Untouched (5 page)

“What’s good?” Cade was standing in the kitchen doorway, a bottle of beer in his hand.

“My job,” she said, her face heating. Because she felt like a jerk. Because what had seemed okay a moment ago didn’t seem so easily justified with her brother standing there. “It’s going well. Everything is legit. Cole was sure I’d done something really stupid.”

“I never said that.”

“You pretty much did. Because let’s be honest, Cole—you think I can’t make my own decisions.”

“I never said that either.”

“But you think it.”

He let out a heavy breath. “Lark, I’m sorry, but you’re my baby sister—”

“Who is twenty-damn-two, thank you very much.”

“And you live at home.”

She winced. “And you want that to change?”

“Hell. No. I’m just saying, you’re still under my protection, Lark, and I take that very seriously.”

“Cole.” Cade shook his head. “She’s not a kid. You have to ease up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Cole pushed his hat back on his head and scowled. “If you want to act like I’m a tyrant, then give me a chance to act like a tyrant. Fine, I don’t think you know a damn thing about the real world. I said it. So I worry about you now that you think you’re just going to go out into it.”

“I’m down the street,” Lark said. She was angry, angrier probably because she’d effed up and gotten tricked by Quinn. Because in some ways, Cole had been right, and she should have asked for his help, but because she hadn’t she was in an impossible situation. “And anyway, I deal with people online all the time for the business. I know how to conduct myself.”

“Virtually,” Cole said.

“Knock it off, asshole,” Cade said, coming to stand beside Lark. She almost laughed. Because Cade had given her a hard time about the same thing not that long ago, but obviously he wouldn’t let Cole do it too. And because she didn’t deserve to have Cade defending her.

“It’s fine.” She looked at Cole. “It’s fine. Cade, Rockstar me.”

Cade rolled his eyes and went back into the kitchen, returning a moment later with her favorite energy drink in hand. She lifted it and smiled. “Thanks. Now I’m going upstairs to recede into my virtual world like the little socially challenged creature I am. Feel free to hang out down here and talk about how incapable I am. I’ll be resting up. For that job thing I have that I got on my own and that rocks. Oh, and did I mention that I’m making really good money? Because I am.”

She turned and started to head up the stairs.

“Lark.”

She turned and looked down at Cole. “What?”

“Sorry. I’m overprotective. I can’t turn it off that easily.”

She flicked the tab on the soda can. “Right. I know. Thanks.”

“Seriously, don’t be mad at me, please. Or I will send in the baby to give you kisses.”

“Ohhhh . . . fine,” she said. “But I’ll take kisses from my niece any time.”

“I knew I would get you.” He smiled, a little sheepishly, and some of her annoyance disappeared.

“Yeah, yeah. Fine. I’m going now.” She continued up the stairs and into her room, closing the door behind her and pressing her computer’s on button while sinking into her chair.

She knew Cole meant well, but honestly. She wasn’t a kid. She put her feet up on her desk and grimaced. Okay, maybe she still acted a little like a kid sometimes. She slowly lowered her feet back to the floor.

But then, there were a lot of people in her particular field who were like her. She was a computer geek, but she also made her money with computers, so it was acceptable. She clicked the icon for her favorite game and started loading up a campaign that was already in progress. Before she was able to transition from the waiting room to the map, there was a knock on her door. “Come in.”

The door opened and Cade was there, leaning against the frame. “Hey.”

“Hi.” She looked down. She didn’t really want to talk to Cade right now. It would only stab her conscience. But he was being nice, and she didn’t want to be a jerk during the rare moment when he wasn’t.

“Sorry about Cole. You know how he gets.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“And while I tend to express it more by busting your chops, I understand how he feels.”

“You?”

“You’re our baby sister. I know it was scary as hell for you to lose mom like we did. And I know it was scarier to lose dad too. To have no one. You were so young, and . . . and I can’t imagine what it felt like being left with just . . . us. But from our point of view? We were all you had and we were just a couple of dumbass guys. Me, a skanky rodeo cowboy, and Cole, with the dysfunctional marriage and do-gooder complex. We weren’t fit for you, Lark. And we knew it. And you have no idea how terrifying that is. So we tried to compensate.”

“You were hardly ever here.”

“I was making good money, and you know it wasn’t just for me.”

She nodded mutely.

“And Cole . . . Cole stayed married to that witch way longer than he should have because he was trying to do the right thing. Because he was trying to be enough.”

“He should have asked me. Because I would have told him to ditch the bitch.”

Cade laughed. “Yeah. Thank God he finally did.”

“And thank God for Kelsey, who generally keeps Cole’s focus off of me.”

“The point is, I know Cole is a pain, but I know how he feels too. You were our responsibility starting at a young age, and sort of like obnoxious parents, it’s hard for us to let go.”

Lark bit her lip, guilt rolling through her. “Yeah, I know . . . I do know that it’s hard. You guys are all I have too. I know how suddenly you can lose family. I know how quickly life can get upended. Something happens and everything changes. That’s one reason I’ve been happy staying here. One reason I haven’t wanted to leave. Because I know family is precious, and you guys are all the family I have.” Her throat tightened.

She felt like a worm. A gross, slimy, sibling-betraying worm.

Except what choice did she have? If she didn’t follow through, she had no doubt that Quinn would show up here, smug and jackassy and demanding payment for the broken deal. She would look like an idiot, and he would get money from her family.

At least this way he wasn’t taking money from the Mitchells, and he wasn’t giving money to them either. He would have to pay a Mitchell for doing damn fine work. That was something, anyway.

“And we love you and stuff, which is where the attitude comes from sometimes.”

“Thanks, Cade.”

He put his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, well. Don’t tell anyone about this little moment of sincerity. It’ll damage my rep.”

“I won’t let anyone know you were decent for five minutes, don’t worry.”

He winked. “Thanks.” Then he straightened and closed her door. She shut her eyes and listened to his footsteps, uneven and heavy thanks to his limp, as he went down the hall.

Yes, she was a worm. But a worm in a binding contract, so there was really nothing she could do about it.

Nothing but finish the job. And she would do it really, really well so he would have nothing to complain about. When she thought about it, he’d probably expected her to pitch a hissy fit when she found out who he was. Which she had. And he’d probably really like her to quit so he could do his broody, nasty bad-guy thing and come collect money from Cade.

Or at the very least, he’d probably love to find her in breach of contract due to her behavior.

Too bad. He wasn’t going to get the chance. Nope.

She might have made a mistake signing the contract, but he’d made a mistake thinking that she would be the easy way to get to Cade. There was a vague woman-in-the-refrigerator air about it all. Too bad for him, she wasn’t a passive, two-dimensional comic book woman. She was a real woman, and she was going to hold her ground.

She turned back to her computer and clicked into the map, adjusting the scope of her virtual gun and training the site onto a passing zombie.

Oh, yes. Quinn Parker had underestimated her. She squeezed the virtual trigger and leaned back in her chair.

She wasn’t weak. And she would prove it.

Chapter Four

When Lark showed up at work the next morning, she was dressed more casually than she’d been the day before. Dark blue jeans and a button-up top that looked like she’d bought it up at the general store.

Plaid with little silver-rimmed, pearl-centered snaps. Interesting. He couldn’t help but wonder how easy buttons like that would be to pop open.

Quinn redirected his thoughts and walked over to where Lark was standing, about to go into the computer room.

“Morning.”

“Good morning,” she said, her eyes dropping to just below his belt, her cheeks turning pink.

Remembering their exchange from last night, no doubt. She was a sharp woman, that was for sure, with an even sharper tongue. He kind of liked it. He was used to women who didn’t try to challenge him. Women who were a little tipsy and into feeling his muscles, and then some, back at the hotel. Women who got all breathless and wanted him to be rough and dirty and everything they imagined having a bad boy in their bed would be.

He had a feeling Lark would gut-punch him if he tried anything. And for some reason that made her buttons, and the thought of undoing them, more interesting.

There was something wrong with that. Something wrong with him. Well, that wasn’t new news. He’d known there was something wrong with him from day one. So had everyone in his family.

“Yeah, it is. Do you know what you’re doing today?”

“Getting everything online and building a porn fence those little bastards won’t be able to scale no matter how hot the boob-lust burns.”

“Good luck. Teenage boys are highly motivated by topless women. If ever one of them was going to become a hacker, that would be why.”

His eyes flickered down to those buttons again. It wasn’t only teenage boys who were motivated by breasts.

“It might lead to a job opportunity, because trust me, if they can bypass my security measures, then the future is bright in the computer industry for them.”

“You’re that good?”

“I’m going to build the Great Firewall. You’ll be able to see that sumbitch from space.”

“No alcohol. No naked women.” He paused. “We really are bringing them into hell for a reboot.”

“They need it, don’t they?” she asked.

Quinn nodded, trying to get his mind off of those buttons. “Yeah. They do. I wish I’d had a place like this. I might have got my head on straight a little sooner.”

“What was it that made you get your head on straight?”

“Jail sucks,” he said. “That and I wanted a career in the rodeo, which you can’t do from behind bars. You have to be around to ride. You have to be willing to bust your ass, and when you’re busy working hard, you’re too tired to get into trouble.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I’ve made some mistakes in my life, but trust me when I say most of them happened more than a decade ago.”

She bit her lip like she was trying to keep words from punching their way out of her mouth. Then she relaxed a little. “Well, great. Good for you. Good for you . . . I’m going to . . . build the Great Firewall.”

“Of course.”

She disappeared into the building and he shook his head, turning and heading back toward the house. He had some paperwork to deal with. Having Longhorn turned into a nonprofit meant there were a lot of
I
s to dot and
T
s to cross.

And if his brain was occupied with all of that, then he couldn’t obsess about Lark and her buttons. He had way more important things to obsess about. Paperwork, for starters.

And what Sam would be reporting from Elk Haven Stables.

***

Jill looked around the cabin she would be staying in with her husband for the next week. Courtesy of his dickhead boss. She let out a breath and walked to the far wall of the cabin, then back again. It was a very small space to be sharing with Sam, all things considered.

Like rooming with a stranger. And after twenty-three years, she had no damn idea how that had happened. But she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a conversation with him. Couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at her like he even saw her. It always seemed like he was looking right through her.

The front door opened and Sam walked in, his expression grim. “All checked in.”

“Great,” she said.

“Yep.”

She looked at him and wondered when he’d gotten old. He had new lines around his eyes and gray at his temples. And then she just wondered if she didn’t look at him anymore either.

“So, what are your plans for the day besides playing spy games?”

“Nothing. They have horses available. I might go out for a ride. Been a while since I did that.”

“You do that for your job.”

“Not up in the hills.”

“True. Fine.”

“Why, what are your plans?”

She shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t really have them. I might work.”

“Of course.”

She let out a long sigh. “Yeah, whatever the hell that means, Sam. We’re here doing crazy work for your boss, but I get attitude when I say I’m working?”

“You could ride with me.”

“I don’t want to,” she said. She regretted how shrewish that sounded almost the minute the words came out, but she couldn’t back down. She didn’t want to back down.

He sighed. “That’s fine, Jill. I’ll be back around later.”

He turned and walked back out of the cabin, and Jill let out a long breath. She’d screwed up, again. She felt like she only said the wrong thing with him now. Maybe it was just a testament to how difficult it was to talk to a stranger.

She sat down at her computer and logged in. Her throat dried when she saw she had an email from Jake. She clicked it open and skimmed it. It was mainly about work. About the sales threshold for the month and how everything was going so far.

And then she got to the last line.

I’m going to miss the sexiest woman in the office this week.

She squeezed her eyes shut and closed the email program. That was overt, even for Jake. He was a flirt, that was for sure. And she truly, truly had no intention of ever taking him up on any of his subtle offers.

But she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had called her sexy. She was a forty-three-year-old woman who’d been with one man. She’d given him her beautiful years and had given birth to two children, with the stretch marks to prove it.

So yeah, she was hardly beating admirers off with a stick. Including her husband, who seemed bored by her at most.

She opened up the email again.

Sexiest woman in the office.

Dammit. What was she doing? She closed it again and shut her laptop, pushing up off the desk. Forget work. She would just got for a walk. Try to forget her fight with Sam. And try to forget the email from Jake.

***

“Take a lunch break, Mitchell.”

“Busy,” Lark responded before turning around, and then when she did, the air got pulled straight from her lungs. Quinn. Not shirtless this time, but in a dirty, tight white t-shirt, the edge of his tattoo extending just past the edge of the sleeve.

He was wearing tan Carhartts, low on his hips, streaked with dirt, a tear in the upper thigh that was just . . . distracting. Could she see a hint of skin there, or was it just frayed pant material? She fought the urge to stare. But it was hard.

What was it about him that was so magnetic? Why couldn’t he be a troll?

Evil people should be required to signify said evil in their physical appearance, à la Disney cartoons. At the very least, their laughs should be some sort of sinister cackle.

But Quinn’s wasn’t. Even when he was being a jerk, his laugh was like a low roll of thunder that rumbled through her body and made her feel like a storm had just blown through.

It was lame. Somehow, when she was with Quinn her brain cells reduced by a third.

“You aren’t too busy to eat. I’m not going to let you skulk around grumbling and pretending that I’m a slave driver and unreasonable and trying to kill you. You might want me to be, but I’m not. Lunch. Now.”

She let out a breath. “Fine. No need to get all command-ish.”

“Apparently there is.”

“You aren’t the boss of me.”

A slow smile curved his lips. “Baby, I absolutely am the boss of you. You signed a contract, remember?”

“Then I ought to sue you for sexual harassment.
Baby.
Good Lord. Next you’ll be asking for a martini and your slippers.”

“Is that your way of calling me sexist?”

“No. You’re sexist. That was my way of calling you sexist.”

“Neatly done. Now come one, there’s a sandwich waiting for you. And I didn’t ask you to make it, so I think that’s a strike against your sexism accusations.” She made a face. “Everyone else is done already.”

Thank God. That might mean he would leave her in peace with her sandwich.

“I haven’t eaten though, so I’ll join you.”

Bastard.

“Neat.”

He laughed, again, that sort of pleasant laugh that was all deep and . . . sexy. Dammit all, it was sexy. “You’re so transparent. I like it.”

“What’s to like about transparency when someone clearly disdains you?”

“Because you don’t like me, but I do unsettle you.”

“In that way the villain in a movie unsettles me.”

“That’s not it.” He held the door to the dining room open for her. The long table was empty, except for two plates with sandwiches and potato chips, one set at the head of the table, the other just to the left.

“Yes,” she said, “yes, it is.”

He sat at the head of the table and she fought the urge not to move her plate down further to put some distance between them. That would be transparent. As was looking below his belt buckle and at the rip in his pants.

She didn’t mind if he knew that she didn’t like him, but she didn’t want him to know that she thought he was hot.

“Okay.” He put his elbows on the table and picked his sandwich up with both hands. “If you say so.” He took a bite of the sandwich, and she found herself watching his mouth.

“Were you raised in a barn?” she asked, picking her own sandwich up and keeping her posture straight and her elbows very much not on the table.

“Nope. In a fuckin’ mansion.”

“Lies,” she said.

“Truth.”

“What were you, the stable boy?”

“As much as my dad would have liked that? No.”

“Uh . . . I thought you were all . . . you know, you seem like . . .”

“Like I’m not from an affluent background.”

“Well, yeah. And you said you had a rough . . . time.”

“I did. But most of that was my own fault. You know, it’s pretty easy to think you’re invincible when your parents pay for everything. And I really enjoyed making their lives hell while they footed the bill. Then I left home when I was seventeen and found out that life is a lot harder than I realized.”

“You had a family and you just left?”

“Complicated,” he said.

“Are your parents still alive?”

“My mother.”

“Do you ever see her?”

He swallowed. “No. I haven’t talked to anyone at home . . . it’s been more than ten years. I didn’t go back for my father’s funeral.”

“That’s not complicated at all. That’s stupid.”

“What?”

“It’s stupid. Both my parents are dead. I couldn’t talk to them if I wanted to, and you have no idea how much I want to sometimes. But I can’t. I never can again. And you can. You could call your mother and talk to her, but you don’t. You could see your whole family anytime and you don’t. You missed your own father’s funeral.”

“My family aren’t worth visiting, how about that?”

“I’m sorry, did you not just tell me that you were a jackass who did everything you could to make their lives hell?”

“Repaying the favor. Don’t talk about what you don’t know about.”

“So, tell me about it.”

“Why?” he asked.

Why indeed. She shouldn’t care. She shouldn’t be letting this make her mad, but she was. It was her trigger, and Quinn wasn’t the first person to be on the end of one of her blazing “call your mother” rants.

Because she’d been a child when she’d lost her mother, and all through her life, especially when she’d hit puberty and had been stuck in a house with only men, and then only men and her brother’s psycho thank-God-now-ex-wife, she’d wanted her mother back so badly her whole body had ached.

And there were all sorts of people who resented their mothers. Resented their caring and their hovering.

She would trade anything to have that.

“Because,” she said. “We’re both here. We have to eat lunch. We already don’t like each other. Some people would promise not to judge. But I will. I’ll judge you basically no matter what because I already don’t like you. But at least I’m being up front about it.”

“Fair enough. Fine. I’m a bastard.”

“Yeah, we’ve met. Tell me something I don’t know.”

He shook his head. “Nope. You misunderstand me. I’m a bastard. The product of my mother’s illicit affair with, of all people, the gardener. At least it wasn’t the pool boy. We almost avoid clichés this way.”

“And you know that for sure?”

“Everyone does. But no one says it. Let me tell you about my family, since you want to know; and feel free to judge them too, since you’re in a judgmental mood.” He put his sandwich on the table and leaned back in his chair. “Blond. Fair. Extremely conscious of heritage and blood. Both of my parents—and I say parents in the loosest sense, as my father, the one I was raised with, is not my father—are descendent of America’s first families. I’m the youngest. My brothers and sisters are all blond-haired and blue-eyed, clearly from that fine lineage my father is so proud of.” He smiled. “I’m not. Or did you need that spelled out for you?”

She looked at Quinn, at his dark eyes and hair, skin that was a deep olive color. “Just because you don’t look like them . . .”

“It’s more than that. My father knew from the moment I was born that I wasn’t a Parker. To avoid scandal, he gave me his name and he never said a thing, but everyone knew, Lark. Everyone knows. My parents’ friends knew. My brothers and sisters knew. It was my brother that told me for sure. Because he knew about the affair. And when he told me that . . . well, there was no more doubting, not even a little bit of it. I’m not a part of my dad’s precious brood. Not one of the pureblood wonders who can trace their line to Plymouth Rock. I’m my mom’s midlife crisis. The one she had to look at every day until she just decided not to look too closely.”