More than life, p.1
More Than Life, page 1
More Than Life
Mary Calmes
Mary Calmes Books, LLC.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
A Note From The Author
Also by Mary Calmes
Coming Soon
About the Author
More Than Life
Copyright ©2020 Mary Calmes
http://marycalmes.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of author imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted on the cover is a model.
Cover art Copyright © 2020 Reese Dante
http://reesedante.com
Edited by Desi Chapman
Content/Copy Edit by Lisa Horan
Beta Read by Will Parkinson
Proofreading by Judy’s Proofreading
Assistant Jessie Potts potts.jessie@gmail.com
Created with Vellum
Acknowledgements
I wanted to take this opportunity to thank my amazing team, Desi Chapman who sees the book at it’s very worst and streamlines my thoughts, Lisa Horan who digs deep and asks the hard questions while being ever supportive, Will Parkinson who patiently points out things I missed and Judy Zweifel who must comb through the minutia. Clearly, it takes a village. And Reese Dante who has to weed through so much talking, and too many details, and yet always creates the perfect cover. And last, but not least, my long-suffering, patient even when giving me a reality check, assistant Jessie Potts. I could not be on this journey without you.
Thank you all.
And thank you, my wonderful readers, who are the reason I get to do what I love.
More Than Life
Hart Jarrett was only supposed to be passing through Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He wasn’t supposed to get involved, no emotional entanglements to tie him down. Setting down roots was never part of the plan, not until he opened himself up to love. Too bad the man he bet on bailed and left Hart holding the ranch. There were two choices after that: run away, or stay and build something real from nothing.
Nearly six years later, Hart has created a home and a life he never expected, with the help of his best friend and foreman, Morgan Brace. The ranch is thriving thanks to its loyal men and strong ties to the community. But there’s a snake in the garden, and it takes many forms. There’s a dead man on Hart’s property, a man he knows, and the questions are piling up. As if that weren’t enough, his ex has reappeared out of the blue, with plans to reclaim what he willingly gave.
And, to make matters worse, it appears Morgan is finally taking his dating life seriously.
Everything Hart has built is unraveling.
The life Hart wants doesn’t work without Morgan in it. Imagining a future without Morgan, him turning elsewhere for love and coming in second to someone else in Morgan’s heart—as well as his bed—is almost unbearable. So maybe, just maybe, the answer lies in Hart confessing that he loves Morgan more than life itself.
If Hart gambles and loses, will he even still want the life he’s worked so hard to build?
One
It was early for this. When I saw the two cars park in front of the house, one a sheriff car, the other a newer Ford Bronco, I took a breath and sipped my coffee instead of getting up. At the moment, I was warmish with the heater behind me, even sitting outside in the early morning thirty-degree weather. And again, it wasn’t even nine yet—too early for an interrogation—so for once I set my manners aside and stayed put. Besides, I was tired. I’d been burning the candle at both ends for weeks, working on new contracts, acquisitions, and hiring temporary staff for the winter to help with yearly events. I was running on coffee and adrenaline and wishing for something stronger to keep me vertical. Mostly a vacation would have been nice, but being a rancher wasn’t the kind of job you could hit the pause button on. And besides, we were gearing up to be busy, as we were every fall.
“Morning, Hart,” Sheriff Octavia Lange called over to me, not smiling but lifting her hand in greeting.
“Tavi,” I called back. “May I offer you some coffee?”
She reached the wraparound porch of the cabin before the others. “Did you make it or did Wes?” she asked hesitantly.
I scowled at her as one woman and three men stepped around her so they were no longer standing in snow up to their ankles. November in Wyoming was cold but beautiful with all the white diamond powder. The trouble became that underneath the blanket of Disney-movie perfection, on my ranch as well as everyone else’s, was either dirt or grass. It didn’t help that my little five-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot home wasn’t anywhere near the main house. Instead it sat on the other side of the foreman’s house, which was past the newly renovated bunkhouse beside the stable. Near and around the mansion was all gravel, but that wasn’t the case here. My home was surrounded by a sea of thick, wet mud. They had all just slogged through it to reach me.
“I made it,” Wes Haggerty announced in answer to the sheriff as he stepped out the front door with a tray of mugs and a steaming carafe of French roast. There was sugar and creamer and a separate mug, because the man had the memory of an elephant.
Once he set the heavy tray down, he took hold of the mug and walked it over to the woman in the silver fox hat—which I’d told her, the last time she was on the ranch, that I didn’t approve of. Fur, in my humble opinion, always looked better on the animal it grew on.
“Here you are, Miss Thomas. Earl Grey with a bit of cream and the lavender honey you said you liked the last time you were here.”
She practically whimpered as she took the mug and gifted the caretaker of the Ironwood Ranch with a glorious smile that lit up her whole face.
When he turned back to me, I rolled my eyes. The smack on the shoulder I got as he walked over to stand beside my chair hurt just a bit. He was not a small man. None of the men who worked for me were, and Wes, in particular, was built like a tank with tree trunks for arms. No one would have looked at him and intuitively thought that he was the one who planned and made three meals a day, seven days a week, as well as baking for every holiday and special occasion. He came off as scary, maybe even deadly, and the scar that bisected his left eyebrow didn’t help matters. But when anyone saw the joy on his face when he covered the dining table in the bunkhouse with all kinds of different pies, they understood instantly that the man took too much joy in his culinary triumphs to ever slit your throat in your sleep.
“Be nice,” Wes muttered under his breath, bumping the side of my chair with his foot before he retreated into my tiny house.
I was always nice. “He’s getting scones,” I informed the group on my porch, warm now as they’d all grabbed cups and poured coffee, and the heater was close and pretty powerful. I had bought one of the same ones that sat on the sprawling wraparound deck of the main house, so I knew it was top-of-the-line.
Close to six years ago now, when I was new to the area, when Lee Quantrell first brought me out to the homestead so he could not only fuck me under his father’s roof, shoving me, and the fact that he was bi, in the man’s face, the ten-room, ten-thousand-square-foot hunting lodge of a house was where the owner of the Ironwood hung his hat. But when Lee and his father, Henry, had locked horns over the running of the legacy ranch, in a surprise move, Henry had bought property on Maui and left to start a new life in the Aloha State. A month later, Lee got the news that his father had married a woman half his age. He was hoping to have more children.
“He’s only fifty-six,” I told Lee, shrugging. “He was young when you were born, only twenty-three, and he’s spent his entire life taking care of this ranch because his father guilted him into it.”
“Don’t talk like you know him,” Lee reproached me, his gaze angry and cold.
But I knew what I was talking about, because unlike his son, I had sat up night after night with Henry and listened to his drunken stories about what his hopes and dreams had been. He could have had a football scholarship and left the ranch behind, but his father forbade that, allowing nothing other than stewardship of the land. When Lee’s mother, Donna, died in childbirth, her heart, as it turned out, not strong enough to deliver a baby, Henry turned to his own mother to raise his son.
When Lee was five, breast cancer claimed his grandmother, and a year after that, a heart attack took his grandfather. It was only Henry and Lee left on the Ironwood, the stunning three- hundred-and-fifty-thousand-acre property surrounded by the Bridger-Teton National Forest and the Grand Teton National Park. And when Lee turned eighteen, he did what his father had not and made use of his own scholarship—football again—and went all the way to California.
He had a life there in Los Angeles, but the temptations of being on his own proved more than he could first manage and finally control. Things spiraled quickly. Being focused on neither football n
The fighting between father and son started almost immediately.
Henry wanted to transition the ranch into a self-sustaining farm. Pastureland would become a place for crops and the cattle would all be sold off.
Lee wanted to merge with other smaller ranches, acquire more land and more cattle, and rival the largest spreads in Texas.
Neither man wanted to budge, and the daily battles left Lee on the prowl at night, looking for danger and a place to vent his frustration.
In California, Lee had discovered he liked having sex with men just as much as women. In the Army, there had been one man, first a friend, then his lover, who became the center of his world. The IED that sent Lee to the hospital sent the man he loved to his grave. Back at home, heartbroken and scarred, he’d become a festering wound of pain and anger. The second I saw him—damaged, violent, and beautiful—out at a bar with his old high school cronies, I knew what I wanted. People with pieces missing were my weakness.
I knew what I looked like, long and lean, every muscle toned and defined from slavish devotion to the gym. Golden hair, golden tan, golden brows and lashes, blessed—I was told constantly—with eyes the exact color of spring grass. I made certain he saw me everywhere and left before he could cross the room to get a word out. It was an endless game of cat and mouse until I was there, on his ranch, the new guy on the Ironwood account, brought with the team from Somerset, the public relations firm owned by Emma Grant, to meet his father. I was crisp and polished, the epitome of class and professionalism until I turned my head to the sound of hoofbeats and went mute.
Lee Quantrell was big up on a horse, and when he dismounted, at six-three, he wasn’t small then either. The thing was, he wasn’t only tall, he was wide through the shoulders and chest with those long, carved muscles of a swimmer, and his walk was what the word sinful had been created to describe. I had no idea that a fluid swagger was possible until I’d seen him pull it off. Just seeing the man made me think of sex, and from the sound Emma made, she was not immune to his charms either.
Gorgeous, as a descriptor, did not do the man justice. He was simply stunning, and that was before the aviators came off and he glanced at me. I had never seen midnight blue in my life. I was staring, gawking, my obvious interest horrifying for a moment before I recovered my icy façade. But he’d seen it, his smug grin told me so. When I was touring the stables, at the back of the crowd, taking notes, he’d yanked me sideways into the tack room and closed the door behind me.
“This isn’t appropriate, Mr. Quantrell,” I informed him, breathing slowly, in and out, so there would be no humiliating catch in my voice. “You need to let me out.”
“Who the fuck are you?” he growled, one hand splayed on the wall beside my head, the other lower, at waist-level on the same wall, caging me there so I couldn’t move.
“Hart,” I said simply, lifting my hooded gaze to meet his, strong and steady, holding him there, watching as he swallowed hard and inhaled. “Hart Jarrett.”
“Let me take you to dinner, Hart Jarrett.”
“I can’t,” I murmured, reaching out, touching the collar of the sherpa-lined denim jacket he had on. “I work for you.”
“You’re fired,” he declared, his hot gaze on my mouth. “Now will you have dinner?”
I smiled slowly. “Is dinner necessary?”
The hungry whine, thready and breathless, was followed fast by a moan of raw, aching need as I dropped to my knees and made quick work of his belt. I was rough getting into his jeans and swallowed him down the back of my throat in one long, fluid movement. He let me get him close but then yanked me off him, to my feet, before he spun me around and shoved me face-first into the wall. He used me, hard, fucking me up against the wall after I passed him a condom out of my wallet. Afterward, when we were both standing there panting, he asked if he could still take me to dinner.
“Why?”
“Because next time, I’d like to do this in my bed.”
“Next time?”
“And the time after that,” he said, smiling at me. “I see us doing a lot of fucking.”
As declarations went, it was honest, which I liked, and it was just sex, which suited me even better. But by the time he asked me to move into the house with him two weeks later, it had become more than just getting off for me. And because I was in love for the first time, I missed that it wasn’t the same for him.
When he said, “I want you with me all the time,” I had heard a declaration of love, but he simply wanted me at his beck and call, no longer needing the pretense of any other sweet declaration or thoughtful gesture. What had begun as a conquest for him, turned, stupidly, to thoughts of marriage and children and forever and ever for me. He wanted to shock his father and the men who called the ranch home. But mostly, every night, he wanted me as many times, in as many ways, as I would allow.
The novelty of having me wore off in a month. He was bored with monogamy and needed to up the ante. To make our sex life more exciting, he wanted to invite others to join us. When I declined, he was annoyed even though I told him the reason. It wasn’t a judgment; I didn’t think it was wrong or perverse. I’d had many threesomes and more over the years, but he was mine, exclusively. He belonged to me, and I didn’t want to share.
He wanted to tie me up, but I turned down that offer as well. And it wasn’t that the idea repulsed me. I’d been bound and gagged in the past, flogged, held down, blindfolded—the list went on—but he wasn’t strong enough to make me respect his power, and that dynamic could end up being dangerous for both of us. He might really hurt me if I challenged him, or laughed, at the wrong moment.
Between me not giving him what he needed and the relentless push and pull with his father, I saw him change. He was miserable, quick to anger, and bored out of his mind. I was going to give him his out, end the relationship myself, even had a new job lined up in San Francisco, when his father suddenly gave in and gave up, taking his half of the ranch in cash and signing over the land and all other assets to Lee. It was a stunning reversal, and I for one was thrilled. Without the controlling, domineering influence of his father, I could be his real partner, I could marry him, be his rock, his life mate, his husband, and I was certain, then, that I could make him happy. I was pretty sure his frustration with his father and the direction of the ranch was the reason he’d felt a need to make changes in our dynamic. He had to exert power somewhere, and since he couldn’t in his professional life, he’d tried in his personal one. But now he was the one in charge, the singular owner of the Ironwood, all would be well.
Unfortunately, with no buffer between him and the men and the staggering weight of a ranch that was in danger of imploding from mismanagement, the pressure increased tenfold. There were bills, notices, contracts to fulfill, and mouths to feed, shelter, and pay. Everyone was looking to him because the Quantrell who slept in the big house had to create something from nothing. That was the only way it all worked. New ideas, new paths, and a focus on the future. It only took four months after his father left for Lee to fold under the weight. When I came home from work that last night and found him in our bedroom packing, hurling clothes into his Army duffel, I tried for several minutes to get him to stop and talk to me.
“I’m sorry, what?” I finally yelled because he wasn’t making any sense.
“I’m leaving,” he said flatly, all trace of emotion leached from his voice, monotone and robotic, not sounding like himself in the least. “Is that clear enough for you?”
“I don’t—”
“You always say you wanna help me,” he railed, getting madder by the second, “that you’re so sure you can save me and the ranch.”
