Page 70 of Last Chance Cowboy
They sat at a table outside, and each had a cheeseburger, a chocolate shake, and a double order of fries.
“Have you ever had a sausage roll?”
The question was out of left field. “What?”
“I take that as a no. They’re really good. It’s like a puff pastry with a sausage in the middle. I wonder if I could make a cheeseburger sausage roll for the bakery.”
He really enjoyed her sweets, and he couldn’t say that he typically wanted anything savory when he went to Juniper and Sage, but it didn’t sound like a bad idea.
“I would eat it. You could test it on me if you wanted to.”
“How nice of you to let me experiment on you.”
Her cheeks turned pink, and she ducked her head.
This time, he didn’t look away from her. From the blush in her cheeks.
There was a grim sort of certainty settling in his bones now. He wanted her.
He really did.
And he had told Cody that he knew him, that he knew he wasn’t the kind of man to make a move like that. To do something like that.
When he knew that he couldn’t give her anything, when he knew that she was someone he would have to deal with on a day-to-day basis after the affair ended, when he knew that she was younger than him, and softer than him, when he knew that he had the potential to break her.
But he had also never, ever told that story out loud to another person who had no idea about it. Only her.
So he couldn’t follow typical patterns as evidence of how he would handle this with her. And right now, sitting there with her with a hamburger, a milkshake, and French fries, having just spent the night in the woods, having just cut his chest open and showed her everything inside of it, he had no idea what he was going to do.
He only knew that he wanted her.
He wanted her in a way that transcended every other precedent that had ever existed.
He wanted her in a way that wasn’t typical.
He didn’t know if he had the wherewithal to turn away from her. She had touched his face last night, and all he had wanted to do was kiss her, but he hadn’t.
Because everything hurt. Because if he had kissed her, he would’ve lost control completely, he would’ve shattered something in him, and he knew that he couldn’t afford that.
So he hadn’t kissedher then.
But he didn’t feel like there was a damn thing keeping him from doing it now.
“Thank you,” she said, lifting up a French fry and eating it. “For this. All of it.”
She defaulted to thanking him, to being nice to him when she didn’t know what else to do. He wondered if it was because she was having the same problem. That nothing was really stopping her from kissing him.
He didn’t think he was reading these cues wrong. He was pretty damn sure she felt the same heat that he did.
And you’re the older one. You’re the one who carries the responsibility of not being a big idiot.
Except, he was already an idiot where she was concerned. Had been from the beginning.
That was for damn sure.
They finished up their lunch, and then he drove her back up to his place.
He was still wrestling with his need, the proclamations that he’d made to Cody, with his own self, when she got out of the truck and began to head toward her car.
