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"You ever wanna talk, Elena? You know where I’m at."
"Thanks, Hunt. I need to check the yearlings before they get into trouble."
Yearlings were like teenage boys—bold, restless, and too damn curious for their own good. If I didn’t keep an eye on them, they’d be testing the fence line, pestering the older geldings, or getting tangled up in something they shouldn’t.
I remembered Duke as a teenage boy—reckless, stubborn, mine in ways neither of us had understood back then. But the man standing on Wilder Ranch now? He wasn’t mine. He belonged to someone else.
I knew why my heart ached; I knew why it felt like something inside me had split open, raw and bleeding. But knowing didn’t make it hurt any less. It only made it worse.
The man I loved was here.And he hated me.
CHAPTER 4
duke
One fucking day and she’d all but driven me into a physical altercation with another man.
“What the hell is going on with you?” Fiona demanded, throwing her phone onto the king-size bed that Itzel—the housekeeper who’d introduced herself with a polite smile—had made up so neatly it felt like we were in a hotel.
The whole house had a very manicured vibe that hadn’t been there before.
Maria had made the house feel like a home. I regretted that thought as soon as it entered my head because I’d made a conscious effort to see nothing positive about the woman who had spent nearly a decade and a half in my father’s bed while my mother nursed a broken heart.
Fiona had chosen my mother’s old bedroom for us to stay in. I’d asked her just to pick a place in the west wingof the house. I knew Maria and Elena had rooms in the east, but that was when I thought Elena still lived in the ranch house and wanted her gone. But I also wanted her at the ranch to show her I’d moved on.
Look at my sexy blonde girlfriend, bitch.You’re not in my life anymore. I’ve moved on while you’re still here.
But Elena wasn’t the girl I’d left behind. This woman wasdifferent. She wasn’t bright and cheery, rosy-cheeked, andhappy. This woman was gaunt. Still beautiful as fuck but subdued. Her eyes weren’t bright; those chocolate brown eyes were somber. Her body wasn’t curvy like it used to be. It was wiry, probably because she lived on horses. Her hands didn’t look soft, and yes, I’d looked at them. They were hands that did work.
Her whole demeanor was the antithesis of who she used to be.
“Mi cielo, make love to me.” She raised her beautiful lips for me.
I knew I’d hurt her when I took her virginity, but she wanted more; she wanted to feel close.
“You’re probably sore,” I managed to say, though my cock was throbbing to be inside her again, feeling her climax squeeze the cum out of me.
“Please,” she moaned, and I was gone.
For three months, I made love to her, made love with her, stayed inside her, next to her. I’d told her I loved her, words I’d never said to anyone else in my life, not even my mother.
Words had power; I knew that, and I gave it all to her.My sweet Elena turned out to be not really sweet when I found out she’d seduced me as her mother had my father.
“I didn’t know, Duke. I promise. I didn’t know.”
“How could you not know that your mother was whoring herself when you lived in the same house,” I thundered.
She wept, repeating, “I didn’t know.”
“Your mother destroyed mine,” I said to her. I threw ten one-hundred-dollar bills at her. “I think that’s payment enough for your pussy.”
“Duke?” She looked at me like I’d stabbed her.
“Cut the act, Elena. Take that money, take your mother, and get the fuck off of this ranch.”
But I was the one who had left when I confronted my father, and he told me that this was none of mybusiness. He screamed at Elena for being a slut, and I’d liked that, hadn’t I? Though, now, when I looked back, it seemed unfair and disgusting that a man who was sleeping with that girl’s mother was calling her names for having an affair with his son. The whole thing was a nightmare out of some shitty talk show from the nineties.
“Duke?” Fiona demanded. “What the hell is?—”