April, Dani - Raven's Ranch (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme) (23 page)

She hopped on her good leg as she bent down to pick up her boot. She thought about putting it on but decided she couldn’t because her shin was too badly scraped. She watched Roy as he disappeared over the side of the bluff, taking extra careful steps so that he wouldn’t go over the edge. Now what was that crazy man doing, she wondered, and felt like a complete idiot herself as she was forced to hop around on one foot.

In a minute Roy returned and he was wheeling her bike up the rocky face with him. The bike was banged up pretty bad and looked like it had blown the front tire. Considering it could have fallen off the edge and plunged three hundred feet to the bottom, just seeing the bike again, even in a damaged state, was a welcome sight.

“Can you put any weight on that leg?”

“Yes, nothing’s broken. I don’t even think anything is strained. It just hurts, that’s all,”

He laughed as he looked down at her leg. “I haven’t seen so much blood outside the slaughter house.”

The sight of his mirth brought all of her anger back. “Go to hell!”

“That’s probably where I’ll end up.” He was still laughing. “Come on, we’ve got to get some first aid on that leg.”

He motioned for her to follow him, not even trying to help her now. Apparently she had scared him off with her temper.

“Where are you taking me now?” She groaned through her pain as she slowly hobbled after him.

“There’s a supply shed just up ahead. It just might have a first aid kit in it.”

“What’s it doing all the way up here?”

“It’s above the flood plain. We store some auxiliary equipment out here for that flood that comes around once every ten years.”

“All right, I’m coming, wait for me,” she said, trying her best to keep up with him on her sore leg.

The supply shed was just a tiny barn standing on top of the bluff. Inside, it was dark and smelled moldy. There were boxes stacked all along the walls, but Raven couldn’t make out what any of them held in the dark. She sat down on the floor and held her injured leg out before her. When she looked down at it, she saw it was still oozing blood. It was at the stage where it looked a lot worse than it felt, and it looked really horrible.

Another embarrassment was her torn jeans. They were just an old pair, and she didn’t care about losing them. They had been ripped to shreds along the left leg, torn all the way up to the waist. The other leg of her pants hadn’t fared much better. The jeans’ right leg had a huge rent in the thigh that made it hang down to her knee. Fortunately, her right leg had escaped with just a few minor cuts.

Her panties were even showing under the carnage of her jeans and she tried to cover up with her long shirt.

Roy cranked open a window next to where she sat. Light poured inside the dark interior. Her shin was revealed to be even uglier than she first thought. She winced at the image.

After a moment, Roy brought down a small first aid kit from one of the shelves and knelt at her side. She felt too humiliated to even fight him anymore, and she let him bring her damaged leg up and set it across his knee. She smelled the antiseptic as he opened a bottle and began rubbing some on a cotton ball.

“This is going to hurt a little.” He tried to prepare her.

“Go ahead,” she told him.

She tensed up and pounded back against the wall in pain as he rubbed the cotton along her cut shin. More tears bubbled in her eyes, but she refused to let them fall.

“The bleeding has stopped, but it’s a good thing we had this first aid kit out here. That’s a really deep cut. You could have easily gotten an infection.”

She wanted to move away from the pain of the antiseptic-soaked cotton rubbing along her leg but bravely held out her leg for him to continue.

“Almost done,” he told her. “You’re doing well, just a little more to go down here.” After a few minutes the pain level fell to that of a sting and she was able to relax and lean back. “There, all finished.”

“Thanks,” she found herself telling him grudgingly.

He fumbled through the first aid kit looking for a bandage that would be big enough to fit over her cut and the right size to fit at the awkward angle of the wound. He finally settled on three large bandages, as her cut was thick enough and long enough to require them all, and propped her leg back over his knee to start applying them.

Outside, the sky had darkened prematurely, and light drops of rain began to fall. The tin roof of the shed caught each drop and made it sound like a deluge of water instead of just a light summer sprinkle.

“You’re almost patched up as good as new. It’ll be a couple of months before that thing heals entirely, and even then it’ll probably leave a scar.”

“Oh, great, I’m maimed now.”

“You’re still the sexiest woman on the ranch.”

“Sure. I’m the only woman on the ranch.”

He smiled. “Probably ought to take those pants off and let me take a look at the other leg.”

She looked up at him and was going to say something mean, but then stopped herself short. He was trying to be good to her, and after all it hadn’t really been his fault what happened to her. Carefully bringing her shirt down to her knees to hide everything, she reached to her waist and unfastened her jeans then shrugged out of them. They were ruined and she threw them aside.

“There are a couple more cuts over here we really need to get the antiseptic on. They’re not as big as the other one, but they could still get infected,” he told her and started over again on her right leg, bringing it up to rest on his knee and administering to her.

“Finally got you out of your pants,” he told her and laughed. “Told you I was going to get you out of your pants someday.”

She laid her head back against the wall and felt demoralized. “Why don’t you go ahead and fuck me. Isn’t that why you wanted me to come out here?”

“It’s funny things turned out like this,” he told her as he worked on her leg, completely ignoring her comment.

“Yeah, funny, ha-ha…”

“What I mean is I actually did want you to come out here today for a reason.”

“I’m a little sore to spread my legs right now, but the night is still young. Give me a couple of hours.”

He laughed at her, not fazed by her banter in the least. “Not everything revolves around your pussy, Raven,” he told her. “Though I hear it’s pretty amazing.”

She laughed in spite of how she felt. His hands really felt good as they worked the bandage over her cut. “Okay, I give up. If you didn’t bring me up here to fuck me, then why did you want me to come all the way up here?”

He finished with the last bandage and set her legs back on the floor. He went over to one of the shelves and pulled down another box. He brought the box over and set it down before her on the floor. Kneeling down, he opened the box—it didn’t look as if it had ever been opened before—and brought out a tiny instrument holding it up to the light for her to get a better look.

“You know what this is?” he asked.

“I have no idea. What is it?”

“A GPS ear tag for a cow.”

“Oh, my God.” She suddenly became interested, new life flooded back into her. She sat up and reached for the device, taking it out of his hand. “How did you get this?”

“We’ve got a lot of them. In this shed alone there are several thousand of these little babies.”

Suddenly Raven felt no more pain. For a second the crash was forgotten, as was her severely cut leg, and the fact that she sat on the floor in front of him wearing only a shirt and panties and felt like she had lost all of her pride in the last hour. All of it was forgotten. What Roy had just given her was the key to her future life on the ranch.

“Are you serious?” she looked over at him, wanting to shout for joy.

“Well, honey, there’s one thing I’d never do, and that’s lie to a half-naked woman about a GPS chip,” he told her, his old mocking tone back.

“Why do you have them?” She reached past him and tore into the box he had brought down. In that box alone there were probably a couple dozen.

“I got them for your grandfather a couple years back. He had some crazy idea about joining the twenty-first century and tagging all his cattle with one of these things.”

“Well why didn’t he do it?” Raven was exasperated. “If he had done so back then we wouldn’t be in all this trouble now.”

“He was a stubborn old man. I was the one who originally talked him in to buying all of these, but he talked himself out of ever using them.”

“You talked him into buying these?”

“Yeah, I did. Why do you look so surprised? I have a college education.”

“You have a college education?” Raven’s jaw must have dropped open. This rude-talking, unshaven, long-haired, black-hat cowboy had a college education the same as her?

He just shrugged and gave her a wicked devil-may-care smile.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that. It’s just…what was your major in?”

“Computers.” He looked down and away from her.

She was so surprised she hobbled over closer to him on the floor, and let her shirt fall open just a little too much without knowing it.

“My God, that’s the same as me.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Why are you out here in the middle of nowhere working on a ranch that can’t even afford to pay you regularly?”

“Like you, I couldn’t get a job right away in the industry because of the bad economy.” He paused as if he didn’t want to continue.

“And?”

“And like you, I came up with a unique way of getting out of otherwise depressing circumstances.”

“You fell in love with five cowboys?”

“Cute.” He laughed with her.

“No really, tell me, what did you do?”

“I was a hacker. I made a killing until the FBI caught up with me. I ended up spending a couple of years in a federal prison. When I got out, the courts told me I couldn’t work in the industry again.”

Raven looked at him. She felt like she was seeing him for the first time. He was so much like her in so many ways. “You were trying to help my grandfather save the ranch even before I got here, weren’t you?”

“He wouldn’t take my help.”

“Well, I will take your help,” she grabbed a hold of his shirt, pulling herself close to him.

“I can’t do that, sorry.”

“Why?”

“You already fired me, remember?”

“I’m unfiring you,” she told him and pulled him the rest of the way into her arms. Their lips met. They both opened their mouths, and their tongues danced over one another.

He pulled her back down to the floor and continued their embrace and their long kiss. Saliva mixed between their mouths. Passion warmed her inside and caused her heart to start beating fast and her breathing to become heavy. It seemed like he wouldn’t let her go for the longest time. Finally, they both had to come up for air.

“Do you realize we have what we need to save the ranch now,” she told him, deliriously happy, placing another big kiss on his mouth.

“Maybe.”

“No maybes,” she told him firmly. “With you and me working together, we can install the software and run it.”

“Can we find any software we can afford to buy?” he asked, and she could tell he was starting to get interested now as well.