Love Her Better (Kaid Ranch Shifters Book 4) Page 3

  “Smells good.”

  “I remembered how to cook.”

  That was a weird thing to say, but he said lots of weird stuff, so okay. “Sam, you can’t just come into my house whenever you feel like it. There are boundaries with me.”

  He gave her his broad back and began opening the plastic containers. “I found lots of parts for the Chevelle yesterday after I left. I brought them here. They’re in a box on the porch. I was going to bring them in and put them on the table so you could be surprised, but the table is clean, and the girls at the ranch get all pissed off when I put dirty shit on clean tables.”

  “Sam—”

  “I said I would be here at six, but you didn’t answer the door,” he said, turning to her. His eyes were downcast. “I knocked loud. Your door was unlocked. I didn’t like that because it’s not safe. I figured I would just make you breakfast and have it done when you decided to get up.” He glanced up at her, but then quickly down again.

  Oh, God, she was wearing a thin white tank top with no bra, and tiny pink and purple striped cotton pajama shorts. Her nipples were definitely showing.

  His eyes sure looked striking as he glanced up at her again. “I’m gonna fuck up a thousand times because I don’t understand the world like other people do. And maybe you’re gonna get tired of it and tell me to fuck off. Maybe you’ll do that. And it’s okay if you do. I’ll understand. But the girls at the ranch keep preachin’ to me about talking more and saying what’s going on in my head, and Cassidy, it’s so damn much. I’m a fucking mess. But…I’m also a mess who realizes it and doesn’t want to be like this forever. So, this is me saying what’s in my head, saying how I feel, and I fucking hate talking about feelings. I’m askin’…please have patience with me. And please eat my burrito.”

  She snorted and pursed her lips. This was a serious moment. He’d just opened up and talked to her more than any other man had ever done, but that last line slayed her.

  “What?” He cracked an uncertain smile and look directly at her.

  “Nothing.”

  “What did I say funny?”

  A giggle escaped her. “You said ‘eat my burrito.’ It sounded dirty.”

  And then he did. He smiled, and the whole world stopped spinning. Time froze. Perfect straight teeth, and that smile reached straight up to his gold eyes. And the way he was looking at her? It made her heart stutter. Right here, right now, Sam Kaid was the most handsome man she’d ever seen.

  “You have a great smile,” she told him before she could change her mind.

  The smile dropped from his lips immediately, and confusion swam in his eyes. “I smiled?”

  She nodded. “Do you not smile very much?”

  He looked down at his arm, and there were his goosebumps again. “No. Never.”

  Sam Kaid was a mystery. One with many layers. Complicated, obviously, but for some reason, she could get a read on him like the horses she trained. Men didn’t usually read like that for her. He’d just gone through a string of emotions that obviously confused him, so she gave him an out. “I’m hungry, and the meme you saw was correct. Feeding us is your best weapon against grumpy moods.”

  “Good. You look like a chimpanzee.”

  She scrunched up her face. “What?”

  “Look at your hair in the mirror.” He wasn’t smiling at all right now. He was dead-ass serious.

  Cassidy made her way over to the full-length mirror by the front door and yelped at what she saw. She’d taken a shower before bed last night but had been too tired to dry it. It had dried in a curly mass all around her face. She tried to pat it down, but somehow it fluffed up even bigger. “Oh, my gosh, I’m going to get ready before we eat.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you said I look like a chimpanzee!”

  Sam looked confused as hell as he shrugged up one shoulder. “I like chimpanzees.”

  She motored for the bathroom and teased him, “Find memes about complimenting girls.”

  She brushed her teeth and put her short hair into one of those puff-ball high ponytails, smeared make-up on her face, pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a blue tank top, and then when she went to pull on a hoodie, she looked at herself in the mirror and changed her mind. This tank top showed off her best assets—her boobs. Her ass was flat as a pancake, but she’d scored genetically in the teet department. Thanks, Ma.

  So, she folded her hoodie in the crook of her elbow and made her way primly out of the bathroom as though she hadn’t attacked the place like a tornado and left it destroyed in her wake.

  Adrenaline still pumping through her body, she made her way to the table where her breakfast burrito sat steaming on a plate with a cup of coffee smokin’ right beside it. The entire house smelled divine right now.

  Sam came back to the table with his own cup of coffee in his hand, and she pointed to his plate stacked with four giant burritos. “Hungry?”

  “Always. Gotta feed the animal.”

  She frowned. “What animal?”

  “The animal inside me,” he said simply.

  Oh. The animal inside him. Cassidy attracted the weirdest boys.

  There was a small bowl of salsa beside her plate, so she dipped the burrito before she took her first bite, and oh my lawdy, that bite was a warm combination of heaven—rice, cheese, marinated chicken, scrambled eggs, and…. Broccoli? She stared down at a little green sprout sticking out of her burrito.

  “You put broccoli in here, and it’s so good I can’t even taste it.”

  “Vegetables are good for your body,” he murmured around a massive bite of food.

  Huh. Okay. Broccoli for breakfast then, and she would’ve never thought about adding that to a breakfast burrito, but it tasted fucking phenomenal.

  “Why don’t you smile very much?” she asked, going back to their earlier conversation.

  Sam shrugged and kept eating.

  “Why do you think you’re a mess?” she asked.

  He chewed and narrowed his eyes at her. “You like talking about feelings.”

  Busted. “Yes, I do.”

  He shoved the last bite of his first burrito in his mouth and moved onto the next before she’d even taken three bites of hers.

  “I can’t decide if I’m impressed or grossed out by how much you can eat,” she joked to lighten the mood.

  “Be impressed. You’ll never have to feel unfeminine around me. You will never out-eat me. You could order a dozen things on the menu and try them all, and I would clean up anything you couldn’t finish. There’s no waste with me. Be impressed.”

  Huh. She actually liked that. She did have a big appetite, and boys who ate salads weren’t really her type. So okay. Impressed, she was. And she felt more comfortable to pig out. Cassidy finished her entire burrito and every drop of the salsa, too. There was something comfortable about eating with Sam, even if he was dead-silent the rest of the meal. It wasn’t an empty silence. More like a contented one.

  And when they were done, he wiped his hands on a napkin and pushed back from the table of empty plates. “I don’t smile much because I don’t have a reason to, and I’m a mess because I’m a monster. Someday, maybe, I’ll tell you about that part, but hopefully I never have to.”

  Chapter Five

  Sam couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Cassidy was teaching him how to act around the horse until he trusted them. She called it “getting the first touch in.”

  Asshole’s lead rope was very long. Cassidy had it laying gently in one hand, no pressure on his halter. She’d just been standing in the middle of the corral for half an hour while he tired himself out bucking and running around her. When he’d turned his backend to her one time to kick at her, she been immediate and firm with his punishment, a soft pop with the end of the lead rope. He hadn’t tried that again.

  Okay. Just because Asshole had been hurt before didn’t mean he got away with bad behavior with Cassidy. Sam liked it.

  He was standing well back be
cause she’d asked him to. Sitting on the tailgate of Wes’s truck, watching her move. Watching her grace as she pulled the lead rope a little tighter in her hand and took two slow steps toward him.

  Asshole stood there, legs splayed, eyes wide, breath steaming like a freight train in the early morning light.

  Sam didn’t know why he did, but he pulled out his phone to take a picture of her. This was a moment he didn’t want to forget. She was angled to the side, face downturned as she stretched her fingertips forward. She looked completely submissive and unintimidating. Asshole stretched his neck out and sniffed her knuckles, and that’s when he snapped the picture. That first touch. Both creatures reaching for each other for connection.

  One touch of the nose, and then he backed away, but he was slow about it. Uncertain. Like he wasn’t sure about what had just happened—a human had just touched him in a way that shifted the foundation he’d built his anger on. One kind touch, and Sam could see him questioning everything.

  Sam understood that down to his bones.

  He thought she would be done for the day, but nope. She stayed in there for another hour. Sometimes she gave him space and just existed near the horse, and sometimes she moved forward to touch him again. And he let her.

  Sam hadn’t believed much in magic until now.

  “Do you want to try?” she asked, breaking the silence of the morning.

  Sam hopped off the tailgate and made his way to the corral. The horse perked up his head, and his nostrils flared with his breath as Sam made his way through the gate. He stood well away, just like she’d done. She handed him the rope.

  The horse didn’t like any of this, and Sam knew why. He was a predator. If Cassidy had better senses, she could’ve smelled wolf fur on him plain as day. This horse had his ticket punched.

  It bucked and paced as far away from Sam as he could get. Started sweating a white froth again. Five minutes, and he never settled down.

  Cassidy removed herself from the corral and leaned on the fence, watching them.

  Minutes dragged on, but each time Sam moved a step forward to try for a touch, the horse bucked and jerked on the long lead rope.

  “Maybe he doesn’t like men,” Cassidy said softly.

  “That’s not it,” Sam said, dropping the frayed lead and making his way out the coral gate. Of course, the horse didn’t want to touch him. No one did. “He doesn’t like wolves.”

  Feeling stung for reasons he didn’t understand, Sam made his way around the barn and to the old Chevelle in front of her house.

  “A horse can humble you,” she called after him. “He can teach you patience.”

  Sam gave a shake of his head. If she only understood the kind of patience he’d already learned. Patience of a hunt. Patience of a kill. He didn’t need to learn patience. He needed to not fail for a little while. To have one tiny victory that built up his confidence and made him feel like he wouldn’t be a freak forever.

  In his old life, with his alpha, he had never failed. He’d completed every mission, every kill, Leif had sent him on.

  In this life of normalcy, what had he done right?

  Getting an animal to like him wasn’t going to work. Animals could sense evil, and guess what Sam was? Turned into a werewolf, born in evil, taught that he was nothing, and then trained in evil deeds. No animal, horse or human, would be able to ignore that.

  He didn’t even blame the horse for hating him.

  The Chevelle though…the Chevelle didn’t have feelings, opinions, or instincts. The Chevelle could give him a victory.

  Chapter Six

  Men like Sam Kaid liked to be left alone when they were processing.

  She didn’t understand why, but the horse’s rejection had stung him. Stung him enough that he quit on the animal, and the Kaid brothers had a work-hard-play-hard reputation that said they were definitely not quitters.

  Sam was strange, but his complex layers were very interesting to an intuitive person like her.

  Time and time again, she’d found excuses to get out of the barn and check on what he was doing to the Chevelle. He seemed to be fine with hours of silence while he worked on her car. He’d found all her dad’s old tools in the storage barn without her even directing him and was currently on his back, the northern end of him completely under the front end of the car, the southern half lying on the grass. He’d lifted it onto blocks somehow. He wasn’t even loudly cursing like her dad used to do when he worked on cars. He was just covered in grease, jerking something loose under the hood in silence.

  She’d just finished a lesson with a ten-year-old girl named Charlotte, and she and her mom waved as they drove off. It was two in the afternoon, and her stomach was growling like a grizzly.

  “Do you want a sandwich?” she asked as she made her way past him and up onto the porch.

  When Sam scooched out from under the Chevelle, she gasped at how light his eyes were. They were different. Not the dark brown they usually were. The seemed to be glowing from the inside out and even brighter with all the smeared grease on his cheeks.

  “I can always eat,” he said, void of a smile, or any facial expression really.

  Cassidy shifted her weight, the old porch floorboards beneath her creaking with her movement. “Um, Sam?”

  He sat up and dangled his arms over his knees, a wrench in one hand. “Yeah?”

  “Don’t give up on your horse. I think a lot of people have given up on him. He just needs one to get through all his tests and stick with him. Be that person, okay?”

  Sam wiped his cheek on his shirt and left a grease smear on the material. “My brothers believe in me.”

  She nodded, confused. “Okay, that’s good. It feels good to have someone in your corner, right?”

  Sam deadpanned, “No. It annoys me.”

  “Why?”

  “Expectations get heavy if you carry them too long.”

  “I’m supposed to keep this place running in my father’s name. I understand about expectations being heavy.” He didn’t respond, only stared off toward the corral with his horse in it, so she offered him space and said, “I’ll be back with lunch.”

  She left him there, made sandwiches, but when she brought them out, Sam was gone. His tools were all cleaned up, and his truck was nowhere to be found.

  A silly side of her missed him. Him being here had been a distraction from the norm. And during the next two lessons and while she mucked out stalls and fed horses and refilled water troughs, she still looked for him. She still listened for the sound of his truck engine. Time and time again, she looked over at the Chevelle on blocks.

  Sam Kaid might have just left her alone to train this horse.

  He was back.

  Cassidy could tell from the bag of breakfast biscuits sitting in the middle of her kitchen table. It was 7:00 am. She’d hit the snooze three times, but when she finally stumbled into the kitchen to start coffee, she found it sitting there.

  He’d even set out butter, peach preserves, a knife, and a napkin in the spot she’d sat at breakfast yesterday.

  She didn’t know why, but this touched her heart so much. He paid attention, thought of her, and took care of her in his own way. And he didn’t even know her! Not really.

  Heart beating fast, she got ready and braided her hair in pigtails, pulled on her second favorite trucker hat, and even pulled on clean jeans without dirt stains on the knees. Plus, she spent an extra three minutes putting on makeup because she was growing a tiny, microscopic crush on a Kaid brother.

  She snatched the bag of breakfast and the butter and speed-walked out of the house. And what she saw as she came around the side of the barn stopped her in her tracks.

  Sam Kaid was in the corral, long lead rope in hand, sitting on the ground with his eyes downcast. And the horse, that terrified, violent, raging horse, was standing on the other side of the corral, looking half asleep with his back leg propped up.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked softly as she approac
hed.

  “Three hours,” he answered without turning around.

  “You’ve been in there with him for three hours?”

  “You said he needs patience.”

  She couldn’t help the big, dumb grin on her face. He wasn’t giving up. He was sticking with the horse, and that said a lot about him as a man.

  “Stand up slow,” she urged him, keeping her distance.

  It was barely dawn, and everything was colored in hues of gray. Sam stood slowly, the rope still loose in his hands. He sidestepped toward the horse but paused when Asshole jerked up his head and perked his ears.

  “Whoa,” he cooed in a low, soothing voice. So damn sexy. “It’s just me. We match. Someone messed you up, and someone messed me up, and we’re both stubborn now. But we’re both okay. Life is different for us now.”

  The horse snorted, and the whites of his eyes showed as he glared at Sam.

  “Whoooooah,” Sam murmured again.

  Asshole walked forward, then spun and paced a few times along the back corral fence. Sam waited. He waited and talked. “You’re safe here, ol’ boy. Safer than you even realize. I would kill anyone who hurt you. Kill them. You hear?”

  Cassidy believed him. She did. There was such a note of honesty in his voice, how could she not? Okay…Sam might be a little dangerous.

  “I don’t have no one, and you don’t have no one, so whatcha say?” he crooned, taking another step toward him. “How ’bout we get along in this fucked-up world together?”

  Asshole screamed and reared, jerked the rope right out of Sam’s hand, and kicked the metal corral with a resounding bong!

  Disappointment swirled in Cassidy’s chest. She’d wanted it for Sam. Wanted that first touch for him so bad, but Sam only grinned and shook his head. He gave the horse some space and sat down where he’d been earlier. “Gonna make me earn it,” he said low. “I would do the same thing.”