Flynn's Kiss (Disarmed & Dangerous) (9 page)

Where the fuck was she? How could one little woman simply disappear from the face of the Earth? It wasn’t right. He wanted her, and he wanted her now. He’d gotten himself all hot and lathered and a huge erection going on by the time he’d arrived at her lodge that morning, all ready to fuck her brains out before maybe taking her out for breakfast, parading her around a little, letting folks know she was his.

He’d got a woman. He hadn’t had a girlfriend for almost three years. He’d had sex, it wasn’t so difficult to come by, but a relationship with all the trimmings…he was beginning to think it might be what he needed. It didn’t mean he was making a lifelong commitment. She may be lush and gorgeous with eyes he fell into every time he looked at her, and soft, rounded curves that suited her buoyant, bouncy nature. It was a refreshing change, but beyond her laughing and joking, he wasn’t convinced she had the level of intelligence to keep him interested. Most of what came out of her mouth was laughter and light teasing, and there was probably only so much of it a man could take. He liked intelligent women.

She couldn’t be that bright. She’d disappeared.

He rubbed his face and considered going back to shave before he tracked her down, and then shrugged. It didn’t make any difference, she wasn’t going to want him to put his face against hers anyway, despite reaching out to touch him with her fingers; she wouldn’t want the intimacy of his scars up against her sweet, soft skin.

He stopped as he reached the stables and wondered what the hell he was doing there. He’d damned near searched the entire property. The first place he’d called at was Jack and Kate’s, but Jack had been at work and Kate hadn’t even mentioned the bouncy brunette. He hadn’t wanted to bring up her name in case she was keeping him a secret.

He chewed the inside of his cheek where the scar tissue had left a thick ridge, glanced at his surroundings, and gave up on his search.

He was shit with women. He’d only just gotten himself laid and he’d lost her.

“Flynn. You going to stand there all day with your thumb up your ass, or are you coming to help an old man?”

He grinned. Carl had been old when Flynn was a boy, but he sure as hell still didn’t need help. He hadn’t aged any more. He just seemed to have shrunk some.

Three hours of working alongside Carl, with no need for conversation, relaxed Flynn enough for him to enjoy the familiar process of mucking out horses’ stalls. It eased his tension and cleared his mind. It wasn’t such a big deal the woman had disappeared. She was going to resurface sometime soon, and he was in for another hot session of sex when she did.

He grinned to himself as he watched Sam and Jack approach, both of them wearing jeans and T-shirts, boots and hats. Similar in size and stature, the brothers stood a couple of inches taller than Flynn, and where his slim wiry body lent itself to speed and agility, theirs were solid and resilient. When they were kids, he’d always been able to outrun and outmaneuver them, but if they caught him, they’d pound on him just to prove they could.

Things weren’t so very different now. They might have grown older, but he wondered if they’d ever grow up. They both had the light of mischief in their eyes, and he figured the only reason he wasn’t already chin deep in hay and horseshit was because Carl would probably beat the crap out of all three of them for goofing around in his stable yard.

He lifted his chin in acknowledgement, leaned on the handle of the shovel, and watched them approach through narrowed eyes. Carl might be there, but he wasn’t about to turn his back on the pair of them. One Swann was trouble, two were murder.

“Hey Flynn, where have you been? We haven’t seen you around since the party.” Jack pushed his hat farther back on his head and gave him a wide smile. “I have to say, you’re looking
magnificent,
Flynn.” The two brothers jostled each other with their elbows and grinned. Flynn squinted and cast the old boy a sideways glance and realized he was also snickering like a teenager.

“What the fuck…?”

Carl rubbed his nose with the back of his hand, and the brief smile dropped from his face as Buddy drew up across the yard with a truckload of supplies. Carl turned his back and started saddling the bay stallion he’d been grooming.

“Have you seen Liberty recently?” Sam’s dimples deepened as he tried not to laugh, and Flynn pinned him with a narrow-eyed stare. “How is she?”

“I bet she’s
magnificent
.” Jack chortled and the two idiots leaned on each other as they tried to catch their breath.

Flynn’s irritation ratcheted up at the mention of Liberty, but he decided not to take the bait as the boys were obviously only out for trouble. Another movement across the yard caught his attention, and he glanced over to where Buddy hopped down from the truck. The guy cast a furtive look in their direction, and for some strange reason, took a wide berth to avoid them. Flynn thought it was probably in Buddy’s best interest to do so, considering the mood the two brothers were in. He’d probably end up in the shit pile, too, at this rate. He glanced back in time to see Sam narrow his gaze and watch Buddy sneak across the yard.

“Dipshit.”

Since the boys’ attention was on someone else, Flynn turned to see what Carl was up to.

“Who’re you saddling the horse for?”

“Whoever is going to find Liberty.”

“Liberty?”

“Sure.” Carl squinted into the distance and flicked his hand. “She’s been gone a while now.”

“Where did she go?” It was like pulling teeth; the old man wasn’t going to volunteer information easily any time soon.

“Beats me. She took off on Shiloh.”

“Fuck, Carl. How long ago? She could be lost by now. I’ve been here for over three hours, so it must have been before then. It could take days to find her.”

“It won’t take you long, not with your tracking skills.” Carl’s calm nutmeg eyes met his as he handed him the reins.

“Who said I was going?”

“You wouldn’t expect an old man to go would you?”

Sam gave an innocent smile as he turned his attention back to Flynn. “I have to fence-check the eastern line.”

Jack shrugged. “I’m on duty in an hour.”

Bristling with anger and the unfamiliar concern rolling in his belly, Flynn threw himself up on the stallion’s back.

“Which way?”

Carl sucked his teeth for a moment while Jack and Sam stood silent, like a pair of bookends, with their arms folded across their chests, eyes narrowed, and lazy interest in their gazes.

“North.” Carl indicated with a nod. He clucked his tongue as Flynn wheeled the horse in the right direction, and then he handed him a canteen of water.

“I don’t reckon she’ll have gone too far. After all, her sweet little rump was slapping up and down on her saddle as she trotted out of here. She’s going to have one bruised ass by the time you find her.”

Flynn shot him a sharp look as Carl’s face, wreathed in a huge wrinkled smile, stared up at him. “She’s got
magnificent
rhythm, though.”

He whipped his head around, glared at the two idiot cowboys wiping tears from their eyes as they doubled over and laughed harder.

“Fuck you.”

Flynn clapped his knees to the horse’s side and felt the bunched up muscles stretch as the stallion obligingly shot forward, taking no more than a moment to go from canter to flat out gallop.

Confusion and anger bubbled together as deep masculine laughter rolled out behind him. Didn’t they realize what danger she could be in?

Flynn hunkered down and let the stallion have his head.

“Fuck.”

Liberty had gone missing. The heat of the day could have killed her by now. Delicate as she was, she would have been unprepared for wilderness such as this, and she’d already proven she didn’t understand the heat of the sun in this part of the world.

He’d murdered her hat the night before, and her sweet tender skin was going to be burned to a frazzle. If that didn’t take its toll, and he didn’t find her by nightfall, she’d most likely die of hyperthermia.

He pulled the stallion down to a canter. No point winding the horse this early on in the search. He glanced down at the ground and checked to see he was on her trail. A little curl of unease trickled through his gut. It didn’t look as though she was travelling alone. He’d have thought Carl would have mentioned it if she was with someone. It made sense if Carl had sent a guide with her, but from the look of the smaller hoof prints, she was being closely followed by a pony. No self-respecting cowboy would sit a pony that size.

He lowered his brows and squinted at the trail. The hoof marks in the soil were too regular and close to the larger horse. She wasn’t being followed, she was leading a pony for some reason, a pony with plenty of weight on it. What the hell was going on?

He tempered the horse’s pace again and let his imagination roll while he thought of what he was going to do once he found her, because from the look of it, Miss Liberty might not be in as much danger as Carl had made out.

He blew out a breath and leaned back in his saddle to ponder. Come to think of it, Carl hadn’t made out she was in any kind of danger. He’d only said she’d been gone awhile. He ran his hand over the back of his neck as a prickle of suspicion he’d just been set up tingled through his system. The sneaky little bastard had been gurgling with laughter when he left.

The heat of the sun warmed his skin and relaxed his mind, letting it wander while he automatically tracked her.

Carl mentioned her ass had been slapping up and down in the saddle, but it was probably because she was English and they did it when the horse trotted. He was pretty sure it was called posting, and the whole idea, contrary to Carl’s opinion, was that they didn’t get their asses bruised on the skimpy little English saddles if they got the rhythm right.

A mellow languor stole over him as he remembered her rhythm. Yup, it was pretty damned good. Her thighs had been well-toned and had the strength to ride him. Her taut little ass had flexed and stretched in all the right places, and he couldn’t recall a single moment when he could complain about loss of rhythm.

He blew out a gusty breath to try and cool himself, but he couldn’t pull his mind away from Liberty’s legs. When she’d entwined them around him the night before, she’d been in no danger of letting go. Course, he’d had her pressed hard against the door, with no slide factor built in. He gave a wry smile at the hot memory of little Miss Liberty and tried to redirect his thoughts onto their original path, but the vision of her backside doing a rising trot distracted him.

Course there was no need for posting in an American saddle as they were as comfortable as an armchair, but he wouldn’t mind seeing her posting. Not just her sweet little ass, but those luscious breasts had to be affected in some way. The thought of her breasts consumed his mind and off went his imagination down that track again. He remembered her breasts jiggling above him the other night, and then again held firmly in his palms last night. Warm and heavy, soft and satiny. Her evocative scent, light and feminine when he tucked his face into her neck, had stayed with him and conjured memories and desires.

He was pretty sure the sun was affecting his brain as he took a few swift gulps of water and readjusted himself as the thought of Liberty made him harden and swell, making him pretty uncomfortable in the armchair of a saddle.

Sunlight burned the back of his retinas, so after four hours of riding, he could have sworn blind he was hallucinating when those scorched-out eyes focused on a spot of bright, glowing white almost on the horizon. A little beacon.

He strained his vision in the vain hope he might be wrong, but as he approached, he knew fucking well it was the bouncy brunette with another goddamn awful excuse for a hat perched upon her head. Some ignorant bastard had taken a perfectly good Stetson and colored it up white. Stark white.

Fuck.

The yellow one with the dead bird wrapped around it had been an obscenity and had been quickly squashed. It wasn’t deliberate, and he still had the pretty little feathers in the breast pocket of his shirt for some reason beyond his own comprehension. But this hat was even worse.

He scanned her campsite as he advanced on her. She seemed to have managed to unsaddle the horse and unload the pack pony and was seated on a deep pink blanket on the ground, leaning comfortably with her back up against the saddle.

Fuck.

Her bright eyes were on him, and she had a mile-wide smile plastered across her face as though she’d been expecting him. She was the only person he knew who could possibly look cute in a goddamned ugly white Stetson.

Fuck.

She gave a little shake of her head and flicked her hair back over her shoulder. He almost fell out of his saddle when a musical jingle accompanied her movement, and he realized some idiot had attached a string of tiny silver bells that danced around the headband of the Stetson.

“Hi, Flynn. What brings you all the way out here?”

He was still gulping in air trying to recover from the atrocity. His already heated flesh began to simmer. Like she didn’t know. She looked as cool as a cucumber, completely at ease and unflustered, and for some reason that riled him.

“You.”

Smooth and easy, keeping his eyes on her, he dismounted.

“Me?”

“Yup.”

If anything, her smile widened like she was pleased to see him, and her straight white teeth sparkled at him. He narrowed his eyes and stared at them to see if any of them were even slightly crooked. They weren’t. They were perfect.

Fuck.

She reached forward and astounded him as she picked up a wine glass, took a sip of the contents, and replaced it on the ground at her side with delicate, feminine precision.

Fuck.

She was perfect. He was in such fucking trouble, and something about it made him furious.

“Is that wine?”

“Hmmm,” she hummed, obviously pleased with the flavor.

He clucked his tongue in disgust and turned away from her, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. He unfastened the horse’s girth, removed the saddle, and placed it on the ground. He looped the horse’s reins to allow him to wander the few steps to join the other two animals behind where Liberty had set up her perfect little camp. In the perfect spot, beside the small stream meandering past. Perfect.