Dylan (Bachelors of the Ridge #1) (14 page)

Don’t act like a virgin, don’t act like a virgin
, I chanted in my head when I felt him hard underneath me. Like,
hard
. So I took a deep breath, and met his eyes while I traced over his shoulder muscles, down his biceps and then back up. When my hand smoothed over his heart, the thrashing underneath my palm took me by surprise.

Dylan smoothed his hands up my back, underneath the thin layer of my shirt.

“You know,” I said, watching my hands trace along his tanned skin, “I think that this may have been the greatest idea I’ve ever had.”

He drew me in, giving me slow, sweet kisses. It felt like he was figuring out what I tasted like, and he couldn’t make up his mind.

“I agree,” he replied, his voice dark and low.

“Are we gonna do it now?”

“Not right now, Sprite. Let’s work our way up to it.”

Naturally, I pouted. Then he laughed, pulling me into his chest, where I happily snuggled in for the next few hours.

W
hen my phone rang
, I didn’t even look at the screen. I’d only been asleep for about three hours by that point, given that Kat had stayed over until almost five a.m. watching
The Office
, occasionally kissing, but mostly driving me insane with the heated looks that she’d skim over my body.

“Hullo?”

“Are you sick?” My sister, Casey, bellowed into my ear and I pulled the phone away, digging my face into my pillow.

“No, but I think I’m deaf now.”

“Big baby. Whatcha doin’?”

“Well, I
was
sleeping.”

She laughed, and I heard shuffling in the background. “Still? Oh, you probably worked late, huh?”

Work until 12:30 a.m., go to bed at 5:02 a.m.—probably not a time breakdown that she needed to know. I clicked the button and put speakerphone on, tossing it on the pillow next to my head.

“Uh-huh. What’s up?” I rolled to my back, covering my face with one hand and petting Leonidas’s head with the other while he stretched along my side.

“Welllllll, I was thinking that maybe you need to actually use your guest room for something.”

“I use it now. It does very well holding all the boxes I don’t feel like unpacking.”

“Oh! I can help with that. I think I’m nesting a few months early.”

That made me smile. Casey was the most anal retentive person I’d ever met, everything color-coded, alphabetized and labeled. She’d been nesting her entire life. “You think I want you to come visit me?”

“Oh, I expected you to say no to me. But you can’t say no to me
and
Mom.”

The groan that I let out made Leonidas pop his head up, then he rested it on my stomach, watching me with oddly perceptive dark brown eyes. When I pinched the corner of one of his floppy ears with my thumb and forefinger, he turned his head to give me a playful nip.

“I’ve barely been gone for two months. I mean, I expected that me moving would upend your world, but this is excessive even for you.”

Even as I said it, I wasn’t sure she’d be able to tell that it actually warmed me immensely that they wanted to visit already. They were all so busy, everyone’s lives so full of things; I didn’t think anyone would venture west for at least six months, maybe even waiting for me to come home for a holiday first.

“Please? Come on.”

“I’m rolling my eyes right now,” I said, my hand still covering them and blocking out the eastern sun that filtered through my window. “You’re begging me when you full well know that I’m not going to tell you no.”

She squealed, and the pitch of her voice made Leonidas tilt his head to the side.

“Oh yay! Jake doesn’t want me flying anywhere or going more than one hour away from my hospital at all during my third trimester, so I need to go now.”

“Yeah, I’m surprised Army Man is letting you out of his sight now that you’re carrying his undoubtedly strong offspring.”

“Oh, he’s going to be gone for two weeks for some training thing now that he’s been promoted to Captain. Mom and I are looking to go during one of those weekends.”

I scratched the side of my chest. “When is that?”

“He leaves in a month, so hopefully tickets aren’t crazy expensive.”

“Who’s going to watch Remy?” Jake’s German Shepherd was one of the most badass dogs I’d ever met, and I looked down at Leonidas where he was gnawing on the corner of my white bedsheet and shook my head.

“Dad said he would.”

“Dad’s not going to come?” I asked the question easily enough, but I couldn’t help but feel a tiny stab of disappointment that he might not want to come. All three of my brothers lived near my parents, so he’d never had to travel to see them, but the cynical part of me said that if it was any one of them, he’d have come. Which wasn’t fair, I knew it, but I’d just always felt the tiniest bit of separation between me and my parents, compared to the twins and Tate.

“If we can find a good price on tickets, he might. I didn’t really ask beyond that. Maybe he thinks it’ll be more fun for Mom and I to travel together. Girls’ trip.”

“Oh sure,” I said dryly. “Just my favorite way to spend the weekend.”

“Zip it. Speaking of women…”

I grabbed for the phone. “Okay, I’m hanging up now. Bye.”

Casey laughed and I felt a pang, realizing how much I missed her. She was living such a big part of her life right now, and I wasn’t there. I’d always been there for her, and it was glaringly obvious that she didn’t need me.

“Stop. I’m kidding. Only I’m not, if there’s anything you want to tell me.”

Maybe it was bad, but it hadn’t crossed my mind to tell her about Kat. Not because Kat wasn’t important to me—she was. She’d quickly become my favorite person to be around since moving to Colorado. And since the majority of the time I’d spent with her so far had just been as friends, I felt like I still wanted to guard whatever we’d become now. Not keep it a secret, so much, but protect it.

If Casey sunk her claws into my friendship with Kat, especially now that she was coming to visit, I knew Kat well enough by now to know that she’d run—hard and fast. And she’d never look back.

“No women to speak of, at least not what you’re asking for. I’ve made some friends, thanks to Garrett and work, but that’s it.”

“Hmmph. Boring.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“Yeah well, that’s nothing new.” Casey said something, obviously cupping the speaker of the phone. “Okay, I gotta go. I’ll email you if Mom and I book some tickets.”

“So I can go back to sleep now?”

“Yes,” she sighed. “Bye, big brother.”

“Uh huh.” I clicked on the screen to hang up the call and rolled over into my pillow.

I’d just started falling back asleep when the alarm went off on my phone. I grabbed it, feeling groggy all over again and cursed when I saw the reminder for a therapy appointment for Leonidas in an hour.

Kat had wanted to try hydrotherapy for him, use it to help strengthen some of his back muscles when walking normally. We’d scheduled it over a week ago, when I wasn’t allowed to touch or kiss her, so I knew this would be an interesting appointment.

Forty-five minutes later, Leonidas was poking his head out of the open passenger window, his fur flying around his face and his tongue lolling out of his head. I took a sip from the travel coffee cup from the console, wincing when I burned my tongue on the bitter liquid.

I hooked Leonidas’s leash onto his collar, forcing myself to not pick him up, to let him do his awkward little gallop across the empty parking lot. What the hell had I been thinking scheduling an appointment at ten o’clock in the morning?

But walking into the clinic helped, because the sight of Kat wearing men’s board shorts and a skin-tight, bright blue tank top over them was enough to perk me up.

“Nice outfit. I think I have the same swim trunks.”

She rolled her eyes, mixing some creamer into her cup of coffee. “We wear them when we’re doing therapy in the tank. It’s not like I could wear my bikini bottoms.”

I leaned in, taking great satisfaction from the shudder that went through her when I tucked a messy piece of hair behind her ear.

“What color bikini bottoms?”

Kat smacked me in the stomach and walked through the gate into the main area. I waved at Glinda, and actively ignored the way she narrowed her eyes at me and Kat.

Leonidas and I followed Kat through a glass door that housed a small length of track, almost like a treadmill with clear walls and an entrance at the back part. With efficient movements that spoke of experience, Kat grabbed something that looked like a doggy life vest, strapping it around Leonidas’s belly and tightening the straps. He sniffed at it furiously, trying to turn in circles to investigate it.

“Should I help?” I asked, feeling a little helpless while she fluttered around the room. She hadn’t really met my eyes since I arrived. I couldn’t help but wonder if having me here, in her work place now that we’d become something else, disconcerted her the way it had me.

“Nope,” she pointed to the corner of the room. “You can take a seat there and just watch.”

With a whistle and some snaps of her fingers, she encouraged Leonidas to walk through a hinged door and up onto the treadmill. After he’d sniffed around, she hopped in with him, and latched the door behind her. While she held onto his leash with one hand, she leaned forward to the panel at the front of the apparatus and clicked some buttons.

The treadmill started at a slow pace, and Leonidas stumbled only once before he figured it out. Then water slowly started filling the tank. It tripped him up at first, his nose sniffing at the water around his paws as it raised in height. Soon he was up to his chest, the buoyancy from the water allowing him to walk pretty normally, since it supported the under-side of his belly, and the life-jacket thingy held him up in the water.

Kat grinned at him from where she had her feet perched on either side of the treadmill in the water. It lapped at her knees, and Leonidas’s tail started whipping back and forth in the water the more she increased the speed of the treadmill.

“Walking like this,” she explained, drawing her hand down in a line parallel to his back, “he’s using his muscles differently that he usually does. Because his chest, shoulders and hips don’t usually line up this way, line up straight.”

“Makes sense,” I said with no small sense of awe. “This is really amazing, Kat. Thank you.”

For the first time all morning, she met my eyes. Her gaze was so direct, but I could see more than a tinge of vulnerability. “Don’t thank me.” She shrugged. “I didn’t come up with this thing.”

“No, but you’re really great at your job. And that helps me. It’s not like I know what I’m doing.”

She shrugged again, obviously uncomfortable with my praise. But maybe she hadn’t had much of that. Ever. A teacher or two at school, Bill at the bar. But I knew well enough now that she didn’t really have friends, and definitely didn’t have family.

And it shamed me a little, knowing that I’d had an opportunity to talk about her to Casey, to tell my sister about this smart, funny and kind woman that I’d befriended. And whatever else she might be at the moment.

“You know,” I said slowly, watching her face carefully, “I talked to my sister this morning. And I think she and my mom are going to be coming out for a visit in a month or so.”

“Oh.” She looked around the room before coming back to me. “That’s nice.”

She hit a few buttons and the water started receding. I waited until she’d finished unhooking Leonidas and grabbed a few towels. She still hadn’t looked at me, but I took one of the towels from her and started wiping down Leonidas, who was panting happily.

“So would you want to meet them?”

Kat froze, then started wiping off her legs with fast, mechanical movements. “I don’t have to. I wouldn’t want to intrude on family time.”

Then she left the room. It wasn’t fair to feel frustrated, because I knew there’d been a chance that she’d freak out. But I didn’t expect her to completely shut me down. Once Leonidas was fairly dry, I hooked up his leash and walked to our usual exam room. I stopped briefly when a black and gray cat wheeled by. Really, his back legs, or where his back legs should be, were resting on a small car, and he used his front legs to propel himself forward.

I looked down and Leonidas was watching it too, with a tilted head.

“Okay, boy, let’s go see if we can’t fix whatever we just screwed up.”

His face lifted when I spoke to him, and I could almost see in his eyes,
We? Buddy, this is all you.

Kat was in the exam room, studying a clipboard like her life depended on it. For a second, she glanced up at me, but then shifted her face back down to the papers in her hands. “Oh, he’s done. You can go check out with Glinda to schedule his next appointment. Just tell her to add in an extra thirty minutes on his normal time so we can do hydrotherapy at the same time as his checkup.”

“Kat,” I started, but she held up a hand. It went against my nature, but I closed my mouth and waited.

“I know I don’t have normal reactions to things. I know that. But I don’t really know how to do the family thing. I mean, you saw me when I met Anna. She’s perfectly nice, and when confronted with a beautiful woman who knows how to coordinate her outfits, I become this mute bitch person. I don’t … I don’t want to do that with your family.”

More than anything, I wanted to wrap her up in my arms and just … hold her close. But how did you explain to someone who’d never experienced it that your family would instantly accept and probably love her? You didn’t. She’d never believe me, she’d just have to meet them and figure it out for herself.

The only thing that might make her feel better was if I was honest. But I still thought for a second before I answered. “I think you probably know how to do the family thing better than you realize. I mean, what do you think you’ve been doing with me and the guys the last couple months?”

Kat didn’t say anything, but she let out a deep breath and then turned to me. “That’s not the same and you know it.”

I smiled. “I know. But it was a nice try, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. But I can’t help that my first reaction to meeting your family is abject terror, Dylan. Like, I’m having a hard time standing here right now because that’s what you want of me.”

“I’ve felt terror about Casey, too. Don’t worry. She threatened to kill me with a curling iron once.”

It had the desired effect, because Kat’s mouth relaxed into a tiny smile. “Can we just wait? See how I feel when they’re here?”

“Of course,” I replied quickly, feeling a wave of relief that she wasn’t shutting me down completely. But her face was still so pale and her pulse was pounding under the translucent skin of her neck. She just may have been serious when she used the word terror.

I eased my hand across her shoulder blades and started pulling her into my chest, but she braced a hand over my heart. “No. Not here.”

Even though I nodded and gave her an easy smile when I pulled my arm back, the prick of disappointment that I felt at the wall she’d shoved between us couldn’t be helped.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, keeping her eyes trained onto the floor. “I just … not here, please? It’s not that I don’t want to, or—”