Please Me, Cowboy (Montana Born Rodeo Book 4)

  Gracelyn couldn’t allow that. She’d left those lost country roads and the terrible disappointments of her family behind her for a reason, no matter her reaction to being back in the same state as all of them now.

  “I don’t like honey,” she said. Because she had to speak then, or she’d tip forward into him and then maybe lose herself off of the side of the planet, and that was what came out. It had the added benefit of being true.

  His dark hazel eyes glinted. “I take it you aren’t offering me your thoughts on natural sweeteners.”

  “It sounds old-fashioned. Forced.” Unlike the way his hand folded over hers, as if they’d been crafted to come together like that, but she wasn’t thinking anything so insane. Of course she wasn’t. “Two septuagenarians pretending to be hip for the young folks.”

  “What about babe?”

  She mock-shuddered. “Chauvinistic at best.”

  “Darlin’?” She shook her head and she saw that ghost of a smile on his hard mouth, there and then gone again in an instant. “Then you should probably brace yourself. I’m Texan born and raised. Darlin’s going to come on out from time to time whether you like it or not. Sweetheart?”

  “That might as well be an ad for a terrible Valentine’s Day movie desperate singletons drag their bored dates to, little realizing the men are only putting up with the make believe holiday in the first place, because they don’t want to be That Guy Who Broke Up with Her on Valentine’s Day, like some Taylor Swift song.”

  “Not that you’ve given it any thought.”

  She eyed him, and that bland look he trained on her. “I’m an analyst. I analyze.”

  “You sure do. How about baby?”

  “That’s demeaning, obviously.” Gracelyn started to scowl at him, then remembered her role here was to be obliging and sweet and yielding, not scowly, especially where someone could see them. Which was why she smiled sunnily when she continued. “Maybe you should ask yourself why you’d want to use an icky diminutive for a grown woman?”

  Another twitch of that harsh mouth, a gleam of dark gold in his eyes, and he used his free hand to wrap hers tighter in his. “Because it’s an endearment, not a rant. It’s about sex and affection, Gracelyn. Not politics.”

  Gracelyn had never before had occasion to think too closely about the use of endearments, much less her feelings on the topic. So she couldn’t have said why the subject was suddenly of such critical importance to her. It blocked out everything else. The past she’d left behind so deliberately, cutting off everything she’d known before she was eighteen with surgical precision. Her current geographic location a mere two hundred and fifty miles or so west of what had once been her family’s farm and how edgy that made her. The brilliant sensation of his warm, hard fingers threaded through hers, indistinguishable from all that Montana sky so blue and bright above them.

  Her voice was a little more husky than it should have been, then. “What’s wrong with my name?”

  “Couples have secret languages.”

  Jonah tugged on her fingers, raised them up to his mouth and then, horribly and inevitably and marvelously, set his mouth against her knuckles. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a press of her knuckles against the hard line of his mouth, as if in thought. As if her hand was an extension of his. It spoke of an intimacy her body rushed to accept, to make real. It soared through her, leaving a hollowness, a deep and atavistic longing, in its wake. And it was another kind of grief, because, of course, it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

  “Endearments are a part of that,” he said, his mouth moving against her skin. “An easy part.”

  “Endearments are organic,” Gracelyn retorted, shaken and off-kilter and not sure how to go about getting her balance again. “They can’t be flung around like this, hoping one sticks, three seconds before we walk into bar and try to play off this completely fake relationship for an audience.”

  She was careful to keep her expression far blander than what was happening inside of her—one of the finest lessons her childhood had taught her, now she thought about it. They’d never expected her to up and leave, no matter the scholarship she’d worked so hard to secure, making no secret of her aspirations. They’d dared her to try, then laughed at her as she did.

  No one leaves this place alive, they’d assured her as if the rundown old farm was Appalachian, out of that old song about Harlan, and it might as well have been. You dream big, but you’ll be right here with the rest of us when the dust clears.

  They’d been so damned sure she was the same as all the rest of the Packards with their clipped wings, bad reputations, and limited horizons—and part of their certainty came from the fact she’d stopped showing them anything she didn’t want them to see. Right about the time it was clear they didn’t actually want what was best for her. Also when she’d been ten, as she recalled. It was one of her finest talents—that and her mulish determination to do the very thing people told her she couldn’t.

  And there was no reason her age-old mask should feel like it was choking her today, with Jonah Flint staring down at her as if he could read the things she’d etched into her very soul. As if the mask that had saved her once was no protection from him at all.

  As if this wasn’t a game they were playing. As if what happened here, between them, mattered.

  Speaking of fanciful, she snapped at herself. That’s bordering on straight up crazy.

  “It doesn’t have to fit,” Jonah pointed out. His voice was a gentle rumble, too deep and male to be soft. But still, it shivered through her. It felt like another one of those almost-kisses, that hard mouth against her skin as if it belonged there. “It has to sound like it fits, which isn’t the same thing.”

  Gracelyn saw the moment he remembered himself, and his purpose here. The dark gold in his gaze disappeared as if it had never been, and he went colder, harder, without seeming to move a muscle. He kept hold of her hand, though he dropped it from his mouth, and he started toward the building in front of them. Gracelyn told herself she barely noticed how easily they walked together, how in sync they were, and so quickly, as if they really had walked hand in hand a thousand times before.

  He chose you because you suit his image of the girlfriend he doesn’t actually want, she reminded herself harshly. And you’re doing this because who the hell else gets to say they spent two weeks this up, close, and personal with Jonah Flint? This could be a major stepping-stone in your career—but not if you’re all fluttery about holding hands with him!

  Jonah tugged open the depot’s front door and a cheerful burst of noise floated out to greet them as he ushered her inside. Gracelyn had spent some time researching the other half of the once unbreakable Flint brothers team in the past few days. She knew that Jasper Flint had opened this microbrewery only a few months back, after painstakingly renovating the old train depot here in Marietta. But research and even detailed pictures on the internet hadn’t entirely prepared her for the appealingly clean lines and little touches that were obvious at first glance. From the big, bright paintings on the walls to the airy, open balcony seating area up above, every little detail was well thought out and gave the place a wide open, effortless feel.

  Perfectly Montana, she thought.

  There were great steel vats behind high glass walls and a busy bar counter staffed by cheerful-looking bartenders in bright blue shirts. She saw a busy, open kitchen in the back and a menu written in a bold, welcoming hand across a chalkboard on the wall beside it. And then, when a family group claimed a table and sat down, she saw him.

  A man who laughed with his whole body and looked like something she’d made up, in all those fantasies she’d deny she’d had, ever since that afternoon in Jonah’s office.

  A man who looked so much like Jonah it made her heart stutter in her chest, because he simultaneously looked nothing like Jonah at all.

  “Holy crap,” she whispered, not realizing she’d come to a stop until Jonah frowned down at her. “That’s what you’d look like
if you were happy.”

  She couldn’t have described the look that moved over Jonah’s face then, only that it hurt her. Him, too, she knew—and she didn’t know how she knew. But then, that quickly, something dark and fierce replaced it, and his hand tightened slightly—only slightly—around hers.

  “That’s what I would look like if I’d suffered a mental break and possibly had a frontal lobotomy to match,” he told her, his voice as precise as a man with that much Texas in his voice could hope to get, and she felt the lash of it as surely as if he’d broken her skin with its sharpness.

  Then he was moving, and the other man—Jasper, she told herself, because of course it was Jasper, the younger Flint twin by barely a minute, identical in almost every physical way except for his longer, carelessly dark blonde hair that he wore so haphazardly and that utterly non-Jonah expression of lazy amusement on his face—glanced up and went still.

  And for a moment that Gracelyn felt thud in her like a deep and terrible drum, they could have been interchangeable.

  “Sweet Jesus,” came an older female voice from one of the tables nearby, complete with a lascivious cackle, “did you know there were two of them?”

  “I bet Chelsea did,” came the muttered reply. “That wench.”

  Is this Chelsea woman a bad influence on your brother? Gracelyn had asked back in Dallas, trying to understand why this situation called for such dramatic measures on the part of a man like Jonah, who she rather doubted usually needed to produce fake girlfriends for family occasions. Drugs? Alcohol? Gambling?

  Because she certainly knew more than anyone should about the way those nasty little vices cut out souls and left walking, talking, utterly empty shells behind in their wake.

  She’s a schoolteacher, Jonah had replied from the leather sofa across from her in his office, spitting out the word like it was a vicious curse. Like he’d said Voldemort in a roomful of Harry Potter’s wizards.

  She’d gazed back at him. An evil schoolteacher?

  He is Jasper Flint, Jonah had bit out, his outrage evident in every syllable, and something far darker beneath the words. He is my brother. He is better than a goddamned history teacher.

  Gracelyn couldn’t have said what came over her as they walked across the floor of the microbrewery toward a man who looked entirely too familiar, eerily the same, yet wasn’t. Jonah was among the wealthiest men in the world, a fact no one in Dallas, a place fairly bursting with wealthy men, could fail to notice. They’d flown here today on one of his fleet of private jets. He owned more property than some small countries. He was as respected as he was feared, which Gracelyn knew very well, since she worked for him. She was close enough to him at the moment that she could tell, as a person who’d grown up around folks who’d never met a difference of opinion they couldn’t escalate into an assault charge, that the particular hardness of his lean muscles meant he could probably knock some heads together if he wanted. He was, by any measure and according to documented fact, a tough, hard, deeply formidable man who could take care of himself in any and all situations.

  Clearly.

  But she moved closer to him anyway, as if he needed that. As if he needed her support, when she was well aware he’d only come here in the first place to break up his brother’s relationship. And if she knew Jonah at all, maybe it was his brother who needed the help.

  If he needed it, she acknowledged as that thing like grief swelled in her again, she would fight off all his demons herself. One after the next.

  If he’d let her.

  “Jonah,” said his twin, his voice warm despite the wariness in his own hazel gaze, so much the same it was almost alarming. “You came. I didn’t think you would.”

  “Of course I came,” Jonah bit out, sounding colder than usual. “It’s not every day my twin brother—”

  He shifted, or Jasper did, and Gracelyn saw the pretty blonde woman standing there, just behind Jasper. She thought Jonah must have, too, though he gave no outward sign of it.

  “—opens up his own brewery and starts talking about rodeos like a born again cowboy,” Jonah finished smoothly. “How could I resist?”

  For no good reason, Gracelyn pulled her hand from his and then slid her arm around his waist instead, her fingers pressing into his lean hip. She didn’t know which one of them that was meant to reassure. The dark, brooding look Jonah slid down at her in response didn’t make anything better or more clear, it only made that odd hollow thing inside of her deepen. Then twist.

  But she had a job to do, and this wasn’t it.

  “Hi,” she said, breaking into whatever silent communication was happening between the brothers before her heart split wide open in her chest.

  She stuck out her hand toward the woman she assumed was the potentially evil schoolteacher like any friendly, folksy Montana woman would, and she should know. She’d been one, once upon a different life. That was why she was here, she reminded herself. Not all this touching that was turning her into someone she hardly recognized, and they’d only just got here.

  She turned her smile up a notch as the other woman took her hand. “I’m Gracelyn. Jonah’s girlfriend.”

  *

  “You didn’t mention you were coming up when we spoke,” Jasper said once he and Jonah had moved to the bar, ostensibly grabbing a few drinks to toast his surprise arrival and their happy brotherly reunion.

  If Jonah had any reservations about leaving Gracelyn to handle the schoolteacher on her own, well, it was too late now. Besides, he needed to get a sense of where his brother’s head was, and he didn’t need anyone to tell him that would be a whole lot easier without the local barnacle attached to him. Divide and conquer, he thought, as if he and Gracelyn were really a team.

  It was like Jasper was psychic. “Just like you didn’t mention this girlfriend of yours.”

  Jonah checked a sigh just audible enough to be sure Jasper heard him, in the time-honored fashion of every older sibling, everywhere.

  “I thought that phone call was all about your big announcement.” Jonah leaned against the bar and eyed his brother. He focused on Jasper and not the overly-enthusiastic bar staff who milled around him and laughingly called him boss, all clad in too-bright t-shirts with the FlintWorks logo stamped across the front. “It was also the first time we’ve spoken in a year. Or maybe you think I should have thrown her in your face right about the time you insinuated human emotion wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse?”

  Jasper had the grace to look faintly abashed, but that was the thing about Jasper: he wasn’t one to hold a grudge. It either made him an idiot or a saint, and Jonah’s money had always been on idiot.

  “Given that the last time you used the term ‘girlfriend’ to describe a female in your life we were eighteen and you were angling for a major post-Prom payoff, yeah,” Jasper pointed out, grinning as if no time had passed and it was fine to bring up ancient history. “Maybe you should have.”

  “I wasn’t aware I had to run my relationships past you for review,” Jonah replied coolly, because he wasn’t his brother. He made his grudges into sky-high monuments, painted them bright colors so they’d never be forgotten, and lived in them like they were his home. “My apologies. I thought we were grown-ass men.”

  Jasper’s trademark shit-eating grin was familiar, certainly, if strained just slightly around the edges, showing that he wasn’t as at ease with this reunion of theirs as he was trying to appear. Which had the immediate effect of making Jonah feel better about the whole thing.

  “Relationships?” Jasper asked. Of course he did. “Plural? You? Jonah Flint, the Man Who Walks Alone?”

  Jonah inclined his head slightly, and almost let himself smile. Almost. Jasper laughed, as if he had.

  Still almost smiling, Jonah turned back to the noisy, Saturday afternoon bar crowd as Jasper prepared their drinks.

  Oh, babe, you know what I like, Gracelyn had murmured when he’d asked for her drink order. The laughter in her dark eyes as she’d called him a name
she’d rejected had been a little punch to his gut, but that had seemed better than the great mess of things that battered at him when he thought about his messed-up relationship with Jasper.

  Ignoring both thorny topics, Jonah forced himself to look around at this place his twin had made. With his own two hands, more or less, if the relentlessly positive emails Jonah had done his best to ignore over the last year were to be believed.

  “Not so bad, is it?” Jasper drawled, thunking pint glasses of beer down on the counter between them one by one. “Definitely not the end of the world, as I believe some people might have thought when I came up with this plan.”

  Not the end of the world, sure. Just the end of everything they’d built together. Just the end of them. Jonah hadn’t been surprised, really, when Jasper had flounced off into the ether two years ago, demanding they sell everything and reinvent themselves. He’d always been the emotional one.

  But he’d always thought his brother would come back, because Jasper always had before, no matter where his spontaneous bursts of restlessness had taken him. They’d always reinvented themselves together. From their earliest days, when their angry, brutish father had driven them around Dallas in a cloak of righteousness to show them what they couldn’t have, Jonah and Jasper had been united in proving him—and the world—wrong. Even Jasper’s marriage to the toothy and faithless Marlene hadn’t changed things between the brothers, because Marlene—and the house and the cars and the life—had never been anything more than an accessory. A billionaire’s shiny bauble, like so many of the brittle women they knew in Dallas, interchangeable from all the rest and wholly unlamented once she’d gone.

  This was different. Jasper was a sophisticated man. He’d moved in dizzyingly high circles in Dallas with that easy grin of his, making everyone he’d encountered think he was their new best friend. He was good at it, damn it. What the hell was he doing, tying himself down in a place like this?

  The microbrewery wasn’t the problem, Jonah acknowledged as he looked around. He was impressed despite himself, because of course anything Jasper did would be impressive. That was the Flint way. Jonah wouldn’t mind investing in the place, taking a look into regional expansion. He could see opening another FlintWorks near his vast ranch holdings north of Flathead Lake, on the other side of the Rockies. It would thrive near the winter skiing and summer lakefront communities, he was sure, as most Flint projects did.