Unlikely Love

By Christopher Maddox

Given their backgrounds, you would expect them to be intolerant of one another and incapable of forging any kind of relationship. They are thrown together in the Wyoming wilderness and are forced to live under the same roof due to circumstances beyond their control. Two people who have no interest in each other must tolerate the other’s presence for a short period. He’s a seasoned, reclusive, white rancher with a tortured past, and she’s a gorgeous, black woman who is running away from problems of her own. Isolation removes prying eyes and many of society’s arbitrary restrictions. Eventually, physical attraction and sexual desire transcends the racial barriers and takes these two from not being attracted to one another to the point where they cannot wait to be together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Maddox
• Release date: Oct 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310562242

Christopher Maddox

I have always been addicted to love and romance. I like strong, independent women, so I tend to write about strong female characters that either start out strong or develop whatever inner strength is needed to see them through. My heroes and heroines are sometimes flawed because mistakes and imperfections always build character and strength in strong people. Some of my stories are taken from life’s experiences while others are drawn from experiences I wish I’d had. In my world, there are no boundaries to the limitless pleasures that can be found in the female form or from the joy that can be shared between lovers. However, my books are not about page after page of mindless, non-stop sex, but when it is appropriate, I try to make it real. Where love and romance have a chance to blossom, intimacy is usually part of the equation because it is the fuel that ignites the desire that leads to love. I like to think of myself as an adult romance writer with a moral compass. I live in Florida with my wife and three, poorly trained, dogs. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. I love happy endings. I love hearing from my readers and appreciate their comments and suggestions. Click on the link below if you would like to send me a message. Thank you. [e-mail]

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Unlikely Love

Christopher Maddox

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 Christopher Maddox

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This work contains content of an extremely graphic nature including graphic sexual acts. All characters in this work are eighteen years of age or older. This is a work of fiction intended for adults 18 and over only. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Epilogue

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Chapter One

Jake Conrad was on his way home from his weekly trip to Laramie, Wyoming. His place was just south of Arlington, Wyoming where he lived on a little over one hundred and thirty-five thousand acres of prime ranch land. The land had been in his family for many generations. It was some of the best ranch land in Central Wyoming, and it was capable of supporting a lot more cattle and horses than he was currently grazing on it. The fact is that he has let the place run down for the past ten years. It all started when his wife, Sarah, left him to move back to Los Angeles, and when she did, he fell apart.

He had met her while he was attending college at the University of Davis in Central California. It was a storybook romance of lust and extreme heat at first sight. They had fallen in love rather quickly, and they were married during their last year of college.

His parents were wealthy, and since he was an only child, he had never wanted for anything. They took care of his every need. He owned his own home at Davis and drove a new F-150, four-wheel-drive pickup, as well as, a BMW sports sedan. Jake was a handsome young man, standing six feet two inches tall. He was strong, agile, and lithe from working on his parent’s ranch. He was a little rough around the edges, but he was kind and gentle. Except for the time he was attending college, he had lived his entire life in a remote part of the Wyoming wilderness.

Sarah had been immediately attracted to him, and that is a bit of an understatement. She couldn’t keep her hands off him. They say that opposites attract. Well, these two were polar opposites. She was tall, blond, and statuesque. She was worldly and sophisticated, and when they met, he was anything but worldly and sophisticated. As a result, he fell deeply in love with her. She was going to be his prize, and he had planned to take her back home to Wyoming after he finished college.

He had been home schooled until he started the seventh grade. At that point, he was bussed forty-five miles each way to Laramie. Sure, Laramie was a town all right, but it was a small town with a population of only about thirty-one thousand. The population would swell a little during roundup, but that was only temporary. Laramie is one of the nation’s great historical cities. It’s an integral part of the country’s rich, exciting history involving some of the most notorious legends of the old west, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The point here is that Laramie was the largest town in close proximity to the ranch, but still, it only had a population of thirty-one thousand people, and it didn’t offer a big-city girl much more than just the basics.

His marriage to Sarah had gone well until Jake’s parents were killed in a freak grizzly bear attack on their ranch. Apparently, they had stumbled upon one of their cattle that had been recently killed. They had gotten down off their horses and were looking around the kill for sign when they were ambushed by the bear. His father had left his rifle in the scabbard, and when their horses ran off, they didn’t stand a chance.

When that happened, it became necessary for Jake to move back to the ranch and assume his responsibility for running it. Well, Sarah enjoyed ranching as long as she could do it and still live in Southern California. She was not cut out for ranching, and as far as she was concerned, living in Wyoming had not been part of the bargain. She was a big-city girl who was into large, regional malls and fancy restaurants.

She considered having to live in or near Arlington, Wyoming a virtual death sentence. The country around it was beautiful, but it was pretty much right in the middle of nowhere. In fact, if someone were to ask you where you were going, and you replied nowhere, Arlington could be one of your possible destinations. The latest census figures from two thousand and ten indicate that the population was twenty-five, and the growth rate was a negative forty-three percent. In other words, Arlington was slowly dying. The closest cities where there was any shopping to speak of were either Salt Lake City, Utah or Denver, Colorado. Both of these cities were several hours away by automobile and were, occasionally, too dangerous to travel to during the winter months because of blowing, drifting snow.

Sarah lasted one winter on the ranch, and that was enough for her. When she was finally convinced that she would never be able to persuade him to sell the ranch and move back to Southern California, she left and filed for divorce. Jake didn’t think that she would actually leave. To him, their marriage was a lifelong commitment, and when she left, after her first winter stuck on the ranch, he was devastated. As a result, he spent quite a while consoling himself with a bottle of whiskey. I think we should make that several bottles of whiskey over a period of several months.

It took him about a year, but he finally snapped out of it. He got back to ranching; however, it was on a much smaller scale. Due to the embarrassment of his wife leaving him, he didn’t want anyone around that could whisper and talk behind his back, so he let all of his ranch hands go and tried to run the place by himself. Eventually, he ended up having to sell most of the cattle and the horses. He kept what he felt he could manage by himself, which was around five hundred head of cattle and a few horses. He did hire extra help, however, during the spring and fall roundups.

In the ten years since Sarah had left him, he had become a recluse. He was wealthy, but he never spent any money unless it was absolutely necessary, and getting laid, he felt, was one of those things that was absolutely necessary. His only connection to the outside world, besides a couple of old friends in Arlington, were his weekly, Saturday trips to Laramie to get what provisions he needed and to get laid.

There were a couple of girls that he had known since high school that he occasionally went out with, but he actually preferred to pay for his sex. There were a couple whorehouses in town that the police conveniently ignored. When ranch hands come to town from all over the prairie, they come looking for something good to drink and something good to, well, you know what I mean. They want some sex. It didn’t even have to be good sex, just as long as there was plenty of it. Because of that, whorehouses and brothels have enjoyed a long, rich history in towns like Laramie, and time hasn’t done anything to change that.

For a while, he frequently stopped by one of them, but he didn’t like the lineup process or having to wait for one of his favorite girls if she was busy with someone else. So, for the last three years, most of the girls that he hooked up with, he found on the internet. For a town of only thirty-one thousand people, Laramie seemed to have an abundance of hookers. He learned that the vast majority of them were not full-time pros, though. They were part-time girls trying to make some extra money, and they appeared to like what they were doing much more than the full-time prostitutes did who worked in the regular whorehouses. They ranged in age from eighteen and up. Some were college girls going to the University of Laramie, and some were just single girls needing some extra cash that may or may not have had a boyfriend.

The majority of them, however, appeared to be married women that were doing it behind their husbands back. Jake liked the married gals the best. The majority of the married women were doing it because the needed the extra money and they enjoyed sex. Most of their husbands worked for one of the ranches, the railroad, or they were long-haul truck drivers. It didn’t really matter whom they worked for, the fact was that they were gone most of the time, and their wives were lonely.

It was late Saturday night, around eleven-thirty in the evening, and he had just turned off of Highway 80 onto the Arlington exit. To get to his place, he didn’t even have to go through town, such as it was. He simply drove west on a side road less than half a mile, and then he headed south toward his ranch situated between Rock Creek Canyon and Medicine Bow National Forest. His house was about ten miles off the highway, which became impassable sometimes during the winter months because of blowing and drifting snow. That night, there was no way he could have stayed in Laramie if he expected to be home the following day. It was mid-December, and the weather forecast called for temperatures well below zero and for blowing, drifting snow. This meant that the road to his ranch would be impassable for a few days unless he took his tractor out and cleared it himself, something that he hated to do. He did have a snowmobile that he could use if there were an emergency, and he needed to get to town for some reason.

He was about two miles south of the highway. The outside thermometer read thirteen degrees Fahrenheit, and there were already flurries of snow swirling around the trees and settling on the gravel road to the leeward side of the ridge that it traveled along.

About an hour or two of this shit and no one will be going anywhere, he mumbled. That suited him just fine because he had plenty of provisions including a bottle of whiskey, and he had just had sex with one of his favorite girls. He was tired and ready to crawl into a nice, warm bed and see how much snow morning would bring.

The snow was coming down very hard now, and the bright glare from the headlights of his pickup was reflecting back off the large snowflakes making it difficult for him to see the road.

What the fuck, he yelled. There was a car parked halfway on the gravel road right in front of him. He slammed on the brakes and swerved to the left barely missing it. It appeared to be abandoned. That fucking car wasn’t sitting there when I left for Laramie this morning, he grumbled.

There is an unwritten rule in that part of the country. If you encounter a vehicle out in the wilderness in the winter, you must stop to determine what the situation is and lend a hand if it’s needed.

Probably some dumbass, fucking kids out for a joyride and broke down earlier in the day, he bitched as he walked up to the car. He flashed his light inside, expecting to find it empty, and he would be able to go on his way. To his surprise, however, there was someone lying down in the front seat.

Aw, Fuck, he mumbled as he tapped his flashlight on the window. It took two more loud raps on the window to awaken the person that was sleeping inside. The window came down slowly. He saw a young girl with dark-brown skin and long, curly, dark-brown hair looking fearfully up at him. She was shivering.

What in the hell are you doing out here, in the middle of the night, parked in the middle of the road? he asked angrily, pointing the light directly in her eyes.

She looked blindly up into the light, attempting to shade her eyes.

Please don’t hurt me. I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. Am … am I trespassing or something? she asked.

No, not really, but this road doesn’t go anywhere except to my place. What are you doing sleeping in the car? Don’t you know there’s a blizzard on its way? Hell, it’s not on its way; it’s here, he said angrily.

‘I just pulled off the road to get some sleep. I didn’t want anyone to bother me, so I drove over here hoping that no one would notice," she said, shivering.

Hell, you don’t even have any snow tires on this car. Where are you headed? he asked. She didn’t answer right away, so he figured she didn’t want to tell him. Listen, I don’t care where you’re headed, but you need to start that car and get back out on the main road before you get stranded out here and me along with you.

She looked up at him fearfully with tears in her eyes. It won’t start. I think the battery is dead, she whimpered.

I’ve got jumper cables. I’ll give you a jump start, he said as he went to get the cables out of his pickup. He quickly looked around at the amount of snow coming down, and he knew that she would never make it to wherever she was headed. Ah, fuck, he said, throwing the cables back in the toolbox behind the cab of his truck.

He walked back to her car. She was shivering so badly now that she could barely talk. Listen, Miss, are you by yourself?

Y-y-y-yes, she said, shivering, barely able to talk.

Okay, get your stuff and lock your car. You’re going with me, he said in a very terse, firm voice. She looked quickly up at him. She was desperately fearful of him now.

No. I can’t go with you. I need to get going, she pleaded.

Missy, if I leave you here or if I get your car running and let you leave without snow tires, I might as well just shoot you right here because you won’t be alive in the morning. As much as I would like to, I simply can’t leave you here, he grumbled.

But I don’t know who you are. How do I know you aren’t …uh …

He cut her off. Missy, right now it doesn’t matter who I am. I’m not an ax murderer, and I’m not a rapist. So get your shit together, and get in my truck before we both die of exposure.

I don’t think that I should. I’ll be alright, she insisted.

Lady, I am not asking you to come with me, I am telling you. Now get your fucking clothes, and come with me because you are going with or without your clothing, and you are going now, he shouted.

She was tiny and scared to death of him. She was only five feet, five inches tall and looked as though she was skin and bones. M-m-m-my c-c-clothes are in the t-t-trunk, she managed to get out.

Here, get in my truck. It’s warm in there, and I’ll get your clothes, he said as he helped her step up into the truck. He retrieved her luggage along with three paper bags full of some type of girly stuff. He threw the luggage in the back of the truck and placed the bags on the jump seat behind them. He locked her car and gave her the keys.

She looked over her shoulder toward her car as he pulled away and headed down the desolate gravel road. The thing that made the biggest impression on her was a huge rifle with an enormous scope hanging on a rack in the back window. She shivered at the thought of what that could do to someone.

Don’t worry, it will be there when we can get back to it in two or three days, he said as he strained to see the road.

She didn’t look his way or say anything. She just sat there and shivered, scared to death. She didn’t know what to think. Here she was, running away from the mob in Denver, and now, she’s being picked up and kidnapped by some crazy, deranged Mountain Man, who’s headed further back into the woods.

Even though he knew the road like the back of his hand, he had to drive slowly because of the poor visibility. They had been on the road for about five minutes, and she began to warm up.

How much farther, she asked, timidly.

I think it’s about five more miles. It’s kind of hard to tell with the snow blowing like it is.

I bet your family will be glad to see you drive up this late with the weather as bad as it is, she mentioned cautiously.

I don’t have any family. Just a cat and a mangy old dog, he said, looking briefly toward her.

She spun her head around and looked his way. Her eyes were as large as golf balls, and her look of fear was undeniable.

She trembled and looked briefly at the door handle.

"Listen, Missy. If you get out