Married To The Cowboy (Love In Collin's Ranch 3) Read online

  It didn't help that she more or less blew through her half of the inheritance in less than a year and came back home with her hand out and nowhere to go. Her brother sent her packing without a dime to her name. Ever since then, she'd been shacked up with boyfriend after boyfriend, trading on her fading looks and her always-ready drug connections.

  But when she saw Paul step out of the school in his full dress blues, for the first time in her long history with him it dawned on her that she'd made a mistake playing with him the way that she had. She realized that she should have stuck things out with Paul, maybe even married him after high school. Sure, Daddy wouldn't have liked it very much, but really, would it have mattered what he thought? He was dead, after all, and she was still alive and lonely despite the fact that the man she was currently shacked up with claimed to love her. But he was small potatoes, just another divorced middle-aged dad with shared custody of his spoiled brat of a daughter. She knew her time with him was short. She knew this because she wasn't the type of woman you kept. She was the type of woman you snorted Coke and got drunk with; she was the type of woman you rented a sleazy motel room with and fucked in the ass. But she knew things would be different with Paul. He would treat her like a lady; he would treat her like he loved her and her alone.

  But then she saw the pretty little red head. Jenna had seen her before, leading kindergarteners out to their parents’ cars and daycare buses. She was cute as a button, and Jenna couldn't stand her on sight. She was the type of woman who would eventually make some lucky son of a bitch an ideal wife and mother. She would be able to handle both home and career with grace and stability. She would have a successful, long and happy life. Jenna thought about running her over with her boyfriend's Acura the minute she saw her, but held back the urge like she always somehow managed to do. But when she saw Paul turn and hug the young woman, she suddenly felt the urge to harm even more strongly.

  At that very second Jenna McClean, the one-time queen of Gold Canyon High School and the city of Apache Junction, decided that she was going to murder Missy Sanders for stealing away her long-lost puppy dog.

  Chapter 6

  The week dragged by so much that I felt like I was going insane. After meeting Missy on Monday, each day dribbled by like it was made of thick tar. No matter how I tried to occupy myself, I found myself drifting off and my thoughts filling with Missy. Each night after the workday was done, I would sit out on my porch smoking, counting down the minutes until I knew she would be home and settled. All I wanted to do was hear her voice, her laugh. To be honest, I felt a bit like a stalker, and that at any minute while we were on the phone talking, she would tell me abruptly to stop calling her, that I was creeping her out.

  But it never happened. Whenever I called, she sounded breathless and excited, like she had been waiting by the phone anticipating me. We would talk for hours each night, asking about our days and chatting about simple things at first before we headed into deeper territory: our childhoods, our past loves, our past lives. No subject was forbidden and neither of us judged one another. When we would finally hang up, I would then spend the rest of the evening pacing the house, thinking about what I would say the next time we talked, and then when I went to bed, I sat up half the night thinking about her, my mind wired.

  Then it was finally the Friday of the carnival, our first date. I was sweaty and nervous when I picked her up at her apartment, a retirement condo complex she shared with her ill grandmother. The old lady met me at the door in her wheel chair and gave me an appraising eye and a little wink as I escorted her granddaughter down to my Jeep. Missy was dressed stunningly in a simple white summer dress and comfortable-looking brown leather sandals. Compared to her I felt overdressed in my cowboy gear, and I have to admit I felt like a bit of a goof in my snakeskin boots and brand-new Levis. But she didn't seem to notice my discomfort and even went so far as to compliment me.

  The carnival itself was simple and fun. All of the food stalls and games were manned by the school children, their parents, and Missy's fellow teachers, who all poked fun at her for somehow getting out of having to work the carnival. They made fun, but each time after we left one of the booths her colleagues, particularly the female ones, would give her an appraising smile or nod. Obviously, most of them liked the shape of me. We spent a couple of hours wandering the carnival, talking about just about every subject under the sun and eating buckets of crappy fried foods. Soon enough, we found ourselves back at my Jeep, our bodies pressed against one another, her mouth on mine, the taste of chocolate and popcorn rich on our tongues. Our kisses seemed to go on forever, both us completely oblivious to anything or anyone. Finally she pushed me away breathlessly.

  "Take me home," she said with a wicked smile. Being a little slow on the uptake, my heart sank a little.

  "You ... You want me to take you back home to your apartment?" I asked nervously.

  She giggled like a little girl and then put her delicate hands against my chest.

  "I think we'll end up waking up my grandma with what I'm planning to do to you, so you’d better take me back to your place instead."

  ***

  Jenna watched the two of them kiss and fumble at each other like teenagers for almost an hour, her vision going red with each passing second. After the redhead pushed Paul away, she knew damn well where they were headed and what they were going to do, and she was going to make goddamn sure that wasn't going to happen. And if it somehow did, she was going to make sure that it was going to be the last piece of ass that little girl was ever going to get in her short life.

  ***

  We barely made it through the front door of the cabin before I had Missy's clingy little white summer dress ripped off of her body. For as small and lithe as she appeared the two times I had previously seen her, she was actually quite voluptuous. Her breasts were perfect, heavy orbs and her hips and behind were heart shaped and firm. As we kissed in the doorway, I swept her up into my arms like she was my bride and she laughed as she cradled my neck and nibbled at my left ear lobe.

  I laid her down on my narrow bachelor's bed—which suddenly seemed far too small—and laid her gently down on top of the rough blankets. She reached behind and unfastened her bra, her breasts spilling out. I took her delicate pink nipples into my mouth, toying with them with my tongue and teeth, her breath quickening as I gently nibbled. I kissed a slow trail down to her silky white underwear, slipping the damp garment away from her hips and down her legs, continuing my trail of kisses down until I plunged my mouth and tongue into the hairless folds of her vagina. As I lapped at her clitoris, I felt her fingers push through my thick sweaty hair, her grip tightening with each movement of my tongue, her hips thrusting against my mouth until she was practically smothering me with her wetness.

  Her orgasm was like an abrupt desert thunderstorm. Her moans seemed to take on a physical form and filled the room as her heady taste drenched my mouth and face. She urged me on top of her, and for the first time I noticed I was still fully dressed. I ripped myself out of my shirt and fumbled at my belt and the buttons of my pants. I was filled with animal frustration as my fingers suddenly felt too large and clumsy, but Missy took charge and finished stripping me down and pulled me on top of her. She guided me inside of her, rubbing the head of my cock against her still-throbbing clit to lubricate it, and then plunging me inside of her. Her moans once again took on a life of their own as I slid easily inside of her up to the hilt.

  I felt her legs wrap tightly around my back, as if she was somehow trying to will my entire body inside of her. Her hips bucked wildly as she came again. Breathlessly, I pulled out of her and laid myself flat on my back, and she climbed on top of me and began to slowly rock back and forth, her cunt gripping my cock in its silky wet folds. After a few minutes, I could feel my own orgasm beginning to build, but then she suddenly pulled me out of her wet cunt, repositioning her body slightly forward and then pushing the head of my cock into the pucker of her ass. She pushed down, her teeth sl
ightly gritting as pushed the rest of me inside the tight warmth of her behind. With each movement, she convulsed with pleasure as she rubbed at her clit. Finally, I couldn't hold back a second longer and I exploded inside of her.

  ***

  She was far from done with me after that first time, and I was more than willing. But after a couple of hours, we both collapsed into a sweaty heap of flesh and fell fast asleep. I woke up around 3 am, my throat parched, and I stumbled to the kitchen for a long drink of water. As I came back to the bedroom, I noticed that the bedroom light was on. I smiled to myself thinking that Missy was up and willing to have another go at it (as tired as I was, I had to admit I was up for it).

  But when I walked into the room, I saw something that froze me in my tracks. Jenna was standing over Missy, a thick wad of Missy's red hair gripped in one hand and a razor-sharp hunting knife held against her throat in another.

  "I swear to God, Paul, you take one step closer I'm gonna cut her throat from ear to ear!"

  Sometimes, the things you love the most come back to haunt you. In my case, they come back to kill something I loved even more.

  "Jenna... Jenna, you don't want to do this."

  "You’re making me do this!"

  I looked at Missy, her eyes filled with tears, pleading me with me to stop this mad woman, and suddenly my body seemed to take on a life of its own. With blinding speed, I chucked my water glass at Jenna's head. It missed its mark and shattered across her shoulder. I charged her, jumping over the bed and tackling her to the floor. She still had the knife clutched in her hand and, as my weight fell on top of hers, she let out an almost animal scream of pain. It shocked me so much that I pushed off of her and saw that the knife had plunged into her stomach just below the ribs. Her eyes were full of panic as her blood gushed from the grizzly wound. I tried to staunch the bleeding with my hands, but I knew that she was bleeding too heavily, and no matter what I did there was no saving her. Despite my anger at her for all the things she'd done to me in the past and for what she'd almost done to Missy, I held her in my arms and wept as the last of her life slowly drained out of her.

  Epilogue - Six Months Later

  The one thing I've realized since that dreadful night is that I've always been a searcher. I've spent my entire life searching for some type of purpose, something that I thought would make me a better person, or set me apart from my brothers and my family. Something that was entirely my own. Thinking back about the way my life once was, I knew that my life was nothing but foolishness and that my search was always leading me back to one place and one person.

  The place is the ranch. I know now it's where I've always belonged.

  And the person was Missy. I didn't know it then, and maybe that's why I always clung to the idea of being with Jenna. Because Jenna was just practice, someone to teach me what love isn't, so that when love finally found me, I would be ready for it.

  But the fact is, I wasn't just looking for one person. I was looking for two. Missy, and my daughter.

  She's due to arrive in another four months, and both Missy and I are teaching each other how to love her more than anything else.

  It's been a long road, a long search, but I can't tell you how glad I am to have made it here.

  THE END

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  Desired by the Alien King

  Blinking her bleary, groggy eyes, Gwendolyn tried to focus her mind on the last thing she could remember. The shooting pain in her head—where did that come from?—did not make it any easier.

  She and her archaeological team had been going through the Sarmian excavation. The desert around them was gorgeous. It reminded them of the Grand Canyon and the Painted Desert of North America back on Earth, except the browns and tans and the ruddy and rusty colors were streaked with green and grey. Being surrounded by all that beauty had made them wish they were tourists instead of scientists. But they had gotten to work well enough, for each of them was well accustomed to interplanetary travel. More exciting than Sarma itself was the idea of who lived there and what first contact with them meant. Gwendolyn and her people were living the dream of not only every archaeologist on Earth, but every biologist, every biochemist, every political scientist and historian, every philosopher—practically the whole of humanity. They were on the cutting edge of the most exciting thing to happen in human history since the confirmation of extraterrestrial life itself.

  The Sarmians were not merely extraterrestrial—they were humanoid. They had human forms, human anatomy. Except for the trail of hair descending from the hairline of the scalp to the bridge of the nose, they could easily pass for human, at least physically. It was something that science had always deemed biologically impossible, but it turned out to be one of the times when the universe yanked the rug out from under science. The Sarmians had become Earth's great obsession and people from every discipline were all but foaming at the mouth to have a crack at studying the planet and those who lived there.

  And Gwendolyn Rush had snagged for herself the singular honor of leading an archaeological team to the desert wilderness of Sarma, into the ruins of an ancient Sarmian society, to dig for clues to why the Sarmians were so much like humans.

  What they were seeking was not just insights into how ancient and prehistoric Sarmians might have lived, but also confirmation of the only theory that could explain them, a theory so radical that it could have been easily dismissed if the very existence of the Sarmians were not such a radical thing. What the scientists of Earth hoped the planet Sarma might yield was any clue to the identity and nature of the aliens who, the theory held, had come to Earth eons ago and abducted prehistoric humans, taking them across the stars to guide and shape their evolution for some unknowable purpose. The Sarmians were one riddle whose answer might expose a greater one.

  And that was what brought Gwendolyn light years from Earth into the heat and dust and undeniable beauty of another planet, supervising other archaeologists and students in the digging and scraping and sorting and categorizing for later study of structures buried in the sand and the objects and artifacts that they contained. As much as Gwendolyn loved and cared about the work, it made her wish that she were a leaner and lighter woman. Gwen was pretty—an almost luminous beauty in fact—with a soft round face, bright blue eyes, and an incandescent smile. When she did not have her hair bound up in a scarf or rolled up under a hat, it fell in loose black curls about her shoulders. But it was in the mid section that she felt a bit ponderous when she went to work on a dig. Her hips, buttocks, and thighs had somewhat more of a spread than she would have liked. At times she would watch the female students who accompanied her on digs, note their hips and thighs that lacked the same spread, and think, A decade and a half ago, that was me.

  But then, a decade and a half ago Gwendolyn was not one of the youngest leaders of the field of xenoarchaeology, whose perseverance had contributed to humanity's greater understanding of the non-human species of the galaxy. A decade and a half ago she could only dream of leading the effort to understand the other human-like species in the galaxy, something that biology had predicted man would never see. Even if she was not what the most desirable men wanted to take to bed, there were compensations.

  Work on Sarma proceeded uneventfully until Gwen and the crew noticed a greying of what had been a perfect blue sky, and a low sound like a million heavy breaths exhaling coming in from the distance. They all looked up from their tools and their excavations and found something growing and looming into view on the horizon. It was a
spreading vastness of ruddy brown emerging over the hills in the distance, and it could mean only one thing. Gwen cursed the luck. While modern Sarmian society was as advanced as Earth in many ways, they did not have a lot of the niceties of Earth, such as weather-tracking and severe weather dissipation systems. On Earth, massive sandstorms rising out of nowhere had ceased to be a problem long ago. Sarma, damn it all, still had them.

  As the airborne tsunami of sand came rushing in, Gwen ordered everyone to cover up their work, throw on scarves and goggles, and take cover themselves. She had just gotten her tools into an electric wheelbarrow along with some pottery whose markings and symbols she wanted to study and covered her eyes and her face when everything around her disappeared into flying sand. She pulled her electrolocator out of her pocket and turned it on, meaning to use it to find her way around by detecting masses and other moving bodies in the low visibility of the sandstorm. The screen on the device showed the shapes of structures and devices around her and the moving forms of the rest of her party. It also detected two other moving bodies coming up behind her, which she took to be simply two other members of her team looking for shelter.