Chapter Five
He was sitting on the couch when Joss returned. He’d removed his boots but was muttering curses at the pill bottle he’d crammed between his abs and the splint. He was clearly having problems negotiating the safety cap one-handed.
“Let me.” She placed the glass on the coffee table and grabbed the bottle out of his unresisting grasp. “How bad is it?”
He slumped against the couch, the back of his head dropping along the rolled cushioned top, his eyes shutting. “Hurts like a bitch.”
Joss unscrewed the bottle and decanted two pills. “Here.”
He reached out blindly for the pills, his fingertips grazing her flesh. Goose bumps fanned up her arm, crept up her nape and buzzed her hairline. He tossed the pills back, his eyes still shut, his throat bobbing as he swallowed.
Joss picked up the water and stepped closer, nudging his knee with hers. “Wash them down with this.”
He roused, levering himself forward, his legs spread wide in a very male way. He took the glass and drank, draining it before handing it back. Their fingers brushed, which did strange things to her equilibrium.
“Thank you.” His voice was a rough whisper, his face upturned as he dropped his hand to his thigh. “For the water. For patching me up.” He smiled. “For the drugs.”
Joss smiled too, the quiet of the night and their voices creating a strange intimacy.
“And for bringing me back to your place.”
She was achingly aware of how close they were. Aware of the hairsbreadth distance separating their legs. Aware of how her body towered over his. Aware of his spread thighs and the opening in his chaps spotlighting his crotch.
Aware of his potency.
She was about to take a step back when his hand slid onto her leg. Slow and lazy.
“You don’t wear your scrubs home,” he murmured, his fingers idly stroking just behind her knee, the denim of her jeans no barrier to the sensations sweeping up her leg.
Joss willed herself to move but not one damn synapse obeyed. It was as if his fingers had injected them with a paralyzing agent.
“No.” Her voice was hushed yet high. Breathy. “It’s against hospital policy.”
“Pity.” He smiled at her. “You look hot in them.”
If it was possible to orgasm through compliments alone, she’d just moved into the red zone. He was dangerously good for her ego.
His hand moved higher, applying subtle pressure. Joss swayed closer, somehow finding herself standing between his thighs, his fingers fanning inexorably north, creating all kinds of havoc. Sensation streaked to her inner thighs and tingled hot and urgent between her legs. The air was so thick in her lungs she was barely breathing.
The urge to place her hands on his shoulders, to push him back, to slide her thighs either side of his and straddle him…
Sweet baby cheeses.
It had been a long time since she’d had a man between her legs.
His palm came to rest where the groove of her thigh met her ass. “I bet you look hot out of them too.” The hoarse whisper combined with the illicit nature of the moment brushed like sandpaper over her skin. “With just a stethoscope around your neck. And my belt buckle.”
The startling accuracy of his fantasy, so closely aligned to her earlier one, was exactly what she needed.
The proverbial bucket of cold water.
She stepped back almost tripping over the coffee table in her haste. What the hell was she doing?
What the hell was he doing?
She righted herself, scrambling around the other side of the table. But not even the heavy mahogany felt sufficient protection from the hormonal juju he was pumping out.
“Don’t.” Her voice was shaky, her cheeks aflame.
Once again he held up his good hand in surrender. “Okay.”
“This is not happening between us.”
He shrugged, slow and lazy. “Okay.”
Joss was not comforted by his response. It was hardly groveling capitulation. Not that she wanted him on his knees in front of her.
No. She absolutely, positively, did not want that.
She narrowed her eyes. “I mean it.”
“I believe you.”
Which wasn’t exactly comforting either. But if being a mother had taught her anything it had taught her retreat was sometimes the wisest course of action.
Time to get the hell out of Dodge.
“Good night.”
He touched his forehead in mock salute and she turned away before he could add anything more. Not that it stopped him. “Sweet dreams,” he whispered.
It followed her all the way to her bed.
*
Joss was still lying awake two hours later. Frankly she was terrified of falling asleep in case those dreams turned out to be far from sweet. Troy on the other hand was sleeping like a baby, stretched out half naked and dusty on her couch.
She’d checked on him an hour ago—purely from a medical standpoint—and man, had that had been a mistake. Even asleep his presence dominated, his good arm thrust above his head, his face turned toward it, his damn crooked nose pressed into his damn perfect bicep.
The foot closest to the edge of the couch was flat on the floor spreading his thighs wide. His jeans rode low on his hips, his buckle giving off a dull shine in the ambient light, drawing her attention north to his belly button and south to that bull’s-eye between his legs.
And here she was, lying in bed thinking about that target. Thinking about every delectable inch of him. Feeling like a horny teenager one moment and a dirty old woman the next.
She’d told herself a hundred times it was just a sex thing. That it was just biology. She may have been a widow but she was still a woman. With needs.
For the love of Mike, she was thirty-four years old. Not a hundred and four.
Not dead.
Joss liked sex. She and Andy had always had an active sex life right up until a car had run a red light and taken him from her. And she’d been deprived of that for a long time. So surely it was only natural for that urge to return at some stage?
She had slept with a guy since Andy had died. On the first anniversary of his death, to be precise. That hadn’t been about urges. She’d been drunk and sad and had needed a crutch.
But this. This…thing she felt when she looked at Troy was different. It was chemistry. Crazy and unfathomable but wholly undeniable. She remembered it well. Remembered the spark in her veins, the low drag in her belly, the tingle in her breasts.
Remembered how good it felt to have a man’s weight pressing her into a mattress, a man’s head between her legs, a man’s hardness pounding inside her.
Remembered it as vividly as she remembered the trail of his finger on the back of her thigh.
She wasn’t going to act on it. She wasn’t. But it was there, nonetheless.
*
“Mom.”
Joss groaned at Damien’s not-so-quiet whisper right near her ear. She’d finally subsided into slumber sometime after the sun had started to pinken the sky, which felt like five minutes ago.
“Wake up, Mom.” A brisk shake to her shoulder jiggled her eyelids open. Her son’s spotty not-quite-a-boy-not-yet-a-man face filled her vision, the metal tracks on his teeth no longer foreign to either of them. “The guy from the other night is asleep on the couch.”
Joss sighed. It hadn’t been a bad dream. “Yes.” She stretched. “It’s a long story.”
Damien seemed to take that in his stride. “Pop said breakfast is almost ready.”
“Okay.” She rubbed her eyes and sat up, her bedside clock pronouncing it to be six-thirty. “Tell him I’m coming.”
Joss swung her legs out of bed and grabbed for her short-sleeved cotton gown that came to just above her knees. Normally she wouldn’t bother but with Troy in the house covering herself seemed like a sensible move.
Frying bacon greeted her as she padded down the hallway past the doorway into the living room. She refused to look his way but caught the bulk of his reclined body in her peripheral vision nevertheless. She entered the kitchen and Gus greeted her with a nod.
Her father-in-law was a strong, stocky man—considering his seventy years—with a dapper white goatee that always reminded her of Colonel Sanders. “Morning, Joss. We have a visitor I see.”
“Yeah. Sorry ’bout that.” She crossed to the ever-present coffee pot. She’d tried to introduce one of those modern pod machines but Gus was welded to his gut rot.
She relayed the story as she fixed her breakfast. Occasionally she joined Gus and Damien for heart attack on a plate but usually she stuck with yogurt and granola.
“He really is a bull rider?” Damien asked, a tremble of excitement in his voice.
Joss nodded. “He’s the full cowboy.”
“Awesome.”
“This the guy who brought the criminal mastermind home the other night?”
Damien had the good grace to blush. He’d copped an earful from his grandfather the next day and had spent the last two days working for Gus for free. Considering her father-in-law owned a fencing contractor business, Damien had been worked to the bone.
He still had the blisters.
“Yes.”
Gus plonked down his plate loaded with bacon and two sunny-side up eggs. Damien was already halfway through his. Her son might have wanted to come to a rural backwater as much as he’d wanted to drill a hole in his head but he’d embraced his grandfather’s breakfasts with gusto.
Which was probably just as well given how perennially hungry he was. Joss didn’t seem to be able to fill him up these days.
“Good.” Gus nodded his approval as he tucked into his food. “It’s the least we could do for him.”
Gus was just finishing up when Troy appeared in the doorway. He was bleary-eyed, rubbing his right hand over his hair, his biceps and abs shifting nicely. A flush of heat surged from the tips of her toes to the top of her head.
Sweet baby cheeses.
Maybe she was perimenopausal? Thirty-four was young but it wasn’t unheard of…
He shot her a lazy smile. “Morning.”
His low easy greeting reached out and touched her as surely as the finger that had stroked up the back of her thigh last night. She imagined how good it would be to hear that greeting every morning and gripped her mug tighter.
She hadn’t realized how much she missed the intimacy of a relationship—not just the sex—until this second. Even something as simple as a good morning from a man not related to her popped the cork on a well of yearning.
“How did you sleep?” She kept her tone brisk and impersonal.
“Like a baby.” He leaned his good shoulder into the frame. “You?”
She narrowed her eyes at him in warning. What was he doing flirting with her in front of Gus? “How’s the elbow?”
He grimaced at his splinted arm. “Well I know it’s there.”
“You should take a couple more pills.”
“Nah,” he dismissed. “It’s bearable.”
Joss suppressed a snort. That was just stupid man code for hurts-like-hell-but-trying-to-look-brave. “I’ll examine it before you go.”
Which meant she was going to have to lay her hands on him. And hope like hell they didn’t develop a mind of their own.
“Sure.” He tipped his chin in Damien’s direction. “Hey, mate.”
Damien mumbled a greeting obviously still embarrassed by his history with Troy. Gus stood and ambled toward Troy. He reached his hand out as he neared. “I’m Gus.”
Troy shook his hand. “Troy Jensen, sir.”
Gus eyed him for a moment. “You got a shirt, son?”
“I do but…” He tapped the splint. “Think I need some coffee before I figure out the ins and outs of this thing.”
Joss blinked as the older man honked out a laugh. Gus Garrity was small-town with a capital S. He usually held strangers in great suspicion. He certainly didn’t take this easily to them. “Joss can help you with that later.”
Joss would most definitely not help him with that later. Performing a cursory examination was going to be hard enough without becoming his damn nursemaid.
He was a big boy; he’d figure it out.
“You hungry?” Gus asked.
“Starving.”
“You’re not one of those fancy vegans are you?”
Joss suppressed a smile at the horrified expression on both men’s faces. “No, sir.”
Her father-in-law nodded briskly in approval. “Call me Gus.” He pointed to the table. “Pull up a seat. I’ll have it cooked in a jiffy.”
He chose the one next to Joss—of course—which she refused to acknowledge. He was hard to ignore though with pheromones radiating off his body in waves. Thankfully Gus and Damien were full of questions about the rodeo and she didn’t have to make conversation.
“What’s your background, son?” Gus asked, placing another heaped plate of bacon and eggs on the table.
Joss wondered how Troy was going to manage to use utensils with his splinted arm. Normally she’d offer to help but, as with his shirt, she figured he’d work it out if he was hungry enough.
Evidently he was as he attacked the mound of food.
“That an Australian accent?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“You learned to ride bulls back home?”
Troy nodded, his mouth full. Gus waited patiently while he swallowed. “I started working as a stockman on a big cattle property…that’s like a ranch, when I was sixteen. I got into the rodeo circuit there before coming over to the States to try my luck seven years ago.”
“Cattle property, huh?” Gus stroked his goatee, his gaze narrowing in on Troy. Joss knew that look. She wondered what the old coot was up to. “What are your plans now?”
“I was going to mosey on to Big Springs for the rodeo there next weekend but the doc here reckons I shouldn’t compete for a few weeks. Hoping to make Lubbock in three weeks.”
“Do you have a place you go to in breaks? Some kind of base? Family you go to?”
Troy paused to wash some food down with a cup of coffee Gus had put in front of him earlier. Joss still wasn’t sure where this was going. “Not really.” He shrugged as he speared more bacon. “Sometimes I head to one of the guys’ ranches but otherwise I kinda just drift around in between rodeos. Head to the next town, check it out. A lot of the guys fly to events but I’m happy to drive. I like being out in the open.”
He said it all very matter-of-fact and it certainly confirmed Joss’s earlier opinion about him being a rolling stone. But it sounded so…lonely. America was a big country, a lot of big sky, open plains and deserted roads.
Her doctor bone tweaked and before she could stomp on it she said, “You don’t have any family? Not even back home?”
His hesitation was almost imperceptible. Probably if she hadn’t been sitting so close she might not have seen it at all. But she did.
“I usually head back to Oz for Christmas. Back to Forrester’s Landing, that’s the property I worked at. Aaron Forrester’s my best mate and I usually crash with him although he’s just gotten himself hitched so…”
He didn’t finish the sentence but Joss did. So he didn’t want to be a third wheel? That was sad. Even sadder was the way he’d deliberately avoided answering her question about his family.
“You’re at a loose end, then?” Gus mused.
Troy nodded. “Apart from some physical therapy.”
Gus drummed on the table. “I’ve got some good physical therapy for you. Any good at fencing?”
Joss almost choked on her mouthful of coffee. She sat up straight in her chair and shook her head. “No, Gus.”
Troy ignored her. “I can fence in my sleep.”
“Gus.” She narrowed her eyes at her father-in-law who could be stubborn as a mule. “He dislocated his elbow. He shouldn’t be doing any heavy lifting with his arm. Not to mention it’s going to be in a splint for a couple of weeks.”
“He’s still got his right arm, don’t he?”
“Yeah,” Troy drawled, amusement flattening his vowels even more than usual. “I’ve still got my right arm.”
She glared at Gus. “You want to take on a one-armed fencer?”
“Damien’s got his summer job starting today so I’m losing my sidekick and Cody’s out with his broken leg for another couple of weeks. It’d be handy to have even one extra hand on.”
“I bet I can fence better one-armed than most men can with two.”
There was no bravado to the claim. His expression was sincere and Joss believed him. She didn’t doubt this man could do a crap ton of things better than most men.
“It’s only temporary,” Gus said. “Just some help with a couple of big jobs I have on. And I’ll pay him.”
“No, sir.” Troy shook his head. “I’ve got more money than I know what to do with, I don’t need yours as well. I’m just happy to help. Besides…” He flicked a sideways glance at Joss. “You know what they say about idle hands?”
Idle hands were the devil’s tools.
It might have done him more credit had he actually looked like that was a bad thing. She tried really hard not to think about his hands and the kind of sinning she assumed they got up to on a regular basis.
If she’d ever met anyone more like the devil incarnate, Joss couldn’t remember.
“Okay then. If you insist.” Gus wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. “But I must insist that you bunk with us.”
“What?” Joss sat up abruptly. No way. Sweet baby cheeses. She’d boink him for sure.
“In the loft over the garage.”
Joss gaped at her father-in-law. The loft? Was he insane? He barely knew Troy. There were people living in this town who’d been here for over a decade that Gus barely spoke to because they were new folk and now he was throwing his house open to some blow-in from Australia?
Ultimately though, this wasn’t Joss’s house and she didn’t get to say who could stay.
Troy grinned, big and lazy, an intoxicating waft of cocky-young-guy enveloping her. “Thank you, Gus, I’d love to. I can pay rent though.”
“Nonsense,” Gus dismissed. “You work for free; you stay for free.”
Joss shut her eyes briefly. Awesome. She was going to be cohabiting with Troy Jensen. Of course, Gus would run him so ragged there’d be no time for his hands to become idle.
But what about hers?