Page 23 of Last Chance Cowboy
He wasn’t one for banter. Not for any reason.
In fact, he resented being drawn into it. But most especially, this kind of banter, that made his stomach go tight, and made the blood in his veins run hot.
Dear God, the house was cute.
Not in the sense that he thought it was cute, but in the sense that it was empirically done to be cute. Old-fashioned plates hung up on the wall, festooned with florals.There were little bouquets of dried flowers hanging in the window, and all the curtains were lace. The furniture looked like it had come from a Sears showroom back in the 90s, and if he hadn’t known that she lived here, he would’ve thought it belonged to an old lady.
Well, maybe. If it weren’t for the little touches that gave it a quirky vibe.
Like the little frog cookie jar she had on the kitchen counter, and the little ceramic mouse sitting on her counter, a wooden spoon slid through its paws.
“You can just set it down on the table,” she said.
“Yeah. You didn’t hit your head, did you?”
She blinked and shook her head rapidly. “No. I didn’t. I really… I didn’t. I’m fine. All I did was sprain my ankle. Well, and I have some abrasions,” she said, lifting her sweatpants up above the knee very suddenly, and making his heart hit his sternum as she revealed bandages covering her leg.
“Nothing that needed stitches?”
“No,” she said. “They were all pretty surface. But I’m supposed to kind of stay off my feet for the next couple of days, and I don’t really want to do that. I don’t like doing that. I don’t like…” She held her hands up and waved them around. “I don’t like having nothing to do.”
“Healing isn’t doing nothing,” he said. This was something he knew for a fact. Because he had done it several times in his life, whether it was from the trauma he experienced as a child, from an injury in the military, or an accident on the rodeo circuit.
“You don’t seem like the kind of guy who would say something like that,” she said, tilting her head to the side.
“Really? What kind of guy do I seem like?”
“The kind that would growl sternly and say, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Walk it off.”
“Walking it off in this case would be pretty fuckingstupid, actually, and what I’m not is stupid. There’s a difference between being a baby and sitting down because something feels too hard, and sitting down because you actually can’t do it, and you need to take a rest. Need to let your body do what it does. I was a combat medic in the military,” he said, wondering if he was going to regret giving her this information. “So I know a little bit about healing, and also about survival.”
“I mean, I knew that you did survivalist stuff, but I didn’t know about the medicine.”
“I wouldn’t call itmedicine. I would call it very crude emergency training. Generally speaking, I could hold somebody together while we try to get them to the doctors. I can reset a bone, stop bleeding, give CPR. But that isn’t really the point. The point is, even soldiers sometimes just need to rest because there’s healing their bodies need to do. You’ve got to let yourself heal.”
She was looking at him with far too much interest, and he knew then that he had made a mistake because he didn’t want her to be interested in any part of him. Not in his past, not in who he was.
He didn’t really want anybody to be interested in those things, but with her, especially, there was something dangerous about it.
“But my bakery…”
“Yeah, I’m kind of broken up about it too, because where am I going to get my breakfast?”
The corner of her mouth tucked up just slightly, and her cheeks turned pink. Dammit.
Dammit.
“Anyway. I’m just going to drop your stuff. I have to get to the hardware store before itcloses.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He turned away, then stopped. He was forgetting something.
“Marlowe wants you to come over on Friday. For dinner.”
“Oh. Sure.”
He nodded and was about to turn away again when she shifted, and her crutch slipped just slightly, and she wobbled.
