Taming His Wild Girl (Wild Whip Ranch Book 2) Read online

  We watched the end of the saddle bronc, and she joined in with all the whooping and cheering as my old buddy, Deacon, rolled and thrashed on his horse’s back. Then it was time for the cowgirls’ barrel racing. Isabelle hung over the barrier, watching as the competitors galloped from one barrel to another, dirt flying everywhere. Every so often, she turned around and asked me questions—if I knew any of them, how long it took to train—and every time our eyes met, there was a jolt in my chest like a bolt of lightning.

  When a sixteen-year-old-girl and her pure white horse beat the competition by 0.4 of a second, Isabelle lit up like a Roman candle, her blue eyes flashing.

  “Like that?” I couldn’t stop myself from grinning.

  “Oh yes.”

  “You hungry yet?” I asked when the competition was over.

  She blinked. “Yes, but…” Her brow wrinkled. Ah, yes, the infamous diet my mom groused about. Mrs. Stevens carried a little scale, and would take over my mom’s kitchen to weigh Isabelle’s food. Every dry piece of chicken, every stick of celery, had to pass muster. My mom muttered privately it was a wonder Isabelle weighed anything at all. At first I’d chalked it up to my mom being annoyed that she had to cook special ultra-healthy meals for one sixteen-year-old guest, but at dinner, Isabelle’s plate had more empty space on it than food.

  I couldn’t do anything about it then, but I could now.

  “Come on. We’ll find something.” I took a firm hold of her hand and turned away from the delighted look on her face.

  There were a bunch of food stands, selling everything from burgers to hot dogs to tacos. When we passed the gourmet burger van, I noticed her linger.

  “I won’t tell if you don’t,” I said, thinking of all those half-empty dinner plates.

  “Really?” There was such longing in her eyes that it made my insides crumple. “But…”

  Her hand drifted to her stomach automatically, and I wondered how many things she’d denied herself over the years.

  “One burger’s not going to kill you.” I gripped her shoulder and squeezed lightly.

  She grinned. “Okay.” She stepped forward to the counter, but I was quicker.

  She had no idea what to have on it, so I got her the works, then I found us a quiet spot to lean against the wall and eat.

  The pleasure on her face as she bit into the cheeseburger was like a gift from heaven.

  “How is it?” I asked, getting more enjoyment out of watching her than from my own burger.

  “Amazing.” She licked a bit of ketchup from the corner of her mouth. “Thank you.”

  “Welcome.” I bit into my own food to hide my satisfaction.

  When we were done, Isabelle laid a hand on my bicep. My skin tingled under her fingertips.

  “Thank you so much, Joel. For all this.” Suddenly she was close, looking up at me expectantly, pupils dilated. If she’d been two years older and not the daughter of a guest of our ranch, I would’ve taken her into my arms right then and there.

  Instead, I took a step back.

  She looked hurt.

  “I’ll get us some drinks,” I said, conscious of the heat that was raging through my body.

  “Can I have a beer?”

  “What? No!” I rubbed at my forehead. “You’re not old enough.”

  “Please, Joel. It’s not a big deal. All the kids at school drink at parties.”

  I whipped off my Stetson and wiped my sweaty forehead. Being a killjoy did not suit me. “I promised your mom I’d take care of you.”

  “And you are. One little beer won’t hurt.” She was pouting now, the most adorable puffy lower lip poking out.

  “Unless I end up in jail.”

  “Fine. I’m going to the bathroom.”

  Before I could say anything else, she turned on her heel and flounced off.

  What has gotten into her? I went to follow her, but she disappeared into the crowd, and I figured I’d stay put so she’d know where to find me when she got back.

  She wasn’t back in five minutes, or ten. Those lines for the ladies’ room could be legendary, but I got a prickle of unease at the back of my neck. It was getting real busy here. What if we missed each other? What if some cowboy mistook her for a buckle bunny and tried to take advantage of her? Panic ignited in my veins.

  I strode off in the direction of the ladies’ washroom.

  There was a line outside the door, but she wasn’t in it. She must still be inside. I hung around outside the door awkwardly. Dammit. I should never have let her go by herself.

  Seventeen minutes had elapsed by now. I went to the start of the bathroom line.

  “Hey, I’m looking for a friend,” I told the girl who was waiting by the door. “Would you mind shouting ‘Isabelle’ in there for me?”

  “I’m Isabelle,” slurred the girl, a buckle bunny who was more naked than not.

  I narrowed my eyes and batted at her hand, which was creeping along my crotch. “A different Isabelle.” Trust me.

  She sighed dramatically, and pushed up off the wall. “Isabelle!” she bellowed in a voice like grinding rocks.

  There was no answer. I spun around and rushed back to the table where we’d been before.

  “Joel.” It was Isabelle’s voice—coming from the bar.

  My heart sank because I knew, without even looking at her, that she was drunk. How the hell had that happened so fast?

  There she was, leaning against the bar, between two creeps in fake cowboy boots, shot glass in hand.

  Without thinking, I rushed over and grabbed her by the arms. “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  She threw her hands up drunkenly. “I went to get us beers, since you were being such a spoilsport. Then someone bought me a shot.”

  I stared into her face. Her eyes were a little glassy. More than one shot. “How many have you had?”

  She blinked with exaggerated innocence. “Two? Maybe three? We were racing to see who could down them fastest.”

  “Who is we? These guys here?” I demanded.

  “Hey, take it easy, bro,” the one with the pubey beard said, already sniffing trouble.

  I clenched my fists, fingers itching to deck him. “Get the hell out of here,” I growled. They had the sense to melt away. Well, I had twenty-five pounds on each of them, at least.

  Suddenly, Isabelle’s mouth was on mine. Those sweet, pink lips that I’d only fantasized about kissing in my darkest, most unacknowledged moments.

  For several stupid seconds, I let it happen. Let her lips glide against mine. Let the tip of her tongue seek out mine with inexperienced eagerness.

  I tore away from her.

  This was wrong. Three miles past wrong, and into the next county.

  She laid her hands on my face and went in for another kiss.

  I caught her this time, held her still. “No, Isabelle.”

  Her eyes widened and her lower lip began to tremble. “B-but I thought you liked me.”

  “As a person,” I lied. “Only as a person.”

  “Isabelle!” a voice called. A very familiar voice.

  Gut plummeting, I slowly turned around. There was her mom, hands on hips, eyes blazing, and her father, purple-faced, squaring up to punch me. They’d come to check up on us. Of course they had.

  Then Isabelle burst into tears.

  “What is it, honey?” Mrs. Stevens’s face transformed into an expression of concern.

  Isabelle stumbled into her mom’s arms. “I don’t feel well.”

  “What is this?” Mrs. Stevens pulled her daughter’s hair back, capturing it back into a ponytail. Isabelle’s eyes closed, her face pinching.

  “Stop, Mom, that hurts—”

  Mrs. Stevens slapped her daughter’s hand with her own, and deftly secured Isabelle’s long hair back with her other. “You know how dirty your hair gets when it’s down…”

  Isabelle winced at the way her mom tugged her hair, and put a hand over her mouth. “I’m gonna be sick.”

  M
rs. Stevens finished with the ponytail and darted her head close. “Have you been drinking?” She turned gimlet eyes to me.

  Cold horror clawed at my spine. “I-I didn’t… we were only apart for a moment…” I swiped off my Stetson and pushed my sweaty hair back. How could I explain what happened without framing Isabelle?

  “She’s drunk.” Mrs. Stevens glared at me as she forced her daughter’s head to her shoulder. With her hair back in place, Isabelle looked pale and frail, clinging to her mother.

  “Drunk? How on earth?” Mr. Stevens roared.

  “I lost track of her for a minute…” I took a deep breath. This was bad. But I wasn’t about to be accused of offering alcohol to their daughter. “Isabelle got a little over-excited. She told me she was going to the bathroom, but she must have come out looking for me, and some guys offered her a drink.” My fingers worried the brim of my hat. I had to tell the truth, all of it. “The alcohol must’ve hit her hard. She got confused, and that’s when…” I trailed off and ducked my head to meet Isabelle’s wide eyes. She gave a little shake of her head. She didn’t want me to tell them about the kiss.

  Mrs. Stevens tore Isabelle away from her, and gripped her own daughter’s face with an iron hand that left white marks on her daughter’s cheeks. “Is that true, Isabelle?” she demanded.

  Isabelle bit her lip. Her chest heaved as her gaze darted to me. Then her lips firmed. “Joel tried to kiss me,” she blurted.

  “What?” her father demanded, inserting himself between his wife and daughter, and me.

  “No, sir,” I said firmly, even as my heart cracked. Isabelle had lied. She’d lied, and any closeness we’d had was gone. We were miles apart, further than when we’d started. “I kept my word. I didn’t take advantage of your daughter. I didn’t kiss her, she kissed me.”

  “One of you is lying!” Mrs. Stevens fumed. Her nails bit into her daughter’s skin. “Is it you?”

  Isabelle blinked her big eyes at me. Then her expression turned blank and lifeless as a doll’s.

  “No, Mom,” she said, her voice eerily calm. Her pert little nose tipped up and she sniffed. “As if I’d get involved with a cowhand like him.”

  Chapter 1

  Four years later

  Isabelle

  The heavy door to the changing room was jammed, as usual. I put my shoulder into it and it gave way suddenly, tossing me into the room. I gave a squeak of dismay, and Destiny—also known as Alice—looked up from a cracked pleather chair in the corner and smirked.

  “Hi,” I said weakly, and she went back to her phone. She was wearing a lacy bodysuit and a pair of very unsexy glasses. I dumped my holdall on the counter, glad there was no one else there to witness my latest humiliation.

  The room was windowless, and the yellowish walls were daubed with graffiti. One of the strip lights was buzzing and flickering, and the air stank of cigarette smoke and singed carpet.

  What a palace.

  I pulled off my sweatshirt and pants and stuffed them in my bag. Underneath, I was wearing a ballerina’s leotard—a silver shiny thing. But instead of tights, I’d teamed them with a pair of lacy hold-ups, and instead of pointe shoes, I pulled a pair of sky-high stripper heels out of my bag. I also took out a ridiculous frilly tutu, and a pair of red sequin-covered hearts, which I needed to attach to my nipples. At the sight of them, my stomach turned over. Tonight would be my second ever time on stage. During the third song, I’d been told by the boss, I needed to pull the top of my leotard down and, “Show the audience your tits. Give ‘em a bit of a tease.”

  Bile rose in my throat again and I clapped my hand over my mouth. This was just the beginning. In three more shows, I would have to take more and more off, until the ‘climax’ night, when I was going to dance fully nude. Doing the splits, turns on the pole, bending double—all the stuff I’d watched the other girls do—while a bunch of men stared at my private parts with hungry eyes. The awfulness of it churned and churned in my mind, and I blinked fast until my eyes stopped stinging.

  I leaned close to the mirror to attach a pair of false eyelashes, and sweep shimmery shadow across my lids. Then I straightened up and checked the overall effect. I didn’t have a ballerina’s body anymore. I had rounded C-cup boobs, and curvy hips. They probably would have wrecked my career—if it hadn’t already been destroyed on that terrible day, along with every single other thing I cared about. The fabric of my stockings was more opaque than most strippers’ , because it concealed an ugly, eleven-inch scar—the sole physical reminder of everything I’d lost.

  I was pulling my bleached platinum bob up into a bun when some of the graffiti caught my eye:

  I’m just a waitress, she said.

  The scrawled statement was a mockery of us dancers. Us strippers. Anger flared in me. I’d been just a waitress here, until my stupid mouth had confided in one of the other waitresses. I hadn’t told her everything—about all the loss and grief, of course—just that I used to be a pretty serious dancer. And that had been enough. She’d told the bosses—probably for a kick-back, I guessed, from the smug look on her face the last time I saw her. They’d practically wet their pants in excitement, and now I was being forced to strip. And if I refused? “Well, we don’t want to talk about that, honey, do we?”

  I shuddered. These guys were mafia. European, olive-skinned, leather-jacketed, and everything about them radiated menace. I cursed the day I saw the ad for the waitressing job and somehow thought it wouldn’t be so bad.

  The door burst open and Elio, the uber-boss, slouched in, his salt-and pepper hair slicked back with grease.

  His eyes ran all over me, and he broke into a wolfish smile.

  “Ready, Black Swan?”

  I grunted at his reflection in the mirror. He had a craggy face and shrewd, cold eyes. I imagined he could slide a knife into my belly without his expression ever changing.

  “Give me a twirl.”

  I knew it wasn’t a suggestion, and obediently, I lifted my arm above my head and turned around in a grotesque parody of the move I used to practice so diligently, back in the day, when I still had dreams and a family who loved me.

  He looked satisfied. “You give ‘em the white swan, then the black swan, okay? First song all pure, then you get dirty. Men love that. Innocence corrupted.” His hand cupped my ass cheek and he squeezed, hard.

  I gritted my teeth, refusing to let the pain show on my face. “Got it,” I mumbled.

  There was a glint of real, sadistic pleasure in his eyes.

  Bastard.

  I bit down hard on the end of my tongue.

  A moment later, the music outside got real loud. A mad, club music mash-up of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Kind of ingenious how they’d found it.

  If only the sound of it didn’t shatter my heart all over again.

  I checked one last time that my pasties were still attached, and, legs shaking, I exited the room through the rear door that led right onto the stage.

  Chapter 2

  Joel

  Ten more minutes, and I was getting the hell out of there and going back to my hotel room. Judging by the state the stag, Deacon, and a few of my other buddies were in, they wouldn’t even know I was gone. I knocked back my overpriced scotch and waved to the waitress for another. She was over in a second, red lips curved seductively. I ignored her schtick and gave her a generous tip anyway. She was just doing her job—as were the girls on stage. I just wish I didn’t have to watch the whole ugly charade. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to look at naked women. I just preferred it when they were tied to my bed or bent over my knee, and the ecstasy on their faces was real.

  I looked around the strip club wearily. A pink neon sign over the stage read Beyond Hope—the club’s name. I bet they thought that was real smart. It was all black marble, gleaming chrome, fake leather. A sad simulacrum of luxury for someone who didn’t know real pleasure. Who’d never galloped across a wild plain on a snowy evening, then come home to a roaring fire and a willing submissi
ve. Who’d never taken a beautiful, all-natural girl over a hay bale and fucked her until she’d begged them to stop.

  I’d only been away for a day, and already my soul yearned to get back to my ranch. The trouble was, I was never going to find the kind of girl I was looking for in the small town that I called home. Ashcroft was the prettiest town in the whole of British Columbia, probably in the whole of Canada. But I knew every single girl who lived there, and they were either married, or we’d already dated and figured out we weren’t right for each other. I wasn’t interested in finding my Little One among the buckle bunnies I met at rodeos, either. Sure, they might be submissive, but when it came down to it, they were as fake as the girls here. I envied my buddy, Steele, who’d had the perfect excuse not to come tonight—he was at home with his own Little One, and the two of them were blissfully happy.

  Suddenly, the music turned way up. And—what the hell was that?—some kind of children’s song, mashed up with heavy beats.

  The last straw, basically.

  I yelled to Caine to tell him I was leaving. He couldn’t hear me, of course. That dang nursery rhyme was loud enough to split my skull in two. I heaved back my chair and got to my feet… at the same moment that a ballerina appeared on stage.

  A ballerina.

  I froze and ice filled my veins, like I’d plunged overboard into a cold, cold sea.

  I stood frozen, my fists curling and uncurling like the dancer was in my grasp. Once upon a time, there’d been a girl. A perfect little ballerina. The most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Too young for me, so I’d cared for her as a family friend should. I was the only one who could make her laugh, make her smile. But then came that fateful night at the rodeo, and I never saw her again.

  I took a seat and leaned forward to study the stripper on stage. She was petite but curvy, her tits swelling from the low V of her costume. Her hair was white-blonde, not the shining mahogany so like a bay mare’s coat. But something about her reminded her of my tiny dancer. She danced with a regal air. Not slutty, but elegant, with trained precision. Like she’d studied ballet once. As she turned pirouettes on the stage, her limbs lithe and graceful, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her.