Cherish and Protect Read online

  Table of Contents

  Epilogue

  Also by Lori Ryan

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Cherish and Protect

  Book Six in the Heroes of Evers, TX Series

  Lori Ryan

  Copyright 2017, Lori Ryan.

  All rights reserved.

  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher. This book may not be resold or uploaded for distribution to others in any form.

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to people, places, persons, or characters are all intended as fictional references and are the work of the author.

  Also by Lori Ryan

  Heroes of Evers, Texas Series

  Love and Protect

  Promise and Protect

  Serve and Protect

  Honor and Protect (An Evers, TX Novella)

  Desire and Protect

  Cherish and Protect

  Treasure and Protect

  Canyon Creek

  Born to be My Baby

  Never Say Goodbye

  Thank You For Loving Me

  With These Two Hands

  I’ll Be There For You

  If That’s What It Takes

  On the Line Series

  Pure Vengeance

  Latent Danger

  Wicked Justice

  All In

  The Sutton Capital Series

  Legal Ease

  Penalty Clause

  The Baker’s Bodyguard (A Sutton Capital Series Novella)

  Negotiation Tactics

  The Billionaire’s Suite Dreams

  The Baker, the Bodyguard, and the Wedding Bell Blues (A Sutton Capital Series Novella)

  Her SEALed Fate

  Cutthroat

  Cut and Run

  Cut to the Chase

  The Sutton Capital Series Boxed Set (Books One Through Four)

  The Sutton Capital Series Boxed Set (Books Five Through Seven)

  The Sutton Capital Series Boxed Set (Books Eight Through Ten)

  Triple Play Curse Series

  Game Changer

  Game Maker

  Game Clincher

  The Triple Play Curse Boxed Set

  Standalone Books

  Stealing Home (writing in Melanie Shawn’s Hope Falls Series)

  Any Witch Way (writing in Robyn Peterman’s Magic and Mayhem Series)

  1

  He probably shouldn’t have been so comfortable in the dark.

  In fact, most would guess he’d crave the sun and want to sleep out in the open after what he’d been through, but that wasn’t the way things had worked out. He’d spent nearly five years as a prisoner of dark rooms where he’d been starved and left to rot, but James Keegan Lawless somehow seemed to need the dark.

  The barn his sister and her family had converted to an apartment for him served those needs most days, so long as he didn’t throw open the doors and turn on all the lights. He lived in the converted loft, but the lower half was still one large workspace. Laura had said it once belonged to her husband’s father, a man who liked inventing things more than working the ranch.

  James wasn’t working with the saw today, so he only flicked on the lights near the workbench, leaving the rest of the space gray.

  “Go lay down, Lu,” James said in a voice so low only the dog he spoke to would hear it. Lulu, the large Pyrenees mix his brother-in-law had trained as a service dog for him, seemed to always have her ears trained toward him, making anything louder unnecessary. Thankfully.

  He hadn’t expected the dog to help much when he came to the ranch two months back, but he had to admit, she was growing on him. Talking to her was easier than talking to anyone else.

  Not that he talked to her about anything deep or important. He rarely said more than a few words at a time. She didn’t seem to mind.

  Just opening his mouth and saying anything nowadays was hard. Then again, he’d never been big on words. Still, somehow, in the jungles of South America, in a small area called the Devil’s Den by those who spent any time there, the words seemed to have been stripped from him. Words, humanity, his soul.

  The dog didn’t judge. She padded over to the blanket he’d tossed on the ground in the corner for her and tucked her paws under her chin. Sentry. She stood sentry over him.

  James went to the corner and lifted the sandpaper he’d left there the night before, folding it several times to get a clean spot before applying it to the wooden shelf he was making. He should do a table and chairs next. The loft had a small set, of course, but the one down here in the workroom was old. He could do better.

  Lulu’s head came up and James nodded. “Yeah, I hear her too.”

  The dog looked at him as if to say, “What do you plan to do about it?”

  “Not a damned thing,” he answered as he pictured the woman out there, strong and sure as the devil herself on top of that horse. He knew she’d do a few laps of the ring to warm her horse up, then she’d send the horse over jumps so tall and wide they could make your heart hold its breath, as she and the powerful beast strode toward them.

  She would laugh when she landed, and he didn’t blame her. She was flying, after all.

  According to Laura, the jumps the woman was taking weren’t even as high as they could be. The horse she kept here at Bishop Ranch was a retired Grand Prix jumper, so she only took her over five-foot jumps, not anything higher.

  James moved his hands over the wood. Solid, smooth, steady under his hands.

  Lulu stood and moved on quiet feet to the door, looking out through the crack where the edge of it almost met the side wall. She breathed in a deep gulp of air and he wondered at all she might take in with that breath. He’d heard that when a dog was sniffing, it was like it was reading the newspaper. They pulled volumes of information in through those sensitized noses of theirs.

  James froze for a split second as his thoughts went involuntarily to what she would smell like. The goddess on the horse. That’s how he thought of her. Not because she was gorgeous, though she was. No, she was a goddess because of her strength. She rode on that beast like it was nothing, took those jumps as if they were two inches tall instead of five feet.

  So, yeah, she was a goddess.

  “Lu, bed.” He pointed to the blanket and the dog went, looking at him like he’d stolen a donut right out from under her nos
e.

  “I don’t know why you’re so fascinated with her anyway,” he said, to himself and the dog.

  He started the careful job of applying glue, then fitting together the last of the dovetail joints that would secure the top of the bookcase to the body. He wondered idly how many pieces of furniture he could make before he ran out of space to store them. Maybe Laura and Cade could take some to their house.

  Then again, he thought with a glance around, if he stacked them to the ceiling, he could fit a lot in the barn.

  Lu’s head came up again and Cade heard the footsteps that had spurred the movement. Not human footsteps. A horse.

  James tossed his rag on the table and issued a low whistle to the dog before retreating up the stairs to the loft.

  Could be it was Cade coming to see him.

  Or not. Better to watch from his stairs so he could escape up to the loft if he needed to.

  Presley Royale slowed as she neared the barn. She wouldn’t knock or say hello. She never did. She knew Laura’s brother, James, lived there and from what she could gather, he didn’t want visitors. She could respect that. If anyone could understand that not everyone wanted to see or talk to people, it was Presley.

  Much to her parents’ dismay, she wasn’t born wanting to be the center of attention. She would rather go home and bed the horses down for the night, then read a book in bed. They wanted to drag her to whatever wine and cheese or victory party was taking place after the show.

  Still, she liked circling out near the old barn to cool down Tess after a ride. The view behind the barn was gorgeous for a lot of reasons. In the spring, there were wild flowers dotting the landscape in slashes of bright color. But even now, in the dry summer, there was a beauty to the yellow grass that blew in the breeze. She wondered what it would look like in the fall. There were a few trees out on the horizon, and even though fall in Texas had nothing on the changing leaves of New England, they would turn orange or yellow. Presley would bet it was pretty.

  She murmured to Tess and made the almost unconscious gestures that would move the horse around to loop the older barn before walking back to the newer barn that now housed the animals. She’d have to ask Laura if they had names for the different barns. Although, she guessed now this one should really be called James’s barn regardless of what it had been called before.

  Presley was too deep in thought for her own good when Tess startled and shied, catching Presley off guard. She gripped with her legs and dug her hands into the mane. Presley would figure out what had spooked the horse later. For now, she needed to keep her mount.

  As with anything having to do with horses, fractions of a second changed the situation. It quickly became clear that keeping her mount was the last thing Presley needed to do as Tess stumbled sideways and fell. Presley threw herself, trying to clear the space before a thousand pounds of lean muscular horse flesh came down on her, pinning her to the ground or breaking a leg.

  She almost made it.

  Presley looked up from her string of curses in time to see that someone had witnessed her creative burst of frustration.

  She didn’t have much time to process the man standing over her as he steadied Tess by the reins, before cursing again as Tess grunted and tried to right herself.

  “Stop her!” Presley held out a hand to the man. “Hold her reins and try not to let her move. I don’t want her to hurt herself.”

  He shot her a look, but held the reins firm while Presley half dragged, half limped, but mostly scrambled to Tess’s head. She shooshed and steadied the mare for several seconds, making sure she was calm. If Tess tried to get up while she was still panicked, she was more likely to injure herself in the process. Presley pushed herself to a standing position, leaning most of her weight on her one good foot.

  A few clucks of her tongue and Tess was on her feet. Presley eyed the horse from where she stood. She needed to feel her legs, check them for injuries. The only problem was, when Tess had gone down, she’d fallen on Presley’s left foot and she was guessing from the amount of pain she was in, she had likely suffered a bad sprain. She didn’t think it could be a break, but she also wasn’t eager to find out by trying to walk on it and failing.

  “Do you know anything about horses?” She asked. She could feel him behind her. He was that kind of man, the one you felt straight on through to your toes. She kept her voice steady and soothing with the question, still rubbing one hand up and down the flat of Tess’s face.

  “Some.” It occurred to Presley that the man hadn’t said a word until then, and she wondered if he only spoke in one-word sentences. Though, she supposed, a single word couldn’t really be called a sentence.

  “Enough to run your hands down her legs without getting yourself kicked?”

  He didn’t answer. Just moved silently to her left and began to do as she’d asked. He seemed to know what he was doing, taking up a position that kept his back to Presley as he faced the horse’s rear and bent to run his hand gently down the front right leg.

  “They won’t be swollen or warm yet, so just look for cuts,” she said.

  He nodded and moved to the back leg next and so on. It was a position that allowed her to see his jean-clad ass in a way that shouldn’t have been so distracting given her level of concern for Tess.

  He stood and turned Presley’s way.

  “No cuts.”

  Two words this time.

  Presley nodded. She would check for herself about twenty more times before she put Tess up for the day, but this would have to do for now.

  “Thank you,” she said looking at the ground. “We should figure out what spooked her. She doesn’t shy easily, so there had to be a snake or something.”

  The man, who she assumed was Laura’s brother James, pointed to a spot on the ground behind her. The body of a snake sat cut in half but still writhing some ten feet away.

  “Oh.” Presley couldn’t really think of much more to say to that. She saw a shovel laying nearby and put two-and-two together. “That was fast.”

  She thought she saw James’s lips twitch, but if they had, he halted the action before a smile could appear on his face.

  A beautiful white dog sat in the door to the barn, alternately looking between the man and the snake.

  “That’s not for you, Lu,” James said, only the slightest edge of warning tempering his tone.

  “Will she listen? A snake head can bite for up to an hour after it’s been cut off.”

  The dog answered for James, backing up a few feet before laying down, head on paws and watching them.

  “Okay, then,” Presley said. She hopped on her good foot to stand at Tess’s side and took hold of her mane with one hand, preparing to limp it back to the animal barn so she could get Tess on crossties and check her legs herself. She needed to watch for heat or swelling, which would indicate there was inflammation from an injury

  That was how she’d started thinking of Tess’s barn. There was the animal barn and the brother barn.

  The thought made her picture a barn full of sexy, brooding brothers that had asses to die for and eyes that seemed to see into a person’s soul. Not a bad way to use a barn.

  Wow. Those were new thoughts for Presley.

  “I don’t think so,” James said quietly and slid his arms around her waist, somehow taking the reins of her horse at the same time.

  “Excuse me? I need to get Tess put up.”

  He snorted.

  “What are you doing?” Presley asked as he moved her over to a large rock near a tree and settled her on it. He led Tess down to a small pasture that sat between the riding ring and the brother barn. Presley watched as he stripped the horse of saddle and bridle and let her into the pasture. The competency of his movements was the only thing that overcame her irritation at him. That, and the fact his actions had given her a chance to watch Tess as she walked beside him. Given Tess’s steady gait, the horse probably wasn’t injured.

  Then James was back and crouched before h
er, raising a hand to the side of her head. She realized she still wore her helmet and raised her hands to take it off, but he pushed them aside.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m what?” She raised her hands one more, this time intending to feel for blood.

  He grunted and moved them aside again, replacing them with his own. He held her head in place with the right hand and prodded softly on her temple with the left.

  “I thought you couldn’t fall,” he murmured as he worked.

  “What?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “What would make you think I couldn’t fall?” Presley didn’t ask the other questions running through her head. You know who I am? Enough to have thoughts about me? As in, you’re thinking about me?

  He brushed along her left cheek with his thumb but remained silent.

  Presley did not. “I don’t fall often, I guess, but believe me, there are times you can’t help it. For one thing, if your horse goes down, you are, too.” When Tess had stumbled, there was really no way for Presley not to go with her. It was physics, and physics ruled a lot of what happened on a horse. “And if you have over a thousand pounds of muscle moving under you at top speed and it decides to stop with no warning…” she didn’t finish the statement.

  Truth was, she could usually keep her seat when Tess did that nowadays. She could often keep her seat on any horse, but there were always falls. Any rider who said they didn’t fall was talking crap.

  Mostly she was talking now just for the sake of talking. He didn’t seem to want to fill the quiet and she suddenly needed to, which was a little out of character for her.

  With a grunt, he stood. “It’s just a scratch.”

  He turned and walked through the door to the barn, the dog turning and following him as he passed.

  Presley sat on the rock, wondering if that was the end of it. No hello. No goodbye. It had been the strangest encounter she’d ever, well, encountered.

  She stood, looking over to where Tess stood lazily munching on grass. Presley blew out a breath of air, ready to attempt the hobble back to the animal barn. She took a limping step toward the pasture and flinched.