Desert Heart (The Wolves of Twin Moon Ranch Book 4) (11 page)

“Right. Well, I was going to pick up Carly today, but there’s been a report of trouble out of the east side—”

Her heart thumped harder. Hellhound? “You mean, the…the…” She couldn’t exactly say it, not with Rick right there.

“Maybe. Look, I have to check it out with Kyle, so I need you to pick up Carly. Her flight comes in at nine.”

Her eyes flew to the clock. She’d just make it if she rushed.

“Of course, if you’re too busy,” Cody said, slipping back into surfer dude tone, “I can tell Ty and ask him to pick—”

“No!” she yelped into the phone. It had taken years to get her father and older brother to accept that she was all grown up, and even so, they still used the stare of death on any male suspected of fooling around with her. Rick, they’d kill on the spot. “Cody, if you so much as—”

He laughed. “Just kidding. Unfortunately.” He gave a theatrical sigh. “I owe you forever for helping me win my mate, so I’ll have to let you off the hook. This time.” She could see the wink hidden in his words. “But it would be a big help if you could get Carly.”

“I will. But you owe me.”

“I do owe you.” His voice was serious for a change.

She clicked off, sighed, and looked up to find Rick—gloriously naked Rick—handing her a steaming mug of coffee.

She blinked. Coffee? When was the last time anyone had made coffee for her?

Apart from Aunt Jean on the occasional quiet afternoon, nobody. Ever.

“
Café con leche.
” He smiled and pulled her back to bed, where he lay down, propped on one elbow. “Just like my dad used to make.”

She took a sip, placed the mug on the side table, and curled up beside him like a cat, perfectly at home. Just like in her dreams, it was her and the love of her life, waking up together, starting a day together. The ultimate fantasy, because they were both naked, too. Her mind threatened to run away on that one, but she reeled herself back in. She couldn’t allow herself any more fantasies or any more mornings. This had to be it.

“I have to go,” she mumbled, although her body refused to budge.

He rubbed a thumb across his chest in that absent gesture she loved so much. “Yeah?”

“I have to pick up my sister at the airport.”

His eyebrows shot up. “You have a sister?”

“Carly. She lives in California with her mom.” She cursed inside, because her voice was suddenly wistful and weak, like it always was when she wondered how different life would be if she’d had a mother to live with. Just to talk to, even, from time to time.

Rick studied the swirl of milk in his coffee, lost in his own thoughts. Was it worse to be left behind by a mother who’d run out, she wondered, or to lose a loving mother to cancer far too young, as Rick had?

When he finally took a sip, it ended up being a heavy gulp, and he winced a little. Her, too. Then he flashed a tight, bittersweet smile. Like he knew just what she was thinking. Maybe even wondering the same thing.

She took his hand and held it, and the warmth traveled up her arm, making her chest swell just a little bit. A little more when he pulled her knuckles to his lips and kissed them without saying anything.

Over in the main house, the grandfather clock bonged. Eight o’clock.

“I have to go,” she whispered.

He smiled that tight, bittersweet smile and kissed her knuckles one more time.

“No breakfast?”

She shook her head slowly. Sadly. No breakfast. No mornings. No more.

“See you soon?” Rick forced his voice to be steady.

Tina’s gaze fluttered to the ground, to the wilted flower beds, to the road. Anywhere but to him.

“See you soon,” she whispered, and then she was gone.

Rick stood on the Seymours’ porch, watching the dust cloud of her Corolla rise to the pale autumn sky for a long time after she drove out of sight. He stared into the distance as the dust slowly settled again.

He kicked at the dirt and sighed.

Tina. He’d stayed up a long time after she fell asleep, just looking at her, and woke up early to do the same thing. He could run a finger along her back, her eyebrow, her hip again and again and never get tired of it. He could get old happily and even go blind in the other eye, as long as he could still feel her, touch her, sense her at his side.

He’d have thought they’d more than made up for lost time with the number of orgasms they’d both hit, but his fingers still flexed in empty air, wishing for her back. Because there was the high that came with sex, and there was the peace of coming home. He raised his nose to the desert air, sniffed like a dog, then chuckled to himself. Tina definitely brought out the animal in him.

See you soon.
How soon?

His fingers tapped together as he walked, calculating how many of his twenty days he had left.

He turned on his heel and headed inside the Seymour homestead. Stopped in the doorway before going in, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light until he could make out the hands of the grandfather clock and the lines on the black-and-white artwork on the wall. A Picasso print—the one Mrs. Seymour told him about when he was a kid. The wobbly stick figure was Don Quixote, who chased after windmills and did all kinds of other crazy things.

Chasing after windmills,
old Henry would chime in.
Like us running this ranch.

They’d laugh at that, the Seymours, and smile at each other and carry on. They never gave up, not in tough years, not through the droughts, not when outsiders came along with offers that were too good to be true. And he’d do the same. The ranch had a lot of potential. He knew he could get it back on its feet—without resorting to crazy plans like selling water rights or any such nonsense. Why would Tina’s brother think he’d ever do such a thing?

The wind breezed down the empty hallway, prompting a sigh. The only souls left on the ranch were him, old Dale in the bunkhouse, and a couple of ranch hands who came and went. Yesterday, with Tina here, the whole place seemed to have perked up, but today, it was as tired and worn and empty as it had been before.

He turned the corner for the office and came to an abrupt halt.

The door was open, and Dale sat reclined in the chair with his dirty boots propped on Henry Seymour’s oak desk.

“Dale,” Rick gritted out. The soaring updraft that he’d been gliding on suddenly petered out and dropped him in a dusty heap.

Dale barely looked up. Barely acknowledged him there. Lazily turned a page of a ledger before stabbing his cigarette out on a saucer over by the lamp. The delicate saucer that was part of Lucy Seymour’s china set, painted with a pheasant and flowers and grass. There was nothing delicate about the stale smell of tobacco, though, or the stale smell of the ranch foreman.

Rick counted slowly to ten.

“Have a nice sleep-in, boss?” Dale said, tossing him one of those crocodile smiles.

The man might as well have said,
Blowing off work again?

Rick scowled. “Get your feet off Henry’s desk.”

Dale shifted his feet into a more comfortable position. “Your desk, you mean. Boss.” He added the final word a split second after the rest. Trying to push Rick’s buttons, as usual, though it would never work.

“Henry’s desk,” Rick growled back.

“Not sayin’ a man doesn’t deserve a little lie-in, not with company like that.” Dale faked nonchalance, tilting his head in the direction Tina had gone.

That button worked. Rick thumped both hands on the desk and all but roared in Dale’s face. “Get. Out. Of. This. House.”

That got Dale moving. Faster than he’d ever seen the man move, as a matter of fact. Rick kept his hands on the desk lest they throttle Dale as he scrambled past. One more comment, one more hint, and he’d kill the man with his bare hands.

He stood there a long time afterward, fighting to settle his nerves. Yeah, Tina definitely had a way of bringing out the animal in a man.

“Carly!” Tina waved, spotting her sister at last. She’d pushed the speed limit and run more than her share of yellow lights to get to the airport in time, but she’d made it.

“Tina!” Carly strode over from the security checkpoint.

A dozen heads turned, as they did wherever Carly went. Her long blond hair flowed like she’d just stepped out of a shampoo commercial. Mile-long legs stuck out in the ample space between her ultrashort cutoff jeans and ultrahigh cowgirl boots, showing a golden tan. The pink tank top she wore hugged her trim figure so tightly, Tina could make out the ring Carly wore in her pierced navel.

Carly shook off three would-be suitors like flies just in the course of covering those thirty feet. Walked right past them, exuding that I-couldn’t-care-less-what-you-think attitude she’d been born with. She strode across the tired carpet of the airport and stepped casually into Tina’s hug.

“Hey, baby sis,” Tina murmured. Even with Carly being Carly, it was good to see her again.

“Hi, old lady,” Carly shot back. She patted Tina on the back, then froze. Sniffed. Pulled back to study Tina’s face.

Oh, shit.
Tina cringed.
Here it comes.

“Yum,” Carly announced, loud enough for half the crowd to hear. She leaned in for another sniff. “He smells good.”

Shit, shit, double shit. Her sister’s keen shifter nose had zoned right in on Rick’s scent. God, what had she been thinking last night, rubbing up and down Rick like that?

We were thinking
mate.
Remember?
her wolf chimed in.

Tina grabbed her sister’s arm and hauled her down the concourse. “Shh!”

“It’s not like these people know you!” Carly laughed, tossing her golden hair.

Four different men tripped over their own feet just watching her, and even the priest standing beside a newsstand looked ready to break his vows.
Carly-traffic
, as Cody called it. The woman created gridlock everywhere she went.

Tina dragged her along by the elbow as two men bumped into each other. “Next time, I’ll let Cody pick you up.”

“Next time, I ride my Harley. I hate flying.” Carly sniffed.

Every inner alarm in Tina clanged as she stopped in her tracks. “Wait a minute.” She took Carly by both shoulders. “You didn’t crash another motorcycle, did you?”

Carly rolled her eyes. “No,
Mom
. I’m just here for three days this time, so I decided to fly.”

Tina studied every inch of her sister’s lithe frame for fresh scars. Shifters healed quickly, but if you looked hard enough… The faint scratches across one shoulder were from the time Carly totaled her last bike in an accident that would have killed any human. The jagged line across her right forearm from one of her rock climbing falls was still there, too.

“Good.” Tina finally nodded. “Flying is safer.” Anything where Carly wasn’t at the controls was safer.

Her sister flashed a wicked smile as her eyes took on that wild look. “Maybe next time I will ride the bike. Really let that puppy fly…”

“Don’t even joke about it,” Tina barked, towing her down the hallway again.

Her heart was thumping now, because yes, as older sister and sole Hawthorne female at the ranch, her motherly instincts were always hard at work. And they worked double time whenever her daredevil sister was around.

Daredevil? Death wish is more like it,
the ranch women used to mutter. Tina had always shushed them, because you never knew. Carly might try living up to those words just to prove that she could.

“Ha!” Carly pointed at the luggage belt. “Mine’s the first one out!”

That was the thing about Carly; she had a lucky streak a mile wide. A good thing, too.

“Buckle up,” Tina reminded her the minute they slid into the car.

“Sure thing.” Carly buckled it behind her back so the alarm would stop dinging. She leaned back and rested her feet on the dashboard.

“What if we get rear-ended? What if an eighteen-wheeler wipes us out?”

Carly yawned. “We’re shifters. We’ll heal.”

“One of these days…” Tina was afraid to say the rest. That shifters were still mortal, and a bad enough accident on an unlucky day…

Carly cranked up the air conditioning and changed the subject. “How do people live in this climate? I swear it’s a hundred and twenty.”

“A hundred and seventeen,” Tina murmured, merging onto the highway. “Here in Phoenix. But up at the ranch—”

Carly took over from there. “At the ranch, it’s a perfect eighty-nine. At the ranch, everything is perfect. You sound like Dad.”

Tina scrunched her lips together, but Carly just laughed. “Now you even look like Dad.”

Which was easy for her to say, because Carly, like Cody, was lucky enough to take after her mother: free-spirited, gorgeous, outgoing. Tina and Ty, on the other hand, had been cursed with their father’s genes. Striking dark looks were one thing, but she could have done without that leaden mantle of duty, the excruciating attention to detail that made her nearly as hard to please as her father.

“So, is old man Atsa still going on about this hellhound?” Carly asked.

Tina tsked. “It’s a legitimate concern, Carly.”

“Is it? Anything new?”

She had Tina there. A week had gone by since Atsa’s warning, and they had no concrete evidence that the Navajo shaman hadn’t raised another false alarm. The constant vigilance was wearing everyone down, and to be honest, they’d all eased off a bit. Patrols still scoured the countryside and the neighboring packs communicated regularly, but none had found any sign of a demon.

“Cody called this morning and said he was checking on the latest report, but he didn’t sound too convinced.”

“Wait, Cody
called
you to say this?” Carly eyed her closely, then cracked into a grin. “Oh, I get it. You were with Cowboy Delicious, so you weren’t at home.” Her face lit up with mischief. “So, okay, tell me about him. I want details.” Carly rubbed her hands together. “Gory, orgasmic details.”

Tina rolled down the window for some fresh air. Maybe trying to clear a little of Rick’s lingering scent, too. A futile attempt, because she’d rubbed him hard enough to make his skin shine, but it was worth a try. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”