Unbroken (5 page)

“You want to put mothereffing buffalo in my fields?”

“Bison. And you don't have anything but weeds in them, Amber, so what does it matter?”

“Cade Mitchell, why the hell do you suddenly think you can claim space in my home? My bedroom—”

“Guest bedroom.”

“Whatever. My bedroom, my field . . .”

“There isn't anything happening here. Nothing making you any money. And this way I won't be giving you a handout. You can get a percentage of the profits.”

“And if it fails?”

“We'll have lean protein to last us through the long winter months. And possibly some very unconventional fur coats.”

“Did you just think all this up on the fly?”

He put his hands on his lean hips. “Basically.”

“I'd be impressed if I wasn't so irritated by your hijacking of my life.”

“I'm not doing it to bother you,” he said. “I'm doing it to help you. So instead of being so damn stubborn for the sake of being damn stubborn, maybe you should just say . . . I don't know . . . ‘Thank you, Cade, for a lifetime of covering my ass.'”

“But I don't need—”

“Amber,” he said, “there's no one out here. There are no points for pretending you don't need anyone. Because no one else is here to see, and I think your act is just that. A buncha bullshit.”

“I've had to count on me, Cade, because in my experience, things happen and it's only you that's left standing with you.”

“Have I ever not been there? Has your grandpa ever not been there?”

“My grandma's not here now.”

“But she would be.”

“Abandonment doesn't always have to be because a person quit caring. The effect is the same. No, it's even worse. Because no matter what, I'll never pass her on a street. I can never look her up online and find her phone number and yell at her for going away. I could do that with my mom, you know? She's alive still, even though she's moved to Chicago. I could still find her. I have found her. I could call and give her a piece of my mind. Scream myself hoarse. Because she's still here. Grandma isn't. Grandpa won't be. As much as we hate talking about it, Cade, you almost weren't. So yeah, I don't count on life handing me fresh-squeezed lemonade and warm fuzzies. I count on having lemons thrown at my head while I dodge spiderwebs, flaming spears and other awful things, because that is my life, okay?”

He crossed his arms across his chest and leaned back on his heels. “You think you have the monopoly on loss here?”

She looked away from him. “No. I know I don't.”

“Then don't talk to me about it like I don't understand. I do. But what the hell is the point of living like everyone's already dead? Then I might as well be six feet under and not here offering you support. I'm trying to help. Could you make an attempt at being a little less emotionally crippled for ten minutes or so and try to think it through with logic?”

That was one of the downsides to having a friend you knew so well. And who knew you. They didn't sugarcoat things. She would really like some sugarcoated
poor babies
, but Cade wasn't going to hand them out today. He was set, his jaw fixed and determined, his dark eyes blazing with that epic Mitchell stubbornness that she knew so well.

Cade seemed like a laid-back, affable kind of guy. And in many ways, he was. But then, that was his secret. He didn't seem like the competitor in the rodeo who was taking it all deadly serious, and that was why he won. He made a career out of people underestimating him.

But Amber knew better. She knew that when that man set his mind to something, changing his mind was like beating your head against a brick wall. Fortunately for her, she had a hard head.

And she'd used it many times with him over the past few years.

“If you're staying here, you're making breakfast in the mornings.”

“It's the gentlemanly thing to do. Since, in theory, I'll have been keeping you up all night banging your headboard against the wall.”

Stinging heat flooded her face, centering on the apples of her cheeks. Bastard. She hadn't blushed in . . . she wasn't sure she'd ever blushed in her whole life, and here she was blushing like some innocent kid.

“A night of headboard-banging is worth at least four strips of bacon. I'll have to keep up my stamina. A short stack of pancakes wouldn't go amiss either.”

“What do you think people do in the bedroom, Amber? Run laps around the bed?”

“Oh, no, I just thought you might need to have the woman on top. All things considered.” As soon as the words left her mouth, she wanted to call them back.

Cade was the first person to make fun of his injuries. Most of it was a defense mechanism, and she knew it. She doubted Cade knew it, but she did. And sometimes she poked fun at him too.

But right when she said those words, she knew she'd gone over a line. Insulting his sexual prowess was one too far. Even for her.

He arched a dark brow and took a step toward her. There was very little change in his expression, his posture still casual, his weight still distributed unevenly to help relieve the pain in his leg. But she could feel the change in him. Could feel his anger, a wave of heat that surrounded his body and radiated outward. Could see it in the depths of his dark eyes.

“You have to be careful saying things like that,” he said.

She tried to say something, anything, to smooth it over because, hello, she was a bitch and she was most particularly a bitch because Cade was trying to help her and she was being a jerk because her pride was acting up like a bad case of hives. But she couldn't speak, her throat totally closed up for some reason.

Maybe because she'd never had Cade's anger directed at her, not like this. Not in this very male, very predatory kind of way that seemed dangerous in a—dare she think it?—sexy way.

“Because,” he continued, “some people might think you were asking for a demonstration.”

She nearly choked. “I'm not.”

“Like I said, be careful. Now, be a dear and show me to my room.”

Her jaw dropped and she forgot to feel guilty for her bitchiness. “Don't make me fire up the forge and brand your ass, Mitchell.”

She turned and walked back toward the house, and Cade followed. Close. She could feel his heat at her back, could feel a weird crackle of tension between them.

They walked inside and he closed the door behind them. “Just a second,” she said. She looked into the living room and saw her grandfather asleep in the chair in front of the TV. “All right, follow me.”

She headed up the stairs, their feet clunking on the hollow wood steps and, somehow, adding to the awkwardness. Since when was there awkwardness between her and Cade? She blamed him for this. For his stupid plan. His stupid Save the Amber plan.

Like she was a snowy plover, sitting on a beach and being all endangered, and he was some kind of magnanimous park ranger keeping people off her dune.

She could defend her own dune.

Except now, he was all up on her dune. Meddling and shit.

“Okay, Cadence,” she said, because when she used the childhood nickname given to him by Lark she could not think about him having sex—either on the bottom or the top. “Are you sure you're up for this?”

She pushed open the faded wooden door at the end of the hallway and made a grand, sweeping gesture toward the twin bed with a rustic metal frame, covered by a faded and threadbare quilt her grandma had made around the time Hitler had invaded France.

There was a round tatted rug on the floor, also the handiwork of her grandmother. Also from a time that predated the Internet.

There was an old-fashioned alarm clock on a doily, on a rickety old nightstand. And in the closet, Amber happened to know, was a collection of her grandma's old winter coats. Which smelled heavily of mothballs.

They didn't often put guests in the guest room, so it was, frankly, not entirely guest-ready.

But Cade had volunteered. So he could suck it.

“Here it is,” she said. “All the comforts of home. If you happen to be the Swiss Family Robinson.”

“I've spent nights sleeping in horse trailers; do you really think this bothers me?”

“Your family home is pretty swank.”

“Yeah, and I'm not in it very often. At least, I spent a lot of years not being in it very often. Besides, Amber, I'm not backing out on this. Not now. It has to last for at least as long as Davis is sniffing around. I'd be bunking with you even without your grandpa counting on it.”

“I don't want to lie to him,” she said. “Not Davis. My grandpa.”

“Yeah, I got that. And I don't want to lie to him either. And I didn't mean to. But he overheard what I said—which was not premeditated, by the way.”

“Which gets you a reduced sentence, but doesn't absolve you entirely,” she said, glaring pointedly.

“I wanted to help. Which I think should get me pie and cookies, and not your laser eyes of doom.”

“I have my pride,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and wincing when a coiled-up spring dug into her butt. She bounced lightly on the lumpy mattress. “You really are going to be cursing my name after a couple of nights of this.”

“You don't give me enough credit, Jameson.”

“You haven't sat on the bed yet.”

He walked across the room, his gait more uneven now than before they'd climbed the stairs. It made her chest hurt, made her regret her brattiness even more. He sat down next to her, his fingers curved around the edge of the mattress.

He bounced up and down like she'd done and cast her a sideways glance. “Yeah, this sucks. Did your grandma put her enemies up on this bed?”

Amber laughed. “They don't normally have guests. I think my bedroom was the good guest room, but they moved me into it and . . . I don't think we've had anyone stay here since. Surly teenager put a cramp in their social life, I guess.”

“You were pretty surly.
Are
pretty surly.”

“Shush,” she said, pinching his bicep and not managing to grab hold of much. He didn't have pinchable flesh, that man. He was too rock-solid.

Suddenly she became very aware of the fact that they were sitting on a bed together. And it was hard to breathe again. Particularly with his words from earlier hanging between them still, like an unwanted cobweb that needed to be swept away.

Some people might think you were asking for a demonstration.

No. She didn't want a demonstration. Though, for some reason, she was having a hard time looking away from his mouth. His mouth was one of the most beautiful things on earth, in her humble opinion. Those lips, curved into a smile, had always meant that her day was going to get better, just because he was there. Pressed into a firm line, they presented a challenge to get them to curve upward.

And then, just aesthetically speaking, they were a sight to behold. The lower lip was fuller, the upper lip dipping down in the middle, making the kind of dent she was sure some women fantasized about sticking their tongues in.

Not her. Because he was her BFF and ew.

Yes. Ew. That was her official stance on tonguing Cade's lip dip.

“You're certainly prickly,” he said. “Like a porcupine.”

“Don't forget it. I'm a badass mofo. If I get you with my spines you're going to be filled with regret and woe.”

“I think I got hit by one already.”

She frowned, a sharp pain lancing her chest. Man, she felt like a bitch. “Sorry. I'm too pointy sometimes. I know.”

“Not usually with me.”

“I know. But you've been Super Cade more times in a row than I'm used to.”

“You've been in jeopardy more often than normal.”

“Until Lex Luthor ties me up in a warehouse somewhere, I don't think you have to worry too much.”

“If I'm ever in jeopardy, you have my full permission to save me,” he said. “How's that for equality?”

“You'll never admit to needing me,” she said.

“You never admit to needing me either.”

“No. You're a master at unsolicited help.”

His expression sobered. “In all honesty, Amber, you've done a lot for me. I don't like to talk about when my mom died. And I didn't want to be around anyone when it happened because . . .”

She nodded and bit the inside of her cheek. She knew why. Because he'd been raw in a way no eighteen-year-old guy wanted to be in front of anyone. Because his grief had been a living monster that had picked him up in its jaws and shaken him like a rag doll.

And he hadn't wanted anyone to see. But he'd let her see.

“Yeah, well,” she said, clearing her throat. “I'm a judgment-free zone when it comes to emotional disasters because I'm such a mess.”

“A surly mess,” Cade said, that delicious—but not to her—mouth of his curling up into a smile.

“Rawr,” she said, standing up because really, sitting next to him was starting to make the whole left side of her body feel like there were little caterpillars crawling over her skin.

“I have to go home and . . . tell Cole that we're moving in together.”

“You're going to tell him though, right?”

“About?”

“About the . . . us not banging?”

“Why?” Cade asked, standing. “It's not his business. He doesn't share everything with me. Like that time he banked his sperm and accidentally knocked up someone he'd never met.”

“He told you.”

“After a couple of months.”

“This is different.”

“No. For the sake of authenticity, I think that we need to keep the details on the down low. All he needs to know is that I'm moving in with you. It's not like it's going to shock anyone.”

She crossed her arms and shifted her weight. “Really? You don't think everyone is going to be shocked by the fact that after sixteen years of friend . . . oh.”