Page 21 of The Rogue (Four Corners Ranch #11)

What he wanted to do was wrap her up in cotton wool and put her on a shelf until she was able to process what had happened

with the dissolved wedding. He didn’t want her going off half-cocked with some ridiculous notion that she was unappealing

and needed to test herself with some random man to prove she was hot. But he also didn’t need her looking at him like she

was both curious and hungry. It was just bad. It was all bad.

“Aggghh.”

The moment was broken by Rue’s plaintive noise.

Rue was hopping from one foot to the other because the ground was so fucking cold.

“The water’s only going to make this worse,” he said.

“We can do it!” she shouted.

“This is insane. And not only that, it’s unnecessary.”

“Quit being a baby!” she said.

“I am not being a baby. I am being a reasonable human being who is pointing out to you that this is not going to—”

And then she shrieked and began running toward the water. At full tilt. And he had no choice but to follow.

The minute the icy water enveloped her, Rue knew she had made a mistake. Hell, she had pretty much known it from the moment

they had pulled up, but he was giving her such a hard time and she wouldn’t allow him to win. Which meant they both had to

lose.

And then...

Then he had stripped his shirt off, his pants off, and she had found herself staring at a whole lot more of his body then

she usually did.

Everything was so tangled up in her head. She was single. So that was a thing. Single for the first time in a very long time,

and he was a man and she didn’t normally think of him that way.

Well, it wasn’t like she had never thought of him that way. But that wasn’t what defined him the most. It was all this sex

talk. Around him. At him. With him.

And suddenly then she couldn’t really think of him as anything else. The most gorgeous man she had ever seen in her life,

standing there with her half-naked out in the middle of nowhere, and that was the thing that had got her feet moving. Like

she was running away from him.

Only he had followed.

And now she was submerged in ice.

It was like the thought jarred her awake. She propelled herself back up toward the surface and gasped, which actually came

out a lot more like a scream as she started windmilling her way desperately to shore.

“That was so dumb!” she screamed as she pulled herself up on the shore.

“No fucking kidding,” he shouted, coming out behind her.

She shivered, and then started laughing. “Oh my goodness, I am so ridiculous.” She chattered and chattered. “What was I thinking?”

“You weren’t,” he said.

And then he moved to her and wrapped an arm around her, bringing her close to his body, which was still warmer than hers,

in spite of the fact that he had just gone into the same water. Her hand pressed against his bare chest, his skin wet like

hers. She felt his chest hair beneath her fingertips. Her ear was pressed against his heart, and she could hear it thundering

fast. And it was like everything stopped making sense. Like the world had been turned on its head. Maybe they had hypothermia.

Or at least she did. Because this didn’t feel like it should have. Like it often did to be taken into Justice’s arms. Because

he was a man. And their skin was pressed together, and she was really curious about what it was like to lose your mind over

somebody. She was afraid to look up at him, but at the same time she was compelled to do it. She tilted her face upward, and

he looked down at her.

It was like time stopped. A more heightened version of what had happened to her up on the mountain during their ride. “We’ve

got to warm you up,” he said.

She looked away from him then, because she had to. And that was when she saw it. It looked like a cave that she’d never noticed before, nestled just behind the watering hole. You would have to snake along the rocks to get into it, but she wondered if anyone had.

“Is that...?”

“Don’t,” he said, grabbing hold of her arm and dragging her back, his grip bruising. The look on his face was so unlike Justice.

She didn’t even know what to do with it.

“I was just looking,” she said.

“It’s not safe,” he said. “It’s dangerous.”

“To look at a cave?”

“Don’t go in there. You can’t... you can’t go in there.”

“I wasn’t... I wasn’t going to.”

She grabbed her other clothes up off the ground, and held her shoes in her hands as she made her way back to the truck. He

followed her, but he didn’t get dressed. He opened up the truck door and got inside, still in only his underwear. And he was

all angry . And everything felt strange.

“It’s not you,” he said.

“What? I know it’s not me, you’re freaking out and I didn’t do anything. So I assume you don’t like caves.”

“No. I don’t,” he said. “I... I never mentioned this because it happened before you moved to the ranch. I used to go exploring

all around these parts. I went in that cave. There was a cave-in and I was trapped for three days.”

“What?”

She was already completely disoriented and his words didn’t even make sense. He’d never mentioned this. He’d never even hinted

at it before.

“Yeah. I was seven. Anyway. I still don’t like closed-in spaces like that.”

She had never actually noticed Justice having a phobia of anything like that, but if she thought about it, there were certain things he didn’t do.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She was still shivering in spite of the heater in the truck. “Why has it never come up in your family? Why—”

“You know how we are, Rue. You know how things were back then. I don’t even know what all was happening with my brothers all

the time at that point. The house was chaotic. Half the time Denver slept out in the barn and Daughtry was always following

after Denver. Landry was already obsessed with Fia—whether she knew it yet or not—and he was always loitering wherever she

was to try to catch a glimpse of her. Basically, everyone was just trying to survive. Me being lost for a few days? That was

just... the kind of thing that happened.” He cleared his throat. “So yeah. It’s just never been that big of a deal.”

“But you got... really upset.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I did. I don’t avoid this place. I live here. I would never go back in that cave, and I would never want

anyone else to.”

“Well, that’s why it seems odd you haven’t mentioned it.”

“My brothers know. And not very many people come down here. I’ve never had to worry about you being an exploratory little

rat because you’re usually so cautious. So yeah. I don’t normally have to worry about you. But that was kind of a random move

on your part.”

“I’m not random,” she said.

“You’re being a little random.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

That added to the weirdness of all of this.

There was some major trauma in his life that she didn’t even know about?

She had witnessed a whole lot of his childhood, so she had always been pretty sure that she just knew about the things that happened to him.

Apparently not. It was a strange revelation.

As was sitting there looking at his bare chest, his bicep, being this close to him in the truck.

“It was so exhausting, suddenly. She was wet, and it was getting a little bit humid inside. Her best friend was half-naked

right next to her and he had just told her about something awful that had happened him. She wanted to reach out to him, but

it felt weird to do it because there was something about the way he held her down by the water that had rearranged things

inside of her. She felt exposed. Which was strange because he was the one that had told her this new thing about himself.

“Let’s go home. I’ll get you some hot chocolate. We’ll watch a movie.”

“No. I want...”

He looked at her, his gaze sharp.

“Just leave it. Okay? It’s not a big deal. I’m sorry that I freaked out at you.”

Was he sorry that he’d held her in his arms for a minute there? Was he sorry that something had shifted between them, and

she didn’t know how they were going to shift it back? That was what she was really curious about. She didn’t care that he

had been angry at her. She cared that she had suddenly seen an intensity in him that she had not seen all that often. It had

come up at the wedding, when he had gone after Asher.

Intensity. She couldn’t help but think about that. She couldn’t help but think about it.

“How did you survive that?” she asked while they were driving back.

“It’s the simplest thing to survive. You sit in the dark and you wait for somebody to come get you. That’s it.”

He was being... very Justice about it. And she felt horrified.

“You must’ve been dehydrated.”

“Yeah, pretty dehydrated. But there was a little bit of water trickling in a top corner. And I sipped on that a little bit.

I don’t know. I was a kid. So it’s fine. I mean kids are resilient. And you know...?”

They both had been. Because they’d had to be. But she didn’t like him minimizing this or writing it off. And she liked even

less that she hadn’t known about it. It felt like a strange spanner that had been shoved into the works of their friendship,

works that had been moving unevenly because their dynamic was all messed up and had been for the last few days. Imbalanced

and kind of a mess. Because of everything she had been through, and everything he’d had to help her with.

They were driving back toward the house, and she put her hand over his without even thinking. Because it was what they did.

But she was wearing a jacket and bikini bottoms, and he was in his underwear, and the air was thick with something electric,

while there were raw waves of emotion she couldn’t begin to read radiating from him. It was a mistake, because the normal

touch wasn’t normal in a moment that contained nothing of what they normally were.

She didn’t want to jerk her hand away because it would reveal it. Would reveal her. What if everything inside him was the same?