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She flushed red to the tips of her ears and ducked her head, “Sorry, Dusty.”
“It’s all right.” He grinned. “But you were right. I was a baby, damn near ready to bawl my eyes out. Eventually, I got his tail up and—”
“That’s quite enough,” Ben said firmly. “We all know what happens next. Please, we’re eating here. Spare us the gruesome mental images.”
“Well,” Mitch grunted, “While I was arm-deep in, y’know, Jack the genius here decided that the stimulator was not oiled enough—”
My brows shot up. “What?”
“Exactly,” Micah rolled his eyes. “He grabs the sterile jelly and goes to town on the thing while I am still arm’s deep in the bull, praying for judgment day to come already and take me, the thing hops up on the dummy cow, and now, I have to drop to my knees so my arm doesn’t snap in half. Tail flinging into my face while I am inches from gonads bigger than my head, a position I never want to be again, thank you very much. Now, I’m praying for death because I will never get the smell of a bull’s backside out of my nose—” Micah turned to me, his face dead serious, “—bossman, I need a raise.”
The whole table burst into laughter while I lifted my glass of iced tea. “I’ll table it for the next budget.”
While the attention shifted to another topic, my eyes landed on Samantha, and I wondered what to do. Nothing came to mind, but I hoped that soon enough, something would.
* * *
The call came in at twelve-thirty in the afternoon two days later, just as I sunk to my office chair after a long morning of riding with my men over our land to inspect the herds. I’d just showered and looked forward to a hearty lunch when my landline rang.
I answered, thinking it was a work call, only to hear a female on the other line. “Hello, is this Mister Maxwell?”
“Speaking,” I replied. “May I have the pleasure of knowing whom I’m speaking with?”
“Miss Everett,” she replied. Her voice was soft, slightly melodic, and calm—the perfect voice of a guidance counselor. “I am your daughter Samantha’s guidance counselor. There’s been an incident—”
I groaned and clasped my hand over my eye. “Oh, God. What did she do?”
“She fought with a classmate,” Miss Everett replied. “Don’t worry; no one had a broken bone, but a budding male ego is bruised, but even so, it is school policy to call in the parents when these things happen. Can you meet with me by one thirty?”
I checked my watch. “I’ll meet you at one. Thank you, Miss Everett.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Maxwell,” she replied. “See you soon.”
Hanging up, I tilted my head back and said a little prayer about what to do when I got there and that this did not blow up into something worse. Shoving from the desk, I went to grab my keys and headed out to the school.
The elementary school dearly needed an uplift; the front façade looked like two twelve thousand feet cinder blocks with steel bones and glass eyes, plopped on with ten acres of land. The exposed brick was worn and weary, and I felt the heat radiate off the wall as I stepped through them.
Should I have placed them in private schools? I have more than enough money for it.
Even as I thought about it, I knew the answer. It was the same. Sam and Harper needed to know what it was like to be in the real world, not the silver-spoon pampered, isolated, my-way-or-no-way some rich kids thought the rest of the world was like.
A passing teacher gave me directions to the guidance counselor’s office, and I got to the wooden door with a square of frosted glass in the middle. After rapping on it three times, I rocked back on my heels, mentally repeating the litany of apologies I would give to the lady when the door opened.
And when it did, and I saw the woman before me—all cinnamon hair cascading over her shoulders in shiny waves, big brown eyes luminous, stunningly beautiful with her heart-shaped face and full-bodied lips, body so perfectly curved and proportioned—every word died on my lips. At the same time, every drop of blood fell to my feet.
Jesus H Christ, I knew those lips. I knew that body, had touched it, had dreamed about it, had ached to leave my mark on it again.
“Rayna…”
ChapterFour
Rayna
When Sam’s dad stepped into my office, I stopped, and my jaw dropped.
Samantha’s father was…Jesus Christ, John. The man I’d had sex with a month and a half ago.
I was flat-out shell-shocked. If a nuclear bomb went off two feet away, I would have never been any the wiser.
