Please Me, Cowboy (Montana Born Rodeo Book 4), Page 4

  But he certainly wouldn’t set himself up as a bartender there. Just as he wouldn’t disappear into the soft gaze of some local girl who must have thought she’d won the freaking lottery the day Jasper had rolled into town. Jonah had hardly looked at the blonde woman his brother had introduced as Triple C. He’d worried his feelings about her would have been written all over his face, and he knew exactly how his brother was likely to react to that kind of insult. Especially as he was probably expecting it.

  No need to race toward his endgame when an amble would do the same trick.

  “I can see that you like it, you know.”

  There was laughter in his brother’s voice, still. There always was, and Jonah found it as infuriating as ever. How different would their lives have been if Jonah had decided to take after their reckless, vow-breaking mother too? Instead of their grimly righteous father who’d ruled over his home and the two sons his wife had left behind her with all the fury of the Old Testament?

  “I can already hear the expansion proposal,” Jasper said, making no attempt to conceal his amusement. “You can’t help yourself.”

  When Jonah turned back to face his twin, he trotted out a grudging smile. He told himself he was only playing his role as he did it. But he knew better. This was Jasper. This was his brother, his twin. The only person on the face of the earth he’d ever trusted, and one of the very select few he’d ever loved. His father had been a terror. His mother had taken off when the twins had been five, the better to craft herself a merry family of little girls Jonah didn’t care to acknowledge, with a significantly more manageable man off in Virginia.

  He’d long since forgiven his mother for leaving his father. It was the fact she’d never come back to rescue her sons from the same fate that he’d held on to for the past thirty-one years. She was his first, best, and deepest grudge, and he had no intention of letting go of it any time soon.

  Which meant Jasper was the only family Jonah had. Being back in the same room with him, even if that room was in this pissant town on a lonely road no one would want to travel on the first place, mattered. He felt it seep into him, like a kind of light. Or like the heat of Gracelyn’s smooth arm around his back, which promised nothing but the ruin of him, he was well aware.

  Like all those things he told himself he didn’t want, because he couldn’t have them. Because he would destroy them all himself, given time. He was a man who knew his limitations. He always had. Because he’d always had a mirror image right there in front of him to show him what his life might have looked like if he’d been a little bit limitless instead.

  If he’d been someone else entirely, free and unfettered and all the rest of that crap. If he allowed himself to be irresponsible. If he’d been a little bit less like the father he hated and feared he resembled in equal measure.

  “Don’t count your chickens just yet, little brother,” Jonah replied lazily when Jasper smiled back at him, as if everything between them was right again—as it would be again, one way or another, if he had anything to do with it. “I haven’t tasted the beer. It could suck.”

  Chapter Three

  ‡

  Gracelyn took one look at Chelsea Crawford Collier—inspiration for the microbrewery’s most popular beer, according to a sign near the bar with a picture of her smiling face attached—and knew everything she needed to know about her.

  The smooth blonde hair that fell around her shoulders, the open face with a hint of freckles. A friendly smile that Gracelyn could tell was entirely genuine. Nice clothes that flattered her figure but weren’t overly suggestive, indicating she took care with her appearance and pride in herself besides, complete with the kind of quiet confidence that made her seem even prettier than she was. She looked like a woman who knew exactly who she was and where she belonged. It was evident as much in her easy handshake as it was in the number of people who called her name, or caught her eye as they happened past the table they’d claimed near the currently empty little stage.

  Gracelyn had grown up poor white trash in a place where there wasn’t a whole lot but poor white trash, and still the Packards had been the trashiest of them all. Criminals, convicts, drunks, drug addicts and gamblers, and that was just Gracelyn’s parents. She’d spent her childhood set apart from the good kids, the ones whose parents hadn’t descended into meth use or too many drunk driving or domestic violence arrests. She’d come to think that had been another twisted sort of gift—because she wasn’t often fooled by people after growing up so hard. People, good and bad and everything in between, tended to wear their intentions on their faces or deep in their eyes, no matter what lies they told with their mouths.

  And Chelsea Collier looked like what she was supposed to be: a perfectly nice schoolteacher in a pretty small town, who happened to be dating one of the Flint brothers.

  What she did not look like—at all—was a gold digger.

  These days Gracelyn lived in a big city filled with a lot of oil money, which meant there were a whole lot of women attracted to the lifestyle that went along with that money. Dallas gold diggers were a breed apart. Big hair, big jewelry, big smiles on their ruthlessly maintained little bodies. The faintest hint of cheap sex like a perfume hanging around them, making it clear how far they’d be willing to go to get their hands on one of the fortunes lying around for the taking. They were claim-jumpers, every one of them, from the diamonds they flaunted that could never be big enough to please them, to their extravagant shoes.

  That was not this woman.

  But Gracelyn was not here because Jonah valued her opinions or sought her counsel, something she would do well to remember. Nor was she here to make friends with Chelsea Collier. Antagonize her, Jonah had murmured in her ear when he’d bent down to her, supposedly to get her drink order. See what happens.

  Which was her fault, Gracelyn supposed, for having assured him she could do exactly that.

  Can you be a bitch? was what he’d asked, bluntly. The way she’d been asked, in other interviews for far less questionable jobs, what she thought her skill set might contribute to the company in question.

  What kind of question is that? she’d asked him mildly. I lived through middle school, if that’s what you mean.

  Dark brows had risen above those shrewd hazel eyes. Is that a yes?

  Don’t worry, she’d told him, smiling slightly. I can be wildly antagonistic, while pretending to be polite. It’s one of the only skills my mother ever taught me.

  Which was true, as far as it went.

  “I know this is a ridiculous thing to say,” Chelsea was saying now, right here in Montana where asides about Gracelyn’s mother felt a whole lot less amusing than they had in Texas, “but while I knew they were twins, I didn’t expect them to be quite so identical.”

  Gracelyn laughed her agreement. She looked across the happily crowded floor of the brewery, where families were having a late Saturday afternoon lunch and friends grabbed appetizers and a few beers, toward the two men who stood on opposite sides of the blonde wood bar, as if they were a mirror split in two.

  One laughing with his head thrown back, open and easy as if he did it all the time, because he probably did. And one smiling back at him, crooked and slow, as if he was thinking about learning how to do it himself.

  Jonah was smiling.

  Gracelyn caught herself staring. She jerked her attention back to this woman Jonah was so dead set against and reminded herself that this was a job. It was an opportunity to observe how one of the finest business minds in the country operated, if only in the realm of his personal life. It was not an opportunity to ogle her boss. Or his equally good-looking, apparently far sunnier-tempered twin.

  “It’s a little disconcerting, I grant you,” she managed to say in reply.

  Chelsea leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table between them, and if there was a single gold digging bone in her body, Gracelyn would swallow her own tongue. Assuming the sight of Jonah grinning didn’t make her do that anyway, of co
urse. But she gritted her teeth against the urge to do something really stupid, like say so.

  “I doubt Jasper would want me to say this, but I know he’s really, really moved that Jonah’s here, that he surprised him like this.” Chelsea’s smile dimmed slightly, but stayed put. “I know things have been a bit strained between them since Jasper left Texas, but I really hope this visit of yours helps mend that.” Her gaze was so sincere it made Gracelyn want to look at anything else—yet she made herself hold it, and the other woman brightened in response. “I’m assuming this is your influence?”

  It didn’t say anything good about Gracelyn that she wished that was true. That she really did have any influence over Jonah, though the very idea was laughable. Or, hell, that she was really in his life in the first place.

  “Can a Flint man be influenced?” she asked lightly.

  “Not often,” Chelsea replied, a warm sort of humor in her voice. “It kind of depends how you go about the influencing, I think.”

  There was a pause, as if she was waiting for Gracelyn to say something about the brothers’ relationship or about Jonah, to pick up the thread she’d put out there like anyone else would, to build a bridge between them as the first step towards friendliness. But Gracelyn only gazed back at her, giving her what she and her cousin Bex had always called the Pamela Packard Special—Gracelyn’s mother’s trademark blank gaze that had reduced grown men, officers of the law, and even hardened criminals to impotent displays of discomfort and, usually, babbling.

  Funny how easy it still came, like it was right there in her blood.

  Chelsea blinked. “Uh . . . are you from Texas too?”

  “I’m from right here in Montana, as a matter of fact,” Gracelyn said. And of course, Chelsea liked that. Visibly. This was the entire point of Graclyn’s being here, wasn’t it? The supposed connection she was meant to use and exploit with this woman—as if being from the same very big state meant anything. Why did the whole thing make her feel faintly sick, suddenly? “A little bit north of Miles City.”

  “I love the prairie,” Chelsea said, with a reverent sort of sigh. “Nothing like the birds singing, the grass rustling, and only the horizon and the sky as far as the eye can see.”

  “You obviously haven’t spent a lot of time on the prairie, then,” Gracelyn said dryly, as if Chelsea was both naïve and faintly amusing. “Or you’d describe all of that as empty.”

  Chelsea’s laugh was definitely strained, then. Point to me, Gracelyn thought, and hated herself.

  “No,” Chelsea said after a moment, shifting in her chair to put a little more space between them. “My family’s been in Marietta pretty much forever. Some would call it having roots. I’m engaged in an eternal debate about whether or not it’s more a noose than roots.” When Gracelyn let another pause drag out too long rather than answering, she straightened and got more brisk. Put on her teacher face, if Gracelyn had to guess. “So you grew up in Miles City, then?”

  “Not exactly.” Gracelyn leaned back in her chair, crossing her legs and propping one elbow on the chair’s back, well aware that particular pose made her look aloof and unapproachable at once. It didn’t matter if her lips were curved. “You have to drive north out of Miles City until you hit Deadman’s Road. Take that until it runs into a big old butte, then turn left. Go, oh, fifty miles or so, and make sure you don’t blink when you see a few rickety buildings huddled together against all that sky. A church, a bar, and a general store, in the middle of nothing but prickly grass. A few of the more optimistic folks like to call it ranch land. It’s really not.” Her smile was sharp then, she could feel it, and she could see it reflected in the stiffness of the other woman’s face. She recognized that expression. She’d felt it on her own face a thousand times when she’d still been a kid in her mother’s clutches. “That’s where I come from. Hooray.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you’re planning a visit home while you’re in Montana, then,” Chelsea said, carefully. Very carefully. Her hands clasped together tightly, and Gracelyn really couldn’t think of a time in recent memory she’d felt worse about herself.

  “Definitely not.” Gracelyn forced a little laugh that seemed to stick into the glossy table top between them, brittle and pointed. “I couldn’t wait to leave the moment I left high school and I’ve certainly never been back since. Small town, small people, small lives. You know.”

  She smiled then, knowing that wouldn’t cover the slap of her words, and she told herself it wasn’t her business to feel badly about the way Chelsea’s open expression shut down at that. Hard. It wasn’t her place. You will remain my subordinate, Jonah had said back in his office. Back in Dallas, where everything had made sense and all the parts of her life had stayed right where she’d put them, out of sight and as out of mind as possible. And that meant that her place was to do her job, whether she liked it or not, or quit.

  She chose her job. She would always choose her job. It was all she had—she’d made sure of that.

  And she was good at her job, because it was that or go crawling back home and she refused, so Gracelyn tilted her head slightly to one side. Then she stuck the knife in, deep. “Didn’t Jonah tell me you were born here?”

  *

  The suite Jonah had taken in the Graff Hotel just down the block from FlintWorks was an old, painstakingly restored and renovated affair. There were burnished plaques on the wall naming a local copper king as the suite’s initial, historic resident, and nods everywhere toward the many Wild West ghosts that were said to still haunt the place. There was a graceful, Victorian living area with windows that looked out toward Copper Mountain in the golden evening light. There were nooks and crannies, unexpected closets, and near-secret rooms, as befitted a lovely hotel from a bygone era. It all should have delighted Gracelyn.

  Jonah had stalked off into the master bedroom when they’d entered the suite, jerking his head toward one of the smaller side rooms to indicate where he expected her to sleep and then leaving her to it with a thud of his bedroom door. She could have explored. She could have lost herself in all the delicious splendor of the place, that local hero and San Francisco tech tycoon Troy Sheenan had restored with little more than gritty determination to succeed where everyone predicted he’d fail, according to all reports—the kind of story Gracelyn loved above all others. She so wanted it to be hers someday.

  But instead, she stood in the center of her room’s polished bit of floor, hardly noticing the stout four poster bed or the old daguerreotype photographs that lined the walls, harkening back to Marietta’s earliest Old West days. There were any number of things she could do and should do, she knew. Unpack, for one. Attend to the long list of messages that were clogging up her phone, because her immediate supervisor was less than impressed—or just straight up jealous—that one of his analysts had taken off for parts unknown with The Man Himself. Or she could try to shake all of this off and take herself out for a run, the best way to lance this sort of emotional poison that she knew would otherwise take root and expand within her.

  But she didn’t do any of those things, because all Gracelyn could think about was the tight, frozen expression she’d left on poor Chelsea Collier’s face when the other woman had only been trying to be nice. Or the too-straight way the other woman had been standing when they’d exchanged a deeply insincere goodbye, as if she’d been trying very hard to hold herself still. As if otherwise, she would ache.

  Gracelyn had never seen that particular set of reactions on another person, but she’d certainly felt them all. Every time her mother had eviscerated her. Pamela had torn into her for sport, or because Pamela was hurting herself and didn’t know what else to do with it, or because she was drunk and mean, or just because she could. It had never occurred to Gracelyn that it was possible she could make someone else feel that way, for any reason, and her stomach lurched at the sad knowledge that she had.

  Because it was her job.

  “Gracelyn.”

  Or, possibly, because
it was him.

  The impatient note in Jonah’s voice clued her in to the fact he’d said her name more than once. Still, it took her another beat to focus on him, standing there in the open doorway to her room.

  And then a whole other beat besides, because he was wet.

  Not actually wet, of course. Just . . . showered. Though it took her entirely too long to work that out as she gazed at him. His hair looked much darker when it was damp and slicked back against his head, and that in turn, made those eyes of his glow dark gold despite the cranky look in them. But the key point was that he was shrugging his way into a t-shirt, which meant that for a brief and glorious moment, she was staring directly at his ridged abdomen. The play of his skin against the fine muscles beneath. The trail of dark hair that dipped below the waistband of his jeans.

  This was the reason, if she was honest with herself, that she’d been so deeply concerned with her job performance that she’d happily acted like such a jerk. Because Jonah had told her she should.

  “What are you doing?” he asked when his t-shirt was in place, which wasn’t really as helpful as it should have been, because Gracelyn knew, now.

  She knew. The sad truth about herself. And the more pressing and immediate truth about the state of his very fine body.

  And that t-shirt was tight, hugging his chest in a way that made her whole body seem to prickle to attention. Jonah’s mouth shifted into something softer then. Something almost warm, like he was playing with her. Like he could play. The notion made her blood feel like molasses, heavy and sweet in her veins.