Hold Me, Cowboy

She shrugged, making her way to the fridge and opening it, bending down and opening the crisper drawer. “I don’t know. Not being completely unbearable?”

“Your standards are low.”

“Luckily for you.”

She looked up at him and saw that that had actually elicited what looked to be a genuine grin. The man was a mystery. And she shouldn’t care about that. She should not want to unlock, unravel or otherwise solve him.

The great thing about Christopher was that he was simple. He wasn’t connected to her life in any way. They could come up and have an affair and it would never bleed over to her existence in Copper Ridge. It was the antithesis of everything she had experienced with David. David, who had blown up her entire life, shattered her career ambitions and damaged her good standing in the community.

This thing with Christopher was supposed to be sex. Sex that made nary a ripple in the rest of her life.

Sam would not be rippleless.

The McCormack family was too much a part of the fabric of Copper Ridge. More so in the past year. Sam and his brother, Chase, had done an amazing job of revitalizing their family ranch, and somewhere in all of that Sam had become an in-demand artist. Though he would be the last person to say it. He still showed up right on schedule to do the farrier work at her family ranch. As though he weren’t raking in way more money with his ironwork.

Sam was... Well, he was kind of everywhere. His works of art appearing in restaurants and galleries around town. His person appearing on the family ranch to work on the horses. He was the exact wrong kind of man for her to be fantasizing about.

She should be more gun-shy than this. Actually, she had spent the past decade being more gun-shy than this. It was just that apparently now that she had allowed herself to remember she had sexual feelings, it was difficult for her to turn them off. Especially when she was trapped in a snowstorm with a man for whom the term rock-hard body would be a mere description and not hyperbole.

She produced the salad, then set about to preparing it. Thankfully, it was washed and torn already. So her responsibility literally consisted of dumping it from bag to bowl. That was the kind of cooking she could get behind. Meanwhile, Sam busied himself with preparing two steaks on the stovetop. At some point, he took the pan from the stovetop and transferred it to the oven.

“I didn’t know you had actual cooking technique,” she said, not even pretending to herself that she wasn’t watching the play of his muscles in his forearms as he worked.

Even at the West Ranch, where she always ended up sniping at him if they ever interacted, she tended to linger around him while he did his work with the horses because his arms put on quite a show. She was hardly going to turn away from him now that they were in an enclosed space, with said arms very, very close. And no one else around to witness her ogling.

She just didn’t possess that kind of willpower.

“Well, Madison, I have a lot of eating technique. The two are compatible.”

“Right,” she said, “as you don’t have a wife. Or a girlfriend...” She could have punched her own face for that. It sounded so leading and obvious. As if she cared if he had a woman in his life.

She didn’t. Well, she kind of did. Because honestly, she didn’t even like to ogle men who could be involved with another woman. Once bitten, twice shy. By which she meant once caught in a torrid extramarital affair with a man in good standing in the equestrian community, ten years emotionally scarred.

“No,” he said, tilting his head, the cocky look in his eye doing strange things to her stomach, “I don’t.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend. Not an actual boyfriend.” Oh, good Lord. She was the desperate worst and she hated herself.

“So you keep saying,” he returned. “You really want to make sure I know Christopher isn’t your boyfriend.” She couldn’t ignore the implication in his tone.

“Because he isn’t. Because we’re not... Because we’ve never. This was going to be our first time.” Being forthright and making people uncomfortable with said forthrightness had been a very handy shield for the past decade, but tonight it was really obnoxious.

“Oh really?” He suddenly looked extremely interested.

“Yes,” she responded, keeping her tone crisp, refusing to show him just how off-kilter she felt. “I’m just making dinner conversation.”

“This is the kind of dinner conversation you normally make?”

She arched her brow. “Actually, yes. Shocking people is kind of my modus operandi.”

“I don’t find you that shocking, Madison. I do find it a little bit amusing that you got cock-blocked by a snowbank.”

She nearly choked. “Wine. Do you have wine?” She turned and started rummaging through the nearest cabinet. “Of course you do. You probably have a baguette too. That seems like something an artist would do. Set up here and drink wine and eat a baguette.”

He laughed, a kind of short, dismissive sound. “Hate to disappoint you. But my artistic genius is fueled by Jack.” He reached up, opening the cabinet nearest to his head, and pulled down a bottle of whiskey. “But I’m happy to share that too.”

“You have diet soda?”

“Regular.”

“My, this is a hedonistic experience. I’ll have regular, then.”

“Well, when a woman was expecting sex and doesn’t get it, I suppose regular cola is poor consolation, but it is better than diet.”

“Truer words were never spoken.” She watched him while he set about to making a couple of mixed drinks for them. He handed one to her, and she lifted it in salute before taking a small sip. By then he was taking the steak out of the oven and setting it back on the stovetop.

“Perfect,” he remarked when he cut one of the pieces of meat in half and gauged the color of the interior.

She frowned. “How did I never notice that you aren’t horrible?”

He looked at her, his expression one of mock surprise. “Not horrible? You be careful throwing around compliments like that, missy. A man could get the wrong idea.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right. I just mean, you’re funny.”

“How much of that whiskey have you had?”

“One sip. So it isn’t even that.” She eyeballed the food that he was now putting onto plates. “It might be the steak. I’m not going to lie to you.”

“I’m comfortable with that.”

He carried their plates to the table, and she took the lone bottle of ranch dressing out of the fridge and set it and her drink next to her plate. And then, somehow, she ended up sitting at a very nicely appointed dinner table with Sam McCormack, who was not the man she was supposed to be with tonight.

Maybe it was because of the liquored-up soda. Maybe it was neglected hormones losing their ever-loving minds in the presence of such a fine male specimen. Maybe it was just as simple as want. Maybe there was no justification for it at all. Except that Sam was actually beautiful. And she had always thought so, no matter how much he got under her skin.

That was the honest truth. It was why she found him so off-putting, why she had always found him so off-putting from the moment he had first walked onto the West Ranch property. Because he was the kind of man a woman could make a mistake with. And she had thought she was done making mistakes.

Now she was starting to wonder if a woman was entitled to one every decade.

Her safe mistake, the one who would lift out of her life, hadn’t eventuated. And here in front of her was one that had the potential to be huge. But very, very good.

She wasn’t so young anymore. She wasn’t naive at all. When it came right down to it, she was hot for Sam. She had been for a long time.

She’d had so much caution for so long. So much hiding. So much not doing. Well, she was tired of that.

“I was very disappointed about Christopher not making it up here,” she said, just as Sam was putting the last bite of steak into his mouth.

“Sure,” he said.

“Very disappointed.”