behind for Jacob. She had already walked him around the place and given him a good look at the facility, but she had also made sure to leave as much direction behind as possible.
He would be taking care of the horses, but also the cattle that lived on the ranch. It was a rare and strange thing for the entire family to leave the property. In fact, they had never done it. Not in all the time that Chloe had lived there. It was a big thing. A marker of the changes that had occurred recently. And she wondered if perhaps that was partly why she was feeling a little bit strange.
Like things were moving faster than usual. Like it was all getting away from her, with everyone moving forward, and her standing still.
Tanner hasn’t changed...
Maybe not.
She sighed heavily. She needed some time to clear her head. She ignored the gathering clouds in the sky and decided to get her horse out of her stall. All of these strange emotions were nothing that a ride through the countryside wouldn’t fix.
She would do that and then she would head up and be as festive as anyone could possibly ask her to be.
And hopefully no one would realize that she was grappling with any kind of weird emotion.
Least of all the stepbrother who was causing them.
* * *
WHEN TANNER SAW that Chloe’s car was still parked in front of the ranch house he swore. He was hoping that Chloe would have already taken off. Hours ago, preferably, because if his much younger stepsister had, then none of this would be his problem. But he had just gotten a call from his brother Calder, who was already at the cabin a couple of hours away, and he’d informed him that the roads were ice covered. There was no way that Chloe was going to get up there in her little car.
And that meant that she had to ride with Tanner.
Of course, he lived with her, it wasn’t like he wasn’t exposed to her all the time. But that didn’t seem to help with the inappropriate attraction to her he’d been dealing with since she was about eighteen, and way too young for him to be looking at her that way.
He didn’t know when it had started, not exactly. It wasn’t as if he’d been struck with lightning one moment, but somehow she had gone from being something not quite a sister, but certainly not eligible, to being...a woman.
No. A lightning strike would have been easier.
He’d have been able to go back to the scene of that crime and do something about it. He’d have been able to get to the damn root of it all and tear it out, if it had been that simple.
It hadn’t been a moment. It had been a subtle build. Something about the way the light would catch her short, curly dark hair sometimes. Or a mischievous grin she would give him.
The way that her laugh rolled through his body and landed with that kind of exhilarating feel that he got when he rode horses and a strong breeze came through and took his breath away.
He’d done his best to ignore it. He really had. And then, one day she had bent over and he had looked. He had seen the way that her jeans cupped her perfectly rounded ass, and he hadn’t ever been able to lie to himself again about what those breathless moments between them were.
For years it had been like this, and over the past few months it had been even worse. A damned torturous slog. Like the buildup of a dam about full to bursting.
Being in an enclosed truck cab with her for the next couple of hours did not sound good. It sounded like it might put a crack in the dam, and that was something he couldn’t afford.
The last thing he needed to do was breathe the same air that Chloe was breathing, before he had gotten his libido under control. That was the real issue with why it had been getting so bad lately, he was sure.
He had not had any sex recently. It was tough. He was busy running the ranch, and he wasn’t particularly open to the idea of a long-term relationship. Hookups were what he thrived on, but with his brothers happily settled into marriage, arranging times when he could go out and fool around and they would hold down the fort for him had gotten fewer and farther between. That was the issue. Not so much Chloe herself, but the fact that he hadn’t been near enough to a willing woman in longer than he could remember.
Well, he could remember. It was just that it didn’t do anything for him. He had tried. He had tried in the dead of night to imagine his last partner, a woman named Alex who worked at the tattoo parlor down in Tolowa.
She had a lot of ink, and piercings in interesting places.
She was so different from Chloe. And as much as it pained him to admit it, that had been the primary attraction to most women he’d been with over the past few years.
Not Chloe.
Alex fit that bill, and nicely. And he’d had a good time with her when they’d been together. But now?
The memory did absolutely nothing for him. For some reason, imagining her thick eyeliner and pouty lips didn’t fire his blood at all. No, it was fresh-faced Chloe that kept imprinting herself on his mind. And he didn’t like it at all.
A man’s life had cornerstones. And his had a few. This ranch. His brothers.
Chloe.
Chloe had been the key to him deciding that the ranch mattered. Seeing it through her eyes had been a revelation, and it had stirred something in him he hadn’t imagined was there. Teaching her to ride, and how to perform chores around the property, had breathed new life into all of it.
Chloe wasn’t a sister to him, but she was something. Something definitive.
Something essential.
He’d never wanted to risk that. Ever. An attraction to her had seemed like the worst thing possible, though he’d figure out how to tamp it down.
He could never risk disrupting a cornerstone. Not just in his life, but in his family’s. All it would take was a crack, and all that he was, all they were, could come tumbling down.
Because Tanner couldn’t keep it in his pants.
And no, that wasn’t going to happen.
As if she had been conjured up from his imagination, Chloe came riding toward the barn, her hair flying behind her in the wind, her lithe, strong body guiding her horse exactly where she wanted her to go.
She pulled to a stop when she saw him, a slight frown on her lips.
“You’re still here,” she said.
“So are you.”
She frowned. “Yeah, I wanted to get in one last ride and make sure that all the instructions for Jacob Dalton were in place.”
“Well, now it’s too late for you to drive yourself. Calder called. The road is not going to be passable in your little two-wheel drive, so if you have anything packed up in that Civic of yours you better throw it in the back of my pickup truck.”
* * *
“OH I JUST... I thought it would
