The Other Brother Read online

  He turned off the lamp and left the room. As he stepped into the hall, a delicate snore followed him. He smiled.

  Chapter Three

  The sofa in the Pruitts’ living room was almost long enough to allow Caleb to stretch out. Almost, but not quite. During the night, he was certain he’d set a new record for tossing and turning, if anyone kept track of things like that. Now the sun was coming up, yet he felt as if he hadn’t slept a wink.

  Of course, sleep might have come easier if he hadn’t kept seeing Melanie’s long, bare legs, and the lower edge of her white lace panties every time he closed his eyes.

  Her father hadn’t returned, and Caleb hadn’t been able to go home and leave her alone last night. The girl he’d known since childhood, the woman she had grown into, would not have gotten drunk last night, or any night, without a damn good reason. It wasn’t like her.

  Maybe he’d been right Saturday night. Maybe she really wasn’t over Sloan. Caleb couldn’t think of anything else that would bother her so much, and he knew her well. But a broken heart? Yeah, that would do it for Melanie. She might act tough as nails, could be as hard and mean as she had to be when the situation warranted, but she had the most tender heart on the planet.

  When he crawled from the sofa it took him a minute to straighten up. He should have slept on the floor. It might have been harder, but at least it wouldn’t have been too short.

  He went to Melanie’s door and found her sound asleep, sprawled on her back, her hands over her head as if in surrender. No way was he waking her.

  He checked again to see if her father had returned, but there was still no sign of Ralph Pruitt. On a ranch at six-thirty on a Tuesday morning there was always work to be done. Where the hell was the man?

  Caleb went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. While it brewed he stepped out the back door to have a look around. The air was cool and damp, the wind light. From the chicken house across the driveway came a noisy fuss and clatter, hens bickering amongst each other, a couple of roosters crowing for all they were worth.

  Not knowing if the Pruitts let their chickens out during the day or kept them penned and safe from predators, Caleb decided to leave the birds alone and headed for the barn instead.

  There he found three pretty mares pacing restlessly in their stalls.

  “Good morning, ladies. I bet you’d like to get out of there. How about a handful of oats first? Maybe a little grooming?”

  Melanie came awake in slow, painful stages. Then wished she hadn’t. Her head! How had a hammer ended up inside her head, and who the devil was banging it against the inside of her skull?

  “Somebody shoot me, please,” she moaned. The beer. Why, why, why had she drank so much beer? For that matter, how had she drunk that much? She’d never been able to hold that much water in one evening, let alone beer.

  Too bad she hadn’t gotten even drunker. Maybe then she wouldn’t be remembering… Good grief! What had she done? Caleb brought her home and had been sweet enough to take care of her, tuck her in, and she had…she had… She’d done something, she knew she had. It involved mouths and lips and tongues, but it was all fuzzy in her pain-fogged brain.

  In sheer misery she rolled to her side. The light from the window blinded her.

  Light? Good grief! If it was that light, it was late. She’d slept half the morning away.

  The mares! Oh, those poor babies.

  Melanie tossed the comforter aside and pushed herself up. Every muscle and joint screamed in protest, and her stomach heaved. She wrapped her arms around her gut and moaned.

  “I will not throw up. I will not throw up. I will not throw up.”

  She waited, breathing deeply, to be sure the mantra was going to work. When everything stayed settled, she slid off the side of the bed and tested the strength of her legs. Since they seemed to work, she staggered from the bedroom toward the back door.

  Coffee. The aroma reached out and tempted her to pause for a cup of sustenance, but she feared that if she gave in, it might be an hour before she was able to force herself outside, and the mares were surely impatient by now, wondering what had happened to her. Much longer and they’d be kicking down their stalls.

  She steeled herself against the seductive smell of coffee and opened the back door. Only then, as the rush of cool air made goose bumps rise on her legs, did she look down at herself. She was wearing last night’s shirt and bra, panties, socks, and not a damn thing more.

  To heck with it. She jammed her feet into the extra pair of boots she kept by the door and slammed outside. It was cool but not cold, and there was no one around to see her.

  At the sound of the door slamming, the chickens set up a clatter in their fenced pen surrounding the chicken house.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Melanie called. “I’m coming, babies.” It had long been accepted on the PR, although reluctantly by most, that their chickens were for egg production, not for the frying pan. At the age of six, when Melanie caught her mother wringing the neck of a hen that had stopped laying, Melanie had cried for three days and refused to eat. She most especially had refused to eat Esmeralda, her favorite pretty bird.

  Her parents had tried and tried to explain the realities of ranch life, of where food came from, but Melanie hadn’t budged. She could eat beef. The ranch produced so many steers each year, and they kept them for only a few months, out in the pastures. She never really had much of a chance to get attached to any of them.

  The chickens were a different story. There were a scant dozen of them, and they were right there by the house all the time, and her parents had never warned her not to get attached, not to name them, not to pet the tamer ones.

  Eat them? No way!

  Of course, her attitude made her the butt of many a joke among her friends, but she didn’t care. To her, eating one of her own chickens would be like eating the family dog. She could eat the Colonel’s chicken, or the grocery store’s, without a qualm. But not her own.

  She entered the chicken yard, leaving the gate open as she scattered grain on the ground. The birds would wander in and out through the day, but they wouldn’t go far; the hens were attached to their nest boxes and the scratch Melanie fed them every day.

  The mares were waiting, so Melanie didn’t linger. Her boots scuffed a fast trail across the gravel and dirt to the barn. It was only as she neared that it dawned on her that the barn door was open. She was positive she had closed it before leaving with Justin the evening before. She would not have been so careless as to have left it open.

  Hearing what sounded like a voice coming from inside the barn, Melanie darted to the side of the big door. Steam bubbled inside her, along with a small dash of fear. If one of those goons her father owed money to had come to the PR again as they had a few months earlier to demand she pay her father’s debt, there would be hell to pay.

  Hearing another low murmur, Melanie slipped through the door and into the deep shadows of the first stall, which was open and empty. For once she was glad her father had taken to leaving tools there instead of putting them away where they belonged. She would have preferred a pitchfork, but the shovel in the corner would do just as well. Quietly she picked it up and peered down the center of the barn.

  A man stood at one of the mare’s stalls, his back toward Melanie.

  Melanie gritted her teeth and gripped the shovel tightly in both hands. No stranger snuck in and messed around in her barn, by damn. She crept soundlessly across the dirt floor of the barn. The creep never heard her coming. She hefted the shovel in the air, and when she knew she was close enough, she swung.

  She would never know if she made a sound, or if some sixth sense alerted him to her presence. Either way, just as she swung, he stood and turned.

  Caleb!

  With a shout of protest he raised an arm to fend off the blow.

  Melanie tried to halt her swing, but it was too late. She did manage to shift her aim, thank God. The steel spade whacked him solidly on the shoulder rather than t
he head, where she had originally aimed. Still, the ring of the connecting blow echoed through the barn. As did Caleb’s brief grunt of pain.

  “Oh no!” Melanie cried.

  “Damnation, woman, what the hell was that for?”

  “Caleb, I’m sorry. I thought— I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  He grimaced and rubbed his shoulder. “What do you think? You whacked me a good one.”

  Now that she realized he wasn’t seriously hurt, Melanie was disgusted with herself. She must be more hungover than she’d thought not to have noticed Caleb’s pickup, which, now that she thought about it, was parked outside the back door of the house. Idiot that she was, she had walked right past it without paying attention.

  Even without noticing his pickup, she should have recognized, even from the back, a man she had known her entire life. Should have recognized a voice nearly as familiar to her as her own.

  “What I want to know,” Caleb went on, “is why?”

  “Never mind.” She tossed the shovel aside and took him by the arm. “Let’s get some ice on that shoulder.”

  “I’m all right.” He pulled free of her. “Let’s get the mares taken care of first.”

  Melanie was torn. Taking care of Caleb was a need. The mares were a responsibility. Caleb was right. The mares came first.

  It took mere minutes to see to the mares and turn them out into the pasture for the day, then she was back at Caleb’s side, leading him toward the house. She took him into the kitchen and pushed him down onto a chair at the table.

  “Take off your shirt,” Melanie said as she turned away and opened the freezer.

  “All you had to do was ask,” Caleb said. “You didn’t have to hit me with a shovel first.”

  “Very funny.” She pulled out a clear, zippered plastic bag of corn kernels. She had grown the corn, sliced the kernels from the ears herself and had the nicks in her knuckles to prove it. She turned back toward Caleb, but stopped where she stood.

  She had seen him without a shirt before, many times, she was sure, but she didn’t remember the sight of his bare chest ever causing this hitch in her breathing before, or this sudden need to swallow. To touch. To feel.

  The hangover must be having an even stranger effect on her than she’d realized. With a shake of her head she carried the frozen corn to him and gently placed it over the red spot on his shoulder.

  “You’re not going to kiss it first?”

  Melanie narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re sure full of yourself this morning. What are you still doing here, anyway? You look like you slept in that shirt.”

  “I could say the same, but at least I’m wearing jeans. Not that I’m complaining about your clothes, or lack thereof. Actually, I kinda like this look on you.”

  Dumbfounded, Melanie looked down at her bare legs. “Oh.” In her book, there was nothing that looked more ridiculous than the combination of cowboy boots and bare legs. With her socks showing out the tops of the boots, no less. “Ugh.”

  Then she glanced up at Caleb and realized he was not looking at her boots with the socks showing above them. His gaze rested somewhat higher, namely the end of her shirttail, which was almost embarrassingly high on her thighs. “Pervert.” She reached out and pinched his uninjured shoulder.

  “Hey, what was that for?” He rubbed the new red spot. “Got another bag of corn?” he grumbled.

  “Baby.” She tried to step away, but he put a hand on her hip. She stopped instantly. His touch, through the cotton of her shirt, was warm, and felt much more intimate than it should.

  “You didn’t think I was such a baby last night,” he said quietly, his gaze capturing hers and holding it like a magnet.

  Melanie’s pulse jumped. “I…don’t remember much…about last night.”

  Leaving his hand on her hip, Caleb tossed the bag of corn onto the table and rose from the chair to stand before her. Close before her. “One of the things I’ve always admired about you was that you’ve always known, and admitted, that you’re a lousy liar.”

  Heat stung her cheeks. She didn’t need a mirror to tell her they were as red as a Hereford’s hind end. “Yeah, well, it was worth a try.”

  With his fingers he smoothed a strand of hair from her face. It was all she could do to keep from leaning into his touch. What was the matter with her?

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Talk about how I got drunk and embarrassed myself last night?”

  “Why did you get drunk? It’s not like you.”

  Melanie shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I was just more stupid than usual.”

  He placed a finger beneath her chin and tilted her face up toward his. “You are not, nor have you ever been, stupid.”

  She forced a wry grin. “I was last night.”

  “I hope you mean because you drank too much, not because you kissed me.”

  “Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t remind me.”

  “Maybe I want to remind you.”

  Melanie knew, from the look in his eyes and the tone in his voice, that he was not talking about reminding her of drinking too much. She swallowed. “Why?”

  “Aren’t you even a little curious to see where this might lead us?”

  “No.” She shook her head hard. “We don’t need to be led anywhere. We do great without kissing.”

  “Yeah.” He pulled her close and rested his cheek against the top of her head. His arms slipped around her and held her loosely. “You’re right. We’ve always done great, you and me.”

  They had stood this way so many times before, Melanie thought. A hundred, a thousand times or more, but never quite like this. There was comfort, as there always had been. Whenever she needed holding to ease an ache inside, Caleb was always there with his broad chest and steady heart. And there was strength, as always, in his muscled arms.

  But today there was more. There was a tension, a new anticipation that hummed between them because now they knew what could happen if their lips met. Melanie both feared and reveled in the warring emotions. Both feared and reveled in the feel of his bare chest beneath her splayed fingers. Without any conscious command or permission from her brain, her fingers flexed. Caressed. Beneath them Caleb’s muscles jerked.

  “Sorry,” she murmured.

  Maybe he should be, too, Caleb thought, but he wasn’t. He wanted her to do it again. He liked feeling her hands on his flesh. It seemed impossible. She was his friend. They had touched each other, casually, a zillion times over the years. Not once, in his memory, had her touch made his pulse spike this way.

  Yes, he wanted her to touch him again.

  He raised his head and looked down into her emerald-green eyes. If they moved their feet they’d be dancing.

  “What are we doing, Caleb?”

  “Are we supposed to know?”

  “Shouldn’t we?”

  “Maybe.” He brushed his nose along the length of hers. “Or maybe we should just…” He brushed his lips across hers.

  Her lips parted on a quick intake of breath. Caleb dived in, and it happened again, that sharp tingling along his spine. That zap of lightning, the clichéd fireworks exploding in his head.

  Melanie felt it, too, that startling awareness, the sheer intensity of which stole her breath and pulled a moan from her throat. Her nerves danced, her blood heated. She pressed herself closer to Caleb’s lean, hard body, craving a closer, more intimate connection.

  He obliged her, his hands sliding down to cup her hips and pull her flush against him, giving her proof that her blood wasn’t all that was heated between them.

  Another moan tore from her throat. She arched against him, reveling in the feel of his erection and of her nipples hardening in response. She dragged her hands down his chest, around his waist, across his back. His skin was hot and smooth and sleek, with firm muscles beneath that spoke of steely strength.

  The need for breath broke them apart. The need for sanity pushed them e
ach back a step, made them look away from each other, he over her head, she at his shoulder.

  Melanie struggled for something to say, some way to explain away what had just happened. Barring that, something to distract them both. Then it came, like a gift, wafting across the room.

  “Coffee,” she blurted. “I need coffee.”

  When she spun away toward the coffeemaker, Caleb took in a deep breath and let it out. She obviously didn’t want to talk about it. And really, he thought, what was there to say? The whole situation was crazy. Best friends weren’t supposed to set off fireworks when they kissed. Hell, they weren’t supposed to be kissing, not like that, in the first place.

  But damned if he didn’t want to do it again, and again, and see where it led them. For now, however, it might be wiser to change the subject.

  “So where is everybody?” He’d been wondering that since before he’d crawled off the sofa earlier. If she wouldn’t talk about the two of them and whatever this kissing thing was that was going on with them, maybe he could get her to talk about something else. “I didn’t see your men when I was out earlier.”

  She shrugged. “Day off.”

  Caleb eyed her skeptically. “Tuesday is their day off?”

  She poured two mugs of coffee and handed him one without speaking.

  “How about your dad? Is it his day off, too?”

  “Lord only knows where he is, because I sure don’t.”

  The sharp bitterness in her voice surprised him. “How long’s he been gone?”

  “What, are you writing a book? You’re sure nosy all of a sudden. Maybe you think a couple of kisses gives you the right to give me the third degree, but if that’s what you’re thinking, buster, you can just think again.”

  Caleb stared, astounded. “Whoa, there. What brought that on?”

  She whirled away so fast that coffee sloshed from her mug to splatter on the floor.

  Caleb set his mug, along with his bag of frozen corn, on the table. At the counter next to the sink he tore a paper towel from the roll mounted beneath the upper cabinet and wiped up the spill on the floor. He threw the wadded towel into the trash, then turned to face Melanie.