Page 10 of Promised to the Cowboy

No strings. No commitment. No future in which I’d have to be the kind of man who stays, who gets looked at every day, who disappoints somebody slowly over the course of years. One night. A man like me could survive one night. A man like me had spent his whole life being told, in the gentlest possible ways, that one night was about all of him anybody should sign up for.

So I said yes to her rules. And then I broke every one of them in my own head before the sun came up because by the time she slipped out—carefully, before dawn, like leaving was a thing she also knew how to do well—I already wanted the strings. All of them. The whole tangle. But I didn’t even know her last name.

“Gabriel.”

I look up.

Evie has stopped eating. She’s got that look—the one from The Honey Pot, the one where she’s deciding something. Her hand rests on the table, and I notice it the way I notice everythingabout her, filing it away. I don’t know what it means yet, but I notice.

“Thank you,” she says. “For the food.”

It’s not what she was going to say. I’d bet the ranch on it. But I let her have the swap because the kitchen door opens behind me.

Daniel fills the doorway, gray eyes taking the whole room in one sweep—Evie, the sandwich plate, my face, back to Evie. I watch him decide not to ask the forty questions stacking up behind his teeth. Delaney’s right behind him with her hand on his back, and she’s quicker than he is to smile, warm and real.

“Well,” Daniel says.

“Don’t,” I tell him.

“I didn’t say anything.”

Behind him, Delaney presses her lips together like she’s holding the rest of it in for both of them.

Evie watches this with open interest, the way you’d watch two dogs decide whether they’re friends.

“Older brother?” she asks, looking at Daniel like she’s confirming something she already clocked.

“What gave it away?”

“You walked in like you were going to read us our rights.”

Daniel’s eyes narrow, but his mouth twitches.

Delaney laughs out loud. Evie just won over my brother’s wife in less than two sentences, and Delaney’s on Evie’s side for life now.This is going to be such a problem.

“She’s not wrong.” Delaney chuckles, sliding onto the bench across from Evie and propping her chin on her hand as if she’s settling in for the good part. “He read me my rights the first time we met. Told me where the property line ran before he told me his name.”

“It was relevant information,” Daniel says, pulling out a chair.

Evie looks at the two of them, then at me. She raises an eyebrow that asks,Is it always like this?

I tip my head a half inch and give her a look that says,You have no idea.

The brief exchange across the kitchen, the two of us agreeing on something without a word, will keep me awake later.

Then, because the universe hates me, Ethan appears with his wife, Jenna. I love my family, but having them all present when the woman I haven’t stopped thinking about for the last four months has reappeared unexpectedly is enough to make my defective heart stutter.

Ethan carefully scans Evie like she’s a dataset he needs to classify.

Jenna takes one look at Evie and me and arrives at a conclusion she’s far too polite to say out loud. “Hi, I’m Jenna. Ignore all of them. You look tired. Did you drive a long way?”

“All the way from Nevada,” Evie replies.

Nevada? Eight hundred miles, give or take, and she did it alone.

Of course, Jenna would notice the shadows beneath Evie’s eyes. She made her own risky drive here to Ethan not so long ago, only her journey ended in a ditch. The thought of the same thinghappening to Evie on some dark highway makes my blood run cold.

“Is that your F-150 parked outside?” Ethan asks, interested in all things mechanical and technical.