Reckless Territory by Kate Watterson Page A

he was alone.
    Turning around, he skirted several sapling cottonwoods and ducked into the cover of the brush. When he walked back into the circle of the small clearing they’d selected for their camp, Robert was kneeling by the fire, setting on a pot of coffee. His friend looked up sharply in question. “I didn’t hear shots.”
    “Nope.” Jace laid down his rifle.
    “No trouble then?”
    “Plenty of trouble, I’m going to guess, but Cole and Victoria are safe enough. I even reckon I can say they are feelin’ pretty damn good right now.”
    “Yeah, that so? Can’t say as I’m surprised.” Robert pushed his hat back a little, his smile rueful. “Cole looked pretty hungry when he followed her.”
    “Well then,” Jace said with wry humor, “he’s just had one hell of a meal.”
    “I’d say I hope he was gentle with her, but Cole’s not one to mistreat a woman.”
    “She didn’t seem to be complaining none.” Jace ran his hand through his hair, listening to the breeze rustling the leaves in the trees. A hawk went by, silent and graceful, the shadow cast by the sinking sun as the bird flitted past them. “This isn’t going to be simple now, is it?”
    Robert didn’t misunderstand. “Could be complicated, but I don’t think so. I haven’t noticed she prefers one of us to another. She’s refined lady, but she is very much a woman and also intelligent enough to know how each one of us is beginning to feel about her.”
    “Think so?”
    “It’s going to be up to her.”
    “Of course.”
    “As long as we agree on that. As I see it,” Robert said with a keen-eyed glance, “when we agreed to share the ranch, we all started over, and in that, we started a life together. We’re partners. Victoria being a part of that is like a gift. She needs us, and speaking for myself, I think she’s like an angel falling from the heavens.”
    “There aren’t many women out West, and none like her,” Jace agreed. Her refined beauty was unique in his experience. She fascinated him—not just sexually, but in every way.
    “I agree. But don’t underestimate her. This isn’t Mayfair but she can hold her own.”
    Robert was the most insightful person he’d ever met, and though he may be young, in Jace’s drifter’s life he’d met a lot of men. It was true, she treated all of them in a slightly different way, but he hadn’t seen a preference either. With him she was slightly flirtatious, with Robert friendly and warm, and with Cole there was always a certain tension—which they had apparently resolved.
    “We might be partners, but she doesn’t have to see it in that light.”
    “I’m saying,”—Robert adjusted the pot on the fire—“I think she’s thought all of it over. Look, Jace, she’d be the last person to want us at each other’s throats because of her. In nature, males are territorial and humans are no different, but as you said, this is the West. Women are scarce.”
    It was true, Jace thought as he got up to get some dried beef from the pack, their supplies at low ebb this close to home. For such a lady, the earl’s daughter had surprising steel under that refined exterior.
    What happened next would be damned interesting.
     
    Her thighs were sticky with semen, her hair had bits of grass in it from lying on the riverbank, and her skin held a light film of perspiration.
    And Victoria felt…glorious. Physically and emotionally. She had wanted Cole and he’d wanted her, and their coming together had been both elemental and yet at the same time, tender and giving. He’d withdrawn from her body and rolled to his back, his rangy body imposingly nude, his cock lax now between his brawny thighs.
    Lying with him was the single most unconventional act in her life so far, and she doubted it would stop there.
    “Did I hurt you?” A long finger traced through a runnel of his iridescent discharge on her inner thigh. “There’s a little blood.”
    Victoria found it hard to believe she could lie