Chapter 3: Honky-Tonk Revenge
The phone screen blurred under her stare. The words pulsed with a venomous certainty. Cheyenne. How did Jo even know? The interview had been a tentative, secret thing, a lifeline to her old self she’d barely admitted to wanting.
Derek’s fork clinked against his plate. “Everything okay?”
The casual concern in his voice was a knife twist. She flipped the phone face down, the sound too loud in the quiet kitchen. “Just clinic spam.” The lie was ash on her tongue.
He studied her, his eyes—those eyes that crinkled with smiles but saw everything—narrowing slightly. He didn’t press. The trust they were building was fresh plaster, still wet and easily marred.
The ride to his ranch was quiet, the landscape unfurling in rolls of burnt gold and scrub. The tension from the text coiled in her stomach, a sick counterpoint to the memory of his body in her bed that morning. His ranch wasn’t what she expected. No sprawling, manicured estate. It was a modest, weathered house, a large barn, and acres of fenced land that felt less owned than endured.
“It’s not much,” he said, killing the truck’s engine.
“It’s real,” she replied, and meant it.
He showed her the barn first, the air thick with the smell of hay, leather, and animal musk. His current bull, a younger, temperamental brute named Diablo, snorted in a separate paddock. “He’s got a twist to the left that’ll snap your spine if you’re not listening,” Derek said, not with bravado, but the detached analysis of a craftsman.
In the tack room, surrounded by the tools of his violent trade, he pulled an old photo from a locked cabinet. A younger Derek, beaming, arm around a man with the same eyes. “My dad. He taught me to ride. Drank himself to death after mom left. Said the ground was the only thing that ever made sense to him.”
The confession was offered plainly, a piece of shrapnel pulled from a old wound. This was his vulnerability, the truth beneath the rodeo star. It demanded honesty in return. The text in her pocket burned.
“Derek, I—” she began, but his mouth was on hers, cutting off the confession. This kiss wasn’t about passion; it was a silencing. A desperate redirect. He backed her against the rough wood of a stall door, his hands rough on her jeans, popping the button.
“Need you,” he grunted against her neck, his breathing ragged. “Right here. Now.”
It was a deflection, and she knew it. He’d sensed her withdrawal, her secret, and this was his answer—physical reclamation. Anger flared in her, hot and bright. Not at him, but at the situation, at Jo’s poisoning, at her own cowardice. She met his force with her own.
“Fucking take it then,” she challenged, her voice low and fierce.
He spun her around, facing the stall door. He yanked her jeans and underwear down to her thighs in one brutal motion. The cool barn air kissed her skin. He didn’t bother with foreplay, just spit into his palm and slicked his cock, already rigid and eager. He pressed the broad, blunt head against her entrance, and she was, infuriatingly, wet for him.
“You’re mine,” he growled, a statement and a question.
He drove into her with a single, deep stroke that punched the air from her lungs. It was a stretch, a glorious, punishing fullness. He didn’t wait, setting a hard, driving rhythm immediately. His calloused hands gripped her hips, pulling her back onto him with each thrust, the slap of their flesh echoing in the cavernous barn.
“This is what you want,” he panted, each word a thrust. “This. Right here. Not some… goddamn… city.”
He was fucking the secret out of her, or trying to. She pushed back against him, meeting his force, taking every inch. The wood grain bit into her palms. “You don’t… know… what I want!” she cried out, the sentence breaking apart as he hit a spot deep inside that made her vision blur.
“Then tell me!” he roared, his control snapping. His pace became frantic, brutal, a piston driving her into the door. One hand fisted in her red hair, not gently, pulling her head back. The other snaked around her hip, his fingers finding her clit, rubbing rough, urgent circles.
The combination was devastating. Her orgasm ripped through her, a raw, screaming thing that buckled her knees. She clenched around him, pulsing violently, and her cry was swallowed by the barn’s emptiness.
It triggered his own release. With a final, deep snarl, he came, hot jets flooding her, his body shuddering against her back. He collapsed over her, his weight pinning her to the door, both of them slick with sweat and spent.
In the aftershock, the truth hung between them, thicker than the smell of sex. His breath was warm on her shoulder. “Someone texted you,” he stated, voice hollow. “At the house. It wasn’t spam.”
She closed her eyes. “No.”
He withdrew, the sudden emptiness physical and emotional. He zipped his jeans with a sharp sound. She pulled her clothes up, turning to face him. The vulnerability she’d seen earlier was gone, replaced by a shuttered, hardened look.
“It was Jo,” Sabrina said, the name a curse. “She knows about a job offer. In Cheyenne. A research position. I interviewed… weeks ago. Before… all this.”
The all this hung there: the clinic, the truck bed, the morning, the barn.
Derek nodded slowly, as if pieces of a puzzle were clicking into a picture he didn’t like. “Are you taking it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.” He repeated it flatly. He walked to the barn door, looking out at his land, his back to her. “So last night, this morning… that was what? A goodbye tour?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” He turned, his laugh short and bitter. “You let me spill my guts about my dead father while you’re packing your bags in your head. That’s fair?”
The distance between them was now a canyon. The physical intimacy had only carved it deeper. Her phone, tucked in her pocket, felt like a live wire. Jo’s calculation was perfect. She hadn’t needed to confront Sabrina again. She’d just planted the seed and let their own insecurities water it.
“I need to think,” Sabrina said, her voice small.
“Yeah.” He picked up his hat from a post, dusting it off. “I’ll take you home.”
The drive back was a silence filled with everything unsaid. He stopped at her house. She reached for the door handle.
“Sabrina.” His tone stopped her. He stared straight ahead, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “The ground’s the only thing that ever made sense to him. I always feared that was my inheritance.” He finally looked at her, his expression grim. “Don’t prove me right.”
He didn’t wait for her reply. She got out, and he drove away, leaving her standing in her driveway, the dust from his tires hanging in the air like the residue of a storm. Inside, the empty house echoed. She looked at her silent phone, then at the sleek laptop on her desk where the formal job offer from Cheyenne likely sat, unopened, in her inbox.
Jo had fired a single, precise shot. It had found its mark, and now everything was bleeding.