pieces falling into place. He saw the whole pattern then. He knew the stories that he’d forgotten, of that angry girl years ago who muttered dark things under her breath every time he walked by. He’d thought it was funny then.
Tonight, it felt like a blessing.
“You don’t hate me,” he told her as he came closer. As he stepped between the trees, there on the wide stretch of grass and dirt they’d prettied up with their own hands. “Between you and me, Violet, I don’t think you ever did.”
“How would you know?” She laughed at him, but there was all that longing in her eyes, written all over her face. “You don’t remember any of it.”
“I don’t have to remember. I hope I’m never too blind to see what’s right in front of me.”
“And what’s that, Lincoln?”
It was a challenge.
But he was beyond that.
Because here they were, under the stars. And she was the one who’d wanted distance between them, a game he’d been more than happy to play, especially when he could see it annoyed her.
But he wasn’t playing anymore.
Tonight she wore his great-grandma’s locket around her neck. His history on a chain. She’d run through the camp, the woods, the night, like every last one of his fantasies.
And she looked a whole lot like his future.
Lincoln understood in that moment that the entire point of being alive was this. The right woman. A night sky thick with stars. These perfect woods, quiet all around them.
And this mad wonder between them, hot and bright, that he knew, without doubt, would burn on forever.
It already had.
This time when he kissed her, it was a claiming.
And tasting her, he was found.
He kissed her and he kissed her, and he indulged all the fantasies that had been plaguing him since the first time he’d had that pleasure. And when he hit his limit, he picked her up and she wrapped herself around him with a greedy sort of joy that made everything in him catch fire.
She dug her hands into his hair. She wrapped her legs around his hips.
Lincoln could have stood like that forever, letting her climb all over him. It was much, much better than he’d imagined and he’d put some time and effort into the imagining.
But Violet pulled away again and fixed him with that imperious look from her black eyes, even darker and deeper now.
“For God’s sake,” she said in a voice of deep complaint. “What are you waiting for?”
Lincoln laughed, a long, hot round of sheer pleasure.
And then he took his time laying her down on the sweet little altar they’d built. He shrugged his way out of his T-shirt, kicked his way out of his boots and his jeans, then followed her down, where she, greedy and impatient in a way that suited her all too well and made him burn besides, had already stripped off that dress of hers.
He was glad that they’d taken it to the ground, because the sight of Violet Cook naked would have knocked him off his feet either way.
“I get it now,” he managed to say with an approximation of his usual drawl as he stretched himself out beside her. “You wear those tents of yours as a public service.”
“I wear them because they’re comfortable,” she whispered, but she was surging against him, moving her hands all over him as if she already couldn’t get enough. As if she felt it, too, this ache. It was almost like panic.
Like there would never be enough of this perfect, unbearable heat and they’d barely even started.
“You wear them because if you didn’t, I expect we’d all be following you around mindlessly, begging you for a single glance.”
“Lincoln,” she said against his mouth, her smile tasting as wicked as it looked. “You already do.”
Everything flared between them then. A white-hot heat that should have melted them both away into nothing.
And it was hard to say whether he took her or she took him, swift and wild and hot.
Only when that was out of their systems did Lincoln stretch her out beneath him and recollect himself enough to take it slow like the Southern gentleman he was.
Or had always wanted to be, anyway. He’d wrapped it tight around the truth of himself, but he introduced her to that part of him, too. The part that had been an angry kid and was now a half-wild man, outside his own skin with the intensity of the things he felt for her.
He usually kept that part of him on a chain, but somehow, he knew Violet could handle him.
And she did.
That time, when he found his way inside her, it was shattering. He built her up and tore her apart again and again. Over and over, until there was nothing between them but starlight and wonder, and only then did he let himself go.
Holding her close, there in the night, so that fate could do the rest.
It was a whole lot later when he and Violet found themselves again, lying tangled up with each other after he’d handled their protection. Her head was on his arm, her dress pulled over the two of them like a blanket.
