Page 92 of Wild and Wanted

Turning into the track that cut through the trees, he spotted a figure sitting on the third stair of his porch and his heart rose to his throat.

Stevie.

She stood as he climbed out of his vehicle. Her hair was loose, curled into long waves, and she was wearing a fringed red shirt, a fringed tan leather skirt and the most impractical white cowgirl boots he’d ever seen. She looked like she had the first day he’d seen her, like Stephanie Everhart, country music star.

But her purple-grey eyes, shining with all their memories, told him she was still his Stevie girl.

And that’s when it hit him. He loved her. He was in love with her. His chest filled with it, his lungs fit to burst. He’d spent the last two months thinking about how much he liked her, how much he missed her, how great her laugh was, how hot she looked wearing his hand as a necklace, how cute she looked when she was cranky, how fondly she smiled when she talked about her sister, how she got a little V between her brows when she was strumming on her guitar with some lyric or other on her mind.

How… special she was.

But they were all just subterfuge. Euphemisms he’d been hiding behind, trying to put other names on the things he was feeling. Because they were so new and fledgling and really fucking inconvenient. How could he possibly trust them? How did he know he wasn’t just romanticising the woman who had absorbed his every waking moment – and most of his sleeping ones – since the day she’d emerged like a fucking angel through the swirling dust?

But he knew now.

This wasn’t romanticising, this was his living, breathing reality. He knew it like he knew the pulse of the mountains. He loved Stevie Everhart.

And, yes, it was complicated and he didn’t know how any of it was going to work, but he’d go to the ends of the earth to make it work – if she wanted it, too.

He strode towards her, his steps eating up the distance between them, and when his foot hit the bottom tread, she whispered, ‘Clay,’ and he opened up his arms and she fell into them, her arms clinging tight around his neck.

‘You’ve wrapped?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

They didn’t say anything for long moments, just held each other, Clay’s heart aligning with the thud of hers, beat for beat. It was like the other half of him slotting into place. Clay had always thought that home was something tangible. A dwelling. Bricks and mortar and land. But now he knew it could be a person.

And he’d found his.

‘I love you,’ he muttered into her hair.

28

STEVIE

Stevie froze in his embrace, her pulse a mad rattle through her ears as she wondered if she’d actually heard those three words they were so low and muffled. Pulling back slightly, she gazed into his eyes, his face as rugged and wild as it had been when she’d first spied him on Electra.

As wild as this place.

This place that had been calling to her ever since she’d left. Or at least she’d thought so, but now she knew she was wrong. It hadn’t been the ranch, it had been Clay. The memory of him calling to her as she played her guitar, tugging at her as she went about her day, whispering to her in the dark.

And God help her, she loved him, too.

And it wasn’t because he was her first, or he was the embodiment of her lyrical fancies or as some kind of rebellion against her lot since Yolly had passed. But because he saw her – he saw Stevie. Not Stephanie the singer. Not Stephanie the good daughter. Not Stephanie the grieving sister.

He saw Stevie.

Who just wanted to write her songs and live a quiet life. Not even Yolly had really seen this Stevie.

‘I love you, too.’

She loved him. She loved Clay Calhoun.

She’d been telling herself it was ridiculous to have such big feelings for someone she’d spent such a brief time with and that it was imperative she didn’t confuse the world of her songs with real life. That she was an ingenue in all this and it would be foolish to wade into waters she’d only just dipped her toe into.

That it was complicated.

But she’d been wrong. Sure, her life circumstances were complicated, but this feeling wasn’t. The love bit was… easy. Flowing like warm neon water into all her nooks and crannies, filling them up, lighting them up. Finding its own level.