The steady beat of hooves pounding on the compacted red dirt road filled Harper’s ears. Faster and faster they came, making a mockery of her rapidly beating heart.
She turned from her descent down the front steps of her mother’s sprawling estate to gaze down the worn dirt road. Away from the motorwagen, already packed to the brim with her belongings, that was to take her to her uncle’s ranch in New Mexico. Half of her thought maybe she was just imagining the sound of those frantic beats. Maybe it was just a cruel trick of her mind making her think Beu was really coming for her.
But as the wind ruffled her long black curls, stringing them around her porcelain face like a wild tumbleweed, she glanced toward that lifting sun and saw what she was hoping for, what she had spent sleepless nights wishing for. Beu, atop his painted prized steed traveling at breakneck speed.
“Harper!” she heard him shout her name and her heart leapt from her chest.
As though her feet had a mind of their own, she turned away from the deathly glare her mother was giving her and flew down the steps. The feeling of the hot Texas soil under her bare feet was only an afterthought as she ran for her lover.
“Harper Louise, you get back here this instant!” her mother screamed as she ran. Her normally shrill voice faded in the background as Harper’s blood rushed to her ears.
How her mother had found out about her and Beu, she didn’t know. Nonetheless, she had discovered Harper’s most coveted secret and had all but dragged her out of bed this morning only to shove her into that damned motorwagen. Her mother hadn’t even let her dress properly before pushing her toward the door while Harper silently fantasized about Beu coming to take her away from all of it.
But now he was here in real life, to take her from this snooty prison she had been forced to call home for the last twenty years.
He looked like a master of his own rodeo with his long-sleeved, dirt-stained, white work shirt. In his haste to get to Harper, he had missed the top three buttons, letting the fabric flap around his dark cocoa skin as the wind tore at him. His black Stetson hat was only staying on his head by the way he grabbed the top as he galloped toward her. His fitted worn work jeans were just the same as threadbare, so much so that the normally rough fabric looked soft to the touch. A fact Harper knew firsthand.
She knew exactly what that fabric felt like between her delicate fingers as she pulled it down his thighs, revealing his hard length to her for the first time. She also knew that fabric wasn’t nearly as soft as the dark skin that lay beneath. The contrast they made together was beautiful, his deep chocolate skin tone all the more vivid when she wrapped her cream-colored hand around him. How could such a hard-looking ranch hand be so velvety smooth under all those layers?
Harper still remembered how she trembled the first time Beu had laid her down. She had been pure as the rising sun before him and now that she’d had him, she couldn’t seem to get enough.
He had been everything she had ever fantasized or read about in those books she hid from her momma. She had reveled in the way his calloused hands had roamed the expanse of her soft pale skin. He explored her body for hours up in that hayloft, taking his time as he kissed and licked her most intimate areas. His light-green eyes, so at odds with the rest of him, had gobbled up the sight of her splayed naked beneath him. Nobody had ever loved her so tenderly before him and she feared nobody ever would again.
“Beu!” she screamed as she ran for the wild cowboy. Her momma would kill her for leaving with him, but she didn’t care anymore. Her breath left her body in labored heaves as she sprinted toward her future. The thin material of her silk nightdress fluttered behind her in the blazing heat, as if shedding who she once was before Beu.
The galloping of his steed became louder and louder the closer he came to his Southern belle. Finally, he slowed to a trot but didn’t stop the horse completely before he leapt from its broad back and stumbled. Regaining his balance under those booted feet, he ran.
“Harper,” he breathed before they collided together.
His hands were everywhere as his thick lips crashed onto hers. He stood so much taller than her delicate frame that she had to stand on her tiptoes just to meet him halfway.
He groaned as she opened herself for him to fully devour. His tongue slipped past her parted lips and danced with hers as his hands roamed up her silky torso. He could feel her naked flesh beneath the thin fabric of her nightgown. She was so hot for him she felt as though her skin would melt right off.
Those calloused fingers grazed the underside of her breast as his other hand dipped to grab her behind. He pulled her to him and let her feel the hard length of his manhood through those soft work jeans. She gasped against his lips as he ground into her.
“Don’t leave,” he begged.
The sound that ripped from her chest was close to a whimper. She shook her head vigorously before pulling him back down to her waiting lips. She was desperate as she climbed his body. She flung her arms around his neck roughly enough to knock his Stetson from his head, exposing his close-cropped black hair.
He held her as close to his body as he could before he pulled his mouth away to speak.
“Harper, I can’t go one more day without being near you. I have loved you since the very first day I saw you jump into Granger Creek in nothing but a slip,” he admitted and Harper hiccupped a laugh at the memory. “If you leave, I’ll follow you. I don’t care if I have to go to the ends of this world, I will find you. I will make you my wife. I can’t imagine my life without waking up to this wild hair and your soft smile every damned day.” He breathed and Harper cried.
Beu smiled down at her while wiping away her tears. “I know I ain’t got much, but what I have is yours. It’s always been yours. You have my heart and I don’t ever want it back. I want … no, I need you to keep it,” he finished with a shimmer of tears in those light-green eyes.
Harper opened her mouth. “Beu, I have always—”
“No, I don’t like that…” Backspace, backspace, backspace.
Harper looked up at her lover and said, “I will keep your heart as long as—”
“Damnit, no, I don’t like that either…” Back, back, back.
She looked up at her cowboy and—
“Goddammit! Come on, Emily!” I scolded myself as I stared at the blinking cursor. I was almost done with this damn book, but I still didn’t know how to end it. No matter how much time passed, I still couldn’t decide what I wanted Harper to say to Beu.
It was stupid, really. I should just have her say she loves him and wants to spend the rest of her life with him, regardless of what her momma says. But, I couldn’t seem to get the words out. The story just didn’t seem completed, but I couldn’t figure out what it needed.
I should just be happy I was here at all. Six months ago, I was staring at a blank screen while still trying to weave this story. Six months ago when I had gotten that phone call from my crazy-ass mother. I swear, between my mother and Harper’s, we could probably write a spin-off book chock-full of all the shit they put us through.
I smiled at my own internal joke. Sometimes I felt like the characters in my books were real people, with real problems.
The smile was quickly whipped off my face as I remembered why Patricia had called in the first place. Tanner. The only other person who had gone through the same childhood as me, who had been my best friend and confidant all my life—my brother—had gone missing. Was still missing.
When she had told me all they knew about where Tanner had gone, or more like what they didn’t know, my blood had chilled in my veins. Tanner was the only person left in my family I’d actually spoken to since I divorced Chris and left town three years ago.
A pang of guilt rushed through my body as I thought about my lack of communication with him since I moved. It wasn’t from lack of trying. We both had ways of dealing with our fucked-up childhood. Mine had been shutting down mentally before marrying Chris as soon as I could to get the hell out of that house. Tanner’s had been drugs and partying.
I know that sounds terrible. But, if you had to grow up as we did, you would understand. Sure, we were raised not wanting for much due to the family’s wealth, but money couldn’t buy the parental love every adolescent craved.
The constant stream of nannies who didn’t give a shit about us moved in and out of our lives like they were on a revolving door. Most of them detested us almost as much as our parents did. All they ever saw was the huge dollar sign that came along with raising us. At least there’d only been one who had gotten too aggressive with us.
When I was eight, she’d pulled my arm a little too hard and popped my shoulder out of the socket. Tanner was the only one who believed me when I said she was the one who had done it. My mother and father never took me at my word, always preferring to believe the abusive nanny in all situations. After all, who wants to believe a child over an adult? Sad thing was, that mentality of theirs never vanished, even after I’d grown up.
They even had her take me to the hospital. Can you imagine that? Letting your child’s abuser take them to the hospital to fix what she broke.
After that, Tanner had threatened the nanny with bodily harm. I never figured out what he had said to her, as he didn’t feel the need to disclose the information to me. He had only been twelve at the time, but whatever he threatened her with had apparently scared her enough she had quit without a resignation shortly after.
As we aged, Tanner started leaving against my parents’ wishes more and more. He was constantly sneaking out of the house. Basically saying a big fuck you every time he crept out his window in the dead of night.
I receded in on myself further, preferring to shut everyone out even if it went against my every need for human interaction.
Even through it all, Tanner and I always found our way back to one another. When my parents refused to bail him out of jail time and time again, it was me that would come to the rescue. And when shit hit the fan with Chris, Tanner was the only person who took my side. He had stood by me and helped me get out of that house. Even offering to “take care of the problem” for me.
I knew he was serious too. My brother had always been the one to stick up to a bully, especially when it came to me. He was four years older than me and every bit the protective big brother.
He was intimidating to look at until you got to know his sweet teddy bear insides. We were both tall but he was impressively so, with broad shoulders and a thick athletic frame. We shared the same strawberry-blonde hair and hazel eyes. About the only thing we didn’t share was the liberal amount of freckles that spanned across my face but not his. He could be considered a very muscular, strong man if only he would lay off the substances that made him less than.
I loved my brother with everything in me and I had a hard time not shutting out the blinding shame that accompanied my thoughts of him lately. I should have been there for him these past couple of years and I hadn’t been. I had to think leaving him behind was the cause of him going missing. His constant need to search for something to fill the void left behind from years of neglect always pushed him to wander.
Patricia said Tanner had taken off a couple of months before she thought to call me and they hadn’t heard from him since then. We both had access to the family’s credit cards and he hadn’t used them at all these last six months.
“What the hell do you mean, Tanner is missing?” I had screeched at the woman who had birthed me.
A pregnant pause over the line had blocked any other sound around me while I waited for her response.
“I mean exactly what I said, Emily. Tanner ran off two months ago and we haven’t been able to find him since.” Her aristocratic tone ground on my last nerve.
“Where the fuck did he go?” I gritted behind clenched teeth.
“I don’t appreciate your tone, young lady. We haven’t spoken in, what, two years? And this is how you choose to speak to your mother,” she scoffed.
I almost laughed out loud at her indignant speech. “Two and a half years, too little it seems. You still haven’t realized I want nothing to do with you. Get to the point of this call, Mother. Where the hell is my brother?”
I could almost see her red face over the phone line that separated us. She was always lousy at hiding her emotions.
Just when I thought she would never tell me where Tanner was, she finally spoke. “The last time he used his card was to withdraw a staggering amount of money and then at the airport to buy two one-way tickets … to Columbia,” she spat the word as if it left a nasty taste in her mouth.
When I finally got the info I needed from her, I ended the call happily. It had been decided that she and my father were going to hire a PI to try and track Tanner down and then I would fly down to Columbia and retrieve him. She had told me the whole trip would be at their expense, obviously. When I located him, I was to bring him back to New York and take him to some fancy rehab facility celebrities attended.
That was six months ago. I didn’t know what the hell PI firm they hired, but they needed to get their money back. I had spent the last half-year stalled in the same spot I’d been since that phone call. I was fretting over my brother, wondering if he was even alive at this point.
That was until Patricia finally called me last night. They had located where they thought Tanner may be and I was to fly out tomorrow.
The relief I felt from finally finding my brother was quickly overshadowed by the realization that I would have to face my horrible family once again.
Pulling myself from my thoughts, I looked up and across my front room. I didn’t know how long I would be out of the country searching for Tanner so I had packed a couple of big suitcases that were neatly stacked by my front door.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and squeezed my eyes closed, warding off the ache that had formed there. When I opened them again, I glanced at the clock and winced.
“Shit,” I mumbled to myself. If I didn’t leave soon, I would be late.