Page 36 of Last Chance Cowboy
“Never.”
She couldn’t tell if he was kidding. Maybe more accurately, she couldn’t tell if he was teasing. She had a feeling he was being honest. But to the point of giving her a hard time, or to the point of giving her a warning, she didn’t know.
That was something she had a feeling she would always have a hard time figuring out with him.
That was by design, she was almost certain.
If anyone was enigmatic on purpose, it was Zane.
Like now, he wasn’t being aloof. He was offering to help her. And that right there was mysterious. Because he just didn’t seem the kind of man who could be induced to care about much of anything.
But that couldn’t be true. Because here he was with Cody. It couldn’t be true because all of his actions seemed to indicate that he actually was devoted to the people he devoted himself to.
He was a massive contradiction, was what he was.
“Fine. We can do it on Monday.”
He grinned, and she felt it all the way down low in her stomach. A smile from him must be one of the rarest things in existence. And she had one.
She was too smart to let him know that she felt like she had just won an impossible game. So she would keep that sense of triumph to herself.
“So, where do you want to meet? What will we be doing? Do I need to bring a sword and shield?”
“It’s wilderness survival skills, not LARPING.”
“It feels a little bit like LARPING.”
“You of all people should know that it’s not. Because it’s way too easy to find yourself in an actual survival situation, without the skills or the tools to help yourself.”
She bristled at that, but what was there to say?
He was right. She absolutely knew what that was like now, and she had no desire to experience it again. Agreeing to do this was like getting back on the horse, which she had never done. Because she had never even gotten on a horse to begin with.
Agreeing to do this was taking control of a situation that could just as easily have taken control of her. She was going to grab onto it, and she wasn’t going to be insubordinate.
She did her best not to think of the alternative, which had to do with obeying his every command. It brought her into a fantasy realm that she simply didn’t need to be in.
She wasn’t one for fantasy, anyway.
It was Zane, and this terrible fascination. That was the problem.
Agreeing to do this wasn’t going to help with her problem.
But it was going to help with her fear that she was developing of the outdoors, and that was going to take precedence.
She was a woman with too many fears and not enough triumph.
So she was going to grab hold of whatever triumph she thought she might be able to find.
“My place will be the starting point,” he said. “I have a few different ideas for what we can focus on. I’ll see you Monday at noon. Noon.”
He got up and walked out of the bakery without even giving her a farewell glance.
She was committed.
She just hoped that by the end, she wouldn’t need to be committed.
Chapter Eight
