Page 87 of Last Chance Cowboy
“All right.”
“The odds of anybody noticing that your car is parked in the back overnight are probably low. But I think it would look weirder for my truck to be here.”
“Right. And you don’t want anyone to know.”
“Do you?” She looked away.
“I guess not.”
He hadn’t thought so.
“Come on,” he said.
She dropped the rag she was holding into a hamper, and put her cleaner away, then grabbed her purse off a hook, and he wrapped his arm around her waist as he let her out the door.
She burrowed against him, and when they were outside behind the bakery, she tilted her head up, her body language demanding a kiss, and who was he to deny her that demand?
So, he did kiss her.
And he was getting lost in it again.
Which he couldn’t do, not out here.
“All right, let’s go,” he said.
He opened up the passenger door of the truck, and she climbed inside.
There was something about seeing her inside the truck that made him smile.
He took a deep breath and got in, starting the engine.
Then the two of them drove back toward town. It was still bright out, this late in the summer, the sun wouldn’t set for hours, and the open fields on either side of the road reflected the golden light off dry grass.
He didn’t question his actions very often. Mainly because he did the same things all the time.
He got up in the morning, went about his ranching business, and went back home.
He would bathe in the river when the weather was nice, shower inside when it wasn’t. He would go to the Graysons’ for dinner whenever he was invited but never pushed for an invitation if it wasn’t right there on the table, because he was happy enough to open up a can of stew and eat by himself.
But then, Cara had come into his life, and he’d started eating a sweet roll at her bakery every morning.
She had trained him to do that, he realized. And she hadn’t been paying him.
“So, you just wanted to see me? When you left out the rolls,” he said, as they drove into town.
“Yes. You really thought that I was… that I felt obligated to do it?”
He shrugged. “I couldn’t figure out another reason that you would do that.”
“You didn’t think that maybe I was attracted to you?”
“I kind of did,” he said. “Mostly because, generally speaking, when a woman’s not attracted to you, she doesn’t blush whenever you look at her.”
She blushed then; he could see it out of the corner of his eye.
“Just like that.”
“Yeah, I suppose they typically don’t.”
