Chapter Eleven
Pete
Monday
Coffee wasn’t enough, I’d decided over the weekend. I needed more. As long as we were on the ranch, Emma would never relax enough around me to really open up. I needed to take her somewhere else, shake things up a little by getting her out of her element.
I waited for her on the porch before sunset. She’d arrived earlier and earlier last week, finally getting to the farm an hour before the sun rose on Friday. It wasn’t even six o’clock when she came up the driveway in her little sedan, the headlights cutting through the hazy dark.
“Stay,” I said to Riley, who obediently didn’t move a muscle as I got up and walked out to Emma’s car.
“Morning!” I said.
She turned quickly, gasping at my sudden appearance. “Morning. I didn’t see you.”
“Let’s go out for breakfast before we get started with the day’s work. There’s a place I like in town.”
She watched me, her eyes too dark to read in the lack of light…not that I’d ever been able to read them in full sunlight.
“Don’t worry,” I said with a smile. “I won’t take it out of your pay!”
She didn’t laugh, but she nodded. She seemed smaller without her hat on, like she’d shrunk five inches overnight. “Okay.”
We drove to town in my truck. The ranch was only a fifteen-minute drive from the western edge of Round Rock, which was where the Texan was, an old diner that had been serving the same country dishes since before I was born.
“They open at six,” I said as we pulled into gravel parking lot. I’d kept the conversation going singlehandedly the entire way. Maybe this hadn’t been the best idea, after all. She seemed tenser than I’d seen her all week. I climbed out of the truck and waited for her to follow me. If the food at the Texan didn’t warm her up a little, I didn’t know what would.
I held the door open for her, enjoying the sweet vanilla scent of her as she walked by and the tickle of her auburn-tipped hair as the wind blew it across my outstretched arm.
“You have to meet the old timers,” I said. We walked over to the round table in the corner, all but one chair taken. The old guys called out to me as we approached. The leader, Big Tom, took a good long look at Emma.
“Hey, Petey,” he said, smiling up at us. “Come join us.”
“I can’t this morning, Big T. This here’s Emma. I just hired her last week. She’s my breakfast date for today.”
I looked over at Emma. Her cheeks were blazing red, but the rest of her face was serene and unaffected as usual, her pretty mouth pressed into a thin line. Had I embarrassed her in front of the guys by calling this a date?
“I’ll catch up with y’all tomorrow morning. We’re gonna get something to eat before heading back to the farm.”
We sat down at a booth and grabbed the menus already on the table. While Emma’s eyes were averted, I took stock of her thick hair pulled back into a ponytail and tousled by the wind, the deep v of her t-shirt plunging down from the bottom of her long neck to the tops of her rounded breasts. My eyes darted to my own menu as soon as she looked up at me.
“What’s good here?” she asked.
“You were born and raised in Round Rock and have never been to the Texan?”
She lifted her chin in that defiant way she had. “My daddy didn’t believe in eating out when he could make a perfectly good meal for us at home.”
I could appreciate that. “My daddy used to bring me to the Texan most days before school. He had a game he liked to play to see who would end up paying for coffee. It was always a lot of fun. Things sure could get pretty damned competitive over a tab of a few dollars!”
That drew a smile out of Emma. I even saw some teeth. I counted that as a victory. I was getting into that safe slowly but surely.
“My daddy made breakfast every morning for us at home when we were little,” she said. “Once we grew up, we took turns.”
She was damned near chatty this morning, or at least that was how it felt. When the waitress wandered by, we ordered our food. When it came, Emma looked impressed.
“This is pretty great,” she said. She dug into her eggs while I poured a bowl of white gravy over my plate of biscuits.
“Is it just you and your daddy at home?” I asked in between bites of sopping biscuit.
She shook her head, lifting her eyes to meet mine. She held my gaze longer than usual, her green eyes widening before they darted back down to her breakfast. I still couldn’t read her worth a damn, but I’d felt something just then, a buzz of electricity between us. Or had I imagined it?
“I live at my own place now. But I have a sister who still lives at home. It’s just the three of us.” She glanced up at me again, her lips curling into a shy half smile.
“Three’s not bad,” I said, smiling, too, loving the feeling of her eyes on me and the sight of the sexy little grin on her pretty mouth. “I’m all that’s left of my family. Well, besides Lacey.”
“She said she grew up with you.”
I nodded. “Yep, we took her in like the stray she is.”
Emma’s mouth twitched into what closely resembled a smile. Reading her might not have been getting easier, but I was learning how to make her smile. I’d happily take what I could get.
We drove back to the ranch after breakfast, the silence companionable. I kept half of my attention on the road and the other half on Emma as she watched the countryside whip by through the passenger side window. She jumped out of the truck as soon as we came to a stop in the driveway. I did the same, nearly running into her as she came around the front of the pickup to get past me and to the barn. It was the closest we’d been to each other since she started here. She backed up with a few shuffling steps.
“Thanks for breakfast, Pete,” she said, her eyes dancing all over my face before locking onto mine. She had a deep, steady gaze that knocked the breath out of me.
“Anytime.” I was standing awkwardly in her path, just staring down at her as she stared up at me.
“I’m gonna get on feeding the horses.” She stepped to one side of me, and I turned to watch her walk off. A thought occurred to me as I was enjoying those swaying hips and the tightness of the denim over her round ass.
“Emma!”
She turned back, eyebrows lifted and emerald eyes wide in a questioning expression.
I walked a few paces closer. “This morning was nice. Would you like to go out to dinner sometime?”
The open expression on her face slammed shut, her eyes shadowed with something I couldn’t quite read, but that made them appear much darker than before. The look on her face never stopped being serene, but it was no longer open. She shook her head, her ponytail moving over her back.
“I’d like to keep my personal and professional life separate, Pete,” she said, and sounded honestly sad about it, which heartened me to hear, even if she was turning me down flat.
“Yeah, I understand,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck.
She nodded once, then went on her way. After a moment of watching those swaying hips, I went my own way, too, kicking my boots through the dusty driveway as I walked up to the house. I sank into my seat on the porch just as Emma was pulling open the alleyway door to the barn.
“Shit,” I said, speaking low to Riley, who was sleeping on his side right next to my chair. “She’s getting to me, Riley. I just can’t help the way I feel about her.”
Riley didn’t budge, his breaths staying short and even.
“I’m going to figure out a way to get her out to dinner with me. She opened up at breakfast. We just need another change of scenery.”
Riley didn’t respond. Or wake up. I’d have to figure this Emma thing out on my own.