The Wicked Horse Boxed Set (The Wicked Horse Series) Read online

  “You don’t need to do that,” I tell him hastily. “I’ve got my own car here.”

  “You’re drunk.” His hand tightens on the back of my neck, and for some weird reason, it makes me want to drop to my knees in front of him.

  “I’m buzzed,” I argue. “Big difference.”

  “Sorry, babe,” he says, and oh, geez… why does Woolf calling me babe make me want to curl into him and purr? “But the Callie Hayes I know needed several drinks to get on top of that bar tonight, so you’re not driving home.”

  Woolf opens the door, and we’re greeted with some old-school Dixie Chicks. “Five minutes,” he grumbles in warning and releases me. “Don’t make me come find you.”

  I turn to give him a glare, but he’s already pushing through the crowd and I lose sight of him fast. I don’t waste any time because while I know I couldn’t be in safer hands with Woolf Jennings, I don’t want to test him. So I cut across the dance floor toward the DJ booth where the red-haired woman who had me sign up for the contest said I could stash my purse. When I approach her, she gives me a smile and nods toward the floor.

  I see my purse and bend over to pick it up. “Thanks for watching this.”

  “No problem,” she says, her voice rising above the music. “And sorry Woolf took you out of the running for the contest. In my opinion, you had the nicest tits up there.”

  My cheeks turn a little pink from her compliment and I awkwardly turn away from her, only to run into a hard, male body. “Callie Hayes… lookin’ good,” I hear drawled out.

  Tilting my gaze up, I see a face from my past and instantly relax. “Hey, Colton.”

  Colton Stokes is still ruggedly handsome, and I’m betting still just as cocky. We dated in high school but broke up after he left for college. He was a year older than me, and I’m guessing didn’t want a girlfriend tying him down. Especially one that wasn’t willing to put out for him.

  Leaning down, he places a kiss on my cheek. “You look fantastic.”

  I know this is a lie because my hair is sticky from beer, and I’m betting even my eye makeup is running.

  “You too,” I tell him, and that isn’t a lie. Colton is damn good looking with his caramel-colored hair highlighted naturally from the sun and dark brown eyes. He’s dressed like most others here tonight with jeans, a western-styled shirt, and large belt buckle, but Colton was always one of those guys that stood out in a crowd.

  Colton runs his gaze down me and with a smirk, says, “I see someone lent you a shirt.”

  I wince. Damn, he must have seen me up on the bar. Double damn… he’s seen my breasts. I wait for shame to overcome me, but it never does and I find that a good sign because if I’m going to shed the vestiges of the old Callie Hayes, I can’t afford to be mired in guilt over it.

  Stepping in closer to me and leaning down again, he says, “For what it’s worth… you would have totally won that contest.”

  “Um… thanks,” I say as I nervously brush some strands of sticky hair that came loose from my braid away from my face.

  “Listen… let me buy you a drink and we can reconnect,” Colton says, and his smile seems genial enough. I’m guessing, however, he’s thinking I might be an easy score tonight since I was just on the bar a bit ago flashing my boobs all around.

  “She’s going home,” I hear Woolf bark above the music so he can be heard clearly, and my elbow is once again in his hand. I turn my head slightly to see Woolf glaring at Colton.

  “Well, then,” Colton says as his eyes slide slowly from Woolf back down to me. “In that case, seems like you’re in good hands tonight. Hope to see you around, Callie.”

  Woolf doesn’t even let me reply, just turns me around and starts pushing me hastily back through the crowd. In no time at all, he has his SUV door opened and he’s helping me to climb in with liberal use of his running board.

  All is silent as Woolf makes his way out to Highway 191 and turns north instead of south.

  “Where are we going?” I ask in confusion, as my house is back in Jackson.

  “I know damn well your father is in town and I can’t take you home like this, Callie,” Woolf says in exasperation. “Reggie would have a heart attack if he saw you looking and smelling like that.”

  “I can make it to my room without him seeing me,” I grumble but secretly… I’m a bit pleased. I’m just not ready to go home yet. I’m even more excited by the fact that I know we’re headed to Woolf’s house on the Double J, which means some more alone time with him. That thought shouldn’t bring me such a rush of giddiness, but it does all the same.

  I knew I’d see Woolf at some point when I returned home from Connecticut. His father and my father were very good friends. His father was a huge contributor to my father’s political campaigns, and we all ran in the same social circles our entire life. Woolf is three years older than me and up until my sophomore year in high school, we attended the same schools in Jackson from elementary school onward. But then my father won the gubernatorial race and we moved to the state capital of Cheyenne, which is less than an hour away from Laramie where Woolf was attending his freshman year at the University of Wyoming.

  Even though we were family friends and were within spitting distance of each other, I saw very little of Woolf while he was in college. This was due, I expect, to the fact that my older brother Richard was attending Harvard back east. He and Woolf were close friends, and without Richard around, Woolf just didn’t come to visit that much.

  That came about even less after Richard died at the start of his senior year at Harvard from pneumonia. Richard was asthmatic and stubborn as hell. By the time he broke down, went to the emergency room, and got admitted, his lungs were so full of fluid he suffocated to death. My eyes prick with tears at the thought of his death, which will hit the eleven-year anniversary mark in a few months. I wonder if Woolf still grieves for him the way I do.

  “What happened to your fiancé?” Woolf asks, and I blink my eyes hard to dispel the moisture. “What was his name? Bill?”

  “Will,” I correct him woodenly. He and Woolf had met once, just last year when Will came home with me for Christmas.

  “So what happened?” he prompts me.

  I gaze out the side window but it’s so dark outside on this lonely stretch of highway, I can’t really see anything. Ironic, since even thinking about Will, I don’t really feel anything. Even my anger has sort of fizzled.

  “I caught him in bed with another woman,” I say softly.

  It was actually a bit more than that. I left work sick one day where I worked as an event planner, having given up on the fight against the overwhelming nausea I was experiencing. I was panicked, thinking that perhaps I was pregnant, and I wasn’t ready to be. I mean… physically and mentally, yeah… I could totally be down with having a baby, but I was having so many doubts about marrying Will that the thought of having a child with him caused me to feel overwhelming dread rather than happiness.

  Stopping at the drugstore on the way home, I grabbed a twelve pack of ginger ale and a pregnancy test. I made it to our house in the burbs outside of New Haven, Connecticut and wasn’t all that surprised to see Will’s car at the house. His law firm was only about five minutes away and he often ate at home.

  I was surprised, however, when I walked back into our bedroom, pulling the pregnancy test out of the bag, and stumbled right upon the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m not sure it even bears repeating the full details, but suffice to say that Will was naked except for a leather headpiece over his head with a ball gag in his mouth. He was in the middle of our bed on his hands and knees while The Honorable Jennifer P. Lane, one of the local circuit judges, whipped him with a riding crop. She was dressed head to toe in black, shiny vinyl and growling at him, “I sustain your objection, Counsel.”

  I thought I was in a dream… nay, a nightmare. My eyes dropped to the bed where a gavel rested near one of Will’s knees, and I shuddered to think where she was going to stick
that thing.

  But for the tiny gasp that came out of my mouth, I doubt either one of them would have known I was there. It would have been my preference to have backed out of the room quietly, sight unseen, but Jennifer’s head turned my way and rather than being horrified, she actually smirked at me. Will, on the other hand, promptly started freaking and was trying to rip the headpiece off while I think he was trying to scream apologies around the ball gag.

  I didn’t wait around to find out. Stuffing the pregnancy test back in the bag, I ran out to my car. I got in, drove to the airport, and booked the first flight back home. While I waited for boarding to begin, I went into the bathroom, peed on the stick, and found out I wasn’t pregnant. Ironically, I wasn’t nauseated anymore, and I’m wondering if I was just feeling a generalized anxiety because of my doubts over Will.

  Regardless, something clicked in my mind as I sat in the airport terminal and considered my past and my future. I had to turn my phone off because Will was burning it up with calls and texts. I imagined him out riding the roads, looking for me. The cocky son of a bitch was just self-centered enough to think that I’d never leave him. That he’d be able to smooth this over and keep me pinned to his side. He would have never thought his little fiancée, Callie Hayes, was at the airport and getting ready to leave Connecticut for what I hoped was forever.

  I bet he sure as shit never thought I would enter a wet t-shirt contest, nor would I be in a man’s vehicle heading to his house late at night.

  I turn my head and look at Woolf. The silhouette of his face shows lines of stubbornness, brilliance, and command. He’s always been that way. I can also see the glow of his eyes from the dashboard lights. He knows I’m looking at him, and his face turns to give me a short glance.

  “I’m sorry,” is all he says over my revelation that I found my fiancé cheating on me.

  “I’m not,” I tell him. “And I’m staying at your place tonight so the mighty Governor Hayes doesn’t see me like this.”

  Chapter 3

  Woolf

  “It looks fantastic,” I tell Bridger as I walk through the newest cabin we had just finished constructing a few weeks ago. While our original plans called for ten cabins, they were getting overbooked so we added on as needed. This makes cabin number thirteen.

  This Wicked Horse building has no interior walls except for restrooms because privacy isn’t needed. The Silo has four group sex rooms for viewing, but those are filled to capacity almost every night so we built this new cabin. Thick, soft carpeting done in a pale blue sets more of an elegant atmosphere. Dark gold silk wallpaper with subtle geometric designs, and several ottomans done in a soft, vinyl material in a dark cream color complete the decor in this eleven-hundred-square-foot cabin. There are two powder rooms on the back wall, and a tiny, self-serve bar on the adjacent wall.

  “I’m naming it Bacchanalia,” Bridger says with a wicked grin.

  “Appropriate.” Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of intoxication and ecstasy, and propagator of the much-revered orgy would be proud. “Participants don’t have to wear togas, do they?”

  Bridger laughs good-naturedly as we walk out of the cabin. “I think clothing sort of defeats the purpose of this cabin, don’t you think?”

  I don’t bother answering because that was rhetorical. Instead, we both trot down the cabin stairs and climb into my work truck. The cabins sit only a couple of hundred yards away from The Silo and nightclub, but the dirt road in between isn’t very friendly on Bridger’s Corvette. We had to take my truck so we could stock the cabin bar with a few cases of liquor and mixers.

  “Did everything go okay last night?” Bridger asks as he pulls his hat off, scratches at his hair, and then plops it back on his head. He tends to wear it longer these days, but next week, he’ll probably shave it all off. Bridger changes more than the seasons.

  “Yeah,” I say as we bounce down the road toward The Silo. It’s a gorgeous June day outside, perfect for outdoor work with the sun riding high and the temps hovering in the low sixties. I think I might even gear up and ride range today just so I’m not cooped up in the office.

  “Dude… I need details,” Bridger says, turning slightly in his seat to face me. “Who was that woman? It’s not every day I see Woolf Jennings carting a woman out of The Wicked Horse and away from The Silo. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it.”

  I pull into my parking spot beside Bridger’s car and cut the ignition. “That woman was Callie Hayes.”

  Bridger’s eyes spring wide, and he shakes his head with an amused grin. “That was Callie Hayes? The girl that got away from the mighty Woolf Jennings?”

  “She didn’t get away,” I snap at him. “I let her go. Big difference.”

  Chuckling, Bridger exits my truck and I do the same. He meets me at the front and leans an elbow on the hood. His face is a bit more serious now. “So what happened last night?”

  Leaning back onto the front grill of my truck, I cross my arms over my chest. I could use Bridger’s advice. He knows all about Callie as I got a little mouthy one night after a party during college, and we exchanged relationship failure stories while we continued to drink in the room we shared at the frat house. Her name has come up on another occasion or two—or three or—when I’m lamenting in my beer glass while some sappy country-western song plays in the background.

  “Nothing happened. I brought her home, let her get cleaned up, and we talked a bit.”

  Bridger just stares at me. He knows me too well to ever accept that as the full story. He can tell by my tight lips that there’s more, because I don’t keep anything from Bridger and he keeps nothing from me. That’s the way of it as best friends and two men who have seen each other doing very depraved things. Hell, we’ve done some of those depraved things together.

  I give a heavy sigh. “She broke off her engagement and moved back home permanently. Or so she says.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” he asks me quietly. He knows this is some damn serious business to me.

  Grimacing, I give him a hard look. “I’m not going to do a fucking thing. Nothing has changed.”

  “You asshole,” Bridger says affectionately. “Everything’s changed. She’s not the young innocent anymore. She’s a woman.”

  “She may be a woman, but she’s still far too innocent to get caught up with someone like me. She’d freak the fuck out if she knew what really went on at The Wicked Horse.”

  I know that to be true because last night after Callie had a shower and dressed in one of my t-shirts and a pair of workout shorts that swallowed her up, we sat down in the Great Room and shared some whiskey. She told me the gory details of how she caught her fiancé in some fem-dom situation. If it weren’t for the disgust in her voice, I would have laughed at the scenario I imagined, but it was too sobering of a tale when she candidly admitted she had come home to take a pregnancy test. For some reason, I wanted to stand up and dance when she told me she was relieved she wasn’t pregnant, and that she’s actually relieved the engagement is off.

  Regardless, she reacted badly to that so I couldn’t even begin to imagine how disgusted she would be at The Silo. Hell, several times a week, you can find Angel pegging some dude up the ass in one of the glass-walled rooms.

  I push off from the front of my truck and step up onto the wooden boardwalk that spans the entire front of The Wicked Horse. Bridger follows me in. The entire club is empty as it’s late morning, but the staff will start trickling in soon. While we don’t open until four PM, there’s still a tremendous amount to do to get ready for the evening rush.

  “You’re really not going to hook up with her?” Bridger asks as we wind our way through the tables toward the office.

  I roll my eyes at him. “Man… this isn’t high school.”

  “Fine, then. You’re not going to fuck her?”

  “No, I’m not going to fuck her,” I grit out as I punch in the alarm code to the office.

  But damn, I want to fuck her so b
ad.

  Last night as she sipped at the whiskey with her feet tucked up underneath of her on the couch, I had to almost physically restrain myself from touching her. I listened to her talk about Will and her life over the last several years. I truly heard her bemoan that she hated living back East, hated her job as an event planner, and hated living in the suburbs where she had dinner on the table every night at six PM sharp for Will, and she wore pencil skirts, flats, cardigans, and headbands because she was trying to be the proper fiancée for a hotshot attorney in a conservatively dull community.

  Yes, I heard all of that, but it didn’t stop me from studying her beauty while she talked. Her hair was the color of dark mahogany and worn shorter than she used to… just a few inches past the edge of her shoulders. And the way her green eyes seemed to shine like miniature galaxies of green and gold. Those freckles… doing nothing but serving to remind me of her innocent ways, and even though my shirt on her was baggy, I could still vividly imagine those perfect tits I knew resided under the soft cotton material.

  Sitting right there on the opposite end of the couch from me.

  That right there was the reason I only gravitate toward blonde women. Those ladies of the sunny-colored hair. It’s because they are the exact opposite of Callie Hayes and everything I would truly desire as a man.

  But then again… do I really desire her for anything more than some of the dirtiest, hottest fucking I could ever imagine? Hell, even plain old vanilla on flannel sheets with Callie would be hotter than anything I’ve ever done. I just know it.

  The real problem, if I just want to lay it out on the line, is that Callie and I would never be compatible long term. I’m not sure I’m built for monogamy. Never tried it, really, and although Callie is the only woman I could ever imagine committing myself too, I’m not sure I’m ready to give up variety. Besides… Callie would never understand my need to have kink in my life, and I would never expose her to it.

  Bridger leaves the subject alone thankfully and sits down at his side of the desk. Our office is huge, furnished with a double-sided desk that we can work at if we’re both here at the same time. That’s a rare occasion though as I have my office back on The Double J and since most of my paperwork still revolves around JennCo, I just don’t use this space a lot. Hell, I actually use it more for fucking women if I’m too lazy to walk over to The Silo, and that is the reason why we have a huge, leather couch against one wall.