Free A Rancher's Love by Capri Montgomery

soft voice caressed his ears so sweetly.
    “Really,” he admitted. “Until you came along I hadn’t wanted to be with anybody.” He pushed one hand into her hair, sweeping the curly soft locks away from her face before placing a soft kiss onto her cheek.
    He eased out of her and pulled her jeans up before fixing his own clothes. If they were going to have this discussion they were not going to do it while he was butt naked and still inside of her.
    She turned around and looked at him. “Well, I’m clean,” she told him. He hadn’t even thought of that. They hadn’t used any protection. Was she on the pill? “I’ve only been with two guys in my lifetime.
    Darin, my ex-boyfriend who now happens to be my stepfather,” she laughed hard. “That sounds so weird doesn’t it?”
    “A little,” he admitted.
    “Feels weird too. He’s my age.” She shook her head. “Clearly I won’t be calling him dad.”
    “Clearly,” he nodded. “Who’s the other guy?”
    “Oh…I was afraid you would ask that. I was…um…sixteen,” she made a scrunched up face that told him she was embarrassed.
    “So was I,” he chuckled. “Daisy and I didn’t want to wait. We never told our parents. And she wasn’t pregnant, clearly, when we got married so that had nothing to do with it.”
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    A Rancher’s Love ~ Capri Montgomery
    “I didn’t think it had, Dean. You loved her with all of your heart and I know that. My situation is a little different than yours.”
    “How so?”
    “I was sixteen and he was twenty-seven.”
    “Zoe! That’s illegal. That bastard—”
    She held up her hand, stopping his tirade. “I was as much to blame as he was.”
    “Zoe, men like that…”
    “He was a good man. I liked him, and as a sixteen year old I thought I loved him. He was smart, and funny, and he paid attention to me; my mother never did. My father didn’t want me, but he, he wanted me.
    He fought it. I know he did because he always kept telling me when I got grown we could see where things went. I didn’t want to wait, so I pursued him a little.” She laughed. “It didn’t take much pursuing. I stayed behind one day to help him clean up the kitchen and he was going to drive me home. He took me to a deserted spot, we started kissing and the next thing I know we’re hot and heavy. I didn’t know we were going to have sex that night, but I didn’t make any attempt to stop him when he pulled my pants down. I let him. We found secluded spots to go at it with each other for several months, but I guess he got scared of what it could do to him and his restaurant so he ended it. He asked me to leave. He said he would set me up in another restaurant if I wanted to keep working in the industry, but he couldn’t let me stay there.”
    Dean could tell it broke her heart. He could hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes.
    “Anyway, I left, started working for a little bakery on the island and voila, the pastry chef cometh,”
    she chuckled. “Well, not in the way I wanted to back then. I so missed him, for a couple years. I think I missed the connection. Plus I loved the job.”
    “So what happened to him?”
    “He still owns his restaurant. When I was nineteen I ran into him at a family function. I thought it would be fireworks and heaven. But there was nothing. There was no spark, no attraction. I started wondering what I saw in the man in the first place, other than he was smart, and a really good chef and restaurant owner. Danny was nice, he was, but I think the me at sixteen and the me at nineteen were just 52

    A Rancher’s Love ~ Capri Montgomery completely different people. If I could go back and talk to myself at that age, knowing what I know now, I would tell that sixteen year old that it wasn’t love and to just wait for it.” She closed her eyes and whispered those words. She opened her eyes. “You’re only a virgin once, Dean, and when you give that gift away it should mean something. At the time I thought