Page 46 of Last Chance Cowboy
He had enough destruction in his life to last several lifetimes. One thing he wasn’t going to do was spread that over to anybody else.
Not if he could help it.
And he could.
He could.
He would do well to remember that.
Chapter Nine
Yesterday had been extremely weird, and she was signing on for more of it.
She literally couldn’t wait.
Spending the afternoon with Zane had been invigorating and exciting in a way that nothing else ever had been.
It was super high-octane fascination, and she was aware that she was – as her dad used to say – cruising for a bruising – but she had never felt anything quite like this before.
Being near him was electric. It shouldn’t be. Except yesterday, he had almost been nice. Yesterday, he had teased her. Told her the worst dad joke she’d ever heard. It had scared her, but in a fun way. Then she had gone and insulted him, and she felt bad about it. Even if he hadn’t.
She felt like she was in high school, except she’d never really had crushes like this in high school.
Crush. There was that word again. The one that she said she wasn’t going to use because it was too juvenile.
But maybe juvenile was the wrong word.
There was something exciting about this.
Fizzy.
She wouldn’t have said that anything with Zane could be fizzy.
But here she was. Feeling exactly that.
In a way she never expected. She had her pack with all of her supplies, and she had a basket of lemon rolls.
The strawberry rolls were his favorite, yes, but she had made him those a few times, and so this called for the lemon sunshine rolls, full of lemon curd, with a lemon buttercream on top. She loved the lemon.
She pulled up to the house, but he wasn’t waiting for her outside. She got out of the car and crept cautiously up the steps. Like he might throw the door open at any moment. But he didn’t.
She went up to the door and knocked.
And waited.
A few minutes later, the door opened, and there he was, wearing a tight black T-shirt, fitted jeans that showed off his muscular thighs, and an expression on his face to let her know she was, in fact, intruding just by being on his porch.
It made her feel as giddy as it might have if he’d smiled at her.
Was she in some kind of regression? Had she just been too responsible for too long? Taking care of everything, and so now her hormones were trying to urge her to obsess over the most irresponsible man to try to catch feelings for.
No. She wouldn’t say feelings. It wasn’t really about that. That made it sound like there was something deeper than the explosive chemistry that she felt when they were near each other. The sensations that she felt when she touched him. When she had reached out and grabbed his arm yesterday.
Oof.
It had been a total miscalculation on her part, and it had also been like being hit by lightning.
Which she had to admit was actually kind of fun.
