“YOUR SISTER TEXTED me to ask if we wanted to come over for dinner tonight. To the main house.”
“Stepsister,” he commented.
“Sorry. Does it matter?”
Jackson frowned. “Not to me.”
“But to someone it does?” she pressed.
“I get the feeling it matters to Tanner,” Jackson answered, “though, I don’t know exactly why.” He knew how Chloe felt about Tanner. It was obvious to anyone with eyes. But Tanner would never, ever reciprocate the feelings. But even so, there was a definite difference in the way Tanner treated Chloe versus the way Calder and Jackson did. He was meaner and less patient with her, for a start.
Though that didn’t seem to dent Chloe’s hero worship. Not at all.
“I don’t have to go,” she said. “If it makes you uncomfortable.”
He frowned. “Why would it make me uncomfortable for you to come?”
Her lips twitched. “Well, I think we both know it doesn’t make you uncomfortable when I come.”
He couldn’t help but smile at that. She’d changed a lot in the weeks since they’d been together, in the weeks since she’d been here. She was more confident, in bed and out. And he liked it more than he should. “True enough. But I meant to dinner.”
“Just... Boundaries.”
“We’re not doing the best job with boundaries,” he said. “But I don’t really mind.”
“I assume that you’d like it if your family didn’t realize just how badly we were doing with boundaries?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“Then we won’t tell them.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“If you think I’m going to get a dirty secret complex, you’re talking to the wrong girl. I already know what it’s like to have half a town involved in my relationship. I’m not saying that this is a relationship. It’s just... I don’t have any interest in having a whole ton of people commenting on us and what we’re doing. Doesn’t appeal to me at all.”
He shook his head. “Me neither.”
But he couldn’t help but feel slightly guilty about it. He never brought women he was sleeping with around his family, so he didn’t know quite how to handle the politics of it.
He, Savannah and Lily had set up a little isolated hideaway of sorts, on his corner of the ranch. They did venture out, sometimes taking afternoons to go to some of the local farms with petting zoos. A pumpkin patch to get Lily’s first pumpkin, even though he knew she wouldn’t remember it.
And then there was what they did at night.
That was just for them.
It was much simpler, and less political, if they simply didn’t know. There was no reason for them to know.
But it gave him an even stronger sense that he might be taking advantage of Savannah in some way.
Though she had made it abundantly clear she didn’t feel that way. Still. “Do you have any work to do before dinner?”
“Yeah. A bit.”
“I’ll see you then.” She hesitated, and then stretched up on her toes, pressing a soft kiss to his lips. “Since I won’t be able to do that later.”
That kiss burned. And it kept burning all through the rest of the day until it was time to pick Savannah and Lily up from the cabin and take them to the main house.
When he saw Savannah standing on the porch, her blond hair blowing in the early-evening breeze, wearing a floaty, flowered dress and a pair of leggings, his heart honest-to-God stuttered. She was holding Lily on her hip, his baby girl clinging to Savannah’s dress like Savannah herself was a lifeline.
She felt like it just then. To him, too.
In the time since she’d been here, his life had changed. Again. He expected to see her in the house when he got in from work. Warm and waiting, with a kiss. Dinner sometimes, but the kiss was what mattered. He was used to seeing her car, a little Camry he’d helped her choose, in the driveway.
He was used to her.
He parked his truck and got out, walked up to the porch. Lily flapped her arms and rocked back and forth, making a series of cooing sounds as she tried to launch her body toward his. Shock, and another feeling, deep and painful, overwhelmed him as he reached out his arms and took hold of his baby girl.
“She knows her daddy,” Savannah said, smiling.
“I guess so,” he said, damn near flabbergasted by the whole thing. Babies were weird. You could mark the passage of time with them. In the months since Lily had been with him, she had changed so much. And in the months since Savannah had been with them, Lily had changed even more. She was making sounds and moving more, kicking her feet, rolling onto her stomach. He had lived a long, steady life of bachelorhood where very little had changed. He lost his father, and that had been devastating. In his experience, change was usually bad. But Lily had brought a series of changes to his life, each one kind of miraculous.
He deposited Lily in her car seat, much to her chagrin, and he and Savannah got into the truck and made their way down the dirt road that led to the main house.
Savannah filled him in on everything Lily had done that day, and he found that he enjoyed hearing about it.
If a few months ago someone had told him he would live for a daily update on the menial activities of a baby...
Well, he would have thought he was having a stroke.
But everything in him was changing. From the way his heart kicked when he looked at Savannah, to the way he worried about the damned future. Because of Lily. For Lily. For himself. He wanted... He wanted to be good. Hell, he wanted to be the best. And he couldn’t remember having aspirations like that before. Not ever.
No, he’d just wanted to please himself. Had just wanted to get by. It hit him then, as he pulled up to the front of his brother’s house, that he had never in all his life contemplated what living for another person meant. He had lived for himself, and he had done it proudly.
But that wasn’t enough. Not anymore. Living for his own temporary satisfaction was the grind. Living for Lily, for her milestones...her smiles. Her first laugh. The first time she rolled over. It was something else.
It turned the passage of time into something brilliant and miraculous.
By the time he and Savannah were standing on his brother’s doorstep, he was fully realizing that his life was changed forever. Being a father—it was who he was now.
Savannah felt like part of it. Which was a worry all on its own.
“Come on in,” Tanner said when he opened the door.
Calder and Chloe were already sitting around the table, a plate of burger patties in front of them, and a stack of toppings and buns off to the side. “I was about to start without you,” Calder said.
“So was I,” Chloe responded.
Chloe smiled at him, but he noticed how quickly her gaze slid over to Tanner.
The fact that she wasn’t over her crush yet was...well, not ideal. But Tanner was oblivious to it and he would also never do anything. Which was the one consolation, Jackson supposed.
“Well,” he said. “I thank you for not devouring the hamburgers before I arrived. I was out working. Apparently the three of you were sitting here lounging.”
“I never lounge,” Tanner said, walking over to the table and beginning to fill his plate. Jackson retrieved Lily from her car seat and cradled her in his arm, holding her with one hand while he grabbed his burger with the other. Savannah took a seat beside him. He wasn’t unaware of the way his siblings watched him, or the way they exchanged glances between them.
There was a strange feeling to all this. Not because he was the one with the baby, but because he felt like a unit with Savannah, who reached down and grabbed a burp cloth, and wiped Lily’s mouth when she needed it while making casual conversation with Tanner.
The worst part was it felt natural. It felt good.
That was like a hammer throw back to reality. Because the bottom line was the reason he had cultivated the life he had was that it meant he didn’t have to count on anyone. No one. The life that he led was geared toward the solitary and the familiar. He and his siblings had always stuck together. Through his father’s endless marriages and their mother’s abandonment. Through their father’s death. No one else had ever stuck by them.
No one who wasn’t bonded by blood—or in Chloe’s case, a bad puppy love problem—had ever stuck around one of the Reid men, save their last stepmother. That was just a fact.
Savannah was temporary, too. Destined to be. There was no use crying over it or lamenting it. It simply was. He could deal the hell with it.
He just had to remember that no matter how much he liked going to sleep with Savannah every night and waking up with her in his arms, no matter how much he liked seeing her hold Lily, seeing her play the part of mother...she wasn’t. Lily had been abandoned once and he would not set her up for it again. Not because he was an asshole who couldn’t remember what was real and what was magic dick feelings.
Hell, he had a ton of sexual experience, but not with women who had never had an orgasm before. And never with a woman who was caring for his child. It was unrealistic to think that there was actually something appealing to him about being in a committed relationship when before there hadn’t been. Not at all.
It was a byproduct of Lily. And when she wasn’t a baby, he wouldn’t feel this way anymore.
Savannah was a nanny. She wasn’t Lily’s mother.
She was his lover. She wasn’t his wife.
As he sat there around the dinner table, with his whole family, who were all effortlessly filling in dead spots in conversation and laughing, and Savannah. It all felt so real, and very much not the casual get-together he’d wanted. And he found himself shoving his burger away. “I’m going to go for another beer,” he said, standing and making his way into the kitchen.
He heard tentative footsteps behind him and expected it to be Savannah, but when he turned he saw his stepsister, Chloe. Her red hair was in a tangle around her face, her expression curious.
“She’s so nice, Jackson,” Chloe said finally, taking a step toward him.
“She wouldn’t be taking care of Lily if she wasn’t,” he responded.
Chloe stuffed her hands into the pockets of her dirty jeans. “I didn’t mean for Lily. I meant for you.”
He stiffened, opening the fridge quickly and grabbing a bottle of beer, curling his fingers tightly around it. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Chloe.”
“Don’t give me that. I know men are dumb assholes, but you’re pushing it a bit.”
“You know men are dumb assholes? Because of all your experience?” He narrowed his eyes. “Or do you just mean Tanner? Who is your brother. And shouldn’t be considered a man.”
“Stepbrother,” she said through gritted teeth. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with this. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But Jackson was feeling mean, and cornered. A hell of a lot like a bear whose nose had been stung by a bee. “The hell you don’t, Chloe. The only person it’s not obvious to is Tanner. And you’re damned lucky that that’s the case, or he’d throw you out on your ass and tell you to find another place to live.”
“Well, he can’t,” Chloe said. “Because the ranch is part mine, too. As you well know.”
“Honey, he would pick you up and drop you off in the wilderness like a feral cat.”
“And I’d find my way home. If Tanner was stupid enough to underestimate me to that degree, he’d also deserve the mauling he would get when I got back. I know you don’t like to be seen as soft, Jackson, but the fact of the matter is, you are soft for Lily. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If it extended to someone else...would it be the end of the world?”
“You don’t know what it’s like, Chloe,” he said. “To open your heart over and over again and lose people you thought were going to stay. My mother, countless stepmothers, and now my dad is just dead. I’m not going to take lectures from you.”
“It’s not like everything in my life was great before my mom married your dad, Jackson,” she said. “It’s not like I haven’t been hurt.”
“Right. And you handle that by staying here and panting after the one man you can’t have.”
Chloe firmed up her chin and crossed her arms, staring him down. If he had thought that he was going to make her cry or something, he had clearly been mistaken.
“I stay because it’s easier to run. I stay here and care for this ranch, for the land, because that’s tough. Starting over a hundred times, that’s easy. That’s what your dad did all those times. Right? New things. New relationships. He had more fights with my mom than any of the women before her. I know, because I heard him tell her that. And she would just smile and tell him that’s what happens when you’re with someone past the honeymoon phase. I stay because staying is tough.”
“Good for you,” he said. “But I know what kind of life I’m going to have. I know it well. I’m not bitching about it, but I’m not spinning fantasies that are never going to come true.”
“I believe that it could. Why do you think it can’t?”
He didn’t have an answer, so he just opened the beer. “Go back to the table and eat,” he said.
Chloe shook her head. “Fine. But you know, I never figured you for a coward, Jackson. A woman showed up on your doorstep with a baby, and you embraced Lily with everything. I don’t understand why you can’t embrace this other good thing that’s right in front of you.”
“And I don’t understand why you’re obsessed with the thought that one of my employees could become something more.”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “Because it is more. I’m not blind. Even I can tell that you’re sleeping with her,” she said. “And I don’t know anything about that sort of thing.”
Jackson gritted his teeth. “It’s not what I want. I never wanted to be a father, much less a husband. I don’t have a choice on the father part.”
“And you love it,” Chloe said softly. “You love Lily.”
“What else was I going to do? She’s a baby. No one else is going to take care of her but me.”
“So that’s it? That’s the only reason. Because she’s a baby? Because you have to? That might be how you handle obligation. But it’s not how you handle love. And you love her. I think you could love Savannah, too.”
Jackson looked behind Chloe’s shoulder, and saw Savannah standing half in the doorway looking stricken, her face pale, holding on to Lily. She quickly turned and shrunk back out of sight. Whether trying to act like he hadn’t seen her, or trying to avoid a confrontation in front of Chloe, he didn’t know.
He shook his head and walked past Chloe, heading back into the dining room. The rest of dinner passed slowly, but incident free. Jackson did his best to ignore everything that Chloe had said to him.
Neither he nor Savannah spoke the entire way home.
Home. As if it was their home.
That was the problem. The real problem. It wasn’t just that Chloe had irritated him. It was that she had scraped up against that little fantasy he had started to have. That feeling of family he was starting to want. Starting to ache for. Lily was asleep when they got inside, and Savannah took her into the nursery and laid her down. When she reappeared, Jackson was pacing, trying to contend with the reckless energy that was riding through his veins.
Savannah’s soft lips parted, and he did the only thing he could think to do. He closed the distance between them and hauled her into his embrace. She squeaked, and his mouth crashed down on hers. He didn’t want to feel anything. Not in his heart.
He was happy enough to have it be in his dick, but nowhere else.
It was all a lie, anyway. No one was ever going to stay with him. Savannah could never love him. Nobody that wasn’t blood ever had. And sometimes, he had even wondered about his father, who had poured more sweat into the ranch than into the raising of his sons.
This tenderness in his chest was all because of Lily. It had nothing to do with Savannah. It was all getting tangled up because he had made a damned mistake taking her to bed. But at this point, the mistake had already been made.
He had to remind himself why he had these feelings, and where they came from. From tangled limbs and intense orgasms. Physical intimacy and that hot rush of need. From the novelty of having a familiar lover, which he never had before. A woman whose body he knew, and was learning better and better with each passing day.
At this point, Savannah and her orgasms were a science. A dirty, wet, fun science.
He knew just where to stroke, just where to lick, just where to suck.
He was in control of this thing between them. Not her. Not his heart. Just him.
She sighed, and leaned into his hold, and he knew that she wouldn’t resist him. Knew that she couldn’t. That was the other problem. He was the only man who had ever made her feel this way, and the temptation to make sure that was always the case snarled inside of him like the caveman idea it was. The plan had been to set her free with more confidence. Or at least, that had been the excuse. The thing he had told himself to justify sleeping with her in the first place.
But he didn’t want anyone else to touch her. Didn’t want anyone else to learn the things that he had about what made her tick. Made her whimper. Made her moan.
She was his. His, dammit.
For now.
He ignored the roaring of his blood that seemed to echo forever in his veins. He stripped her clothes off and walked her back to his room, taking her down onto the bed quickly. Ferociously.
But she reached up, a gentle hand on his stomach that stilled his movements. She scooted toward the edge of the bed and with delicate fingers, undid his buckle. Soft green eyes stayed on his as she opened up the front of his jeans and curled her fingers around his cock, drawing her hand slowly up and down his length.
“Don’t,” he bit out. “This isn’t about me.”
“I hope that’s not true,” she said softly, her eyes never leaving his, her hand working continually. “It’s been going on for a few weeks, Jackson, and I thought at this point it was about us.”
Us.
That word made his stomach feel hollowed out, or maybe it was the light pass of her fingertips over his aching flesh. He couldn’t work it out. Not with her touching him like that.
He was about to demand she stop when she leaned forward, the tip of her tongue flicking over the head of his arousal, sending a shot of white fire through his body. Her mouth was tentative and sweet, and when she wrapped her lips around him he could hardly think, could hardly breathe, let alone demand she stop anything.
It wasn’t so much the slick friction of her tongue, the delicate suction of her lips, though it was good, but it was the way she looked at him. Those blue eyes trained on his the whole time she pleasured him with her mouth, and damn it all, he couldn’t look away. All he could do was watch. This beautiful, fair-haired angel brought down low. Being dirty. Just for him. Because this wasn’t about her getting off, wasn’t about her having an orgasm. This was just about...
Her wanting to do this for him. Her wanting him.
His teeth ached, and he clenched his jaw together. Damn, how he wanted that to be real. Her wanting him. Her needing him. But everything was way too tangled up, and there was just no way that could be true. No way in hell.
She worked her hand in time with her mouth, and all he could do was buck his hips against her as he started to lose his control. He reached down, grabbing her hair and wrenching her head back. “No,” he said. “Not like that.”
“Jackson...”
He rolled her onto her back, then reached for the condoms in the drawer. Then he had an idea.
He flipped her over onto her stomach, grabbing hold of a couple pillows off the head of the bed and putting them under her chest. “Let’s try this.”
“Jackson...” She sounded uncertain.
“Let me take care of everything,” he said. “Remember?”
He rolled the condom on and pressed himself to her entrance, that particular angle allowing him to get deep. So deep he thought his head was going to blow off.
He gripped her hips, slammed inside and relished the throaty sound that she made. Now he couldn’t see her face. Now he couldn’t see those angelic green eyes. Now she could be anyone. Any woman.
Except she wasn’t.
She didn’t feel like, smell like, sound like another woman. And she didn’t make him feel like any other woman ever had. It was different. It wasn’t just pleasure centered around his cock. It was need. Need that pierced his soul. And it terrified him.
The dark, empty well that had been torn open inside of him the moment Lily had been thrust into his arms had only grown deeper since Savannah arrived in his life. And deeper still in this moment. He would never find the bottom of it. No one would ever, ever be able to satisfy it. And he had no idea what the hell he was supposed to do with that.
How the hell he was supposed to survive?
Pleasure began to tighten in his gut, and he gripped her so tightly he made dents in that pretty white skin. He went hard and fast, and then reached his hand between her legs, rubbing her clit in a circle as he drove home. She cried out, internal muscles pulsing around him, and that was it. He couldn’t take it anymore.
He squeezed his eyes shut tight and came hard, his jaw held so firm he was sure he was going to shatter the bone. But even with his eyes closed, even with her facing away from him, he could still see those green eyes in his mind. The way she had looked up at him. The way that she cared about him.
And all he wanted to do, every part of him, was reach out and take what she was offering.
But he couldn’t.
He just damn well couldn’t.