Bad News Cowboy

And he wasn’t pushing her away.

He didn’t move for a moment, simply standing there and receiving what she gave him. But in a flash, that changed.

He wrapped one arm around her waist, holding her hard against him, crushing her breasts to the muscular wall of his chest. So tightly she could feel his heart raging.

Somewhere in her completely lust-addled mind, she was able to process the fact that he was affected by this, too.

She angled her head, trying to deepen the kiss, wanting more, needing more. Just as she did, she found herself being propelled backward, released.

Jack turned away from her and walked about four paces before whirling around again.

She felt cold. Shaky. She had kissed Jack. Actually kissed him. And for about two glorious seconds he had kissed her back.

And then he had...shoved her.

“Don’t do that again,” he said, his tone hard.

“If you’re going to slap my ass, I expect a kiss on the lips first,” she said, not quite sure how she was managing to keep her tone steady.

Her insides certainly weren’t steady. They were rocked, completely turned on end. But at least her voice was solid.

“Don’t...do that again,” was his only response.

“Why not? I thought you were going to teach me how to flirt. Doesn’t that fall under the header?”

“That falls under the header of playing with fire, little girl.”

Her heart thundered faster, her lips impossibly dry. “Maybe I want to.”

“Spoken by a girl who’s never been burned,” he said, taking another step backward.

“Spoken like a man who’s afraid I might be kerosene to his lit match.” Apparently, being stubborn and unwilling to back down handily took the place of having experience and confidence.

Good to know.

“We’re not going to do this.”

“Why?” she asked, not quite as pleased with the tone of her voice this time. She sounded needy. And she hated that.

Her mother had walked out when she was two; her father was a drunk. She’d never had the chance to be needy. Frankly, she didn’t like the way it looked on her. She was making a mental note to avoid it in the future.

“You know why.”

Because he thought of her as a kid? Because he wasn’t attracted to her? Because Connor and Eli would kill him and bury his body in a far-flung field? She didn’t know why, because there were too many whys. But she wasn’t going to go on. She wasn’t going to do the needy thing. She was not going to beg.

She had her pride. Sure, she’d never been kissed before today, but she had never really wanted to be kissed by any of the guys she had known. She would go find someone else before she would make a fool of herself in front of Jack Monaghan.

Though it was hard not to beg when her lips still burned from the touch of his. When her body ached in places she hadn’t given all that much thought to before.

Yeah, that made it a lot harder.

“Get on your horse. And do the run again,” he said, his blue eyes level with hers.

“Still?”

“Are you a quitter?”

“Fuck you.”

“Shout that at me all you want when you’re doing the run again. Go.”

She walked back over to Roo and got on. They walked back to the starting point. Then she looked at Jack, who was standing there holding the stopwatch. She took a breath and started. And her mind was blank. Blank of anything but what had just happened. Blank of anything but the heat and fire burning in her blood from the anger, from her arousal. That moment when her lips had touched his. When he had pushed her away.

She rounded the first barrel and it seemed slow, easy, in comparison to the confusion that was pouring through her. They straightened up and she went to the second, slowing down the moment in her mind so that she could capture the memory of his lips on hers. It had only been a second. A fraction of one, even. But it had felt so important. So altering.

Before she knew it, she was rounding the third barrel, the impression of the heat and firmness of his mouth still on hers as she let out a breath and finished the run.

It was fast. It was clean.

It was good.

She looked up, saw the stopwatch hanging on the fence where it had been before Jack had come.

And Jack was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_b0fc5854-88f5-509f-8fa0-e4b62ff5bde9)

KATE SHOWED UP to the meeting late and pissed. All things considered, Jack didn’t really give a fuck about her mental state.

The little wench had kissed him.

Sure, he’d been baiting her to do something. He couldn’t deny that. But never, not once, had he imagined she would do that.

Somehow, in the moment, slapping her on the rear had made sense.

He’d shown up at the ranch, and neither Eli nor Connor had been there. Then he’d run across Kate. Riding her horse around the barrels, so obviously holding back it had made him angry for some reason.

Probably for the same reason her putting off turning pro made him angry.

She was selling herself short. Holding herself back. Making herself so much smaller than she should.

He hated that. It was something his mother had done, always. Accepting defeat. Receding into it. A woman who hadn’t been wanted by her rich lover, so she’d refused to take anything from him. Refused to fight. Curled so deep into herself she couldn’t even love her son, because she couldn’t see her value or his.

He didn’t want to see Kate doing it, too.

But then she compounded her sins by being...not the Kate he was used to. When she’d done her second run, he’d been far too aware of how her body moved with the horse’s. And it had been far too easy to imagine her riding astride him as he gripped her hips, as she followed his rhythm.

Something in his brain was short-circuiting. And that had been confirmed when she’d started running her mouth, and in his mind it had seemed a perfectly acceptable solution to give her a smack on the ass. Nothing more than a sports pat, something to prove he was in complete control of himself. That she was one of the guys, or just a little sister to him, or something.