Chapter 15

Cole showered, shaved, and changed his shirt three times. Long sleeves, short sleeves, T-shirt? This wasn’t exactly a date, but he was going to her place for dinner, so it seemed respectful to wear something decent. Katie rolled her eyes at his white button-down. She was right. Too formal. He stripped it off and hung it back in the closet.

All of his T-shirts were either dirty or faded, so he grabbed a royal blue polo with the Jacobs Livestock logo and yanked it over his head. There. He was practically in uniform.

And nervous as hell.

He ran a hand over his damp hair, trying to smooth down the cowlick that had tortured him since childhood. No sense putting on his hat when he’d just have to take it off again as soon as he got inside, but he felt naked without it. Naked and Shawnee was not a good combination.

Scratch that. Shawnee naked—the parts he’d seen, anyway—was just dandy. And him naked with Shawnee—

Nope. Not a chance. Shawnee didn’t even like him with his clothes on. She was just using him as a shield in return for home cooking. But his brain just had to go there, and now he’d probably spend the whole evening thinking about nothing else, and sure as hell he’d blurt out something she did not want to hear. He might have to hold her to that vow of silence, for both of their sakes.

When he reached her trailer and raised his hand, the door opened before he could knock.

Shawnee smirked at him. “What did you do, pace off the distance after I invited you so you could show up exactly as the clock struck six?”

No need. Her trailer had become the last checkpoint on his nightly security rounds, so he already knew how many strides it was from her door to his. Give or take a half step. “Was I supposed to be fashionably late?”

“Not when you’re the guy with the beer.” She snagged the six-pack of Shiner out of his hand, pulling out two longnecks before stashing the rest in the fridge. She handed one bottle to him and twisted the top off the other. “Where’s your best girl?”

Cole followed her gaze to the spot at his heels that Katie usually occupied. “I wasn’t sure if she was invited.”

“Oh, right. Like I want her hating on me.”

She had a point. Katie could and usually did hold a grudge. Cole glanced back toward his rig. The team ropers were long gone and no other vehicles moved around the rodeo grounds, so he gave a shrill whistle. Katie popped out from under his pickup and trotted over. Instead of pausing at his side, she bounded up into the trailer and marched over to plunk down near the bathroom door, refusing to look at him, indignation radiating from every hair on her stocky body.

Shawnee laughed. “That’s gonna be one cranky redheaded stepchild if you ever find a full-time night woman.” Then she clapped a hand over her mouth, muffling her words. “Oops. Forgot. No running my mouth.”

Cole cocked his head. “You’ve seen Jeremiah Johnson?”

“Seen?” She snorted. “It was Granddad’s favorite movie. I swear, he must’ve watched it at least once a month.”

“He had good taste.”

Shawnee rolled her eyes, looking remarkably like Katie. “I should’ve known that’d be your favorite. There’s only, like, fifty lines of dialogue in the whole movie.”

She retreated to make room for Cole to step inside. Then they stood, neither of them sure what came next. She smoothed the fluttery hem of her blouse over her stomach. It was sleeveless, the peachy pink color of his aunt’s favorite roses. Her skin looked as dewy fresh as one of those rose petals, and he had an insane urge to lean in and brush his lips over her cheek to see if it was also as soft. One more step forward…

She took a swig from her beer, then scowled up at him, her hair springing around her face like an independent life form, tiny, curling fingers that stroked her throat and bare shoulders. “You’re looming again.”

“I can’t help it.” But he usually didn’t loom with intent. He angled past her, drawing a deep, appreciative breath as he slid onto one of the bench seats at the banquette table. “Do I smell meatloaf?”

“With new potatoes and corn on the cob. There’s a great farmers market here.”

Cole closed his eyes, his taste buds humming in anticipation as Shawnee pulled the meatloaf out of the oven and set it on a heat-proof pad on the table. For a woman he’d always thought of as a human bulldozer, she was light on her feet as she bustled around. Her bare feet. With red toenails. He opened his eyes and watched her fish ears of corn out of a pot of steaming water and set them on plates.

“I don’t mind listening,” he said.

Her tongs froze midair. “To what?”

“Talk.” He ran his thumb back and forth along the edge of the table, the repetitive, tactile sensation grounding him. “People assume because I don’t say much, I don’t want anyone else to talk. But I like to listen.”

“As long as you don’t have to answer?”

“Depends. Ask me about feed supplements, I can go on all day.”

She laughed in patent disbelief. “That I would have to hear.”

“I used to talk a lot.” He pressed the pad of his thumb harder into the edge of the table.

Shawnee turned, a plate in each hand. “And then?”

“I got old enough to figure out I was doing it wrong.”

She paused for a beat, then set the plates on the table before fetching a third to set on the floor by Katie. The dog pretended she didn’t notice until Shawnee turned her back, and even then she sniffed it suspiciously, just to be sure everyone knew she couldn’t be bought off with a slice of meatloaf. “What flipped the switch?”

“Girls.” He studied the way the pad of his thumb went white, then red, then white as he pressed and released. “Before that, I never noticed what other kids thought about me.”

“That must’ve been awesome. Not caring, I mean.”

He risked a quick glance at her. “You should know.”

She made a noise of ripe self-disgust. “If that were true, you wouldn’t be here.”

Because if she truly didn’t care, she wouldn’t give a damn whether Ace watched her rope. In a blink, Cole’s perception of her shifted, revealing a nearly invisible web of cracks in her bulletproof armor. He could make an educated guess at what had put them there. And he had to wonder, what else was Shawnee only pretending not to care about?

“That man is a case study in narcissism,” he said.

She plunked a bowl on the table, heaped with tiny new potatoes. “Listen to you with the fancy words.”

“I read up on it.”

“Because someone called you a narcissist?” Shawnee guessed, and hooted in derision. “Obviously, she’s never experienced the real thing.”

Cole didn’t ask how she knew it was a woman. “I can be pretty self-centered.”

“Single-minded and self-centered are not the same thing.” Shawnee slathered her ear of corn with butter, then passed him the dish—the real stuff, no crappy margarine. “You obsess on particular details to the exclusion of all else, but every waking thought isn’t for your sole benefit. Hell, I can’t keep you out of my business. You even sat through an entire team roping today.”

“My horse was there.”

She blinked, then grabbed her beer and took a long gulp before thumping it down a little too hard. “Right. I forgot.”

Was that hurt in her voice? More likely his imagination, because she was her usual, blunt self when she went on. “Anyway…when you get focused on something, it’s like a boulder rolling downhill. If someone steps in front of you, their ass is probably getting run over, but if you looked up in time, you would try to avoid the collision.”

“That’s not much consolation to the people I mow down.”

She shrugged, conceding the point. “Ace wouldn’t even bother to put on the brakes unless they were holding out a stack of hundred dollar bills.”

Cole scooped up a slab of meatloaf, laid it on his plate, then gestured toward the next piece. She nodded, and he dished it up for her. “Your mother and her family didn’t have money.”

Shawnee’s lip curled. “He married her for the horses. Gramps had a pasture full of ropey sons a bitches. It’s not a coincidence that Ace started kicking ass about the time he and my mother got engaged…and hasn’t done shit since he left.” She hesitated a beat, staring down at her plate. “You are not a narcissist. I’m not sure you even know how to be cruel. Ace, on the other hand…it’s like in a horror movie, when there’s this guy who’s all handsome and smiling, and then bam! He morphs into a monster and hacks someone up with a meat cleaver.” She huffed out a breath. “That’s Ace when you call him too hard on his bullshit. Or say the wrong thing on the wrong day.”

Spoken, Cole could tell, from painful experience. He shot her a puzzled glance as he doused his corn and potatoes with salt. “If you know all that, why do you still let him get to you?”

“Now there’s the million-dollar question.” She drove her fork through the heart of a potato. “It’s genetic, I guess. Look at my mother. After all these years, she still believes they could’ve lived happily ever after if my grandparents hadn’t been so hard on him, and if I would have forgiven him…” She spared Cole a glance, her eyes hard, but in a way that reminded him more of glass than steel. Brittle. Breakable. “I assume you know all the ugly details?”

He nodded. Then he frowned. “She blames you?”

“Not the way you mean.” She used her knife to push the potato off her fork, then proceeded to mangle it with the tines. “She isn’t angry at us. Well, not anymore. We’re just a handy excuse not to blame Ace, so she can keep telling herself he really did love her. Maybe still does. And as long as she believes—”

“She doesn’t,” Cole said flatly. “I doubt she still did, even before you got sick.”

Shawnee paused in the act of spearing another potato, cocking her head in question. “And you know this because…”

“There was a girl.” He sighed, resigned. This was what happened when he started talking. Stuff spilled out, and then he had to keep talking, and the hole kept getting deeper and deeper. “Did you know my brother?”

“I saw him around. Y’all were hard to miss at the junior rodeos, running in a pack with the Sanchez brothers.” She fluttered a hand over her heart in a fake swoon. “The girls all paid close attention to the Sanchez brothers. And Xander seemed nice. Fun.”

Yep. That’s what everybody said. Xander was the fun one. And Cole was…there.

Shawnee’s brows crimped, puzzled. “I don’t remember. Was he one grade or two ahead of you?”

“Neither. We were Irish twins. My mom got pregnant with him when I was only two months old. But Xander grew up a lot faster than I did—because of the autism, I guess—and everybody thought he was older. They didn’t know what was wrong with me, but it was obvious school was gonna be a challenge. So we went together.”

They’d gone everywhere together. It didn’t matter if Cole was backward, because Xander was so funny and smart everyone just ignored his weird brother. And when Cole said something dumb, Xander always found a way to cover for him while Cole skulked back into the shadows.

“They were the cool crowd,” he said. “Everybody wanted to hang out with Gil and Delon and Xander.”

“Well, yeah. They were hot.”

Emphasis on they, but Cole had been included by default, a big hulking fourth wheel, not that they’d ever treated him that way. Growing up, Gil and Delon had spent so much time at the Jacobs ranch that the four of them had melded into a seamless unit. Inseparable, everyone had said.

Until an out-of-control driver smashed their world into pieces.

But he wasn’t going to let the memories tear open old wounds and ruin his appetite. Cole hacked off a chunk of meatloaf and popped it in his mouth. His taste buds had a minor orgasm. “Mmmm. That’s good stuff.”

“Thank you.”

Shawnee picked up her corn and munched the full length of the cob before setting it down, licking the butter from each fingertip in turn, then her lips, her tongue sliding over them, slow and thorough. Heat bloomed in Cole’s chest and trickled south as he stared, mesmerized.

“So there was this girl…” she prompted.

“Wha—oh, yeah.” He gave his head a slight shake to jiggle some brain cells back into gear. “She was pretty and popular and she paid attention to me. But eventually I realized I was just her backstage pass.” He cut a miniature potato into four precise quarters, then each quarter into half, then lined up the tiny wedges in a neat circle. “You can’t not know, deep down, when you’re being used. Not long term. Even I could tell.”

“How?” Shawnee asked, almost gently.

“Mostly…” He hitched a shoulder. “They never look for excuses to be with you. Just the two of you, alone.”

Shawnee was silent for a moment, waiting, but he didn’t go on. “And then you dumped her?”

“No.” He didn’t explain why not. Shawnee could put it together. There was her mother, after all, hanging on way beyond reason.

They both stared at their food, the air humming with Too Much Information, every word of it a weapon she could sharpen to a sarcastic edge and use to slice him to ribbons. But somehow he trusted that she wouldn’t.

“I would have watched you today anyway,” he confessed, glancing up.

She blinked. “Why?”

“I like the way you rope. The way you ride your horse. I learn things from watching you.”

“Oh.”

Their gazes caught for a beat too long, and the tension shifted into an entirely different gear. Before Cole could open his mouth again and dig an even deeper grave, Shawnee grabbed her fork to scoop up mangled potatoes.

“So,” she said. “What’s new with feed supplements?”