Bad News Cowboy

“I have waited on too many damn curbs for a man who was at home drunk off his ass to spend ten seconds waiting for you,” she said, her voice breaking now.

Kate wasn’t just mad. Kate was hurt. And he would have fed his own body to the seagulls about now if he wasn’t so attached to it.

“Kate... I didn’t... Look, I just thought it was best if we had some distance. I sure as hell don’t know what’s been...” He trailed off because he couldn’t find a way to finish the sentence that didn’t force him to confess more than he wanted to.

He looked through the hazy light and saw that her eyes were glittering, filling with tears. The mighty Kate Garrett, whose face he hadn’t seen streaked with tears since she was nine years old, sitting on the step outside her house while her dad raged and threw things inside, was about to cry.

Because of him.

She was right. He was an asshole.

He wanted to tug her into his arms and give her a hug. But hugs, touching of any kind, had turned an unexpected direction. Like a mean bull on a bad day. And there was no way he could reach out to her now.

“Katie,” he said, his voice rough even to his own ears, “please don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying,” she said, but the catch in her voice told another story.

“Damn it all to hell.” He took a step forward and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, tugging her in close. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I thought we could use some...distance.”

She looked up at him and the vulnerability in her eyes caught him off guard, punched him in the gut. “You want distance? From me?”

There was no good way to answer that. “I don’t...want...” He released his hold on her and took a step back. “Things are weird right now. You get that, right?”

“You never want distance from me. We’re around each other all the time.”

“Yeah. And up until today we’d never kissed. So things change.”

“It was only a little kiss,” she said, sucking her bottom lip between her teeth and chewing it.

“Big enough,” he said, his gut burning as the memory flashed through his mind again.

“That you need distance from me.”

“Kate...”

“You’re supposed to be teaching me to flirt.”

“You took it too far.”

“Why?”

“For God’s sake, Kate, drop it,” he ground out, turning toward his truck and starting to open the driver’s-side door.

“Is it because you didn’t like it?”

He whirled around. “It’s because given a few more minutes or a few less thoughts, I would have had you down on the ground and out of your clothes, badger-cat, so unless that’s the sort of thing you want to mess around with, I’d suggest giving me the distance I ask for.”

Kate’s eyes widened, her lips dropping into a rounded O shape. “You liked it, then?”

“This isn’t going to end anywhere good.” He didn’t know if he meant the conversation or what was happening between them. It could be either. Or both.

People were filing out of the Grange Hall now and looking in their direction.

“Can we get inside your truck?” Kate asked, her voice small.

“For a minute.” Only because he still felt like such an ass for making her tear up.

She rounded to the passenger side and got in and Jack paused outside the truck, taking in a deep breath of non-Kate-filled air before opening the door and climbing in.

“Okay,” he said, slamming the door. “What else do we need to talk about?”

“You said you would give me flirting lessons...”

“And I already told you why that’s over.”

“And you said you’d coach me with my riding.”

He rested his elbow against the place where the window met the doorframe. “You don’t need coaching. You need to stop holding yourself back. Get out of your head and just ride. There. I’m all done.”

“And I don’t want distance.”

He let out a long, slow breath, then turned to face her. Speaking of distance, there was less of it between them now than he would have liked. But then, at the moment, a whole arena wasn’t distance enough. Hell, a whole small town didn’t seem to be enough.

She didn’t have tears in her eyes, not anymore. Instead she had that look. That fierce, determined look she got when she was ready to dig her heels in and fight. He’d seen that look many times over the years and he knew her well enough to know there would be no placating her. There would be no gentle words to get her to back down.

When Kate had an idea in her head, she went with it, and he would be a damn fool to do anything but meet it head-on.

“All right, then. You don’t want distance. What do you want?” he asked.

“I want... I want more of what happened today.”

Shit. “What? You want...you want me to lay you down on the bench seat and screw you senseless, is that what you want? You want me to treat you like you’re just any old buckle bunny and not Eli and Connor’s sister?”

She wasn’t looking at him now. She was looking past him. It was dark in the truck, so it was difficult to tell, but he was pretty sure she was blushing a very deep shade of red. “You’re getting ahead of me,” she mumbled. “I was thinking maybe we could kiss a couple more times.”

Shame lashed him like a whip. He was being a serious dick because he had no clue what to do with everything rolling around inside of him. And pushing her away by shocking her, dealing with his rage at himself by speaking the fantasies he was actually having into reality, as if they were so ridiculous they were only worth mocking, not doing, was the only strategy he had at the moment.

“It’s not a good idea,” he said.

He looked out the window and noticed that most of the cars were gone, everyone who had been at the meeting dispersed, headed over to Ace’s, he imagined.

It was just the two of them now.

And there was no damned distance.