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“Thanks to you,” Marta said, and smiled. “I’m so glad you came back, Tyler. May I call you Tyler?”
“Yes. Of course. But—”
“Come in, please. Carmen? Make us some breakfast, will you? And tell my stepsons and my stepdaughter that we have a guest.”
“No need to bother,” a raspy male voice said.
Tyler looked further up the staircase. Gage, Travis and Slade stood one behind the other on the steps. They all looked sleep-tousled, cold-eyed and eminently likable, and Tyler sighed and wished to hell he could at least get to know them before he took them on.
“No need to bother, is right,” an angry female voice said, and his heart turned over.
“Hello, Cait,” he said softly, as the woman he loved came striding down the stairs toward him.
She was wearing a long white nightgown sprigged with tiny blue flowers. Her feet were bare and peeped out from under the hem, and her hair spilled over her shoulders in a wild, glorious tangle.
“You turn around and get your tail out of here, Tyler Kincaid!”
Tyler smiled, leaned back against the doorjamb and folded his arms over his chest.
“Get yourself dressed, McCord,” he said calmly.
“You’re a crazy man, Kincaid. Do you hear me? A crazy man, if you think I’m going to take orders from you.”
Tyler lifted his hand, looked at his watch. “I’ll give you three minutes.”
“You’ll give me three minutes?” Caitlin tossed her head and laughed. “Funny as well as crazy, Kincaid.” She stopped laughing, folded her arms in an unconscious imitation of him, and fixed him with an angry glare. “How about giving me one good reason why you think you can walk in here and order me around?”
“Well,” he said lazily, as he stepped away from the door and started toward the stairs, “well, McCord, actually, I could give you several, starting with the fact that it’s almost dawn and I want us to get to my ranch in time to see the sun come up the way we did last time, both of us on my patio, naked as the day we were born.”
He saw a blur of motion out of the corner of his eye, saw an arm shoot out in restraint and heard one of the brothers—one of his brothers, say, very softly, “Let’s just wait a minute.”
Caitlin’s cheeks turned pink. “What a horrible man you are!”
“I could also tell you that if you don’t get dressed and come with me willingly, I’m just going to have to toss you over my shoulder and carry you away.”
“Kidnap me, you mean,” Caitlin said furiously. “Did I tell you that, Gage? Travis? Slade? Did I tell you this man kidnapped me from this very house?”
Tyler mounted the steps slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. “I could give you all those reasons, McCord, but I won’t.” He stopped on the step below hers, so they were eye to eye, and he smiled. “I won’t, because the only reason worth anything, the only one worth you hearing, is the simplest one of all.” He reached out, clasped her face in his hands. She tried to jerk back but he could see the glitter of tears in her eyes, see something more that gave him hope. “I love you,” he whispered. “I’ve loved you from the minute you tried to run me down with that horse.”
“I did not try to run you down,” Caitlin said. Her voice shook. Tears leaked from her eyes and, dammit, she just knew that her nose was going to start leaking, too, any second. “And you don’t love me. You seduced me because you hated Jonas, and—”
Tyler kissed her. She told herself not to react, not to close her eyes or to let her mouth part to his, but the sweetness of his lips, the feel of his hands in her hair…
“I seduced you because I knew I couldn’t live without making you mine,” he whispered. “And I don’t hate the old man. I thought I did but life is too short for hating.” His eyes went to her mouth. “Hell, sweetheart, it’s hardly long enough for loving. For the kind of loving I want us to share for the next hundred years, anyway.”
Marta cleared her throat. “Well,” she said briskly, “I think I’ll, uh, I’ll go get dressed. Carmen? Make breakfast, would you please? And boys…” She looked up the stairs, at her stepsons, and sighed. It was simple to see they weren’t going anywhere. She sighed again as she made her way past them.
“You don’t love me,” Caitlin said. “You’re only saying it because—because—”
Tyler arched a brow. “Because?”
“Because you want to hurt Jonas.”
“Jonas hasn’t got a damned thing to do with you and me, Cait. He never did.”
“Well, then, you’re saying it because you want Espada.”
“Uh-huh.” Tyler grinned. “So, let’s see. I’m going to marry you so I can wait for you to inherit Espada—”
“Marry me?” Caitlin said. “Marry me? Never!”
“Marry you,” Tyler said agreeably, “in, what? A week? A month?” He glanced up the stairs at Slade, Travis and Gage. “How long does it take to plan a wedding, anyway?”
“Five minutes,” Travis said, “if you don’t let the women take it out of your hands.”
The brothers laughed, and Caitlin’s face went from pink to purple.
“What is the matter with you three?” she hissed. “Get down here, pronto. Drag this man outside. Beat him up. Put him on the back of a horse and send him packing.”
Tyler chuckled and kissed her again. He felt a tremor go through her, and his heart soared. But he wasn’t about to let her know that, not yet. His Cait could be a tricky filly to handle.
“The days when the sheriff put a guy on the back of his horse and told him to get out of town before nightfall are gone, sweetheart. The time when a man controlled his wife’s property is history, too.” He slid his hands into her hair, tilted her face, her beautiful face, to his. “This is morning, Cait, the start of a new day. The start of our life, together. Espada will always belong to you. The Lazy S will belong to the both of us.”
“The Lazy S?”
“Uh-huh.” He kissed her again, taking long
er this time, drinking in the sigh that trembled on her lips. “I’m naming the ranch I bought for the sunrise. Our sunrise. Is that okay with you?”
Caitlin swallowed hard. “Kincaid…”
“McCord.”
“Kincaid, did you really think you could just—just show up here and—and sweet-talk your way back into my life?”
“Yes,” he said simply. “I did. I love you, Cait. And you love me. And we’re going to get married and have a houseful of kids, and every last one of them is gonna call Jonas Baron ‘Grandpa.’”
Travis, Gage and Slade sent up a cheer. Tyler flashed them a grin and before she could move, scooped Caitlin off her feet and into his arms. She shrieked and looked at her stepbrothers.
“Are you just going to stand there and let him do this?” she said, trying to sound indignant and succeeding only in sounding breathless.
“I don’t know,” Gage said. He grinned as he watched her wrap her arms around Tyler’s neck. “Are we, guys?”
“No way,” Travis said solemnly. “For instance, I’m gonna go open the door for our new brother. Seems like a man with an armful of woman can’t be expected to do that for himself.”
“Good idea,” Slade said, and dug in the pockets of his half-zipped jeans. “Tyler? You need wheels, bro?”
Tyler smiled. “Come to think of it, I guess I do.”
“The blue pickup,” Slade said, and tossed his keys.
“You’re all impossible,” Caitlin sputtered as Tyler carried her out the door and down the steps. “I swear, I’ll get you for this. Slade? Gage? Travis? You hear me?”
“Yeah,” Gage said gently. “We hear you, Catie. Loud and clear.”
She did her best to glower over Tyler’s shoulder because it was the right thing, but all she could manage was a smile filled with happiness.
“You put me down,” she said, as he walked toward the blue pickup truck because that was the right thing, too, even though it was the last thing she wanted.
Tyler kissed her. “I will,” he said, “just as soon as we get to that patio.”
He put her in the passenger seat of the truck, buckled her in and got behind the wheel. She folded her arms, looked straight ahead and refused to say a word until they reached the house he’d bought in the hills.
