Page 54 of Risking it for the Cowboy

“I best git.” He brushed back her tendril contemplatively, then stepped back with that cocky grin again. “Didn’t mean to sleep over again.” He winked.

A laugh caught her off guard, and she stifled it. “Yeah, speaking of that. You never went to sleep last night, did you? You overhauled my entire SUV. I wish I could pay you more than three hundred. You got the money, right?”

Three hundred. Shoot … it would pay the entry fee. But three hundred would buy these girls groceries too.

*

Thaddeus scoffed. “Hell no.”

She glanced around him into the living room, his compliments about her music swirling in her mind. Featured in his set? A far cry from the days when a man had been angry she would outshine him…

The money she’d laid out was still sitting there!

She marched to it, plucked it up, and frowned at him.

He threw his hands up. “Whoa, baby, you can’t buy my love. I ain’t for sale.”

“But you can buy a do-over with free labor?” She couldn’t stifle her eye roll this time. “Trouble, just take it—”

“Keep your money.”

“I’m not taking free labor. You can’t buy my love,” she imitated him, and his mouth sprang into a gorgeous smile.

“Don’t matter. I ain’t taking three hundred bucks outta a little girl’s mouth so we’re at an impasse,” he retorted, but that contemplative softness remained.

“You’re stubborn,” she said.

“Nothin’ but trouble, right?” He smirked.

She shoved the folded money into his jeans pocket instead. Ignored the natural bulge right there. So close, she looked up to see that smile hitched up wickedly.

“Well now, is that three hundred bucks in my pocket or am I just happy to see you?” He stepped closer to her again.

Mechanic grease. Body heat. Him.

Her laugh caught her off guard despite her irritation mounting, and she turned back around to finish the tomatoes, as Daisy’s distant chatter to Artex in the backyard filtered in through the screen, when the sound of something softly padding the table made her turn. His eyes locked on hers, the wad of cash tossed onto the surface. And on his face, that cocky grin—

A bang crashed out back.

“Daisy.” The knife clattered down and she bolted for the back door, but Thaddeus was already shoving through it, blazing into the yard and jogging to a ladder.

Daisy stood upon it!

“What in the world are you doing?” Charlie demanded as she hurried over the grass, as Thaddeus steadied it with one hand and held up a hand to spot her with the other.

Daisy beamed down at them and shrugged. “Building a chicken coop for Pumpkin.”

Bright, pattered leggings, mismatched sundress, Converse, and wisps of blond falling out of her twin buns. Beneath her lay a plank of old wood she must have dragged from the wood pile behind the tool shed. Around her waist was Charlie’s leather toolbelt looped around three extra times. In her hand was a hammer as long as her arm.

“Come down from there,” Charlie said.

“A coop?” Thaddeus said.

“Momma said the university doesn’t have the-the structure or something, to put a chicken in, so I thought I could build one and then I could keep him. Then we can go back to the carnival next weekend and I could win another and call him Pie.”

Thaddeus was grinning, so nonchalant, even if his palm remained up, ready to catch her should she fall backward. The box with the chick in it sat nearby, open to the sunshine.

“Wait, another chick? Daisy Maisy, I told you, it’s not that the university doesn’t have the structure for it, it’s that I’m not allowed to build any new structures without their agreement and they’ve already told me, no livestock. We have to find a home for Pumpkin. It’s why I haven’t gotten them before—”