“I used to come up here with my dad,” Julia said. “It was our way of spending time together, doing something we both loved.”

  “What about your mom?” Jake pushed his hat back on his head.

  “She’s a city girl at heart. She tolerated living on the ranch because she and Dad were so in love, but after he died, she had no interest in being so far from what she calls civilization.” From the time she was a little girl, Julia had known that she was more like her dad than her mom.

  “How does she define that?” he asked.

  “Access to the arts and shopping. Sidewalks, a Starbuck’s on every corner. That sort of stuff. I like to visit her, have a mocha, shop for clothes that I’m unlikely to ever wear, but my heart’s out here, same as my dad’s was. Hiking here always makes me think of him.”

  “That’s true for me, too, with my dad,” Jake said, surprising her. “It was usually all three of us boys with him, but twice I can remember coming here, just him and me. He tried to do that, spend time with us individually.”

  “That seems wise of him,” she said, wondering what it would have been like to have had to share her parents’ attention. Having a sibling looked both challenging and rewarding. Jake and Brian were close. So was her friend Sofia with her brother Rafael. She was a little jealous of that. They always knew someone had their backs. Since Julia was little, she’d had good friends—both human and animal—who filled that role for her, too, but it wasn’t quite the same.

  “He was wise. More than I realized while he was alive.” Jake was turned in the opposite direction from Julia, but he suddenly reached out and touched her arm. “Look to the west.”

  She spun around to see the angry roil of black clouds that could form so quickly in the Texan sky. They both knew the storm would come on fast. “We better head back,” she said automatically, even as she frowned, calculating how long that would take them.

  “We won’t make it,” he said, apparently finishing his own calculations.

  “Probably not, but at least we’ll be down from the highest point.” She sat on her butt and scooted off the high boulder. He jumped to the ground, a grin on his face. She shook her head, but she was glad to see his relaxed, teasing expression. They’d shared something poignant about their fathers standing up on that rock, and it felt like an unexpected bond had formed.

  They hustled down the trail, slipping on loose stones. The rain and wind hit hard before they’d gone two miles. They were pelted with huge drops and lightning was putting on a show she might have enjoyed from inside her house. Out here where she was a potential target, not so much.

  “Careful here,” she heard Jake shout over the storm. The next section of trail was narrow as it worked along a cliff face. The ground, hard-packed from the baking sun, wasn’t allowing the water to seep in, so it was running off in muddy rivulets, making the trail dangerously slippery underfoot.

  Jake was just ahead of her, so she saw the second it happened. He started to slide, arms flailing, seeking purchase, but there was nothing for him to grab hold of—just the rocky cliff face or the open air of a forty-foot drop. Instinct driving her, she grabbed for his arm and yanked him back hard against her. They both fell backwards but stayed on the narrow ledge of the trail.

  “Jesus,” he said. He’d fallen partially on her, and they were both panting with exertion and adrenaline. “That was close. We can’t stay out in this.” He scrambled to his feet and reached for her hand, pulling her up. “There’s a cabin not far from here, belongs to Doc Billet. Let’s head there.”

  She didn’t argue. If anything, she was relieved to have somewhere to go, since the wind was increasing by the minute. “How far?”

  “Ten minutes.” He took the lead again, moving more cautiously now until the trail widened. He took a cut off the main trail, and they slid down a muddy slope and came to a hunting cabin. She reached the door first and tried the handle.

  “Locked. We can’t go in.” She knew Doc Billet only vaguely, not well enough to bust down his door.

  “We’ll break in,” he shouted back over the roar of the wind.

  She shook her head, not one to bend the rules to that extent, regardless of the weather. Anyway, they already got some benefit just from being next to the building, blocking off the pounding rain from one side. They could shelter on the tiny porch until the worst of it passed.

  “Going in,” Jake said and lifted a frog statue on the porch to reveal a key. He shoved it in the lock, and they stumbled into the cabin, drenched and dripping, but safe from the storm.

  “You knew the key was there all along,” she accused him.

  “Yeah,” he grinned. Soaked from head to toe and covered with mud from his fall, he should have looked ridiculous. But that grin was as electric as the lightning bolts outside. And just as dangerous to women, she decided. “But I liked watching you face a moral dilemma.”

  “Jake Thorne, you’re a dog.”

  “You like dogs,” he said. “I even heard a rumor that you stole a dog once. That true?”

  “I won’t confirm or deny that statement.” She preferred to think that she’d rescued Fay from an abusive owner, but the truth was she’d taken her and hidden her away until they stopped searching. Maybe she wasn’t such a rule follower after all.

  4

  “Cold,” she said, rubbing her arms with her hands. Her normally curly hair had been flattened by the rain and hung around her shoulders like a damp curtain. Her shirt clung to her curves, concealing nothing.

  He pulled his gaze away from her. This was no time to be thinking about that. She was freezing, and he needed to do something about it. “Texas weather,” he mused. “Hot as hell one moment and sleet the next. I’ll get a fire going.” The cabin was damp with disuse, but there was firewood in the box. He grabbed several pieces and knelt in front of the stone fireplace, making a pyramid of the logs.

  “Not like that,” she said, coming to kneel next to him, her shoulder brushing against his. “It’ll never light. You’ve got to stack them like this.” She rearranged the logs, changing the pattern.

  “I’ve built plenty of fires,” he gritted out. About a million, he thought.

  “Yeah, but did you get them to take off? I don’t think so. Get the matches.” She could be downright bossy. Two could play at that game. He reached for the box of matches on the mantel but held them out of her reach. “What are you doing?” She narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Holding out until you come to your senses about the fire. Keep in mind that I’m not the one who’s shivering,” he said. She was, and his mother would thump him over the head for allowing a lady to be cold when he had the means to fix it. But something in her brought out the contrarian in him.

  She rose and backed off. “Have it your way.”

  He quickly rearranged the logs to suit him, added kindling, and struck a match. In a few minutes, the fire was burning strongly, so he carefully fed it more wood. When he was satisfied that it was set, he took a step back and looked at Julia. She’d moved on from shivering to shaking with cold. “Get out of your wet clothes,” he said. He was starting to feel the chill himself. The fire was great, but it wouldn’t be enough to get them warm when they were still soaked through. He peeled off his shirt.

  “What are you…?” She shot him a look.

  “It’s the only way to warm up. You know as well as I do that your wet clothes are making you colder.” He unbuttoned his shorts, pushed them down his legs, and stepped out of them. If he’d been alone, he’d have stripped off his boxers as well, but he thought better of that with Julia present. He hung his clothes on a line near the fire to dry. When he turned, he caught her eyes focused on his body and had to suppress a smile. She was checking him out. Or was she? She’d stomped on the idea of him taking her out at the bar last night. So was the attraction all in his head? He couldn’t tell. Either she was sending him mixed messages or maybe his radar was wrong. “Come on, join me,” he coaxed. “I promise, you’ll feel better the minute you do.”

  For a second he thought she wouldn’t give in, but her practicality seemed to win out. She shed her T-shirt and shorts quickly enough. He tried not to look, but hell, she had, so he took a good gander at her in sports bra and panties. Her body was trim with long lean muscles developed from actual work, not working out. All in all, it was a damn fine view.

  “Give me your clothes,” he said. When she handed them over, he hung them next to his. By the time he was finished with that, she’d found a couple of thin blankets in a chest. She handed him one and wrapped herself in the other, and they sat inches apart on a small sofa pulled up in front of the fire.

  “That’s better,” she said, but her teeth were chattering and she was visibly shaking still. “Don’t mind me. I get cold easily, and then it takes forever to warm back up.” She hugged the blanket closer around her.

  The good news was, Jake decided, that hypothermia was highly unlikely. But then he’d never been one to test the power of mother nature, and who knew how much worse the storm would get? Without bothering to analyze it more than that, he lifted her up, blanket and all, and placed her on his lap.

  “What are you doing?” She immediately tried to squirm away.

  “Warming you up.” He began rubbing his hands over her arms and back through the blanket. She stiffened but didn’t move away.

  “…Thanks,” she said at last.

  “Thank you for grabbing hold of me out on the trail. I could have gone off the edge.” He’d had plenty of close calls in his lifetime. That was the life of being a rancher. But he knew how fortunate he was that she’d reacted quickly.

  “Maybe,” she conceded, relaxing the tiniest bit. “And you’re welcome. I guess that’s why you’re always supposed to hike with a partner.”

  “You don’t, though, do you?” he asked, noticing that her shivering was lessening.

  “No, I like my independence. It’s why I came back to Darby Crossing to set up my vet business. I had an offer to become a partner in an established practice in Dallas, but I like to do things my way. Being sole owner suits me better. And I couldn’t turn my back on my father’s land.”

  He understood both family obligation and the desire to be independent. “It’s a weird thing, though,” he said. “Working for yourself is good in some ways. I love the freedom and sense of ownership over everything I do, but it tends to absorb my life, leaving not a lot of personal time.”

  “That’s true enough,” she agreed. “I haven’t been on a date since…since I don’t remember when. That’s terrible.” She wrinkled up her nose. “You date?”

  “Some,” he admitted. “Never anything serious, though. No time for that.” Before his dad and Luke were killed, he’d had an active love life, but with the responsibility of the ranch on his shoulders, he refused to dedicate the time it took for anything beyond a casual romance. He told himself that he didn’t want anything more. From what he’d seen, love was messy and ran counter to his need to be in control. Relationships were impossible to control. So if he felt too strongly for someone, experienced feelings he couldn’t explain, he tended to break it off. Or he overcompensated by trying to manage the relationship—which usually resulted in the woman wanting out.

  “So there’s good and bad, but I still wouldn’t trade being a vet here,” she said, bringing him back from his mental wanderings.

  “What made you decide that was the job for you? You could have just taken over your family’s ranch or done anything.” In school she’d been top of her class; everything appeared to come easily to her.

  “That’s simple,” she said with a small smile. “I had a pony named Meredith as a kid. When I was about ten, she got sick and Dad couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so he called a vet—a woman who came from an hour away. I followed her around, asking a million questions. She took the time to answer them and discovered what was wrong with Meredith. I was so impressed that I decided I wanted to do the same thing. I’ve been focused on it ever since.”

  “Inspiring.” He could see how that would have had an impact on a kid.

  “What about you? Did you consider anything but ranching?”

  “Not for a second. I always knew I’d be a rancher. When we were kids, Brian always played the sheriff, and I was the cowboy in our make-believe world.”

  “Who was the villain?” she asked.

  “No one.” Sometimes, Luke was the enemy and they’d sneak around spying on him, but he was never part of their game.

  “So you’ve never done anything else?”

  “Yeah, I have, but not by choice.” It wasn’t a story he told often, but they had time to kill, and he felt comfortable with her. “I got in trouble one summer. Brian and I were out goofing off, trying to pull off stunts in the ranch trucks. I messed up and crashed. I was fine—but the truck wasn’t. Dad made me earn the money for the repairs doing an off-the-ranch job. I worked at the diner in town.” He didn’t add that his father had banned him from so much as touching the horses until he could prove himself worthy of the privilege again. It was a lesson he had never forgotten.

  “Oh, you worked for Aurora’s parents?”

  He nodded. “They were good to me, but I hated the job. Busboy and dishwasher. The worst was being trapped indoors during the summer months.”

  “That would kill me,” she said, twisting a little closer to him. He didn’t think the move was intentional, but it was a stark reminder that a hot and nearly naked woman was in his arms.

  “No matter the weather, I’ve got to get outside every day,” he said, trying to focus on the words and not the feel of her next to him. “Mom used to try to keep me in if I was sick, but I always escaped.”

  “I climbed out the second story window and down the trellis more times than I can remember,” Julia said. “Usually at night, though. Something about the quiet and moonlight call to me, and I can’t stay in.”

  “You use the stairs and the door now, I hope,” he teased.

  “I do. I guess that’s the advantage of living alone. No one tells me what to do.”

  His imagination got the best of him, and he pictured her going outside in a flimsy nightgown to stand in the warm nighttime air. The soft light would reveal her curves through the thin fabric. Curves that were pressed up against him. He felt himself getting hard. In another few seconds, she’d feel it, too. He needed to get her off his lap. Too late, he realized, when she turned her face toward him, her eyes widening.

  “I…um…I’m not trying to make a move on you,” he said. “Honest. You turned down a date quick enough in the bar last night, and I respect your choice. So if I’m making you uncomfortable, feel free to move away and I’ll calm down.” He might have to step outside into the cold rain to do that, but if that was what she wanted, he would.

  For a beat, she neither spoke nor moved. Then she licked her lips and he had to bite back a moan. “What if it’s not bothering me?” she finally asked.

  Not what he expected. “I’d consider myself a damn lucky man,” he whispered.

  She shifted, smooth and lithe, so that she was straddling him. Her fingers slipped under his blanket, tentatively pushing it off his shoulders. “Maybe it’s a good thing that we’re not going into business together, so we don’t need to worry about mixing business and pleasure.”

  The word pleasure broke through the last of his self-control, and he kissed her. In the back of his mind, he knew this was probably a bad idea. She was a neighbor, a friend of sorts. Her touch on his shoulders and chest was just tentative enough to suggest that flings like this weren’t her default, and he didn’t want to mislead her into thinking that they could have something he wasn’t capable of offering. But her kiss, the light stroke of her fingers over his nipples, erased all rational thought, and he deepened the kiss, swiping his tongue into her mouth, dragging it along hers and feeling the hot friction. He put his conscience aside and focused on the exquisite feeling of her in his arms.

  The blanket around her shoulders fell away and he broke the kiss long enough to push her sports bra over her head. He palmed her breasts, making her emit a little sound that went straight through him. He rubbed his dick against her, the layers of their underwear and crumpled blankets still between them. He wanted her naked, straddling him, so he rose with Julia still in his arms.

  “Are you steady?” he asked when her feet touched the floor.

  “For the moment,” she said in a breathy voice. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting rid of these.” He slipped his hands under the lace edge of her panties. As he pushed them down, he lowered himself in front of her, catching first one breast in his mouth and then the other.

  “Jake,” she whispered. Her fingers were in his hair as he kissed her stomach and the tops of both thighs. He wanted to part her and lick her but wasn’t sure she was ready for that, so he traveled back up her body. A moment later, he let his fingers trail between her legs and find where she was hot and wet for him. She gave a little sigh and dropped her head onto his shoulder as he touched her. “So good, but I want more.” Her hands began pushing at his boxers.

  “Wait,” he said. He had a sudden moment of clarity and caught her hands. “I don’t…I don’t have a condom with me.” Which was a damn shame. “I’m clean, but we can stop now if you’re worried about getting pregnant.”

  “Not worried.” She nipped at his jaw. “I can’t have kids. Well…I guess I can, but me getting pregnant is a one in a million shot.” She took his dick in her hand and stroked up him. “I’m much more concerned about this. I want you inside me, Jake.”

  What she was doing felt amazing, but he was as anxious as she was for them to come together. After stripping off his boxers, he sat again on the sofa and guided her down until he was buried deep in her. She felt so damn good that he had to struggle for command of himself.