Page 17 of Promised to the Cowboy

By afternoon, I’ve talked myself in circles so many times I’m dizzy with it, so I do the thing I do when my head’s loud: I go searching for work.

Gabriel isn’t in the barn or the house. Eventually, I find him through the open door of what I assumed was a tack room but is actually a gym—rubber flooring, a weights rack, and a pull-up bar bolted into a ceiling joist that looks like it could hold a tractor.

Gabriel’s mid-pullup, a heavy, round plate attached to his waist. He doesn’t see me right away, which means I get a solid four seconds of watching him train his body. Nothing moving except what needs to. He’s not showy about it. No mirror-checking or grunting for effect. Just a man with control and precision, the muscles in his back and arms straining with the effort.

I stand there stupidly, my mouth dry. The way his arms flex, the controlled power of every rep, the heavy plate hanging from his waist… it floods me with everything that night looked like from underneath him. My breasts feel heavy, nipples tight against the loose shirt I chose so carefully this morning. I have to press my thighs together.

He releases the bar and sees me in the doorway. His cheeks turn slightly red, which is the single most endearing thing I’ve witnessed since I got here, this enormous man caught looking strong and being embarrassed about it.

“Didn’t peg you for secretly running a gym out here,” I say. “Brooding rancher by day, and apparently also this.”

He unhooks the weight from his waist and grabs a towel off the rack, not quite looking at me. “Helps to have something to do with my hands that isn’t fixing fences.”

I lean in the doorway, arms crossed, taking my time about it. “That’s a lot of iron for just keeping busy.”

His expression shutters. “Something like that.”

The joke I was about to make dies in my throat.

A man builds a body like that for a reason. Sometimes the reason is just liking the work. And sometimes a man builds himself into something that can carry anything because somewhere along the way, he decided that was his only purpose. I don’t know which this is yet.

“Come on,” I say instead, nodding at the rack. “I’ll spot you. I’ve been keeping enormous, foolish animals from hurting themselves my whole life, so this is basically the same job.”

That gets a genuine smile out of him, one that lights up his face before he puts it away.

He lets me hover, mostly useless, while he works through a set of chest presses. Every time the bar rises, I catch the flex of his chest and the thick veins running down his forearms. The air between us smells like iron, leather, and him. I keep my hands light under the bar, but my palms itch to feel that hard heat without the metal between us.

We don’t talk much, but it’s the best afternoon I’ve had in longer than I care to remember. By the last set, I’m aching between my legs and furious about it. He hasn’t even touched me, and my body is already rewriting the rules again.

And the whole time, the thing I came here to do sits in my chest like a stone in a boot.

Because here’s the part I keep circling: I went into that night expecting forgettable. That was the plan. I set the rules because I needed to control something I’d never done before. One night was supposed to be a thing that happened and then was over. A door I’d walk through and out and never think about again. I waited twenty-six years to choose it for myself, and I chose it on my own terms—no sentiment, no strings, no morning after.

But—God, it was so much more than I ever imagined.Hewas so much more.

I thought I could walk away clean, and instead, I got a man who treated me like something that mattered while my whole plan came quietly apart underneath him.

So I ran. I’m good at it. And now I’m twenty weeks and five days into the consequence of that night together.

It’s sunset when it finishes settling in me.

I’m standing in the open doorway of the barn, the big sliding door rolled back. The light is turning copper across the corrals, and Captain Winky’s got his one good eye on me from his stall as if even he knows.

Gabriel is across the yard, latching a gate. The low sun catches him, and for a second, he’s just a shape, big and still, a man who builds sandwiches the size of feed blocks and talks about fathers who should never duck their responsibilities like it’s nothing, like it didn’t set something free in me I’d kept caged for years.

My skin prickles simply from looking at him. I remember exactly how those shoulders bracketed me, how careful his hands were even when they were shaking with need. My body leans almost imperceptibly toward him across the yard.

I put my hand on my stomach. Out here, in the doorway, where he could turn and see me do it. I don’t move it.

He deserves so much more than to find out accidentally, or never, or in a courtroom, or in a wire transfer.

I have to tell him.

Soon.

Chapter 7

Gabriel