Cain glanced up at little Ginger, twelve years old today, standing two stories above him in the hayloft. Though his feet twitched to hightail it to the old abandoned Glenn River Distillery, he forced himself not to look at his watch. Whatever time it was, Mary-Louise would still be waiting for him when he got there. He was sure of it.
Last time they were together, she’d guided his fingers down to the slick nub of flesh between her legs, and he’d rubbed it until she’d screamed his name. To reward him, she’d gotten on her knees and sucked his cock into her pretty mouth, making him come in about three minutes flat and backhanding her mouth after swallowing every last bit. And damn if he hadn’t gotten hard again right away because it was the sexiest fucking thing he’d ever seen.
And tonight? Well, if Cain had his way, tonight they were finally going to do the deed. Have sex. Fuck. Hell, he’d even make love if that’s what Mary-Louise required of him. He’d been watching the breeding horses on McHuid Farm for as long as he could walk. Tonight, it was his turn, and he was about as jazzed up as a fifteen-year-old kid could be. It was on. It was fucking happening.
Cain shoved thoughts of Mary-Louise from his mind and grinned up at Princess Ginger in her tower. “Now, Miss Virginia, you ignore ole Woodman here and you jump to me, baby.”
He and Woodman had engaged in this princess-in-the-tower tradition every year since they’d found the boss’s daughter perched in the hayloft door on her sixth birthday. Cain willingly admitted that it was sort of a stupid ritual, but something had made him come here and hang out by the old barn all afternoon, waiting for Ginger and Woodman to break away from the party, even if it made him late for Mary-Louise. And damn if he hadn’t had to work to keep his face from splitting into a grin when he saw them running down the hill toward the barn hand in hand. It wasn’t like loafing around the McHuids’ barn on a Sunday afternoon was a barrel of laughs so he’d kept his expression lazy, but inside he’d been rubbing his hands together with glee because the truth was, he loved this tradition just as much as he loved Woodman and Ginger. It made him happy, when not much else did.
Why should he be happy? His parents sure as shit weren’t happy—they’d alternated between yelling at each other and giving each other the silent treatment for fifteen long, unhappy years. By the age of six, Cain knew that theirs hadn’t been a love match—fuck, they barely tolerated each other. His father, Klaus, had come over from Austria in 1989 after working on the state stud farm of the Lipizzan stallions. He’d accompanied one of the studs to Kentucky to be bred at McHuid’s, seen Cain’s pretty momma at the Apple Valley Diner, gotten her pregnant, unenthusiastically—if the wedding pictures buried in his mother’s sweater drawer were any indication—married her, and stayed in Apple Valley to raise their son.
Meanwhile, Cain’s Aunt Sophie, his mother’s twin, had married the fucking president of the Apple Valley Savings and Loan a month before his parents, and the entire town acted like their wedding was the second coming. (How did he know this? Well, for one thing, those wedding pictures weren’t hidden in a sweater drawer. About three hundred and eighty six gazillion of them were in ornate silver frames, jammed together on the grand piano at his aunt’s house.) And actually, no, the wedding wasn’t the second coming. That blessed event had come nine months later, when Josiah—fair-fucking-haired Josiah—was born. Josiah, who loved horses so much, he had slowly but surely become the son that Klaus had never had in Cain. While Cain was always running off to smoke cigarettes behind the Five and Dime Mart or meet girls at the abandoned distillery, goody-two-shoes Josiah—or Woodman, as everyone called him—was at McHuid’s, becoming Klaus’s right-hand man. And while Cain had no actual proof that his father loved Josiah more than him, he was pretty sure it was true. And while he didn’t hate Josiah for it (his father was owed that honor), he couldn’t deny that it hurt.
So his parents’ marriage was doomed from the start, he was just short of a bastard, his aunt and uncle were local celebrities, and Woodman was worshipped almost as much as the baby Jesus.
Fuckin’ fantastic.
Last but not least, ring-a-ding-fuckin’-ding, while Klaus’s marriage was a bust, his partnership with Ranger McHuid was a horse-breeding match made in heaven. In fact, as the years passed, the McHuid horses had become such a passion for Cain’s father that his wife and son became little more than an afterthought in his life. And it made Cain hate his father and hate horses. Add Ranger McHuid’s ambivalence toward him and Miz Magnolia’s refusal to include him and his family in her stupid parties since the year Ginger broke her arm, he pretty much hated everything about McHuid’s.
Well, everything . . . except Ginger.
“Be smart, Gin,” said Woodman.