Bad News Cowboy

“I know.”

“So,” she said, folding her hands in her lap now like a good student. “You’re going to teach me to flirt.”

He didn’t want to. He didn’t want her flirting with the guys who were part of her group. He didn’t want her flirting with the cowboys who would come in with the rodeo.

And considering what had just happened a few seconds ago, that meant it was exactly what he needed to help her learn to do.

As long as he focused on protecting her, as long as he focused on the right angle, the weirdness between them would evaporate. It had to. It was an aberration, something he would have liked to blame on alcohol. But he couldn’t, since all he’d had was a Coke.

He could blame it on the full moon or on the way she had grabbed his chin. All things that had passed and would pass.

And since they were going to be working on the rodeo together, he really needed to get a grip.

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” He eased his foot slowly off the brake, and the truck started rolling forward.

“But chastely.”

“I will give you certain tools. What you do with them is up to you. And does not need to be shared. And none of this should be shared with Connor or Eli.”

Ultimately, he had Kate’s best interest at heart, he really did. But since he wasn’t related to her, he was being slightly more realistic than they would be. They would probably lock her in her room and not care about the fact that she was twenty-three.

“Okay. It will be our secret.”

He turned his truck onto the little road that led to her cabin. And he tried not to dwell on the way the word secret sounded on her lips. Illicit and a little bit naughty. Nothing he and Kate talked about should sound naughty or illicit.

He swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

He breathed a prayer of thanks when he rolled up to Kate’s house. He needed to get home and get his head on straight. Tonight felt like some kind of weird detour out of his normal life. Suddenly, he’d become aware of some different things about Kate. Some things that he would rather have never been aware of.

And with that had come a thick, heavy tension that just wouldn’t clear up.

A new day would fix that. The sun rising over the mountains, bathing everything in golden light, chasing away the shadows that rested on Kate’s face now. The shadows that accentuated her high cheekbones and the fullness of her lips. The darkness that blanketed the whole situation and made it seem fuzzy. Made her seem not quite like Kate. Made him feel not quite like a man who had known her since she was a whiny two-year-old.

He put the truck in Park but left the engine running. “Good night, Kate,” he said, opting to use the name she preferred. All things considered, it seemed safer.

“Do you want to come in?”

His pulse sped up. “Why would I want to do that?”

“For some tea? For a flirting lesson?”

“Let’s hold off on that,” he said, his throat constricting. Right now he needed to get away from her.

“Okay. Thank you for coming tonight.” She took a deep breath. “And thank you for punching Chad in the face. He’s a doofus.”

Jack laughed. And for a moment things felt as though they might be back to normal. The kind of normal they had before the past year or two, when everything he’d said and done had been wrong in Kate’s eyes. “He really is. I hate that guy.”

“I guarantee that he now hates you,” Kate said, opening the passenger-side door and sliding out of the truck. “See you later?”

“You know you will. Probably a whole lot sooner then you’d like.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She simply smiled and slammed the door. He watched her walk all the way into the house. Because he had to make sure she was safe, after all. Not for any other reason.

Once she was inside, he put the truck in Reverse and backed out of the driveway. The air quality in the vehicle had changed since Kate had left. He could breathe easier.

He wasn’t going to overthink it. It would be a nonissue by tomorrow.

The sun would rise, he would be able to put Kate back in the proper place in his mind, and life would go on as it always had.

* * *

PERFECT. JUST PERFECT. Now that she’d made the critical mistake of admitting it to herself, it was as if a veil had been torn from her eyes and she could no longer feign ignorance of any kind. She was attracted to Jack.

Heart-pounding, bone-tingling, heavy-breathing, thinking-about-him-in-the-shower kind of attraction. How she’d spent so long pretending it was anything else was a mystery.

Self-preservation. That was clearly the answer. That and deep denial that ran all the way to her bones. Because nothing was ever going to happen with Jack. Never, ever, ever.

On a personal level, she liked Jack okay except when he was being a pain in the ass. Which was always. So often she liked him only minimally.

Apparently, though, liking him or not had nothing to do with sex feelings.

She let out a heavy sigh and dropped her bag on the floor. She had sex feelings for Jack. And it was undeniable. When she imagined getting in Chad’s truck and doing all that dirty stuff to him, it made her feel vaguely unsettled and more than a little disgusted.

She allowed herself, just for a moment, to imagine she was back in the truck with Jack, the light low, his blue eyes fixed on her. And she imagined him putting his hand on her cheek. His fingers would be rough, calloused from all the hard work that he did. No matter how much Jack tried to pretend he didn’t take things seriously, she knew it wasn’t the truth. He was a hard worker, and everything he had was a result of that hard work.

She was sure his touch, his skin, would reflect that. Then she imagined him leaning in, those eyes that were usually all filled with mischief turning serious as his focus narrowed onto her face.

And then she imagined him whispering all those filthy things to her. Except he didn’t say the words quite the way Chad had. Not in her fantasy. Of course, what he did say was all very vague and murky because Kate wasn’t exactly up on dirty talk.

But she knew Jack would be way smoother than Chad. His voice would go all deep, the way that it did when he talked about something serious, which was so rare it was like finding gold. And it would get a little bit rough, the way it did when he called her Katie.

When she thought of touching Jack, of taking her clothes off for Jack, she didn’t feel disgusted. She felt shaky and afraid, and given that this was only a fantasy, she could only imagine how terrified she would be if she found herself in this moment in reality. But she didn’t want to run away. She wanted to lean in.

Shit, shit, shit. Undeniable sex feelings.

She turned to her couch, bracing her knees against the arm and falling forward over the side. Then she buried her face in one of the throw pillows and let out a long, drawn-out moan. What the hell was she supposed to do with this? Attraction to Jack, of all people.

It was the worst thing ever.

In his eyes she was nothing more than a kid. A kid he had to protect from herself. As though her flirting was tantamount to running with scissors. And he was going to teach her how to do it right. Just more reinforcement of the fact that he did not see her as an adult woman. And even if he did, there was no point in going there. He was the baddest bet around and everyone knew it.

He was an unapologetic manwhore who did whatever he wanted with whoever he wanted and never, ever made a commitment.

She tried not to find that assessment of him exciting. She should have found it disgusting. She should have found him disgusting. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. She never had.

From the time she was a little girl, running wild through the fields until she couldn’t breathe, until the wind tangled her hair into knots, Jack Monaghan had amassed a whole mountain’s worth of admiration in her soul. When the world had been bleak, he’d made her smile. Simple as that.

She wasn’t a child now. She was a twenty-three-year-old virgin who had never even been kissed, who still ran like lightning through the grass and let her hair get tangled into a mess. And no matter how hard she tried to fight it, he still held his claim on that turf in her soul. The way Jack walked around doing what he wanted was more than a little appealing to someone who felt sheltered beyond reason.