April, Dani - Raven's Ranch (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme) (21 page)

“Keep working, baby.” He placed a reassuring kiss on top of her head. “You’ll find something.”

“I just hope it will be in time.” Her voice sounded small with the sound of the rain pounding against the roof.

He tightened his grip around her and ran his hand through her long hair, brushing it back from her forehead, behind her ears. “It’s been so long since I’ve been with a woman, I’m not sure if I know what to do anymore.”

“I’ve been getting a lot of experience recently.” She laughed. “I think I know enough for both of us.”

They fell asleep holding onto each other. Raven was awakened later in the night by his urgent touch. His erection burned her from under his boxers. She opened her mouth to his kiss. It was a gentle and quiet passion. His hands fondled her breasts under the covers. He slid down her nightie and one of her nipples popped out. He took it in his mouth and sucked it greedily. She ran her fingers through his long, wavy hair and moaned. His hands explored down her back. She squirmed beneath him on the bed.

“Let me take off my panties for you, darling,” she whispered in his ear, feeling his desperate need for her.

She brought the panties down her waist, over her knees, and kicked them from her ankles under the blankets. He got on top of her, and she spread her legs for him.

He looked down at her with uncertainty, hesitating before he entered her. “Is it okay?”

She smiled up at him and put her arms around his shoulders. “It’s fine. I’m already lubricated.”

He penetrated her. He was a large man and took his time with her, the gentlest lover she’d had. He brought them to such a nice rhythm, that even though she was tired from the long day she’d had, after a few minutes she found herself responding to him. Her pussy muscles tightened around his thrusting cock, and sweat poured down from her inner walls.

When he brought her to climax, it was sweet and long. She wrapped her legs tightly around his back, and within a second of her orgasm he had reached the pinnacle with her and was coming inside her.

She couldn’t go to sleep for a while after their sex was finished. Tyler, on the other hand, fell quickly off into a deep sleep. She wondered if this was the deepest sleep he’d had since he lost his wife, and hoped for his sake it was the start of better things to come.

She was happy to have him sleeping next to her in bed, but at the same time she found herself becoming scared. This was guy number four. Things just kept getting more complicated. She felt like she was sitting on a powder keg that was about to explode.

Tomorrow she had a date with Roy. Guy number five. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how that one would go down. Roy was the only one of her five guys who actually frightened her. He had been in and out of jail, after all, but she supposed that’s also what turned her on about him, and she thought somewhere beneath that bearded exterior there was a good heart. Tomorrow she would find out if she was right about him or not.

Chapter Fourteen

Tyler got up before sunrise and left her with a good-bye kiss on the lips. She thought he seemed like a new man this morning and was happy to know she’d had a lot to do with it.

She pulled up the Internet on her computer and began retyping her searches from the night before. She also started a notepad text document of ideas that had been going through her head. She was soon chatting online with a cyber buddy of hers that was also a professor of computer science in California. Things were beginning to take shape that morning.

What did she know about the financial problems of the ranch? First off, they didn’t make enough revenue in selling the cattle to cover all their expenses. This had been going on for some years and they were far in debt to the bank. Secondly, she knew from looking at the accounting books of the Lazy L that the shortfall they ran every year was about twenty percent. That meant that if they could make twenty percent more from the sale of their cattle at market, they could pay off all of their bills and might even start turning a profit.

From talking to Chip she had learned that the Lazy L lost about twenty percent of its herd every year before they could even get them to market. Bran had confirmed that number and said it was probably even higher. Apparently the cattle were easily spooked and just wandered off away from the rest of the herd, got lost on the range, and ultimately died.

If she could figure out how to bring all of her cattle to market every year, she would make up the financial deficit of the ranch and start turning a profit. She could pay her ranch hands the money they deserved and maybe even have some left over.

The problem was there was no way to track the cattle, no way to find out where they were when they went running off. The range was a huge, open expanse of land. Once a single cow left the herd, finding it out on the range would be impossible, and cattle were not like cats and dogs. They weren’t smart enough to know how to find their own way home. They weren’t even smart enough to watch where they were going out on the badlands and were prone to falling down a crevice and breaking their necks or getting themselves stuck inside a gulley and starving to death.

Bran had said there was technology available that might help. Raven knew there was, from her studies in computer science. GPS technology was the answer. It was simple, really, as it applied to the cattle industry. Just staple an ear tag to each member of the herd when they were born. Inside the ear tag would be a tiny chip that would send a radio signal into the atmosphere to be picked up by orbiting satellites. The satellites in turn would send a signal to computers back on the ground telling them the exact spot where that member of the herd was. In fact, it was so accurate they could pinpoint the location of the cow to within two feet. Computer software could be loaded onto any machine that would graphically display all the cattle in real time. When members of the herd began to wander and stray, all one would have to do is watch the computer screen and then they would know when the cows were leaving the herd and where they were going.

It was really as simple as that. Once one knew a cow had strayed all one had to do is get in their truck and go round it up, forcing it back to the safety of the herd. This technology would even save the ranch hands work, because rather than idly patrolling the range looking for stray members of the herd they could merely drive directly to those bad boys and round them up.

Raven knew how to install and run the GPS software that would track the cattle from the comfort of the computer screen right here in her office. She could even turn her laptop into a makeshift server until they could afford a better machine.

The only problem was, and it was a big one, she didn’t know how to procure all those GPS tags on her nonexistent budget. She would have to think about that one for a while.

I have to go now.

She typed in the chat room to her cyber friend, the computer professor.

So soon? We just started going over the plan for beta testing.

My boyfriend has the day off. We have a date.

I thought you told me your boyfriend was going to be off yesterday.

He was. But that was a different boyfriend.

How many boyfriends do you have?

Five.

Girl, you are in trouble. Do they know about each other?

Yes. We’re cool.

How’d you ever manage to get five boyfriends?

It’s a long story.

I hope they’re treating you right.

Yes. They’re treating me great.

You seem to be happy.

Yes, I am very happy. Only the boyfriend I am meeting today is angry with life. I hope that I can make him happy.

She closed down her chat room window and turned her focus to the day at hand. Looking at the clock on the status bar of her PC, she saw that it was well after nine o’clock. This was late. She had let the time escape her as she chatted on the computer.

Where could Roy be? She had imagined that he would come barging into her trailer, without knocking, at the crack of dawn demanding her to get naked and spread her legs. Instead, here it was hours later and still no Roy. What had happened?

Deciding that she might be in for a long wait she made herself a tuna salad sandwich for lunch and pulled a soft drink from the refrigerator. She was starting to lose patience with Roy and becoming somewhat angry with him. She was wasting an entire day that she couldn’t afford, and she could have been well into her research on the new GPS system by now if it hadn’t been for that stupid cowboy.

Curses and obscenities that she would never have spoken aloud ran through her head in regard to the lost cowboy. “You stupid idiot, where are you?”

One o’clock came and still no Roy. She turned on the TV and found an old movie to watch. One thirty rolled around. Still nothing. It was a lonely feeling to be stood up on a date and when she got her hands on that good for nothing…

Her phone rang. Raven clutched it off the table next to her PC and answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

“Where the heck are you?” It was Roy’s voice and he sounded upset.

This, of course, upset Raven even more. “What do you mean
where am I
? I have been waiting around here all day for you. Where the hell have
you
been?”

“I sent you a text last night. Don’t pretend you never got it.”

“I never did.” Raven realized she had forgotten to check her messages this morning because she was so caught up in her quest for the new GPS system. “Why didn’t you just call me?”

“I am calling you now.”

“I meant last night.”

“You were with Tyler last night. I didn’t want to interrupt you two.”

“Well you could have called earlier today. I wasn’t with anyone then. I was waiting for you.”

“You sure you’re not just trying to blow me off? Maybe having second thoughts about taking a guy like me into your bed?”

“I’m not having second thoughts!” she yelled at him, her voice too high.

“Then why have I been standing out here in this godforsaken place all day by myself?”

“Well I waited around this lousy trailer all day by myself!”

“I don’t want to play games with you, Raven. If I’m not good enough for you, just tell me.”

“You’re an idiot! Why would you even think something like that?”

“It’s obvious to me. You’re too stuck up for me. You can forget it…” Raven’s phone went dead. He had hung up.

As soon as he was gone, she pounded on the touch screen of her phone to bring up her text messages. Sure enough, there was his message right there on the screen in front of her from : last night. He had been telling the truth about trying to contact her.

Raven was so angry she almost threw the phone at the wall, but then she remembered she had no money, and if she broke her phone she couldn’t afford a replacement.

She stormed through the trailer, strangling a cry of rage in her throat and wanting to hit something. If Roy had been standing there then, she would have hit him. Who did he think he was to talk to her like that when all she had wanted to do was help him?

The phone rang again. Acting on instinct, Raven put it to her ear and shouted, “What?”

“Meet me on the west fifty in twenty minutes.” It was Roy.

“I don’t know where that is.”

“Take your bike west on the main access road. When you get to the red mile marker, turn north. You can’t miss it.”

“All right.”