Page 42 of Run for the Money

“Huh? No. Get in bed with me.” I pause, thinking better of the demand. “Please.”

She chews her lip. “It’s not too…intimate?”

I raise an eyebrow at her. “Baby, don’t get shy on me now. If holding you while we sleep were too intimate, I wouldn’t have put my dick inside you.”

Her cheeks go bright red, but when I fold back the comforter she crawls in next to me, where she belongs. She nestles against my side, I kiss her forehead, and the mountain of exhaustion we’ve been fleeing catches up to us and pulls us under.

Melanie’s in bed when I come back from feeding GT the next morning. She’s not asleep, though she’s doing a pretty decent job of pretending. Why she feels the need to pretend isn’t clear. I kick off my boots quietly, playing along with her. Since she’s still naked under the sheets, I slip out of my clothes before rejoining her—even playing field and whatnot. Then, acting like I haven’t noticed the difference between her slack-mouthed, drooling sleep face and the soft, relaxed expression she’s holding in place just so, I pull her into my arms and kiss her temple.

“It’s morning,” I say. “We’ve got to getmoving, baby.”

I wish we could take the morning slowly. After the way I royally fucked up our first kiss—and the next one—I’m determined to do better today. In an ideal world, I’d bring her breakfast in bed, we’d talk about last night, and then I’d fuck her again, however she wants me to. Repeat as needed, until she falls in love with me. Forever and ever, until death do us part. Et cetera.

I may be a bit obsessed with her.

In the real world, we’re going to have to discuss the exact nature of our relationship over take-out coffee in the cab of my truck while we drive back home through the mountains. The only advantage is that I’ll have her undivided attention for nine hours, so if the conversation goes my way and she wants to be mine, it’ll be a pleasant drive. If last night was nothing but a pressure release for her, it’s going to be hell. My money’s on the former; I saw the look in her eyes when she said she needs me. There was more to that look than physical desire.

Melanie hums happily, then stretches her legs under the covers. Her skin glides along mine and if we’re not out of this bed in five minutes, we might never leave it. I’m already half-hard; it would take very little to persuade me to kiss Melanie the rest of the way awake to see what she begs for this time.

“GT’s all set in the stables. Once we’re packed, we can check out, get him in the trailer, and head home. You get enough sleep?” I ask.

She hums again, clearly awake, but she’s not answering my question or opening her eyes. A sliver of unease pricks at me, just under the skin.

“Melanie, is there a reason you’re pretending you can’t hear me?”

There’s a pause, then she whispers, “Yeah.”

“Care to share with the class?”

She sighs so hard that the end of the noise is more growl than exhale. “Don’t want to find out last night was a one-time deal. If I never get up, it’s never morning, and so it’s last night forever, and you can’t run away.”

That’s a fair reaction, given my track record. But it also puts a smile on my face so damn big I can actually feel the muscles in my face stretching, unused to the movement. I skate my fingertips up her spine until I can palm the back of her neck and tilt her face up to mine. She still won’t open her eyes, which is as adorable as it is frustrating.

“Do you remember what I told you last night before I gave in to your demands?” I ask.

Her eyes pop open, indignation all over her face. “Demands? I—” She stops, registering my cheerful expression, then blushes. “You’ll have to be more specific. You said, um, kind of a lot.”

Fair again. I hadn’t planned to rant and rave at her, but the second she stepped out in that tissue-thin robe, I was in trouble. It was only a matter of time before everything I’d held back over the past few days burst out. One of those myriad statements, however, is more important than the rest.

“I told you if we went down this road, I couldn’t go back,” I tell her. “I meant it. I don’t…I’m not good at people. It’s not easy for me to make connections, or…Look, the point is, I’m not running anymore. I have feelings for you. I want more than sex, and a hell of a lot more than one night, and if there wasn’t a high-maintenance animal waiting outside for us to take him home, I’d already be showing you exactly what I mean.”

Feelingsis a serious understatement. I blew right past feelings and intocomplete gonerdays ago. I knew the second she got in my truck Thursday morning, red-eyed and sullen, that I loved her. One look at her misery, and I didn’t give a fuck about horses or show jumping or sticking it to my dad. All I cared about was undoing the hurt. The only reason I didn’t demand we stay in Colorado and talk things out is becauseshecares about show jumping. I’m not going to take it from her like her parents tried to, or stand in the way of her goals.

That’s where I worry things get complicated. She thinks she didn’t place yesterday because I stopped kissing her; I’m scared it’s because I kissed her in the first place. I’m even more terrified that if she doesn’t place again this season, she’ll blame me, and I’ll lose her before we’ve even had a chance to begin. It’s a lot of pressure on a situation that’s already high stakes. But now that I’ve given into my desire—now that I’ve dragged her down with me—we can’t undo this. We’re in it, so we have to navigate it.

“You don’t have to…that is, I’m not expecting…,” I fumble. “Is this just physical for you, or…?”

Jesus, I need her to say something.

Pink blooms over her cheeks. The only thing I want more than to kiss that blush is to hear her tell me she has feelings for me, too. I don’t expect her to love me; not when she’s still nursing her heartbreak from a certain irritatingly helpful lawyer. But I think I can be patient enough to have pieces of her heart until it’s whole enough for her to fall in love again. If I’m not the man she falls in love with—no problem. I’ll just set fire to the ranch,change my name, and move to another continent to live out the rest of my days in furious solitude.

“I have feelings, too,” she says. “For you, that is. I have feelings for you, not just feelings in general. Not just physical ones, but emotional. I guess all feelings are kind of emotional if you think—”

I kiss her, to put us both out of this sweet misery. Her lips curve against mine in an obvious smile. She’s straddling my hips a moment later, and then I stop worrying about the future for a while, because my present deserves my full attention.

The drive home is better than I imagined. The hours zip by while we sing along—badly—to a playlist Melanie’s titled, “Post-Competition Songs (Bummer Version),” that consists almost entirely of eighties power ballads. We don’t talk about our relationship or the exact nature of the feelings we’ve admitted. But every once in a while, I glance over to find her gazing at me with something close to wonder, and I can’t believe how fucking lucky I am. It feels too good to be true that everything’s working out so well for me. Nothing in my life has ever been this straightforward before. It’s a marvel—but part of me is waiting for the complicated part to show up.

As we get closer to home, Melanie starts to flag. I’m sure she’s tired, ’cause I sure as hell am. We packed a lot into the past forty-eight hours. Forty miles from Denver, she gets fidgety. I’m about to ask if we need to pull over so she can take a whiz when she finally speaks up.

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