The Curvy Astronomer and the Cowboy (He Wanted Me Pregnant!) (4 page)

“Shall we go inside and get warmed up?” Troy asked. “There’s probably some stuff to do. I haven’t been here for a while.”

I nodded absently. “Yep. Absolutely. Can I follow you in in a minute? I’ve just got to check the telescope.”

Troy glanced at the trailer. “Yup. It’s still there.”

“Check it for
damage.
Just in case anything came out of alignment on the drive up. I’ll come in in a second.”

He smirked and headed towards the cabin.

“Troy?”

He turned back to me.

“Thank you. For, um...bringing me out here. It’s perfect.”

He gave me a smile that made my heart lift and my toes dance inside my sneakers.
Get it together. He’s not interested in you. He’s just being nice.
My mind went back to the dream.
Nice
wasn’t the right word to describe him in the dream. He’d been...
demanding. Possessive.
A hot throb spread through my body.
It was only a dream, you idiot.

I realized that my eyes were still locked on the tight contours of his ass. It wasn’t until he’d entered the cabin and closed the door behind him that I managed to shake myself and look away.
Focus, Emily!

I set up the trailer’s stand. Then I went inside, unfastened the locks and gently paid out two ropes.

Light flooded in from above as the two halves of the trailer folded outwards. Yes, it
used
to be a trailer you could actually live in, but my dad had made some serious modifications. With the outer shell folded flat onto the grass, its real nature was revealed: just a box to protect a telescope that was bigger than me.

“
Wow,
” said a voice next to me. Troy must have been watching through the window because he’d come out to look.

“Yeah, I know,” I said proudly. I didn’t have much in my life—in fact, the telescope was worth more than everything else I had put together. But it was one thing I could be genuinely proud of. “It’s really old, too. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.” I stroked the white-painted metal affectionately.

As I shifted my weight, the trailer rocked slightly. “Damn,” I muttered. “I think it’s not quite flat.” I jumped down to the ground and looked underneath. “Yeah, the left wheel’s in a dip.” I straightened up. “Okay, no big deal. We can just close it up, drive forward, drive back--”

Troy bent down, gripped the underside of the trailer...and
lifted.
“Where you want it?” he grunted.

I went sort of weak inside. The trailer weighed a lot--all that metal and the huge glass lenses. The sheer physical strength taken to lift it was mind-blowing. I could see the muscles in Troy’s arms and back bulging even through his clothes. “A little to the left?” I squeaked.

He side-stepped to the left and set it gently down. When I stepped back onto the trailer, there was no wobble at all. “Thank you,” I said breathlessly as Troy straightened up.

“I’ve got the range going,” he said. “You want something to drink? Hot chocolate?”

I was still staring at his arms. I shook myself and tried to focus. “Thanks,” I said “In a second.” I put my eye to the eyepiece. “Let me just check a few things…”

***

“Emily?”

“Hmm?”

“Here.”

I had to force myself not to grunt in frustration. I mean, it was amazingly sweet of him to bring me out a drink, but I would have been done in another few minutes anyway and—

I frowned as I stepped back from the telescope. The sky seemed a lot darker.

“It’s been two hours,” he said gently.

I stared at him, amazed. “
Really?”
But, now I came to think of it, I had wound up making quite a few adjustments, and then working out positions, and testing my camera and…I flushed. “Sorry. I got caught up.”

He gave me one of those grins. “No need to apologize. But aren’t you frozen?”

Now I thought about it, I
was
cold. I was actually shivering--I just hadn’t noticed in my excitement. I wrapped my hands gratefully around the steaming mug he handed me. The smell of rich chocolate was glorious.

“You really get caught up in this stuff, huh?” he said.

For a second, I did what I normally did when someone said that—I blushed and sort of closed down and looked at my feet. I knew I was kind of a geek about this stuff, and I knew it was the sort of thing men hated. But then I heard something in his voice, something I wasn’t expecting to hear. Respect. He wasn’t mocking me.

I dared to look up and meet his eyes. He was smiling at me. “I’m kinda the same,” he said. “If I’m working with a horse, sometimes Russ or Amanda have to come and haul me in for a meal, or I don’t eat. I just sort of lose—“

“—track of time,” I said with him, nodding. I couldn’t believe it. Who would have thought that this guy, about as outdoorsy and muscled and
rough
as they come, would have something in common with me? I mean, okay, he was talking about taming wild horses and I was talking about exposing correctly for the horsehead nebula, but
still.

And then it happened again. I was looking at him and he was looking at me and our gazes locked. He was only looking at my eyes and yet I swore I could feel his gaze permeating throughout my entire body, as if he was eating me all up. This time, it took even longer to break away. When I did, I was breathing fast.
Idiot!
I thought, staring at my sneakers.
He’s just being friendly.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you warmed up.”

And he led me to the cabin, one big hand on in the small of my back to guide me. It felt good there. It felt
right
there.

Inside, he showed me around. If the cabin really had been in a state when he arrived, he’d done a lot of cleaning up in the last two hours because it looked tidy and clean. One room served as the living area, with a range cooker that was merrily burning its way through an armful of logs. There was a bedroom and a tiny bathroom. The walls were actual logs, the cracks sealed but otherwise unfinished. A lantern hanging from the ceiling threw out a warm, flickering glow. I’d spent more nights than I could count sleeping in motels—clean and complete with electricity and WiFi but utterly soulless. This was the opposite: basic as hell but oddly homely.

“Hungry?” he asked.

My stomach rumbled in answer. I’d skipped breakfast in my hurry to get on the road and I’d sort of missed lunch. It was now rapidly getting towards evening. “Famished,” I admitted.

He cooked, on a sizzling iron skillet. Steaks, not from a vacuum-sealed plastic tray but wrapped in paper, probably bought that morning from some small-town butcher. There were green beans, jacket potatoes and creamy, salted butter.

There was also wine. ”Care for a glass?” he asked.

Suddenly, my heart was thumping. It felt as if he was asking me about a lot more than wine. It was a step, a shift in mood. Turning it from two people who were there through chance into something else.
A date?!

“I’d love some,” I said. “Thank you.”

The wine was good. The food was even better, the steak juicy and tender, the potatoes crunchy and smoky on the outside, fluffily perfect on the inside.

“You come up here a lot?” I asked.

“Now and again. Less than I should, probably. The place could use some work. My dad used to bring me up here, when I was a kid. Now, it’s just...peaceful.”

I couldn’t resist. “After the crazy, noisy, pressure cooker of town?”

He laughed out loud. “I guess it seems pretty quiet to you.”

I nodded. “Maybe a little. Does everyone know each other’s name?”

“Yep. And who they’re sleeping with.”

Now
I
burst out laughing.

“What? You thought folks in a small town don’t have sex? You thought that was reserved for you city folk, hooking up in nightclubs? You don’t need valet parking to have sex.”

I was still laughing, but my face was red.
How did we suddenly get onto sex?
I nodded guiltily. “Okay. I kind of did think that. It just seems so...quaint.”

He shook his head. “Old-fashioned, maybe. But that doesn’t mean we’re all buttoned-down and prim. Hell, it’s probably the other way, in fact. The old west always sounded to me like it was full of sex. All those corsets and saloon girls….”

I flushed again, remembering my dream.

“You said you met Russ Tyler, my boss?”

I nodded. “I think so. He was called Russ, at least.”

“Tall fella, real pretty wife with all the red hair?”

I nodded again...but I felt a flare of jealousy when he described her that way.
Then again, she was a curvy girl. Does that mean he likes--

Troy’s voice jerked me back to the moment. “Well, Amanda’s a vet. Russ flew her out here from Atlanta. Took her off into the mountains to find some horse--”

“A horse escaped?”

“A feral horse. Anyway, they went up there camping and Russ made...y’know. A
connection
with her--”

“With the horse?”

“No, with Amanda. And when he brought her back, she was pregnant.”

“The horse was pregnant?”

“No, still Amanda. Stop focusing on the horse. And then she moved in with him--”

“The hor--Oh.”

“And now she’s married to him and she’s the stud farm’s vet.”

I blinked. “How long were they out there together?”

“Two, three days?”

From strangers to a couple--and her pregnant--in three days?! That seemed insane. And she’d moved here from Atlanta, swapped a big city for a general store with horses tied up outside?

Troy was watching my horrified reaction, grinning. “We do things a little differently out here. When we see something we want, we just go right after it.” He was giving me a look that was almost burning in its intensity. I’d seen it once before...in a stagecoach.

I grabbed my wine and glugged half the glass to buy time. Had he told me that story just for fun, to prove that Mustang Falls wasn’t as dull as it looked? Or--

I looked up and caught his eye again and it felt as if I’d grabbed hold of a live wire. The energy was pumping into me from his stare, searing away my defenses, leaving me exposed….

It suddenly felt very hot in the cabin.

“It’s getting dark,” I said, jumping to my feet. “We should take a look at the stars. I mean,
I
should take a look at the stars. You don’t have to come with me. Unless you want to.”

He slowly got to his feet, giving me another one of those grins. “I’d like to,” he said.

***

Outside, the temperature had dropped to well below freezing. I should have been huddled up in my coat and gloves but instead I felt like a running dog, desperate to cool off, trying to bleed as much heat as possible. Every time I breathed out and saw my breath as a rising cloud of steam, it was as if I was releasing a little of the heat Troy had built up inside me. But however much exited my body, there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply.

The sky was stunning. The cloud cover meant I couldn’t get the pictures I needed, but through the breaks I could see the sky was bright and vibrant, every inch dusted with sparkling diamonds.
This is how the sky should look,
I thought.
Not just a dull black mass, like it is in the city.

Something wrapped around my shoulders. A blanket. Then I felt his strong hands on my shoulders, pressing it to me. “Figured I should warm you up,” he said. “Or knowing you, you’ll stay out here all night and freeze to death.”

Warm me up.
He’d only been talking about a blanket. So why hadn’t it sounded like that...at all? “Thank you,” I managed.

He didn’t move away. I could feel him there, his body inches from my back and ass. It was very hard not to edge backward and press up against him. But,
God,
imagine if I did that and he balked and asked what the hell I was doing?

“Look,” I said to break the tension. “There’s Sirius,” I pointed. I moved my face back from the telescope and pointed.

He stepped to the side of me and followed my finger. “Where?”

Without thinking, I leaned into him, putting my cheek almost against his. “There,” I said. And suddenly we were pressed together, close as lovers. I swallowed. “See the Greater Dog? And the Lesser Dog?”

I felt him nod. “I never learned this stuff.” Up close, his voice was so low, so melodious; it seemed to vibrate right through me. “I mean, I always thought it was pretty, but I didn’t know what they were called. Oh, apart from Pegasus. I figured I should know what the horse was called. Where’s that?”

“There.” I turned to point and he turned with me, but somehow we wound up even closer together, the softness of my cheek nuzzling against his stubble. I stopped talking. We stood that way, just breathing for a second.