Ginger's Heart (A Modern Fairytale, #3)(5)
“Choose, doll baby,” said Gran. “Someday you’ll have to choose.”
The same feeling that she’d had in the barn, when Cain yelled, “Jump to the one you love the most, darlin’!” flared up within her—a fierce refusal to love one cousin more than the other, to give up one in lieu of the other.
Choose? Her memories skated back through a dozen years on McHuid Farm that had always included Cain and Woodman. When they were little children, they played together, swimming buck naked in the creek and racing over the green hills and pastures in impromptu games of tag. As the boys grew up, they started working with Cain’s daddy, Klaus, who was her father’s right-hand man, mucking out the stables and grooming the horses. She’d run down to the barn every day after her lessons to see them, working right along beside them until they were all covered in hay, dust, and barn grime.
Though the Wolframs weren’t generally included in the McHuids’ active social life, the Woodmans were, which meant that, in addition to seeing Cain and Woodman on the farm, she also saw Woodman at every holiday and birthday party . . . and they always managed to slip out unseen with some smuggled sweets for Cain.
They were the Three Musketeers of McHuid Farm, and Ginger knew both boys as well as she knew herself—Cain’s smirking, hotheaded, impulsive ways, and Woodman’s levelheaded patience, caution, and kindness. Regardless of their differences, she also knew that as the only children of twin sisters, Cain and Woodman were much closer than most cousins. Genetically speaking, they were half brothers, and while they surely liked to tease and torture each other, each boy wouldn’t hesitate to jump in front of a train to save the other’s skin either.
In Ginger’s mind, she envisioned them like two halves of the same coin that she held carefully in the palm of her hand.
She loved them both desperately.
Choose?
No, her heart protested. Impossible.
“What if I can’t?” she whispered, leaning back and resting her head on her grandmother’s comforting shoulder.
“Then you’ll lose them both,” said her grandmother softly.
Ginger’s shoulders fell, relaxing in surrender as she closed her eyes against the burn of tears.
“But don’t let’s think about that now, doll baby,” said Gran, leaning her head upon her granddaughter’s, the constant tremble of her unpredictable body almost soothing to Ginger as they rocked side by side in the twilight. “You’re just twelve today. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”
Chapter 2
Cain
“Ginger, jump to me!” yelled Woodman from beside him.
Cain glanced up at little Ginger, twelve years old today, standing two stories above him in the hayloft. Though his feet twitched to hightail it to the old abandoned Glenn River Distillery, he forced himself not to look at his watch. Whatever time it was, Mary-Louise would still be waiting for him when he got there. He was sure of it.
Last time they were together, she’d guided his fingers down to the slick nub of flesh between her legs, and he’d rubbed it until she’d screamed his name. To reward him, she’d gotten on her knees and sucked his cock into her pretty mouth, making him come in about three minutes flat and backhanding her mouth after swallowing every last bit. And damn if he hadn’t gotten hard again right away because it was the sexiest f*cking thing he’d ever seen.
And tonight? Well, if Cain had his way, tonight they were finally going to do the deed. Have sex. Fuck. Hell, he’d even make love if that’s what Mary-Louise required of him. He’d been watching the breeding horses on McHuid Farm for as long as he could walk. Tonight, it was his turn, and he was about as jazzed up as a fifteen-year-old kid could be. It was on. It was f*cking happening.
Cain shoved thoughts of Mary-Louise from his mind and grinned up at Princess Ginger in her tower. “Now, Miss Virginia, you ignore ole Woodman here and you jump to me, baby.”
He and Woodman had engaged in this princess-in-the-tower tradition every year since they’d found the boss’s daughter perched in the hayloft door on her sixth birthday. Cain willingly admitted that it was sort of a stupid ritual, but something had made him come here and hang out by the old barn all afternoon, waiting for Ginger and Woodman to break away from the party, even if it made him late for Mary-Louise. And damn if he hadn’t had to work to keep his face from splitting into a grin when he saw them running down the hill toward the barn hand in hand. It wasn’t like loafing around the McHuids’ barn on a Sunday afternoon was a barrel of laughs so he’d kept his expression lazy, but inside he’d been rubbing his hands together with glee because the truth was, he loved this tradition just as much as he loved Woodman and Ginger. It made him happy, when not much else did.
Why should he be happy? His parents sure as shit weren’t happy—they’d alternated between yelling at each other and giving each other the silent treatment for fifteen long, unhappy years. By the age of six, Cain knew that theirs hadn’t been a love match—f*ck, they barely tolerated each other. His father, Klaus, had come over from Austria in 1989 after working on the state stud farm of the Lipizzan stallions. He’d accompanied one of the studs to Kentucky to be bred at McHuid’s, seen Cain’s pretty momma at the Apple Valley Diner, gotten her pregnant, unenthusiastically—if the wedding pictures buried in his mother’s sweater drawer were any indication—married her, and stayed in Apple Valley to raise their son.