Slow Burn Cowboy

She snorted. What was the deal with that, anyway? Him being cranky with her. She hadn’t moved into his house and taken over a quarter of his ranch.

She’d gone over this morning with the idea in mind to establish some kind of normalcy. And okay, her bringing breakfast unannounced wasn’t normal. But random gestures of kindness were normal for them, and surely croissants were a gesture of kindness?

Then he’d been cranky with her.

Sure, she was applying a little bit of pressure on him to alter his business plan, but she wasn’t wrong. And it came from a place of love. And she hadn’t even mentioned it in a couple of days.

She huffed around the back kitchen, coming out periodically to check on the store, just in case someone had managed to walk in without setting off the bell.

The afternoon passed without incident, and by the time she turned the closed sign she was more than done. She sighed, sitting down in her chair behind the counter.

She should do something. Something pertaining to the subscription boxes, probably. She hauled herself up out of the chair for a moment, leaning forward to fetch a notebook and a pen. She wrote a header on top of the page: Box Things.

Then she stood again, wandering slowly from behind the counter and through the narrow aisles of the store. She started to write down various items she thought might make good representations of Copper Ridge goodies.

Suddenly, she saw a muddy brown blur flash across the floor, and over her foot. She screamed, jumping backward and knocking into a shelf, sending a box of scone mix tumbling onto the ground.

“Rodents!” she growled. “I am beset by small mammals.”

Between the potential attic possums and this, it was getting ridiculous.

Her heart thundering hard, hands shaking, she went back to the counter and, without thinking, dialed Finn. “Where are you?”

“I was just about to head back up to the ranch,” he said. “I was in town grabbing some hardware.”

“Come over to the store,” she said, knowing that she sounded desperate, and not caring. She didn’t know how to catch a mouse. And she could not have mice chewing holes in her things and making nests in various corners. She sold food. It wasn’t hygienic.

“Is everything okay?”

“No! Just... Agh! Get here now.”

“I’m on my way.”

The mouse made another mad dash over the floor and she shrieked and hung up the phone. “Gross!” she shouted at the mouse.

She didn’t know why. The mouse didn’t care that it was gross.

She ran to the door, turning the locks so that Finn would be able to get in. Then she wrapped her arms around herself, pacing back and forth. She muttered under her breath while she waited.

Only a few minutes later Finn burst through the front door, his hat on, his expression intense. “What’s going on?”

“A mouse ran across my foot,” she said.

The features on his face seemed to lower slowly, the intensity morphing into something else. Anger? “A mouse.”

“Yes. A mouse. It was horrifying. I’m emotionally scarred.” It had startled her, enough to call him feeling vaguely hysterical, because what the hell was she going to do about a mouse? But she was feeling calmer now, her heart rate returning to normal.

“Dammit, Lane,” he said. “You said that everything wasn’t okay. I thought maybe there was a knife-wielding maniac in your store.”

“You did not. Or you would have called the police.”

“I thought the odds were you were probably okay, but it doesn’t take much to imagine the worst, Lane. I came as quickly as I could. And it’s a mouse. It is not a knife-wielding intruder.” He was actually mad at her about this. And she didn’t know what to do with that. Didn’t know what to do with how off-kilter their every interaction had been for the past few days.

“Okay, yes, but it is a razor-toothed pest. Which is also alarming.” She did her best to try and lighten the mood with humor. He didn’t take the bait.

“You aren’t in danger,” he said, clipped. “You let me think you were.”

“I did not.”

“I was worried about you, Lane. And you’re brushing that off.”

“I am not! But it wasn’t nothing, and you’re being ridiculous,” she said, some of the initial surprise from her earlier mouse shock beginning to burn away, the quivering in her stomach taking on an entirely different quality. She had to look away from him. From his blue eyes, which were burning with anger and intensity. She ground her teeth together, deciding then and there that she was going to dig in on this. He had been so surly with her lately. He had been treating her like she was one of his invading family members, and she wasn’t.

She had made him food. She was taking care of him. And he was treating her like... Like this. Well, she wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

“What were you going to do?” she continued. “You burst in here with no weapon. If I was being held at knifepoint you wouldn’t have been able to help.”

The intensity in his eyes took on a dangerous glint. “Is that what you think?”

“You’re bare-handed, Donnelly. There would be no saving me.”

He took another step toward her, and for some reason, she shrank back. “Lane, trust me. If you were in any kind of danger, if there had been somebody in here trying to hurt you, I would have torn him limb from limb. I don’t need a weapon to protect you.”

She realized then that he was...not shaking, but vibrating. With unspent energy. Unused rage. And probably, she really had scared him a little bit.

“Finn,” she said, reaching out and putting her hand on his shoulder before she could stop herself.

Whatever she had been about to say burned right out of her head like water on a hot surface. Just sizzled and floated right up into the atmosphere. Away from her. She had no hope of reclaiming it. No hope of doing much of anything but just standing there, her fingertips burning against his hard body.

She knew better than to touch him. They didn’t do that. And she had done it twice in the space of just a few days. And here she was, doing it again. Persistently. She was still touching him.

She jerked her hand back down to her side.

“This has to stop,” he said, his voice rough.

“What?” Was he talking about her touching him? Because she agreed. She just wished he hadn’t said it like that. In a way that acknowledged there was something loaded in the touching. That there was something nonplatonic there. She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want it to be an acknowledged thing.

“This,” he said, gesturing around the room. “It’s seven o’clock at night. You have a crisis, you call me. From wherever I might be, I come running.”

So. Not the touching. Because that was all her, apparently.

“You’re my friend,” she said. “Of course I called you.”

“Yes. But you don’t call Cassie, do you? You didn’t call Alison, or Rebecca. You called me.”

She scoffed. “Right, it would have done me so much good to call them about a mouse. We would have all ended up standing on chairs screaming.” She frowned. “Okay. Rebecca wouldn’t have. But the rest of us would be useless.”

“So you see my point.”

“No,” she said, even though she was pretty sure it was obvious and she was missing it on purpose, just because she wanted to push back at him. Even without knowing his bottom line, she wanted to push back.

“You called me because I’m a man.”

“Well, yes. Obviously. If I have drama with my electricity, and pest issues, I kind of need a man to handle that. I’m proficient at a lot of things, but I can’t be proficient at everything. Nobody is. That’s why I cook for you. That’s what I’m good at.” He continued to glare at her, so she swallowed hard and pressed on. “I guess when you put it like that, it feels a little like I’m labeling certain jobs man jobs and woman jobs, and I get that that’s a problem for some people, but it works for us. It’s playing to our strengths. That’s all I mean.”

He still didn’t say anything, and she was starting to feel nervous, that hollowed-out feeling in her stomach returning.

“Don’t tell me you find that offensive,” she said finally, hearing herself start to sound annoyed. He was letting her twist in the wind, and he didn’t seem at all bothered by that. “But if you do, if you really want to, I can come look at your fuse box and you can cook me dinner, but I have a feeling we would both be unsatisfied by that arrangement.”

“Stop it, Lane,” he said, the words weary. “You know that’s not the problem. The problem is we do have an arrangement. Or, it’s fallen into one. I’m not your husband.”

The words hit her like a slap, and her cheeks stung. “I know. That’s a stupid thing to say. Of course I know that.”

“I’m not your boyfriend. I’m not even your dial-a-dick. But you treat me like one. In every way except for the benefits.”

His words punched straight through her chest, grabbing her heart and twisting it. “That’s not fair.” She couldn’t quite articulate why it wasn’t, just that it wasn’t.

“Isn’t it? You don’t treat me like you treat your other friends.”

“I know. Because you are a man. Do you honestly think I’m blind to that?” It was poorly phrased, because in many ways, until recently, she had been blind to it. She had known, in an abstract sense, but she hadn’t spent a lot of time dwelling on it. On purpose.

That time he and Rebecca had almost hooked up, it had forced her mind to go there and she had found it completely unsettling. She’d been angry, nearly sick over it, and she hated herself for it. To want to keep her single friends—who had no obligation to her—from being with each other if they wanted to be seemed churlish and petty.

But she hadn’t wanted Finn’s time occupied by another woman.

That realization made her mouth drop open. She didn’t want him occupied by another woman, because she wanted him on hand for her. And that made what he was saying sound a lot like their whole arrangement wasn’t fair. A lot like she was, in fact, using him as a boyfriend without giving him any of the benefits of being one.

It was uncomfortable, and she didn’t like it. It made her feel like she was the one being hunted, not the mouse. Like she had been backed into a corner and had no other choice but to fight back.

So, she did.

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