Chapter Six
Ellie gave Kristen blankets after she confessed that she’d “forgotten” her sleeping bag. Later, after she and Austin had excused themselves, she arranged the blankets on the rear seat while Austin rolled out his canvas bedroll. After climbing into the back seat and closing the door, she stretched out as far as she could. It was tight, but she tended to sleep on her side anyway. Except that the seat was just that much too short and that much too narrow. She could open the door and let her feet hang out. Yes. That was one solution. Awkward, but doable.
“Sure you don’t want to come back here?” Austin asked about five minutes after she’d opened the door—possibly because the dome light wouldn’t go off and it was keeping them both awake. And running down the battery.
“Fine.” Kristen got out of the truck and pulled on the blankets, bundling them into her arms and then carting them to the rear of the truck, where she dumped them unceremoniously on the open tailgate.
“Want me to build the divider?”
“Bite me,” she muttered, sounding more like Whitney than herself as she climbed in to the truck bed. She stretched out on top of his canvas bedroll, pulling the blankets up over her. The canvas made a decent barrier and since she was fully clothed, it wasn’t that cold. Really.
It felt so good to stretch her legs all the way out that she was willing to put up with a little cold.
“And thank you for not asking me where to bite,” she said as Austin rolled over, presenting his back to her.
“Saving that for later.”
“Right.” She snuggled deeper into her blankets, wishing he hadn’t said that. What would it be like to be nipped with those very white teeth? Her stomach tightened as a warmth unfurled deep inside of her. Even on top of the canvas, she was too close to the man, and it didn’t help matters that she really loved the way he smelled. But she was not sleeping head to feet. That would be admitting defeat.
Da head. Da feet. Hahaha.
She was losing it.
Kristen sucked in a breath, thought back to saner times, when she wasn’t sharing the bed of a truck with a bull rider, when she’d had a nine-to-five job. When she was traveling along her planned trajectory. Amazing how one unplanned event could throw everything off track so effectively. And try as she might to get things back on track, nothing seemed to work. The loss of perceived control was devastating to her world view.
‘Perceived’ being the key word. Yes, you could do all the planning in the world, but shit happened…and you ended up sleeping in the back of a truck with a bull rider who was more attractive than he had any business being.
What was a person supposed to do?
Suck it up. Roll with the punches.
Easy to say, hard to do, but she couldn’t keep living as she was, on the edge of anxiety, ashamed of the fact that she’d failed. She needed to get some perspective.
She needed to stop feeling as if she wanted to snuggle closer to Austin, and not just for warmth.
Really…what would that get her?
Answers to questions she’d once wondered about…questions she was still wondering about.
Sometimes it was best not to know; not to add new complexities into a life she was already having a hard time managing.
“Kristen?” Austin spoke softly, but his voice sounded overly loud in the quiet desert night.
“Yes?”
“Go to sleep.”
How, when she was so damned aware of him that her entire body was throbbing? She let out a long breath. “I’m trying.”
“Try harder.”
He rolled over so that his face was close to hers. She felt the warmth coming off him, the warm scent rising from the bedroll he was enveloped in. Felt like leaning in. Getting closer.
A shiver went through her and it wasn’t because of the cold.
“Austin…”
“Yeah?”
“It feels really crazy to be here like this.”
“It must be like a dream come true.”
Laughter bubbled up at his ridiculous statement and escaped her lips before she could stop it. She cleared her throat.
“You can laugh, you know. It’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost control of a situation.”
His comment stopped her cold. Was she that transparent? Or was he that intuitive? Did it matter which, when he’d hit the nail on the head?
“You might be right.” Why not admit it? It was true. There was a brief silence, then she said, “Are you going to tell me to be more like my sister?”
“Do you hear that a lot?”
“Practically never, actually.”
Austin rolled over on his back and stared up at the stars. “Do you want to be more like Whit?”
“I…want to break free a little.”
“Just a little?”
Her voice was small when she said, “A lot. I want to break all the habits I’ve developed over the years. I want to say screw it, and do what I want and not care about what people think.”
And there it was in a nutshell. She’d spent way too much time in her life worrying about what other people thought. What their perceptions were. It wasn’t how she wanted to live.
He said nothing. Kristen rolled over onto her back, mirroring his position, flopping an arm over her forehead.
“And you’re right,” she murmured. “About laughing.”
“You were laughing today. After catching Duane.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
She let out a sigh. She couldn’t articulate how it was different, but it was. Not everything had to be placed in a specific box. The thought had no sooner entered her head than she realized how out of character it was for her. She loved her boxes.
She lay back down, watching a meteor streak across the sky. Unfettered. Free. And perhaps close to crashing and burning. The thought made her give another small shudder. Crashing and burning was no fun, but freedom… Might it be worth the risk? She’d already crashed and burned.
And never wanted to do it again.
She closed her eyes, but they flashed open when Austin dropped a lazy arm over her.
“Give me your back.” His voice was low and close to her ear, sending another shiver through her.
“Excuse me?” Her voice was thick.
“Roll over so your back is to me. We’ll spoon through miles of canvas. You’ll be warmer because of it and maybe…just maybe…you might fall asleep.”
Kristen opened her mouth to protest, then thought, ‘Screw it.’ He was right. She needed more warmth and he needed his sleep.
She turned her back to him and he pulled her closer. The canvas of his bedroll bunched between them. She pulled in a breath, let out a sigh as her muscles relaxed. It didn’t feel bad, having Austin at her back.
Crazy, crazy times.
Snuggled up to a bull rider in the middle of the desert.
She hadn’t seen this one coming.
*
Kristen woke with a start, rising on one elbow and pushing her hair back with her free hand as she tried to remember where she was, why she was outdoors. Why she was no longer soaring through the air, as she’d been doing just seconds before.
The stirring behind her brought her crashing back to earth. She wasn’t flying over the valley. She was in the valley, in the bed of a pickup truck, the crisp April air nipping at her.
With a bull rider snuggled up against her rear end.
She was half afraid to look over her shoulder at Austin, who would, no doubt, be the picture of early morning male sexiness. She wasn’t yet ready to face such a thing.
She had no choice.
“Finally,” Austin murmured as if it were approaching noon. Since the sun hadn’t yet cleared the horizon, she didn’t believe that was the case.
“What time are we leaving?”
“Right after coffee.” He smiled a little, his eyes crinkling at the corners as if she amused him.
“What are you smiling at?”
“You look kind of good all rumpled.”
“Rumpled. Thank you.”
“It was a compliment.” He didn’t smile, but his voice was low and intimate. Warm and seductive. Kristen barely kept herself from swallowing.
Right. A compliment.
He put a hand on her shoulder then and drew her back down, so that they were once again face to face, as they’d been the night before, only now she could see his face clearly. His eyes were so damned blue—blue with white streaks that made them seem even bluer. And his mouth…she allowed her gaze to slide down and hold on his perfectly carved lips.
She needed to think of something else. Immediately.
“Those things I said last night—”
He put his fingertips on her lips, startling her into silence.
“Don’t backslide on me, Kristen.”
“Hey, you guys! Coffee!”
Kristen let out an audible breath at Ellie’s yell and Austin scowled…as if he honestly wanted to continue the conversation. Why?
She wanted to ask him, but the words froze in her throat. Thankfully, Ellie gave another shout from the house.
“We’d better move,” she said.
“Yeah.” His expression told her that he thought she was engaging in avoidance tactics. She saw it differently. What she was avoiding was none of his business, and she felt massively self-conscious…no…she felt vulnerable about the things she’d said yesterday. This morning. She’d revealed her weak spots.
Austin rolled his bedroll while Kristen folded her borrowed blankets and carried them back to the house.
Ellie smiled at Kristen. “I hope you weren’t too uncomfortable last night. I don’t usually make my guests sleep in the truck.”
“Actually, it was very comfortable.” Except for the ways in which it wasn’t, which had nothing to do with the sleeping arrangements. She was still marveling at the things she’d told Austin. Half regretting them. It’d been the darkness and the intimate setting and the fact that there was something inherently seductive about Austin. That ‘something’ had threatened her back in the day when she’d found him so tempting that she had to make certain he kept his distance, and it was threatening her now.
It was also making her very, very curious about a lot of things she had no business being curious about.
*
It was still early when she and Austin drove north to I80, the sun stretching its rays across the pale blue and lavender desert, and glinting off the sagebrush on Kristen’s side of the truck. It was a beautiful morning—one of those rare mornings where she actually felt a small stirring of hope. She’d had a good time yesterday. Better than she could have imagined. For a short period of time she’d forgotten about all the crap in her life and simply existed in the moment.
A rare occurrence for her.
“You seemed to hit it off well with Ellie.”
“I like her.” Ellie had an easy way about her that made Kristen feel as if she’d known her for years. Clinton was the same. How was it that intense Austin had such laid-back friends?
“What happens when we hit Salt Lake City?” Austin reached out to take his sunglasses off the dash and put them on one-handed as they turned onto the freeway and started driving into the sun.
She’d been wondering the same thing. She imagined that she could talk Austin into letting her bunk with him for the night and then beg Whitney to forgive her and drive down to get her. It was a seven-hour drive, so they’d have to spend the night, and it really wasn’t fair of her to ask that of her sister under the circumstances—
“I have a proposition for you.”
She gave him a slow look, doing her best to ignore the mental picture that the word “proposition” inspired. “What’s that?” she asked in a remarkably normal voice. She was getting better at this.
“If you would like to stay with me until after the event, I’ll give you a ride to Marietta.”
Red flags started waving wildly. “Why would you do that?”
“I have two weeks off after this event. I have a few commitments the second week, but I figured I could visit my brother on the Forty-Six Ranch the first few days off.”
She was immediately cognizant of a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. “So this has nothing to do with me.”
He glanced over at her, tipping down the sunglasses with one hand so that she could see the very serious expression in his very blue eyes. “It has everything to do with you.”
Her heart stuttered.
“How?” Her voice sounded nowhere near normal now.
He brought his gaze back to the road. “The choice is entirely yours. I’m just offering you this opportunity.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
He glanced back at her, but she could no longer read his expression because the sunglasses were once again in place. “You told me you wanted to break free. I’m giving you the opportunity to do something different.”
Kristen’s back stiffened. Yes. One of the things she’d said under cover of darkness that she now regretted. “It’s not your job to help me do that.”
“Agreed.”
And that was all he said, which was way more effective than an argument. His offer was…nuts. And tempting. Her carved-in-stone strategies were no longer working. She needed to be flexible, but she was afraid to be flexible. He knew that. He also knew that she was competitive.
Several days with Austin Harding. Did she dare?
She’d spent so much of her life not daring and what had it gotten her?
Austin eventually broke the silence as they started across the Bonneville Salt Flats, where the earth shone startlingly white in contrast with the ultra-blue sky. “You were different yesterday. And this morning.”
“I felt different,” she conceded. “And I felt comfortable with your friends.”
“I think you should work toward feeling that way all the time.” His voice dropped ever so slightly. “Unless you want to settle for safety?”
She studied his profile. “It sounds like you’re drawing a line in the sand.”
“You seem to do well with lines.”
Yes, but she tended to box herself in with them instead of crossing them. “So essentially you’re—”
“Challenging you to hang out with me until after my ride? I am. Then I’ll drive you to Marietta.”
“Will we share a room?”
“Yes.”
“But not a bed.” She needed to clear that up. She wasn’t ready to share a bed with the man, even though she essentially already had.
He looked at her in a way that made a small tremor ripple through her midsection. “Not unless both parties are agreeable.”
It was kind of hard to find her voice after that.
“Two beds,” he clarified when she didn’t respond. “Because I know I make you jumpy.” One corner of his mouth tilted up as he quoted her. “What do you say?”
Tough choice. She had the option of heading home to her safety net or she could take a short walk on the wild side. She was due. She was with a guy whom she could now talk to without freezing up. Maybe she could discover a few things about herself.
Maybe it wouldn’t hurt her one bit to take a short vacay from reality.
She told her sane inner self, who was now shouting her head off, to shut up. She’d eventually go home. Confess. Take her medicine.
But first…she would hang with a bull rider and see what she was made of.
Her heart beat just a little faster as, for once in her life, she stepped off into the deep end.
“I accept.”