Impulsion (Station 32 #1)(83)
“Listen…I’m not going to lie to you, your mother burned me with every word she said to you, every word Ava overheard her yelling at you that last night before she took you away. I was raised to give and not take. If things like this come up, it might be hard for me, but I’ll get over it.” When she looked down, he lifted her chin with his fingertips. “I swear I will. I’m not a materialistic person, I can’t change that. I don’t want to.”
“I’m my father’s daughter, not hers. He raised me the same, to give and not take. You and me, we have to do both. I don’t have a dime to my name, Wyatt. My horses and that rig…that’s me. And I want to share that with you and anything else that’s mine. We can give it all away together if you want, but that’s how I’m going to see it. Money is nothing to me, not because of my family, but because I know money can’t buy the only thing that makes anything worth having in this world. It can’t buy the reason I wake up every day with a smile on my face.” She raised her chin slightly. “You can drive it or not. That truck is coming here because it’s mine, and this is where I’m staying. You want to fight about that, Doran, fine, give it to me. But I will win that fight. I swear that to you. You’re mine, Wyatt. I’m not living my life without you. I already know it’s impossible.”
He let his eyes rapidly move across hers. Harley had always known what she wanted, he knew that, but she never really knew how to demand it. This right here, that fire in her eyes, it was stirring him, making his heart thunder. He knew without a doubt she was every bit as powerful as her father had told him she was when he was just a fifteen-year-old boy. And she was his.
His pride tried to hide behind the anger, but he knew she meant every word she’d said. If anything, that gift was merging their lives.
He leaned in and let his lips glide across hers, nibbled the flesh of her bottom lip with his, then pulled away. “Silver.”
She furrowed her brow.
“Change the color to silver on our truck. It’ll match the trailers we pull to shows.”
A beaming smile crossed her lips as she dove forward, leaning him back on the blanket. “We get to make up now, right?” she whispered against his jaw as her lips moved to his neck before she leaned up and gazed down at him.
His hands drifted under her shirt. She grabbed the end of it and pulled it over her head, laughing when she felt his fingertips trace the sunrays across her near bare chest. Only a thin trace of lace was shielding her.
“My only goal every day is just to let you be,” he said as his hand unclasped her bra without the slightest fumble. “And each day that I do, you grow stronger, even more vibrant. I want to give you the world, Harley.”
“You have.”
Harley leaned forward and met his lips as he rose. The kiss was soft and sweet but grew in strength as that random, stupid fight drifted away and the deep-rooted, claiming passion they had together took flight.
With the setting sun as the backdrop, kiss by kiss, touch by touch, the clothes that bound them left, the intense passion exploded.
The stars had risen just as Harley won the final battle of control, sat astride him, then brought them together as one. Their eyes, that deep stare full of emotion, only broke for a moment, only when an erotic rush of energy forced them to.
Chapter Eighteen
Harley was in the shower when she heard her phone ring. She hadn’t managed to talk to Wyatt all day, so she ran to her phone thinking it was him, drenched enough to leave a pool of water with every step, only to figure out it was her mother calling.
That sick, plummeting feeling hit Harley like a Mack truck. She refused to answer, walked away from the phone, even got back in the shower and finished the task she had abandoned. She was cleaning up her mess from the water, gathering a load of laundry when it rang again.
Seeing that it was Collin didn’t really ease her nerves. She had tried to call her father earlier, but Donald had told her that he was having an off day and decided to retire earlier. He seemed to be having a lot of those lately. Right when Harley would grasp the idea of the inevitable, she would call and find him on the golf course with Conrad, laughing as if it were ten years before, when he seemed too powerful to ever die.
Right now, she didn’t know what to expect when she answered. If it was more of the same, making plans for the plays in the game of life she and Collin had no choice but to play in, or if it was bad news, news she didn’t want to hear alone.
“Hey,” she said in a weak voice.
“You all right?” Collin asked in a stunned tone.
Harley took a breath. “Mother called just before. I thought maybe something had happened.”
Collin was silent for a second; he had to stop himself from telling her not to worry about that because he knew one day that call would come. “She called me, looking for you.”
“Where does she think I am?”
Harley had answered every recent email her mother had sent, but there was no emotion or anything personal in them, just what size are you, what jewelry do you have, little nonsense things that made Harley feel like she was nothing more than an item on a menu that her mother was checking to make sure was represented correctly.
“I assume she thinks you are at your father’s house. I never told them any different about your detour, and I don’t think our fathers have either.”