Chapter Ten
It had never occurred to Cody that the bulls might turn out to be the least of his concerns.
The second one he rode in Tacoma—a week after he made a little noise in Missoula because he’d always liked Montana—was particularly ornery. It threw him off at six spine-slamming seconds and to add insult to near-injury, he landed funny. Funny enough to trigger an old knee issue that he’d hoped he’d beaten this season—or at least beaten into submission after a few years of drama and shooting agony when he least expected it.
But no, there it was again, making the doctor who traveled with the tour mutter dire predictions over him when he went to get taped that Cody pretended he didn’t hear. It also made him limp around like a man twice his age when he jumped off a bull, which got the rookies calling him Grandpa and the tour announcers opining about how much he had left in him at his advanced age.
All of that was annoying.
And yet it was still less irritating—less irritating, less fascinating, and definitely less wholly life-altering in ways he didn’t really feel like examining too closely—than Skylar Grey.
He’d invited her to come with him to Missoula, and he couldn’t say he’d really thought much beyond that. He hadn’t considered what might happen in those slow, sweet days of sun and sex. He told himself that all he’d really been thinking about was the sex, but in his quieter moments, when it was just him and those truths he wanted most to ignore, he recognized that had never been about the sex, as good as it was.
It had been about Skylar. He hadn’t wanted to let go.
And the crazy thing was, he still didn’t.
They’d spent one week in Montana, and he’d been so fired up after Missoula that he’d asked her to stay with him another week. Another week of bright summer days in the high country, crossing over the Rockies as they made their way over the Lolo Pass out of Montana and into Idaho to follow the mighty Snake River a while. Then they’d picked their way across eastern Washington, skirting Mt. Rainier to make it into Tacoma in time for the next show.
And Cody wasn’t bored, the way he’d always assumed he’d be if he spent too long with a woman. Or really anyone. Skylar pissed him off, but not because she was hard to live with. Or even to travel with.
Everything about her was easy. That was the problem. She hadn’t caused any trouble in the stands when he’d comped her a ticket and got her a seat with the wives and families. There were a thousand ways for a new girl to get off on the wrong foot when she was thrown in with the fiercely loyal family sector, but Skylar charmed them all.
She was perfect. Except for the small, irritating little fact that she was resolutely determined that the whole damn thing between them was temporary.
It hadn’t escaped Cody’s notice that this was usually his position on these things. He was normally the one throwing down time limits and modifying expectations and ranting on about what was temporary and what wasn’t. But that had changed for him right about the time he’d asked her to come with him the first time, and there didn’t seem to be any chance of it changing back.
And he couldn’t say he particularly enjoyed the shoe being on the other foot.
But what he enjoyed even less than that was the fact that he couldn’t seem to get through to her.
She gave him her body. Night after night. And a whole lot of times during the day as well. Whenever and however he wanted her, she gave herself to him. And hell, she took, too. He thought that the day she’d stripped in front of him, out there in the open with Flathead Lake stretched out behind them like a silent, beautiful witness, was burned into his retinas and his mind and his unruly cock forever. And that hadn’t been the only time she’d demanded a piece of him and taken it.
But it was always, only, sex.
She was driving Cody crazy.
The Sunday morning after failing to win anything in Tacoma—after he’d taken her hard and determined, as if he was trying to work out his frustrations right there on her luscious little body—she padded out from the Airstream’s bedroom that he found entirely too easy to share with her to find him in the compact little living area, icing his damned knee.
“Is it still giving you a hard time?” she asked.
And she was killing him. Cody thought she was really, seriously killing him. She’d tossed on one of his T-shirts and it hung on her like a very short, much too intriguing little dress. He could see the outline of her breasts behind the soft fabric and the hem played tag with her upper thighs. And all he wanted to do was pull her close and get his hands up beneath it.
There was something about the way her hair looked all tousled in the mornings. There was something about that scratch in her voice and that faint fog in her blue eyes that made everything in him hum a little bit, as if she was the tuning fork and all he did was sing in her presence.
“It’s not my knee that’s pissing me off,” he told her.
She blinked at him. Then smiled, which didn’t exactly help anything.
“That sounds very cranky.” But Skylar didn’t get bent out of shape about things like his mood. She didn’t take things personally. Cody kind of wished she would. “Do you need me to make you some coffee?”
“I saw that you packed,” he said instead of saying yes, he would love some of that ridiculously good coffee she made.
And then he wished he could rip those words back and shove them back down his throat.
But he couldn’t. So instead, he watched her go still. He watched the sleep fade from her eyes, making the blue of them look different, somehow. Wary.
“You going somewhere?” he asked, sounding like the jealous asshole he’d never been. Ever. In his entire life.
“Well, yes.” She threaded her fingers together in front of her, which he knew by now meant that she was uncomfortable. But he had no sympathy for her when he’d never been so far from comfortable before. “I figured…”
She shrugged, but Cody knew what she figured. It was like every thought she had was stamped onto her forehead, scrolling past in capital letters he could read from a mile away, and it always came to the same conclusion. She always wanted to end this, whatever the hell it was. She always wanted it done.
And he…didn’t.
Cody didn’t bother to try to talk to her about whatever it was that was keeping her from settling in and enjoying whatever this was for as long as it lasted, the way he did. He knew better than to ask her about her feelings, God help him, or all those ghosts he knew she was running from, right there in her eyes. She didn’t even want to talk about her brother’s wedding, that she’d invited him to when he was a stranger and that she definitely didn’t want him at now that he wasn’t that anymore. Not quite that.
There was no getting close to Skylar. Anytime he tried, she closed up tight. Or tried to distract him from the subject at hand, and he was only a man. He let her.
“I have some land,” he told her now.
His voice was low and he told himself that was because he never mentioned his land. To anyone, because it was private. It was his. He sent so much of his money home, to his mother and his sisters, but he’d also always put some aside for him. Because he had no intention of going out the way so many of the other riders seemed to. Spiraling down when their glory days were done, into this or that abyss, debt or gambling or the bottle. Hell no. The minute Cody had found this particular parcel of land, he’d known he was looking at his future. He’d put down the money years ago. Because he didn’t think he’d be much help to anyone else if he couldn’t help himself first, and the way things went with his family, it was a good bet they’d need some help down the road. And if not them, the many bull riders he’d known over the years who, like him, didn’t have much to go home to when they weren’t on tour.
Cody had never told another living soul about it, until now.
“It’s in Northern California,” he said gruffly. “I don’t mean anywhere near San Francisco. There’s a whole lot of California above the Bay Area, which no one ever seems to talk about. And that’s a good thing because it means they stay away.”
“The only thing I really know about California,” Skylar said after a moment, that same wariness making her gaze seem more than simply blue, somehow, “is that my sister lives there. She’s never mentioned her position on what’s actually considered Northern California, though. But maybe that’s because she lives in San Francisco.”
“I want to show it to you,” Cody told her. He took the bag of frozen berries off his knee and put it on the table beside him as if it was a task that required his full, intense concentration. “My land, not San Francisco. I think you’ll like it.”
That sat there between them for a minute. And he knew—he could see—that Skylar knew perfectly well that it was about more than a plot of land that he wanted to show her. Maybe she could even see how little he wanted this to end, how frustrating he found the fact she gave herself to him without giving him her, and all the rest of the shit he had no intention of saying out loud.
If she did, she kept it to herself. He watched a thousand emotions come and go in those fathomless blue eyes of hers, the only blue he’d ever seen to rival the Montana sky.
But when Skylar spoke again, her voice was soft. Sweet, with that morning scratchiness beneath it.
“I’d love to see it, Cody,” she said.
And maybe he knew then that they were on borrowed time. Maybe it was the way she said his name, as if it was goodbye.
But there was a two-week break between shows and he had nowhere else to be. That meant he could take his time driving them down from Tacoma to his pretty little bit of land on the moody Northern California coast. They drove down to Olympia, then headed west to follow route 101 south, past Willapa Bay and then across the mouth of the great Columbia River to pretty little Astoria before heading out to the Pacific. Even in July, the coast of Oregon was cool and foggy. Rocky and atmospheric.
And when they crossed into California there were redwoods and the same rocky shoreline, and it was only an hour or so south of the border that his land stretched across a high bluff overlooking the ocean.
“How much land do you have?” Skylar asked on their first morning there. Cody had parked the Airstream high on the bluffs, where the Pacific Ocean brooded down below, and there were views in all directions.
He liked the views. But even more, he liked the expanse of all the land, his to do with as he wished. He liked that he owned something in this world and that it was his despite the vagaries of a bull’s temperament or his own physical limitations.
“A lot, I guess,” he said.
They were sitting outside, enjoying the foggy morning with the promise of a hot day ahead once the sun rose high enough to burn the day blue. Skylar had made that coffee of hers that Cody was entirely too afraid was becoming an addiction.
Or maybe it wasn’t the coffee that he was afraid he was addicted to.
“How cagey.” She grinned at him, that crooked smile of hers that made him hurt in ways he liked less with every passing day, especially when she was wrapped up in jeans and a pair of his heavy socks and a blanket she was wearing as a coat. She should have looked like a homeless person and he should have been about as fascinated. But he thought it was possible she was even prettier than the Pacific Ocean showing off down below. “You know that’s only going to make me more intrigued.”
“I’m not being cagey.” He scowled at the water because it was better than aiming it at her the way he wanted to do, and he knew it had nothing to do with the land. “I started with fifty acres. But every time more property goes up for sale around here, I buy it if I can. I don’t actually know how much there is now. I only know that when I’m ready, I can build a house and have no neighbors in any direction. For miles.”
“You really don’t like neighbors. Or people of any kind, really.”
He liked her. But he didn’t say that. Cody tilted his head at the Airstream.
“The fact I’d rather drive myself from bull-riding event to bull-riding event all season and never stay in a hotel unless we’re in a big-ass city where there’s no place to park should maybe have clued you in.”
But Skylar clearly knew he was spoiling for a fight. Because she only smiled at him as if he was being cute, then put her coffee down. She stood, dropping that blanket and stretching a little so her T-shirt rode up and showed him a swathe of her skin, and then she crawled into his lap.
Whether he wanted her to or not, he thought grumpily, but the truth was, he always wanted her to.
He always wanted her.
“Something wrong with your chair?” he muttered, but her mouth was already too close to his.
“I think it broke,” she said, and kissed him.
And he let her. Because of course he let her. But Cody knew within days that he’d made a mistake.
Because all Skylar wanted was a fling and he’d brought her here, to his land, the only thing he had that was entirely his. The only thing he had that was permanent.
And he had absolutely no trouble whatsoever seeing her here. With him. Forever.
Maybe he’d known he wanted to see if he’d feel that way when he brought her down here. When he could have let her leave him in Tacoma and he probably should have. He could have dropped her off at the airport and gone his merry way. He could have been sitting right here enjoying his solitude and the view.
But instead there was Skylar humming to herself as she cooked dinner, or dancing around while he did it. Instead there were the stories she told him about growing up in Billings years ago, well in advance of the hipster wave that had found the place these days.
“Who wants coffee in a mason jar?” she demanded, filled with outrage Cody didn’t think was feigned. “Aside from being obnoxious on about seven different levels, a to-go latte in a mason jar is just awkward.”
“Did it taste good?” he asked.
“That’s not the point.”
His trouble was, he liked her stories. He liked making her laugh. He liked looking up from studying bull-riding videos of his heroes on YouTube to find her reading something on her e-reader with that fierce concentration on her face and her fingers tugging on her bottom lip.
It would have been one thing if all he liked about her was the sex. It would have made everything much easier.
And maybe he’d been kidding himself all this time. Maybe he was getting a little bit too lost in the fantasy of the house he’d build here, where every window looked out on forever and there was no violence, no stepfathers, no shouting and drunkenness. Maybe this wasn’t going to be the safe place for Kasey and Kathleen that he’d imagined it would be. Maybe he was getting carried away imagining a woman living here, lighting up the place, who looked a lot like Skylar.
Because she didn’t want him. Not the way he was more surprised every day to discover he wanted her. The way he’d never wanted anyone else, ever.
And if he had any doubt about that, if he’d somehow convinced himself that she just played her cards close to her chest and possibly felt all the same unwieldy and raw things he did, she disabused him of that notion the morning she looked up from her laptop when he shuffled into the Airstream’s bright and sunny kitchen, aimed her crooked smile at him, and told him she needed a ride to the nearest airport.
“Which I’m pretty sure is in Eureka,” she said in her calmest, most pleasant voice, as if she was moments away from spontaneous laughter. He wanted to put holes in his walls. “At least as best as I can tell from the map. Anyway, I hope it is, because I’m flying out of there. Today.”