LoversFeud (9 page)

“What’s goin’ on in your pretty head?”

“I was just thinking how much more there is to you than you ever showed me before. You’re passionate about your wind farm and what it can contribute toward energy independence, as well as how much money it will pour into the Caden family coffers. Why is it you let everybody believe your only ambition is to mark time partying until you inherit the Bar C?”

Bye rubbed a hand through his hair as though her question had put him on the spot. Then he bent and kissed her. “I don’t give a damn what most folks think of me, but I wanted you to know about my wind farm. I had the feeling you’d appreciate that I’m trying to do something to help harness alternative energy. Mom was proud of what I’m doing with the windmills, even though Byron Four thinks it’s a waste of good capital.”

“He’ll change his mind once you start making money from those windmills.”
Money-grubbing bastard
—that was what her pop called Bye’s father, that is when he was reasonably sober and being charitable in his opinion of the Caden patriarch.

“Yeah, probably. The old man worships the almighty dollar almost as much as he does his land and the Cadens’ position around here.” Pulling Karen so close she felt the strong thump-thump of his heart against her chest, Bye paused as though considering whether to say more. Then he loosened his hold on her and leaned back against the pillows on the narrow bunk.

“I want you to take over as my personal attorney.”

“Why? Aren’t you happy with Jack?” She shared office space above The Corral with Jack, and it would be awkward for her to take over one of his clients. “I don’t know…”

“You’re thinking Jack would mind. He won’t.” Bye paused and traced a pattern on her cheek with one finger. “What I’m about to tell you is privileged information.”

Privileged? “I’m not your lawyer yet, honey.”

“You’re my friend, aren’t you? In any case, I trust you to keep this to yourself. I found out earlier today that Jack Duval is my half brother.”

She listened, horrified, as Bye described the scene that had followed his mother’s burial. “My God. You can’t mean he’s Byron Four’s son.”

Suddenly the room seemed uncomfortably warm, though the fire on the stone hearth had almost burned out and the strong wind outside blew chilly air clean through the weathered wood walls. When Karen recalled that night at the Neon Lasso when she and Bye and Jack had played together, she wondered if Bye and Jack felt half as guilty about that as she was feeling now. She reminded herself she’d never had actual intercourse with Jack, but she couldn’t help remembering how she’d blown him while he’d directed Bye to pleasure her with his tongue and teeth. Or how he’d fucked her ass while Bye had fucked her cunt.

Had what they’d done been incestuous? She told herself it couldn’t have been incest since they hadn’t known. At least she and Bye hadn’t, and she assumed Jack wouldn’t have initiated their game if he’d been aware that his father and Bye’s were one and the same. Her cheeks felt as though they were on fire from embarrassment.

“Yeah. It was pretty obvious my old man wasn’t going to deny it. Apparently he has been keeping Jack’s mother in Lubbock as his mistress, since a few years before I was born. The woman decided to make sure Deidre and I found out we have another brother, right after Mom’s funeral.” When Bye mentioned his mother, tears came to his eyes.

“Oh, no. Bye, that’s awful.”

“Yeah. The bitch had some kind of balls, thinking she could just walk in and take over. My sanctimonious father set her straight, though. Apparently she’s okay as a mistress but not a candidate to become anything more. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Four as furious as he was at her.”

Karen shuddered. “Bye, I’m sorry. You and your sister shouldn’t have had to hear that, especially not right after you’d buried your mom. God, I feel awful for Deidre. She was halfway in love with Jack. At least it looked that way to me.” Fury, almost as vicious as what her pop so often expressed toward the Cadens, made Karen want to find Byron Caden IV and shake him until his pearly white teeth rattled in his head. Sitting up next to Bye, she wrapped her arms around his torso and laid her head on his muscular, lightly furred chest. “What can I do to help?”

“You’re helping, just being here. Listening. Reminding me I’ve got a friend…and a lover.” He tumbled her back onto the bunk and came down on top of her, and the heat of his big body warmed her. It made her want a repeat of the fast, wild sex they’d had earlier after coming back here from watching Bye’s field of silvery windmills turning in the wind, high above the lush, high plateau. The scene below, where some of the Bar C’s cattle had grazed around smoothly moving pumpjacks, had reminded her that in spite of Bye’s faith in windmills, oil and gas were still the real bread and butter for local ranchers.

“Speaking of lovers… Why are we sitting here talking?” Raking her nails down his broad back, she pressed her body closer when he took her mouth like a starving man.

It’s more than wanting, Karen, it’s wishing…
Shit, she’d take Bye however she could get him and do her best not to let her emotions get all tangled up. When he came up for air she lay down and held her arms out to him.

Instead of following her to the bed and losing himself again in her soft, welcoming body, Bye looked down at her, his mind in turmoil. This had been a hell of a day, and it wasn’t just saying goodbye to his mom and finding out his old man had been hiding a mistress and a bastard for thirty years or more. His whole world now tilted on its axis. “I thought I knew who I was, where I’m going. Now…”

“Come back here and fuck me again. Forget about everything for now except for how good it feels when you come inside me. If you want to talk business you can come see me in my office later on this week. For now, though, I want you to make me feel good, the way only you can.”

Did he mean more to her than just a good fuck? He didn’t know, any more than he knew whether his own fierce need for her was any more than lust fed by their previous play at the Neon Lasso and his long dry spell without sex while he’d stuck close by his dying mother. “I want to make you feel good,” he said as he bent and took her glistening, puckered nipple in his mouth. There’d be time aplenty later for thinking. Right now she wanted him to fuck her and he was glad to oblige.

He seemed almost desperate, the way he kneaded her breasts while suckling first one and then the other nipple. In the semi-darkness of twilight, she saw his taut expression, as though he was trying hard to reclaim the wildness that had been a tantalizing part of his mastery at the Neon Lasso.

This wasn’t a game, though. This was real, or at least it seemed so when he let go of her breasts and lowered his long, muscular body on top of her. It seemed real when he took her mouth and ravaged it, his breathing ragged as he ground his hard cock against her mound. He made her as wild for satisfaction as he.

When she raked her nails down his back he let out an anguished sound, almost like the ones calves made when they felt the red-hot branding iron hit their flanks. The low groan that followed when she gentled her touch made her want to hold him, comfort him. She spread her legs wide, gave him room, and when she did he flexed his hips and claimed her cunt. He was so hot, almost as though he were branding her with his possession.

“Do I own you?” he whispered against her lips, as though he knew exactly what she was thinking.

“Oh, yeah.” He owned her body and soul, at least for now. She’d never had a man fill her so full before. As she moved with him, she felt every thrust taking her, pushing her closer to the edge, dragging her along with him toward the satisfaction that was so close and yet so far.

“Come with me, baby.” Though softly spoken against her lips, it was nonetheless an order she was eager to obey. Letting the moment claim her, she sped along, breathing hard, striving to feel it all. The hard pounding of his heartbeat against her breasts, the urgency in every thrust… Every motion picked her up and carried her toward the ultimate goal of mindless ecstasy. Of belonging totally to him for whatever precious moments the fates would allow that sensation to last.

His grip on her shoulders hardened but it didn’t hurt. His cock swelled inside her, filled her to bursting. The hot, wet slapping of flesh on flesh took her higher until something burst inside her, a sensation that staggered her from head to toe. “Omigod.”

“Fuck yeah. Squeeze my cock like that, baby. Don’t stop.” His last word dragged out, as though his feelings at that moment were as incredible as hers.

When he rolled over and drew her with him and they lay together sweaty and spent, she sensed something had happened between them that meant more than two people getting off.

Not as much as two people finding an unbreakable bond, like the ones country singers sang about in their ballads. Not even as much as a couple of teenagers discovering first love. But what they’d just experienced was so much more than the physical connection that had first attracted them to each other.

Pity it could never develop into anything deeper. She felt his regret when he untangled their bodies as darkness enveloped them and began to pull on his jeans and shirt. She noticed he never took his gaze off her.

“I’ve got to get home while there’s plenty of moonlight. Don’t want to risk Vampire stepping in a hole and going down. Wish I’d have driven instead of riding over here, but then I’m sure you need to get home soon. Get on up, get dressed and give me a kiss. I need to make sure you get to your car okay.”

* * * * *

Caden, Texas. The Bar C. The supposed ills generations of Cadens had visited upon generations of Oakleys. Karen guessed she should be thinking about all that. Her pop would be chasing after Bye with murder on his mind if he ever caught wind of where she’d just been for the second time in two days. Right now, though, all she wanted to think about was Bye and the spell he cast over her common sense every time he touched her. She felt him in every pore of her body, the hard heat of him over, in and around her in the closed-in cocoon of that line shack where they’d made love.

No, it hadn’t been love. She mustn’t deceive herself about that. They’d had hot, down-and-dirty sex that could never grow into something more. She cursed the creaky stairs, praying her pop had passed out by now. If he was up, he’d see her and he’d know. Even dead drunk as he was most of the time, Slade Oakley had a sixth sense when it came to sniffing out his enemies, almost like a pack of bloodhounds on the hunt for an escaped convict.

She stripped and lay on the oak sleigh bed that had been hers since she’d outgrown her crib nearly a quarter-century ago, listening to the familiar metallic groans of the pumpjack that rocked up and down incessantly less than a hundred feet from her window. Slade put no limits on where on the Rocking O he’d let the companies drill, she thought, a little resentful that the money that had been pouring in from the well field discovered back toward the end of World War II had elevated the Oakleys no farther than from poor white trash to rich white trash in the eyes of snooty ranchers like the Cadens and the Wolfes.

Karen sighed. No use crying over what couldn’t be helped.
She
knew she wasn’t trash even if nobody else around here believed her. She thought Bye knew it too, even if he wasn’t willing to risk dancing with her at The Corral or sitting in the pew with her at Caden’s only church on the rare Sundays when both of them attended services. It was the damn feud that wouldn’t die and the visual help-along it got when folks drove by the Rocking O and saw nothing but a few poorly tended whiteface cattle, debris that represented decades’ worth of Oakley drinkers—and a hundred pumpjacks clattering like magpies, mocking passersby with their sounds of crass materialism and derelict moral standards.

She wouldn’t dwell on anything but how it had felt, having Bye hold her while they enjoyed the afterglow of that incredible sex. Of the taste of him on her tongue and the smell of sweat and sex surrounding them in the confines of the one-room cocoon that had sheltered them together. Of course she’d treasure the memory of him taking her up on his big, black stallion and holding her close while he’d shown her his field of windmills lazily turning in the breeze.

Bye Caden was making something of himself. Something to be proud of. He was more than the spoiled heir to the biggest ranch in this part of Texas who gave everybody the impression he was killing time by playing the part in town by day and playing at the Neon Lasso by night. How could a woman fail to be impressed by the size of his dream as well as his long, lean body and the impressive length and girth of his cock?

Her pussy clenched as though protesting the loss of that part of Bye. Karen opened her eyes and tried to concentrate on the rhythmic clanking of the pumpjack outside her window. She focused on the determination that had driven her ever since she’d gotten old enough to realize folks thought of her and her family members as trash.

I graduated from SMU just like Laura Bush. I got a law degree from UT. I passed the bar the first time around, and I’ve managed so far to keep a good enough eye on Slade to keep him out of jail since I’ve been home. I’m an okay person no matter what anybody thinks of me, and I’m going to clean up the Rocking O someday when…

Karen’s determination wavered. Who the fuck did she think she was, to somehow have the power to turn around bad impressions of the Oakleys that had been bubbling and fermenting in the minds of Caden County’s inhabitants for over a hundred years? It wasn’t likely going to happen just because one lone Oakley—a girl, yet, in a community that still was big on male dominance—had managed to heave herself out of the muck and mire of stupidity, meanness and pure dog-laziness that had been ingrained in generation after generation of her ancestors.

All she could do was be the best lawyer she knew how to be, and keep a keen eye out for Slade and Buck and all the shirttail relatives who’d certainly need her services if she left them to their own devices. She could use her legal skill to help Bye, but she’d better never think she had a chance to be any more than his lawyer and occasional fuck buddy. Shoving her pillow around her ears to drown out the noise of the well outside her window, she willed herself to go to sleep.