Bad News Cowboy

“Time donation, monetary donation, spreading the word. Whatever you feel like you can give.”

“You’ve got it,” Eli said.

“It will be good for your reputation anyway, Sheriff,” Jack said.

“Well, now you’re acting like I need to have ulterior motives to contribute to charity.”

“I’m just adding incentive.”

“Your pretty face is enough incentive, Jack. It always is,” Connor said.

“I’m flattered, Connor but you’re a married man, and I’m not a homewrecker.”

“That’s too bad. Liss is pretty open-minded.”

“If I took you up on what you’re pretending to offer, you would scamper into the wilderness and never return,” Jack said drily.

“Damn straight.”

“And I’d run in the opposite direction,” Jack added.

“Okay, that call was balls. There is no way this game isn’t fixed,” Eli groaned.

And after that, they didn’t talk about charity, and Jack didn’t think much about it. He didn’t think about Kate, either. Well, not much.

Sure, there had been some tension between them recently. But ultimately, she would always be the little mud-stained girl he’d helped distract while Connor and Eli had dealt with their drunken mess of a father.

It had given him a place to be, something to focus on besides his unhappy home.

The simple fact was the Garretts were more than friends to him. They were family. Connor and Eli were his brothers, a dream an only child like himself had never imagined could be realized.

Then he’d grown up and found out he had siblings. Half siblings, but other people who shared his DNA. At that point he had another realization about just how little blood mattered.

Colton West was his brother by blood, but he doubted the man would ever cross the street to shake his hand. He doubted the other man had any idea.

Connor and Eli had always been there for him. And they always would be.

Nothing on earth was worth compromising that over. Nothing.

* * *

THE LIST OF PARTICIPANTS for each event had grown. And thanks to Jack’s hard work it included several people from the pro circuit. Kate felt downright intimidated, she couldn’t lie. She was signed up to compete against some of the best barrel racers around, and even though it was just a charity competition, she felt as if it would be some kind of moment of truth.

About her skills. About whether or not she had an excuse to hold back from turning pro. About a whole lot of things.

She looked down and kicked a stone, watched it skim across the top of the fine gray dust in the driveway. She’d come out to get a ride in before the meeting tonight. Before Jack was due to pick her up and take her over to the Grange again. But she sort of felt numb, sluggish, frozen. Not in the best space to do a run around the barrel she had set up in the arena.

But she supposed she had to. She kicked another stone.

She hadn’t seen Jack since that day at the Farm and Garden. They had only shared one phone call, where he had rattled off a list of names that had made her stomach heave with anxiety. All the while, her heart had been pounding faster because of the deep timbre of his voice. She didn’t need professional psychiatric help at all.

She let out an exasperated breath and shoved her hands in her jacket pockets as the wind whipped across her path. She upped her pace as she headed toward the barn.

Her fingers were still numb as she tacked Roo up. She pulled the girth tight and checked everything over once. Then she leaned in and kissed Roo right over the star on her forehead. She inhaled her horsey scent, shavings and the sweet smell of the hay. It was like slipping into a hot bath, a moment of instant relaxation.

“Okay,” she said. “We can do this.”

She led Roo outside before mounting and taking it slow over to the arena. Roo was a soft touch, and it took only a little gentle encouragement to urge her horse to speed up. Then she let out a breath and spurred Roo to go even faster, leaning into her horse’s gait, making the turn around the first barrel easily.

She wondered what her time was. She should have grabbed the stopwatch that was hanging on the fence. She leaned back slightly and Roo sensed the change, shaking her head and knocking against the second barrel as they went around.

“Shit.” She looked over her shoulder and watched it topple. So that was it. That was her run.

She slowed considerably when she approached the third barrel, then made an easy loop around it before stopping Roo inside the arena. She cursed again, the foul word echoing in the covered space.

She lowered her head, buried her face in her hands and just sat there. Feeling pissed. Feeling miserable.

“It was a pretty crappy run.”

She raised her head and looked up, saw Jack standing against the fence, his boot propped up on the bottom rung, forearms rested on the top.

“What are you doing here, Monaghan?”

“I decided to come a little early and see Eli and Connor. Neither of whom are here.”

“So you decided to come over and poke me with a stick?”

He lifted his hands and spread them wide. “No stick.”

“Verbal sticks, asshat.”

“Sure. I have verbal sticks. Why the hell did you suck so bad?”

“What does that mean? Why did I suck so bad? I didn’t suck on purpose.”

“No, you didn’t. But you can do better. So the question is, why did this run suck so bad?”

“I don’t think there’s an answer to that question,” she said, sitting up straighter on the back of her horse and crossing her arms.

“There is always an answer to that question. And if you want to be a lazy-ass rider, then the answer to the question is that your animal acted up. But if you want to get better, then the answer is that you did something stupid. Always put the control with yourself. Then it’s your fault when you lose, but then it’s up to you to win.”

“Are you going to have me wash your truck now?” Wax on, wax off.”

“I kind of am your Mr. Miyagi at the moment. Your flirting guru. I might as well teach you how to win rodeo events, too.”

“No one asked.”

“But I am the only one of the two of us who has competed on a professional level. And if it is something that you really want, maybe you should accept my help instead of being stubborn.”

“I’m not being stubborn.”

“Babycakes, you eat stubborn-Os for breakfast.” He wandered over to the open arena gate and grabbed hold of the stopwatch that was looped over the top rung of the fence. Even while he was here witnessing her failure, annoying her, she couldn’t ignore how damn sexy he was. The way his jeans clung to his muscular thighs.

Did women look at thighs? Was that even a thing? Or was it just a bad case of the Jacks?

“I’ll reset your barrels.” He walked into the arena and made sure everything was lined up, lifted the one she had knocked down. Then he walked back to the fence. “Reset yourself, Katie.”

She flipped him the bird while obeying his command. She had some pride, after all.

Then she shut him out. Shut out his voice, shut out his presence and focused. The horse started to move, and she knew that Jack would have started the time at that moment. The start was a little bit slow, and she faltered going around the first barrel. Then she shook her head, spurring Roo on harder into the second. That went better. But she knew she wasn’t at top time. Not even her own top time. She was too in her head, and there was nothing she could do about it right now. Not with Jack here. Not with that whole list of professionals she was going to be competing against in front of people.

Not when she was going to be faced with the undeniable proof of whether or not she had the ability to compete professionally and win. And down went the third barrel.

Kate growled, bringing Roo to a halt. She slid off the back of the horse, walked over to the barrel and reset it herself. “I’m gonna call it good now,” she shouted.

“Do it again.”

“No. I’ve done it twice—that’s enough.”

“Your horse can handle more than that. You know that.”

“I’m done, Jack,” she said, feeling a whole lot angrier than the situation warranted. But she didn’t care. Because all of this felt like a little bit too much. Because she wanted Jack, and yesterday, just when she thought he might want her too, he had walked away. He had walked away and acted as though it didn’t matter.

And now he was here again, getting in her face, treating her like a kid. He was the worst. He was worse than the run she had just done.

“Do you want things to go well when you compete next month?”

“No,” she said, her tone dripping with disdain. “I want to fail miserably in front of a thousand people.”

“With those skills, you will.” There was an intensity to him that was unusual. And it matched her own.

This was weird. All of this was weird. Sure, she and Jack sniped at each other, but this wasn’t normal.

None of this was normal, and she had no freaking clue what to do about it.

She turned away from him and started fiddling with the barrel position again.

“You going again?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said. “I already told you that.”

“Stop being a baby.”

She snorted. “Kiss. My. Ass.”

“I don’t think I’ll kiss it, actually.” She didn’t see his next action coming. Literally, because she was turned away from him. The sharp crack on her backside with his open palm didn’t hurt, but it sure as hell shocked her. “Now, get that pretty ass back on the horse and do it again.”

Shock, anger and undeniable lust twisted together in her stomach, forging a reckless heat that fueled her next set of actions.

He had too much control. She let him set the terms in the Farm and Garden, let him mess with her, let him ramp up her attraction and walk away. He thought he was the teacher, in everything, in all things, because he thought she was a kid, easily dealt with. Wasn’t that what all of this was? Just him dealing with an obnoxious kid. Teach her how to flirt, keep her out of trouble. No way. No more.

He had too damn much control, and he was too confident in it. She was going to take it. Now.

She reached out, grabbed ahold of the collar of his shirt and pulled him forward, catching him just enough by surprise that she managed to knock him off balance and close the distance between them as she stretched up on her toes to press a kiss to his lips.

She realized her mistake a split second too late.

She’d seen it as a moment to seize power, but what she hadn’t realized was that all semblance of control would flee her body like rats off a sinking ship the moment his mouth made contact with hers.

There was no calculation, not now. There was no next move that she could think of. There were no thoughts at all.

There was only this. There was only Jack. The heat of his body, the sensation of his lips pressed against hers. The fact that this was her first kiss was somehow not at all as important as the fact that she was kissing Jack.

And he wasn’t pushing her away.

He didn’t move for a moment, simply standing there and receiving what she gave him. But in a flash, that changed.

He wrapped one arm around her waist, holding her hard against him, crushing her breasts to the muscular wall of his chest. So tightly she could feel his heart raging.

Somewhere in her completely lust-addled mind, she was able to process the fact that he was affected by this, too.

She angled her head, trying to deepen the kiss, wanting more, needing more. Just as she did, she found herself being propelled backward, released.

Jack turned away from her and walked about four paces before whirling around again.

She felt cold. Shaky. She had kissed Jack. Actually kissed him. And for about two glorious seconds he had kissed her back.

And then he had...shoved her.

“Don’t do that again,” he said, his tone hard.

“If you’re going to slap my ass, I expect a kiss on the lips first,” she said, not quite sure how she was managing to keep her tone steady.

Her insides certainly weren’t steady. They were rocked, completely turned on end. But at least her voice was solid.

“Don’t...do that again,” was his only response.

“Why not? I thought you were going to teach me how to flirt. Doesn’t that fall under the header?”

“That falls under the header of playing with fire, little girl.”

Her heart thundered faster, her lips impossibly dry. “Maybe I want to.”

“Spoken by a girl who’s never been burned,” he said, taking another step backward.

“Spoken like a man who’s afraid I might be kerosene to his lit match.” Apparently, being stubborn and unwilling to back down handily took the place of having experience and confidence.

Good to know.

“We’re not going to do this.”

“Why?” she asked, not quite as pleased with the tone of her voice this time. She sounded needy. And she hated that.

Her mother had walked out when she was two; her father was a drunk. She’d never had the chance to be needy. Frankly, she didn’t like the way it looked on her. She was making a mental note to avoid it in the future.

“You know why.”

Because he thought of her as a kid? Because he wasn’t attracted to her? Because Connor and Eli would kill him and bury his body in a far-flung field? She didn’t know why, because there were too many whys. But she wasn’t going to go on. She wasn’t going to do the needy thing. She was not going to beg.

She had her pride. Sure, she’d never been kissed before today, but she had never really wanted to be kissed by any of the guys she had known. She would go find someone else before she would make a fool of herself in front of Jack Monaghan.

Though it was hard not to beg when her lips still burned from the touch of his. When her body ached in places she hadn’t given all that much thought to before.

Yeah, that made it a lot harder.

“Get on your horse. And do the run again,” he said, his blue eyes level with hers.

“Still?”

“Are you a quitter?”

“Fuck you.”

“Shout that at me all you want when you’re doing the run again. Go.”

She walked back over to Roo and got on. They walked back to the starting point. Then she looked at Jack, who was standing there holding the stopwatch. She took a breath and started. And her mind was blank. Blank of anything but what had just happened. Blank of anything but the heat and fire burning in her blood from the anger, from her arousal. That moment when her lips had touched his. When he had pushed her away.

She rounded the first barrel and it seemed slow, easy, in comparison to the confusion that was pouring through her. They straightened up and she went to the second, slowing down the moment in her mind so that she could capture the memory of his lips on hers. It had only been a second. A fraction of one, even. But it had felt so important. So altering.

Before she knew it, she was rounding the third barrel, the impression of the heat and firmness of his mouth still on hers as she let out a breath and finished the run.

It was fast. It was clean.

It was good.

She looked up, saw the stopwatch hanging on the fence where it had been before Jack had come.

And Jack was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

KATE SHOWED UP to the meeting late and pissed. All things considered, Jack didn’t really give a fuck about her mental state.

The little wench had kissed him.

Sure, he’d been baiting her to do something. He couldn’t deny that. But never, not once, had he imagined she would do that.

Somehow, in the moment, slapping her on the rear had made sense.

He’d shown up at the ranch, and neither Eli nor Connor had been there. Then he’d run across Kate. Riding her horse around the barrels, so obviously holding back it had made him angry for some reason.

Probably for the same reason her putting off turning pro made him angry.

She was selling herself short. Holding herself back. Making herself so much smaller than she should.

He hated that. It was something his mother had done, always. Accepting defeat. Receding into it. A woman who hadn’t been wanted by her rich lover, so she’d refused to take anything from him. Refused to fight. Curled so deep into herself she couldn’t even love her son, because she couldn’t see her value or his.

He didn’t want to see Kate doing it, too.

But then she compounded her sins by being...not the Kate he was used to. When she’d done her second run, he’d been far too aware of how her body moved with the horse’s. And it had been far too easy to imagine her riding astride him as he gripped her hips, as she followed his rhythm.

Something in his brain was short-circuiting. And that had been confirmed when she’d started running her mouth, and in his mind it had seemed a perfectly acceptable solution to give her a smack on the ass. Nothing more than a sports pat, something to prove he was in complete control of himself. That she was one of the guys, or just a little sister to him, or something.

It had backfired in a very spectacular way.

Not only because the contact had felt decidedly unbrotherly on his end but because then she had turned around and kissed him.

And it had damn near knocked him on his ass.

More accurately, it had damn near taken them both to the ground, where he would have taken things a lot further than a simple kiss.

He tried to think back to a few weeks ago. When Kate had simply been Kate, the younger sister of his two best friends in the entire world. A woman he’d known for so many years he didn’t spare her a second glance when she walked in the room. There had been no need to look at her. He had her memorized already.

No makeup. Long dark hair either hanging down her back or tied back into a braid. And her body... He’d never even bothered to look. Not in a serious way.

He wanted to go back to that time. Sadly, he couldn’t. Which meant when Kate stormed into the Grange Hall looking furious, he did look at her.

At the flush of rose in her cheeks that betrayed just how mad she was, at the dangerous glitter in her dark eyes. The way her hair was disheveled, probably from the ride earlier, but it made him think of the kiss. The possibility that it had been messed up by him.

The kiss had been too brief for that. He hadn’t had the chance to sift his fingers through her hair. Hadn’t had a chance to do anything much other than brush his lips briefly against hers. Because he had come back to his senses and fast.

He shouldn’t be regretting that.

He gritted his teeth and tried to focus on what Eileen was saying about the progress sheet made for their rodeo day. Kate, meanwhile, had taken a seat opposite him in the circle, making such a show of not looking at him that it made her anger all the more apparent.

Okay, so leaving her during her ride and then not taking her to the meeting as they’d agreed had probably been a jerk move. But he didn’t really appreciate the kiss, so as far as he was concerned, they were even.

Except for the part where Kate Garrett had made his dick hard and nothing would be right in his life or his head ever again.

So yeah, there was that.

Eileen called on him to speak and he rattled off the list of riders he’d gotten to agree to be a part of the competition.

With the venue confirmed, enough riders on board and enough livestock owners willing to have their bulls and broncs involved in the extra day, everything was ready to move forward.

And he could barely pay attention, because the kiss, the kiss that never should have happened, was still burning his lips.

Shit, he was the one acting like a virgin, not Kate.

The word sent a shock of heat through his body. A virgin.

The odds that Kate was a virgin? Very high. Very, very high and he shouldn’t care or ponder that. He shouldn’t think of Kate and sex or Kate and no sex at all.

Except he had thought Kate and sex a lot in the space of the past few minutes, and dammit, he needed a distraction. He needed to chop wood. No, that wasn’t good enough. He should go pull a tree down with his bare hands. Anything to expel the extra testosterone currently roaring through his body.

He could sleep with someone else, he supposed. Kate wasn’t an option and the best way to deal with being horny was to get some. A simple problem with a simple solution.

He raised his eyes and scanned the room, purposefully avoiding looking anywhere near Sierra or Kate. There were some hot cowgirls in the building. Chicks in rhinestone jeans and pink hats with tight tops and big breasts. Girls who would stay long enough to complete the ride, so to speak, and then get on their way. No hang-ups, no nothing. Just his type.

Except looking at them right now was just like looking at a sunset. Real nice, real pretty, but he didn’t want to fuck it.

Not that he wanted to do that with Kate. There was a lot of mileage between a kiss in an arena and full-on...bedroom events.

But the fact that it was on his mind was a bad sign.

By the time the meeting adjourned, Jack wasn’t in the mood to stick around and socialize, even if he should. Especially with the pretty cowgirls.

He didn’t feel like it.

He stood and made his way out, looking at Kate one last time. Kate, who was still very definitely ignoring him.

Fine. He walked out the door, and thankfully, no one stopped him. Probably because he looked about as happy as a guy chewing glass.

He crossed the street to where he’d parked his truck. The days were getting shorter, dusk already lowering itself down to the tops of the mountains and blanketing the town in deep blue. There was something peaceful about it like this. The familiar shrouded in darkness. He’d traveled all over the country during his stint in the rodeo, but he’d never found another place he felt as if he could call home.

On the road he’d found what he did or didn’t do meant nothing. Because no one who mattered was there to see it.

Copper Ridge, for all the history, good, bad and ugly, was his home. No doubt about it.

Eli was here. Connor was here.

And the Wests are here. And you’re still wishing he’d see you.

No. Hell no. The old man could rot, for all he cared. He wanted to be a thorn in his side, sure as hell, but he didn’t want attention. Didn’t need admiration.

“All right, asshole.”

Jack turned and saw Kate storming across the street, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. She painted a sharply contrasting picture to some of the other women in the group. No sequins, no pink.

Oh yeah, and she was looking at him like she wanted to kill him with her bare hands and feed his body to the seagulls.

“What do you want, Kate?”

“Why did you stand me up?” she demanded.

“Why did you kiss me?”

“Because you’re sexy and I wanted to. Now, why the hell did you stand me up?” she asked again, her voice cracking. “I waited for you.”

“I wasn’t in the space to deal with you. And you think I’m sexy?”

“No, dumbass. I think you’re a fucking troll—that’s why I kissed you.” She was mad. And not the normal Kate mad. Not the kind where she wanted to slap his arm and call him a name and call it done. He’d never seen her this mad.

“We can’t,” he said, because it was the only thing he could think to say.

“You can’t say you’re going to take me somewhere and then not show up.”

“That has nothing to do with the kiss.”

“So you didn’t leave me stranded because I kissed you?”

It was exactly why he hadn’t brought her with him to the meeting. “I didn’t strand you,” he said. “You have a truck.”

“I have waited on too many damn curbs for a man who was at home drunk off his ass to spend ten seconds waiting for you,” she said, her voice breaking now.