Temptation: Reckless Desires (Blue Moon Saloon Book 2) (4 page)

But then Janna had caught up with him and restored the peace and balance in him again. Kissed him just long and hard enough to turn the lights in his soul back on.

He drove, replaying the kiss over and over in his mind, because thinking about it kept him swimming in a sea of serenity instead of buffeted by a storm.

He drove ten miles west, to where the dense lights of town spread farther and farther apart. Glanced up at a sky full of stars and looked around. Ducked his head to check every possible angle and only relaxed his grip on the wheel when he was sure the moon wasn’t visible on the horizon.

He worked his shoulders in loose circles. No moon was good. No moon meant he had half a chance of getting through the night sane.

When he made it home and parked, he shut the car door quietly, not wishing to disturb the fragile peace he felt. Then he snuck up to his apartment over the barn and hopped straight into bed like a kid trying not to get caught for staying out too late.

And miracle of miracles, he actually got to sleep. A deep, restful sleep — the kind he remembered from a long time ago. The only dreams that flitted across his brain were good ones, full of meadows and flowers and gurgling mountain streams. Some of the dreams, he ambled through alone, and in others — the best ones — he had Janna at his side and her hand firmly clasped in his. A few were a little weird, with wildflowers springing up against his nose and tickling his belly because he was crouched over them on all fours. Make that four feet and a tail that wouldn’t stop wagging because Janna was there, too. Her body was hidden by the tall grass, and she seemed to have shrunk, too, but he could smell her, right in front of him. And that was nice. Calming. Peaceful.

And yeah, weird, but whatever. He’d take what he could get.

He woke up sometime in the middle of the night and blinked for a while, feeling unusually good for a change. No booze drumming through his head. No nightmares itching through his bones. No memories haunting him.

He wandered over to the bathroom, half asleep, then headed back to bed, hoping for more sleep. But when his gaze strayed out the window, his blood ran cold.

The moon. A fat, greedy, almost-full moon, shining right into his apartment. Right on him like a spotlight, saying,
I want you. I control you.

He yanked the flimsy curtains together, flopped back on the bed, and turned his back to the window. Pretended he couldn’t feel the pull of the moon on his body. Somewhere on the Earth, the ocean was being drawn into a high tide by that force, and for the first time ever, he felt the tug of it, too. On his skin. On his blood. On his soul.

No matter how much he willed the dreams of Janna back, all he got were nightmares. The moon pulled on him like a puppet that twisted and jolted and jumped. He observed it from the outside, though he was still connected enough to feel the pain. The moon pulled him apart, limb from limb, then reassembled the pieces in the wrong way.

Then the nightmare had him running. He was furious. Dangerous. Foaming at the mouth. Chasing some helpless prey over wooded hills. Closing in for the kill and getting absolutely, uncontrollably high from the adrenaline of it. He ripped a doe apart with teeth that couldn’t be his and relished the bitter taste of hot blood dripping down his chin. Wolves appeared to try to steal a piece, and he snapped and growled, chasing them off. A couple of sad-eyed bears came along, too, shaking their heads at him, and when they wandered on without getting involved, his soul cried.

Lost cause,
one of the bears muttered to the other.

Not worth our time,
the second one agreed.

And then his heart stopped, because Janna appeared behind the bears, looking at him. Bright and beautiful as ever except for the disgust written all over her face.

Not worth my time,
she said and loped off behind the bears.

Help me!
He wanted to scream to them.
Don’t give up on me!

“Give up…” he yelped into the darkness, jolting upright in a cold sweat. The arm he threw out knocked the light off the bedside table, and glass shattered across the floor. The shards glimmered eerily in the moonlight seeping through the curtain.

He panted into the sheets for a while, then stumbled to the bathroom to splash water over his face. He scrubbed his eyes and stared in the mirror, scared as hell at what he might do next. Put his fist through a wall? Howl at the moon?

Find her. Find my mate,
the voice growled inside.

He backed away from the mirror. Locked the door he never bothered locking and put a chair in front of it — not to keep anyone out, but to keep himself in, because the images that came with the voice were ugly. He saw Janna, screaming frantically. Fighting off insistent hands that grabbed at places no man had a right to touch, not when a woman didn’t want him to.

Janna, fighting
him
madly. It was him in that vision, forcing her.

“No!” He yelled it out loud, and the vision wavered.

He shook his head, swearing he’d never, ever hurt her. That wouldn’t, couldn’t ever be him.

Just a dream, just a dream…

But, shit. What were those crazy ideas doing in his head, anyway? If he was capable of imagining such things, maybe he was capable of doing them, too.

“Never,” he grunted at the ceiling. “Never.”

He said it a hundred times, then another hundred, and another. Eventually, he drifted through an uneasy half slumber until he blinked at a shaft of sunlight knifing through the room. Tilted his head at the sound of a rooster crowing outside.

He glanced at the clock. Almost six a.m. Sunrise.

The rooster crowed again.
Get moving, you ass!

He rolled out of bed and crunched right past the shattered glass of the lamp in bare feet. He paid the little cuts and spikes of pain no heed as he stared into the bathroom mirror. The face he found there was a stranger who looked a lot like him, but not like the him he remembered. This one was darker. Messier. Crazier. He could see it in the eyes.

Jesus, man,
he wanted to say.
Who are you?

Not the Cole Harper he used to be. The one who could smile and flirt and joke. The one who could focus on anything he wanted and go after it with single-minded determination. The one who wasn’t scared of anything. Not bucking broncs or the bulls he’d ridden or the ones he’d faced down when he went from bull riding to bullfighting — not clowning, some called it, though saving the life of a fallen rider was anything but — because that gave him an even bigger high.
Real
bullfighting — not that gory stuff they did in Spain with capes and who knew what. Bullfighting, as in rodeo bullfighting — going face-to-face with raging beasts looking to trample the cowboys they’d just bucked off. That’s what he used to do — save those men’s lives.

And nothing had ever stopped him. Nothing ever made him give up. Until…

Until one day that started perfectly and quickly went to hell in a real-life nightmare that was worse than anything his imagination could conjure up.

He splashed again and watched the water trickle slowly down his face.

Crap, was he messed up.

So get yourself back together,
the growl in his head said.
Win my mate!

If the voice had come with a face, he’d have punched it out the window of his apartment and right into the water trough downstairs. What the hell was that voice?

He stood in the shower, trying to figure it out. Maybe the pain killers he’d tried taking for a while were mixing with the alcohol he’d been drowning himself in over the past couple of months. Some kind of delayed reaction that was messing with his mind.

Except the voice has been getting worse, asshole,
he told himself.
Even though you’ve been drinking less.

He paused on that thought. He had been drinking less ever since he’d met Janna. Didn’t have much choice, what with her sneaky tricks.

“Your whiskey.” She’d wink and set down a glass filled with Coke. Then she’d smile at him with eyes so full of hope and innocence and belief —
belief
, damn it, like she was so sure of him — that he’d had no choice but to gulp the Coke down. Gulp it and smack his lips and joke to the burly bartender that the saloon really ought to stock stronger stuff.

Simon would roll his eyes at Janna’s misplaced crusade and go right back to watching her sister’s every move with his love-struck, faithful eyes.

Cole thought back in time. Thought forward. Tried to match things up. The inner voice started after he’d slowed the drinking down. Sometime after he’d been knocked out in that fight at the saloon, that time he’d walked in on the men who’d cornered Janna and Jess.

Maybe that was it. His brain had gotten rattled when he’d been thrown against the wall. The guy he’d been grappling with seemed to possess superhuman strength. But shit, he’d had a couple of other falls in his life that had knocked him cold, and none of them left him imagining voices in his head.

Christ, maybe he ought to go back to drinking again.

No way,
the voice shot back.
Must please our mate, and she doesn’t like it.

He got out of the shower, finger-combed his hair, and risked another glance in the mirror. He looked gloomy. And tired. So, so tired.

He made himself the world’s strongest coffee and a burned piece of toast then headed down the creaky outside stairs to the barn. Slowly, to soak in the sunlight, which reminded him of Janna and everything good.

“Heya, Pip.” He tossed his toast crust to the one-eyed Chihuahua-pit bull mix that came running up to him with its tail wagging as it did every day.

The dog scrambled to a halt, though, then backed away.

“Hey!” he protested, stepping closer.

Pip skittered back, showing his teeth.

“Hey, what did I do?” he called after the dog. Then he kicked the dirt. “Great.” The only two souls in the world who looked at him without judgment were Pip and Janna, and now Pip hated him.

Which only left Janna. And Christ, how long would it be before she gave up on him, too?

“Bad night, Cole?” Rosalind called to him from a few stalls down.

Ros was old enough to be his grandmother and fussed over him like one, too. The indomitable Annie Oakley-type owned Lazy Q Stables and pretty much ran the place on her own, but she said she liked having a man around. Still, Cole suspected the job was more about her taking care of him than him taking care of the horses. She tut-tutted over how much or how little he ate, drank, and slept, as if she’d lost track of how many sons she’d given birth to and had taken Cole under her wing. Him and Pip and half a dozen horses everyone else had given up on as too old or too creaky or too jittery to be of much use.

No wonder he’d always felt at home in this place.

“Morning, Ros,” he sighed, grabbing a saddle. “How many today?”

The trail ride business in this part of Arizona had more downs than ups, but Rosalind usually managed to rustle up just enough customers to pay the bills.

“Eight riders,” she said, filling a bucket with oats. “You can start with Dakota, then saddle up Rye…”

He set the saddle along a rail and strode into Dakota’s stall, thankful for this bit of normalcy. Having grown up on a ranch, he could do this job in his sleep. Saddle a couple of horses, clean the stalls. A dead-end job he’d have scoffed at a year ago, but hell, it worked for him now. It earned him a bit of cash and came with the two-room apartment above the stables. Perfect for a not-too-picky wash-up of a cowboy trying to escape the ghosts of his past.

The job had also come without any questions asked about why a guy in his prime would want an end-of-the-road job at a dusty stable that barely made ends meet, as long as he knew horses. And he knew horses, all right. Horses and bulls.

“Morning, Dakota,” he murmured, stepping inside the stall.

The pinto nickered once in greeting, but then her ears went from flopping drowsily to folded back in alarm, and she sidestepped away.

“Whoa, there,” he tried, keeping his voice low.

The horse huffed. Her pink nostrils opened wide, testing the air. She pawed at the hay under her feet.

“Come on, just a little trail ride.” He clipped the lead on to her halter on the third try. God, why was the horse so jittery?

She pranced around as he led her out and tossed her head restlessly the whole time he saddled her. The mare only really settled down once he’d led her outside and left her tied to a post, ready to ride.

Damn horse. Maybe she’d had a bad night, too.

But horse after horse acted the same way, and even Rosalind shook her head at him.

“What’s with you, boy?”

Shit. He wished he knew.

“Whatever it is that’s eating at you, keep it out of the barn. Last thing I need is jittery horses with guests who can barely tell a horse’s head from its ass.” She stepped closer and took his chin in her hand. Turned his head right, then left, the way she studied sick horses and cows. “That girl of yours turn you down?”

“Girl?” How would Rosalind know about Janna? And Janna hadn’t turned him down. Not yet, anyway.

She chuckled. “Whatever poor girl who’s been working so hard at cleaning you up.”

He stepped back, running a hand over his chin. The stubble felt strange, because he usually shaved. Well, over the past couple of weeks, at least, so Janna wouldn’t think he was a complete bum.

Rosalind smacked him on the shoulder. “Seems like a girl worth keeping, if you ask me.”

He hadn’t, but that wouldn’t stop Ros.

“A girl worth trying a little harder for,” she went on, looking at him with that
Son, I expect better from you
look.

A girl worth dying for,
the voice in his head added with a growl.

“Um…” he tried. What exactly did a man say to that?
A girl who deserves better than me?

Ros smacked his other shoulder, hard enough to make him shuffle. “Back to work. Quit upsetting the horses. And tonight…” Her wrinkled face took on a mischievous glow. “Tonight, you get some flowers and bring them to her, and…” She winked, then cleared her throat. “And I’m sure you can figure it out from there.”