Page 25 of Rugged

“Do whatever you need to do.” He uncrossed his arms, leaned forward and gave me a pointed look. “Make her fall in love.”

I scoffed. “Two days is a little short to make a human fall in love, Alpha.”

He made an impatient gesture. “I know, but get it rolling. I want her marked. The sooner the better.”

I couldn’t help but smirk. I even felt a blush creep up my neck. “I really do want to mark her.”

He chuckled. “Think with your head for a minute, not your dick.”

I blinked. Wasn’t he referring to me marking my mate? That definitely involved having her underneath me, naked and squirming.

“Two days,” Rob repeated. “By then, the moon will be full. If she’s not on board by then, you’ll have to be careful you don’t lose control and mark her without meaning to.”

I swallowed. Shit. Yeah.

“What if she doesn’t want to stay? If I can’t make her fall in love?” I asked, suddenly worried I wasn’t enough of a mate for her. That I was a killer. That I’d been banished from my pack and family. Was I even worthy? “She thinks this is a fling.”

Rob shrugged then gave me a hard look. “Figure it out.”

Fuck.

12

EMMA

I registeredthe loss of Johnny’s attentive presence the moment he left the kitchen. I… missed him.

Wow. How could it be that I’d already become addicted to being near this guy?

A guy I just met sixteen hours earlier?

I’d have to ask Lyssa if that was how she rolled. Somehow, I didn’t think she got attached to any of her flings. Not if she changed them at the pace she changed her underwear.

I must have been doing this wrong. My pussy was sore from the insanely good sex. No, it was from the hard pounding with his huge dick. He was big and definitely knew how to use it. I wasn’t complaining.Not at all.

I cleared my throat, realizing I was spacing out and thinking about sex in front of Marina, Willow, and Colton. “So, did Johnny really fall off a horse?” I stuck to a neutral, easy topic. The less I asked about Marina’s work, the less she might ask me about mine. Meaning the job I didn’t actually have.

“He did, actually.” Colton chuckled. The guy was huge, at least six-three or four. He was solid muscle, barely concealed beneath his jeans and t-shirt. His hair was close-cropped and dark, and he needed a shave. “When he joined our–er, came to work for us here at the ranch–he was eighteen. He’d come from a farm in Nebraska and didn’t have much ranch experience. But he was young and strong and followed orders well, so he faked it like a champ. Until he couldn’t. We didn’t realize how green he really was.”

“He’d never ridden a horse before,” Marina supplied in that adorable way couples have of filling in each other’s stories.

He smiled down at her. “Right. Rob told him to saddle Chester to ride, and he did as he was told. The guy was too boneheaded to speak up and say he didn’t know how to put on a damn saddle.”

“Uh oh.” I squeezed my lips together trying not to smile.

“Right. You know where this is going.” Colton grinned.

I nodded. “Yeah, I think I do.”

“So, Johnny makes it look easy,” Colton continued. Marina returned to her cake work but was listening in. Willow quietly sipped her coffee. “He’s watching the rest of us and mimicking our actions. He climbs on without a hitch. He’s young and agile, so he looks like a natural–one foot on the fence rail, the other swung over Chester’s back. All good, right?”

I could tell they’d told this story before. Like it was a favorite of theirs. It showed the camaraderie they had–like Johnny wasn’t just a ranch hand here, he was a member of the family.

God, it was so different from my Hollywood job. Working sunup to sundown, project after project. A thankless, underappreciated grind. It made me ache to have something like this. Camaraderie, kindness, fun, openness.

No job was satisfying if you hated the people you worked with. I’d heard a statistic on the radio recently that saddened me. Fifty percent of workers didn’t have a friend at work. How was that even possible? We, as humans, were meant to live and work communally. To have villages or tribes. To bond together and support each other.

That was what I’d imagined working on a movie would be–a group of people joined together toward the common goal.

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