Page 23 of Destined Predator
Casey stepped nearer, so he could read the expressions flickering over the rancher’s face. “Is that what you want? Me to storm in and take you? It don’t work like that. Like I said before, you tell me what you want. What you need. Needfromme and me to doforyou.”
“But you’re dominant. An alpha.”
Casey gave a half-smile. “And you think that gives me power over you? Control over you? Rhett, I only have what you choose to give me.” He hoped he’d explained it well, that it was Rhett’s choice. At least he was mulling it over. Casey read as much in his face, in the way his eyes moved, the thick lashes casting shadows down his cheeks, and in how his lips parted, as if he were thinking about asking a question. “This is on your terms. You got any idea what you want?”
“One thing.” Rhett moved over a little. “You to come in here with me.”
“Well now. That’s a start.” Casey stripped with the ease and speed of practice, feeling as before Rhett’s gaze following his movements. “You like what you see.” He didn’t need to make it a question. He climbed up the short set of steps and over the edge of the tub then sank onto a seat, finding the water was hotter than he’d expected. He caught the shift Rhett gave, trying to hide his hard-on, and smirked. “That for me?”
“Casey…” Rhett’s pause suggested he was cycling through things he wanted to say. “Gotta confess I’m a little nervous.”
His laugh came rougher than he meant it to, more breath than sound. The steam blurred his face, but not the pulse at his throat. Casey wanted to taste that pulse, to steady it with his mouth.
“Why?”
“I’ve never done this before!” Rhett struck the surface of the water as though it should have been obvious. “A relationship with a guy,” he clarified, perhaps to cut off at the pass any quip Casey might make.
His words struck Casey.Relationship.Is that what this is?“Me neither.” Rhett’s scoff sounded loud in the night. “What?”
“Well, that’s as may be, but I bet you’re, like, the hook-up king of Fallon County.” Rhett drank a swallow of beer.
“That an actual title? Like, at the county fair? I get a crown or a sash?” Amused, Casey took the can from Rhett’s hand and drank from it.
“Okay, that was a stupid thing to say, but I’m guessing you hook up all over the place,” Rhett amended.
“Tell me aboutthisplace.” Casey used the can to indicate the land and passed the drink back to Rhett.
“Really?” Rhett narrowed his eyes for a second, but Casey’s expression seemed to convince him, and he started to describe the Double T, its head of cattle, pastures and recent growth. “That’s not what you mean?”
Casey shook his head, but he liked listening anyway. Rhett talked about fences and weather like other men talked about dreams, and it hit Casey that the land was the only thing Rhett ever let take care of him.
“Not like I’m the manager of the bank you want a loan from, no. More the history, maybe?” Casey was recalling the old photos in Bard’s of the town and its ranches in days gone by. Some of the pictures had been of the Tuckers and their land.
“Why, my ol’ great-gran’pappy started this homestead…”
Casey grinned. Rhett wasn’t the humorless stick-in-the-mud country-boy Casey had first thought him.Not by a country mile.
“It turned into a farmstead, growing crops, then a ranch, raising livestock,” Rhett continued. It was clear the ranch and his family meant everything to him, as he described the prizes their cattle had won, the land’s increased acreage, his rodeo-rider uncle…
“Then when Jack went to New York City, it was just me,” he said. Maybe the night, with its scents and soft sounds, or the sky, with its glow, or the softly bubbling water encouraged confession, because he went on, “I missed him. I’m so glad he’s back even if it was because he felt he had nowhere else to go when a relationship he was in…”
“I heard,” Casey told him when Rhett trailed off.
“Well, he was wrong—this is hishome. Always was, always will be.” Rhett fiddled with the settings on the side of the tub and turned to Casey. “What about you? Where were you before Britton?”
“Beacon. We were all born there, the place Mom and Dad lived after they got together.” He did a quick calculation of how long they’d been in town now.Over a year.“Britton’s a good a place as any and better than most. Ain’t that the town slogan?”
They hadn’t exactly thrown a dart at a map, but they’d picked somewhere they could live in a rural area rather than a big city and be near a town. That way they had space and some chance of a social life with non-family. “You know Ben’s mechanic shop, Akers Automotive, in town, where I help out sometimes. Robin’s training under him. Emil, too.”Even though neither of ’em particularly like it.“Lacey’s a waitress at the diner, and Anne’s a receptionist at the attorney’s near Sixth Street.”
Rhett must have turned up the water temperature. Casey debated helping himself to a drink from the cooler but was too settled to move.
“I don’t know much about shifters, and nothing about coywolves, shifters or not,” Rhett admitted.
“Coywolves are survivors.” Casey flexed the tatts on his biceps, the band on his right that showed a wolf’s eyes, and the triangle with a coyote outline on his left. “We adapt where wolves or coyotes can’t. And when the world tells us we don’t belong anywhere, we build our own damn place.” He didn’t mean to say it that raw, but Rhett’s eyes softened like he’d understood every unspoken word.
“You been with other shifters?”
Interesting question.Casey nodded. “I had a kind of shifters-with-benefits thing going with a wolf back in Bennett County.”
