Reckless for Cowboy (6 page)

She squeezes my shoulder and then saunters off to get more drinks.

Tell him how I feel? Is she crazy? I’ve tried that tactic before. Except it was never a tactic because it’s just the way I am. It’s always ended the same way—badly. No, I’ve learned my lesson.

*~*~*

I sit in my car in the deserted parking lot at the Cattlemen’s, my overnight bag in the seat beside me, feeling like the biggest loser in the universe. I’m just about to turn the car on and head home when the lights of a truck turn into the parking lot. The fickle organ inside my chest pulls its nearly broken self together and does a cartwheel instead.

Cooper leaves the truck running and steps out. My stomach joins my heart’s wild dance and I suddenly feel woozy and ill.

He opens my door. “Sorry I’m late. I was designated driver for a bunch of idiots who don’t know when enough’s enough.”

Of course he has a legitimate explanation. It’s perfect, just like everything else about Cooper. But perfect makes me suspicious, particularly when I’m tired, and right now, with all the emotions and the long, hectic nights, I’m exhausted.

“Come on,” he takes my hand and pulls me out of the car. “Is your car going to be okay here over night?

 “Yeah. Should be. There are surveillance cameras in the parking lot. Plus, who wants to steal a ’95 Camry?”

I lock my doors and Cooper takes my bag and stores it behind the seat. He’s got a sleeping bag and pillow sitting on the passenger seat of his truck.

“What’s this,” I ask before climbing in.

“We’ve got a bit of a drive ahead of us. I thought you could sleep on the way. You must be bushed.”

When I still don’t get in he says, “I told Denny exactly where I’m taking you. Call him if it makes you feel better.”

I call because it’s the smart thing to do. Denny answers, he just got home, and assures me he knows where I’m going.

“Trust him, Brooke. He’s a good guy.”

I glance over at Cooper and he smiles, his wonderful lazy smile. I end the call, climb up into the truck and pile everything on my lap.

I tilt the seat back, prop a pillow between my head and the door, pull the sleeping bag up around me and close my eyes. Sleep eludes me.

Trust him. Tell him how you feel.
This is the advice everyone’s giving me. It’s advice I don’t need. I’m already the kind of person who trusts inherently. All to my own detriment.

Take Simon and Cody. All they wanted was sex. Fine. But why not just say so? Why lie to me about it? Why pretend like you want more? Thank God I never slept with either of them, though it’d been pretty close. Brandt was worse. He knew all the things to say even after he got what he wanted from me. He kept up the charade until I’d fallen hard.

I was the only one for him. He couldn’t stop thinking about me. He wanted to make plans together, about our future. He introduced me to his family, for God’s sake. There was no one else he wanted to share his life with, no one but me….oh…and two other women he’d been telling the same stories to, making the same plans with.

Had he introduced them to his family too?

The fact that I had to find all this out on Facebook has kept me off social media for three years.

An image of Wes, my stepfather, intrudes into my thoughts but I shake my head. I’m not going there.

Shifting in my seat, I force my thoughts elsewhere, namely onto Cooper. I can hear him humming softly to the song on the radio.  It’s a bit off-key, but I like it. I like him. Too much. He’s thoughtful and funny and sweet and unpredictable and way too hot. He’s perfect. Too perfect.

Like Brandt was.

But that thought doesn’t stop me from fantasizing about where Cooper’s taking me and what he’s going to do to me once we get there. Sometime during the course of my illicit fantasies, I fall asleep.

I wake up groggy to find myself cradled in Cooper’s arms as he carries me across a gravel parking area. The sun’s just peeking above the horizon and I twist in his arms. “Where are we?”

“Shh,” he says as he carries me up some steps to a wooden porch. Somehow he manages to hold me with one arm while he unlocks a door with another. “This is my place. Now, go back to sleep.”

His place? I try to force my lids open wider to see what’s what, but they’re too heavy. He carries me down a hall and into a bedroom and sets me down on a rustic log bed. After pulling my boots off, he tucks me in under the covers, clothes and all.

“Get some sleep,” he says at the door. “We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”

I’m too tired to question and I drift off half-convinced this is all some weird dream.

*~*~*

I don’t know how long I sleep, but I wake up to the delicious smell of frying bacon. I’m so disorientated, I sit up, staring at my surroundings, feeling totally dazed. The room is small and simple. The walls are log construction, making the room both dark but warm feeling all at the same time. There’s a three drawer dresser, a small closet, a set of antelope horns on one wall and a picture of a duck on another. That’s about it.

I slide out of my warm cocoon and look around for my overnight bag. It’s on the floor by the door. I pick it up and carry it out into the hall feeling nervous and groggy and trying to find a bathroom before Cooper catches sight of me.

“Morning,” he says, poking his head around a doorway at the end of the hall. “The bathroom is the first door on the left.”

I swear the guy has a tracking device on me. How on earth did he know I was up? My empty stomach replies to my mental query with a little flippity-flop.

“Stop that,” I mumble, giving my stomach a disciplinary smack. “Get it together.”

Twenty minutes later, I step out of the bathroom, showered and feeling much more human. Finding the kitchen isn’t hard. I just follow the delicious smells. Bacon, fried eggs, toast and coffee. I haven’t had a breakfast like this in years. I stand in the doorway of the large country-style kitchen, oak cabinetry, huge table, big butcher-block island. The light is streaming in and by the height of the sun, it must be pretty late.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“Ten-thirty. What time do you work tonight?”

“Eight.” I lean against the doorframe feeling like it’s the morning after a sexy sleep-over—without the sex part—and everything’s awkward.

“Good,” he says. “That gives us a few hours of fun before we have to head back.” He walks up to me and pulls me into his arms, kissing me. It’s full on and I kiss him back. Holy Hannah do I kiss him back. He’s got me backed up against the wall and he’s so close I can feel his arousal through his jeans.

“Do you know how hard it was knowing you were sleeping down the hall? Waiting for you to wake up?”

“No,” I whisper.

He presses his pelvis more firmly against me. “This hard.” He nibbles on my lip and starts tugging on my shirt.

I pull away. “Coop, I…” my words trail off. Suddenly I hear Sydney’s voice in my head.
Don’t let him slip through your fingers. Tell him how you feel.

He grabs my hand before I can move away. “Listen, Brooke. You want to take it slow, we can take it slow. You want to go fast, I can go fast. Whatever you want, that’s what we’ll do.”

I shake my head. More confused than ever. “My head’s saying one thing, my body’s saying something else.”

“What’s your heart saying?” he asks as he tucks a wisp of hair behind my ear. “Because I know what
mine’s
saying.”

I glance up at him. His eyes aren’t black. They’re a warm, chocolate brown. “Don’t,” I say.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t keep saying the perfect thing all the time.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Of course I like it. It’s just I…” I can’t finish the sentence. I want to trust him. I
so
want to trust him. And, maybe I do. Here I am in the middle of nowhere with this man I barely know. I must trust him a little.

Or, I’m stupid and a glutton for punishment.

“You want me to try to be more of an ass? I can do that. I spent years perfecting it.”

I laugh.

He motions to a set place at the table, where the food’s already piled high on the plate. “Sit,” he says. He sits opposite me and smiles. He’s showered and clean and I can smell his fresh aftershave. His hair is still damp and wavy. In the light of day, I see his eyes are framed by laugh lines and long lashes.

I quickly shift my gaze to the plate because I have an urge to lean across the table and kiss him. Again. “This is a lot of food.”

“We’ve got a lot to do today.”

I take a tentative bite. Oh, man. It’s good. The eggs are kind of spicy, like he threw some cayenne in there. The bacon’s thick and crisp. The toast is delicious, and I suspect it’s made from homemade bread. “Cooper?”

“Yeah?”

“What are we doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you always bring women back home on the second date?”

He looks out the window and…Oh my God! I think he’s blushing. “A meteor shower is pretty tough to top,” he says.

“So you bring me here?”

“I wanted to take you someplace you’ve never been before. The only place I could be sure of was here.”

I don’t believe him because he can’t seem to look at me. But I don’t press it.

“Plus,” he adds, speaking through a mouthful of toast—just like I was the other day with my pie. “Ever since Denny mentioned it, I’ve been itching to see you up in a saddle.”

“Horseback riding?” I ask. I don’t think that’s what Denny was implying when he said I needed to get back in the saddle. I’m not even sure that’s what Cooper’s referring to. The possibility of either saddle—whether literal or figurative—is daunting.

“You don’t have an aversion to horses, do you?”

“Oh no, I love them. It’s just, the last time I was on a horse, I was twelve.”

“Perfect,” Cooper says. “That means I can start from scratch and teach you to ride properly. But before we saddle up, there’s something I want to show you.”

Whatever it is he wants to show me, it involves getting in the truck and driving down really bumpy dirt roads. I guess this is the reason you need a four-by-four on a ranch. We’re heading west and the truck finally comes to a stop on the top of a hill. In the wide valley below is a field like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

“Windmills?” I ask.

“Turbines. Thirty-six of them.” He turns the truck off and opens the door. Grabbing a blanket from behind his seat, he carries the bundle under his arm and comes around to my side to open the door. By way of explanation, he says, “The other night I showed you a miracle of nature. Today I want to show you a man-made one.”

We pick our way down the steep hill following a cattle trail through the long rangeland grass. There’s a deep humming and by the time we reach the base of the first mammoth tower, the ground vibrates beneath my feet.

“It’s amazing,” I say looking up. The grey steel of the tower looks impossibly tall—like it’s endless against the blue summer sky. “Is this your land?”

“Yes, but we’ve leased it to the power company. It was Jason’s idea. I thought it was stupid. Just one of the many things I’ve changed my mind about since he died.” He spreads the blanket out on the ground, tosses his hat to the side, and lies down. Just like the other night, he pats the spot beside him. The big difference is, today I can see him. All of him. His face, his eyes, the spot of skin where his shirt is unbuttoned. The snug fit of his jeans.

With none of the hesitation of the other night, I join him. “You have a thing about lying on your back and looking up at things, don’t you?”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“Nope.”

We stare in silence at the slowly turning blades. I feel like a gnat looking up at a giant’s pinwheel. Finally I ask, “How tall are they?”

“These ones are two hundred and fifty feet at the axis. The blades add another hundred feet. When they were constructing them, I got to see the axis, the point where all the blades are connected. You could have stood up inside of it.”

“That’s big.”

“Yep. Pretty damn big.”

“Kind of phallic,” I say.

He laughs.

We lay in silence some more. It’s comfortable. Today I’m the one who reaches for Cooper’s hand, threading my fingers through his and holding on tight. After a while, I start to feel sleepy. It’s just so nice and warm and it’s been a long week and the vibration beneath me lulls me into a lovely drowsy state.

Just as I’m drifting off, something tickles my earlobe and then the inside of my ear. I sit up, slapping at my ear, afraid a bug has crawled inside. Cooper’s sitting beside me, laughing, holding a long blade of prairie grass.

“Jerk,” I say, giving him a good shove before I lay down again.

He rolls onto his elbow and grins. His bangs fall forward into his dark, sparkling eyes.  “Close your eyes.”

“Huh?”

“Just close your eyes.”

As I lay there with my eyes closed I am aware of only two sounds, the humming of the turbine and the sound of my own breathing. There’s a warm earthy scent—sun warmed grass and clover. Then I catch a whiff of him again, clean and fresh and I breathe in deep. I feel his breath against my cheek as he leans over me. Close. Then, the tickle of the grass. Not in my ear this time, but on my face. Slow and methodical, he traces my chin and nose, my eyelids and eyebrows. It sends shivers of pleasure down my spine. A familiar tightening stirs in the pit of my belly as I try unsuccessfully to keep my breathing even. When the grass grazes my lips, I open my eyes to find Cooper staring, his expression intent, his pupils dilated.

“Brooke?”

“Yeah?”

“I want to make love to you.”

Oh help.

Is there anything sexier than a direct man? Nope. At least, I can’t think of anything at the moment and there’s no way I can refuse him. His directness not only makes me wet for him, it makes me weak for him.

“Here?” I ask, breathless. “In a field?”

“Yes.”

I laugh. It sounds nervous.

“I could lie and tell you I just want to kiss you. But I don’t like lying.”

Oh dear.

“If you don’t want this, tell me now and we’ll leave. Because if I start kissing you, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be able to stop.”