After Rebecca’s friends left and I saw her head out to the pastures, presumably to check on the calves, I went into town.

Halfway there, I removed my wig and pulled my hat farther down. If people recognized me, I quit caring. I no longer wanted to hide out on Rebecca’s ranch. I wanted a chance to see where our attraction could take us. I couldn’t do that if I was constantly looking over my shoulder.

So screw it. People recognized me, my location got out…I’d deal with that fallout.

I’d half-expected Rebecca to call me or find me and cancel dinner after her day. It was a huge step for her. I headed toward her place, knowing at any moment, I could open that door and she could turn around and close it in my face, telling me she wasn’t ready.

Instead, she met me at the back, pulling open the screen door as I was almost ready to knock.

My hand holding the bottle of wine I’d grabbed at the liquor store was frozen in the air as she filled the doorway.

“Hey,” she said, that bottom lip disappearing between her teeth.

Jesus. She stole my breath. Her curled hair framed her face and the curls bounced as she stepped back. I had the childish urge to tug on one of them, just to watch them bounce again.

But it was her smile, hesitant but determined, and her damn body in that dress that held my attention.

It swooped down low, barely concealing her full breasts and then clung to her slim waist, hugged the flare of her hips just as nicely, if not more so than the rest of her body, before draping to the floor.

Classy, beautiful, but simple. She gave off the same vibe in that dress as she did when she was in cut off jeans and boots.

The dress was still a thousand times better.

“You look incredible.” Her shoulders jerked back as I barked it out.

I hadn’t meant to sound so harsh, but I couldn’t contain it. My hands stung with the need to have her hips in them, where I could run my thumbs along the soft flesh inside her hip bones.

“Thank you.” She stepped back, bringing the door with her. “You clean up nice, too.”

I’d wanted to look good for her, show her how much this invitation meant to me. I hadn’t expected her to do the same. A burn swelled inside my chest as I stepped inside. “These are for you.” I handed her the flowers and that burn spread as she brought them to her nose, closed her eyes and inhaled.

Pink stained her cheeks and her eyes fluttered open. “Lilies are my favorite. Thank you, again.”

Her sweet pink lips spread wide.

“You’re welcome, I saw them and thought of you.” Delicate, pure, elegant but classic. I’d almost rammed into the car in front of me in my hurry to swing into a parking spot in order to buy them when I saw them in a window shop in town.

She had stepped back but still hadn’t given me enough room to enter. I stepped over the threshold, directly in front of her. It gave me enough space to hold the wine in front of me. “I also brought you some wine, but you’ll have to invite me in to get it.”

“Right. Of course. Come in.”

“Because I have wine?” I teased.

Her hand ruffled her curls as she gave me room to enter. “Well, yes. I might need it.”

I walked into her kitchen and as she closed the door and turned, I was right there. Her hip landed right against my palm. “Oh.”

“Relax, Rebecca. It’s just dinner.” I pressed my lips to the top of her head. She shivered in my hold as I kissed her and that burn in my chest continued to spread. “This can be as relaxed as you want it to be.”

I let her go and moved farther into the kitchen.

Holy crap. My eyes popped open. The spread of a Mexican fiesta all over her counter wasn’t dinner, but a feast. “Did you invite the whole town?”

“No.” She slapped my bicep as she passed, laughing. “I guess I got carried away.”

“It looks delicious, smells even better. And it will go great with the red I brought. Want me to pour you a glass?”

“Yes, please. I have a few last minutes things to do to finish dinner. Make yourself comfortable.”

I already was. Her house screamed home and comfortable living and relaxation. Every time I stepped inside, the weight of all the stress I was still trying to put behind me in California melted away.

As she moved toward the stove, slipping oven mitts over her hands, I went in the other direction.

I found her wine opener, set on the shelves with the wineglasses, opened the bottle and poured two glasses of wine, emptying the rest of the bottle into a decanter on the top shelf.

After I set that on the kitchen table, already set with cream and pale blue striped placemats and matching blue plates, I brought her glass of wine to her.

Since she hadn’t kicked me out, told me this was a rotten idea, and slammed the door in my face, I figured it’d be best to get the rest of the hard stuff out of the way immediately.

She pulled two glass-baking dishes out of the oven and the aroma assaulted me immediately. Red sauce, mounds of melted cheese, they smelled so good I suddenly missed this food truck that was so damn amazing, I risked traffic jams on the I-5 just to have their burritos or tacos. Churros.

My stomach growled from the memory and the food in front of me.

Rebecca laughed, a soft, musical laugh while she was shaking her head. “You okay there?”

“Hungry. It smells amazing and looks even better.”

“Thank you.”

She slid off the oven mitts and picked up her wine. “It needs to cool for a few minutes but then we’re ready to eat.”

“How was your day today?”

I didn’t give her time to close down on me. It had to be hard. Hell, it had to be one of the most painful things she’d done since Joseph died, but last night she let me in, and I wasn’t ready to get kicked back out to the guesthouse.

I went to her, tucked her hair behind her ear and watched her fight countless emotions.

“Are you okay?”

“No.” She shrugged. “But I was proud of myself, I guess, and that sounds stupid, but Brooke and Kelly helped me and I wish I would have taken them up on that months ago.”

“Friends are good to have.”

“I have some of the best and am realizing how much I missed them lately. They always called, you know, but I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t want to deal with their concern or their worry or their ideas on what I needed to do. I just wanted quiet.”

“And Joseph.” I finished for her.

“Yeah. And him.”

Her smile flattened and she sipped her wine. I took a drink too.

“It’s okay to like kissing me, and still love him.”

I wanted her to be okay with liking me. Something told me she’d be okay with the physical—that didn’t involve hearts and souls and emotions—more so than she would be admitting she liked me.

“Dinner’s ready.” She twisted away from me, taking the glass dishes to the kitchen counter and once they were settled, all excitement or nerves had evaporated from her expression. “We should eat.”

“Rebecca—”

“I liked the kiss,” she whispered. Her head was down, hair blocking my view of her. “I liked the kiss and I like you being here, and even though it’s all really strange, I still like it. You don’t have to keep worrying about me, just know that I’m trying.”

I did worry. Nothing good would come from letting her know it.

I grabbed the blue plates from the kitchen table and brought them to the counter where all the food was laid out. “Then let’s eat.”

---

“So tell me about your life growing up. You know all about mine.” She shot me a sheepish smile and dipped back into her enchiladas.

I didn’t know nearly enough about her life I wanted to, but the dinner conversation so far had been spent mostly talking about the animals. Next weekend, she was planning on a large hay baling party. Her friends and Jordan would show early in the morning and work until the hay was all baled. She said last year it took them until ten o’clock at night to finish. I was looking forward not only to the day of work but seeing her friends come to help her. This week we had to mow and prepare all the hay and while she’d explained the process, I was excited as hell to see her working the large green tractor out back, and maybe even use it.

I finished the bite of enchiladas I was working on. They were delicious, some of the best I’d ever had.

“Mom stayed home all her life, Dad worked. He traveled a lot, doing sales for a window manufacturer company, so it was mostly Mom raising my younger sister and me. They’ve been married for almost forty years and they still act like they got married yesterday.”

She grinned and took a sip of her wine. “That sounds like my parents, too. How old’s your sister?”

“Katelyn’s a year younger than me. She drove me crazy growing up, always trying to date my friends. It sucked more when her friends started getting hot and I wanted to date them.”

Her laughter filled the room. “Those Buffalo girls that taught you to kiss?”

I winked and shoved a bite of food into my mouth. “Yup.” Wiping the edges of my mouth with my napkin, I continued, “Anyway, Katelyn went to cosmetology school right after high school. She runs her own salon now and got married a couple years ago.”

“You like him?”

“Brent?” I shrugged. “He’s all right. Treats her well, I suppose.”

She leaned in and arched a brow. “But no one’s good enough for your baby sister?”

It reminded me of Jordan’s reaction the other day. Had my sister lived alone, gone through what Rebecca had, I’d probably have been a bigger dick.

“Maybe,” I admitted. Although I still didn’t like Brent much. He treated Katelyn well, but he didn’t seem to treat her like she was the most important person in his life, either. “Anyway, I suspect life in Buffalo isn’t that much different than here. It’s not really city life, necessarily, either. And the people are nice enough.”

“But you moved to California as soon as you could.”

“As soon as I graduated college and had gotten some small experience doing theater in New York City, yeah. I was doing a small off-off-Broadway play the summer after I graduated and the director put me in contact with someone in L.A. and it went from there.”

She leaned back in her chair, sipping a glass of water with the hint of a smile on her face. It’d been so long since I’d had this discussion—who I was, what I was about, where I came from—everything I wanted to tell her wasn’t flowing as smooth as I wanted it to.

Cooper Hawke rusty at picking up women. No one in California would believe it possible.

“Why’d you leave New York?”

“Honestly?” I rarely talked about this, mostly because it was still a sting to my pride.

“Yeah, that’s sort of good for me.”

“Right. After we got done with that first run of the play, the director I’d been working with came right up to me and said, ‘Get to Hollywood. You got talent, amazing talent, you don’t have what it takes for the theater.’”

“What’s that mean?”

“He didn’t think I had the passion to do the same run of the same show night after night for months at a time. After the first few weeks, he saw me lose my edge and the passion. I was only a small character, not a lead by any means, and I’d been lucky enough to land that role as it was. But he said I didn’t have enough experience to maintain the character for any longer.”

She was silent for a moment, brushing her finger over her bottom lip. “So you moved to California and now you’re exactly where you belong.”

The trepidation was clear in her quiet, almost sad tone. Her point was clear.

I belonged on the big screen, not the small cattle ranch.

“Rebecca.”

She blinked her eyes, almost snapping out of a trance and set down her silverware. “It’s okay. Actually, this is good. Better.” Flashing me a smile that no longer reached her eyes, she said, “It’s good we remember that I think. Don’t you?”

I had barely thought about my life and my role waiting for me back there. If it wasn’t for Camilla being a pain in the ass, and I knew she was since I hadn’t heard from Paul, I hadn’t given anything there a passing thought.

Good or bad, I certainly wasn’t missing anything. However, this conversation was headed straight for one of those buried bombs I was trying to avoid.

“I’m not sure I’m following what you’re trying to say, Rebecca.”

I gave her a moment, her face paling and her hand trembling as she reached for her water. What in the hell?

“Last night,” she said, after inhaling a deep breath. “Last night you said we could be the kind of friends who kissed.”

“Yeah…”

Dark eyes landed on me and froze me to my spot. “What if we were friends who did more than just kiss?”

Only an idiot would say no to that proposition, but as the thought settled in my head, it turned to shit and smelled worse. Leaning forward, I rested my forearms on the edge of the kitchen table. “Are you saying, that while I’m here this summer, you want us to be fuck buddies?”

She flinched and that bottom lip settled in her teeth again.

Fuck me sideways. That was exactly what she meant. And goddamn had I read this wrong. Incredibly wrong.

“I wouldn’t use those words exactly.”

“Of course you wouldn’t.” I pushed away from the table. I needed space before I actually said something to hurt her. Like ‘fuck no,’ or ‘what in the hell are you thinking?’ Or…nothing.

For the first time since I met Rebecca, I didn’t have a single nice thing to say to her.

“Cooper.” Her footsteps followed me, but I headed straight for the fridge where I grabbed a beer and slammed the door.

“What?” Twisting off the top, I flicked it toward the garbage can. It missed and pinged on the floor. I swallowed half the beer while staring at the metal cap like it was the thing currently pissing me off.

“I didn’t mean to make you mad.” Her hands wrung together in front of her, she moved them to her hips before letting them fall to her sides. “I thought you’d like it.”

Worry etched a line on her forehead.

I took another large drink and wiped my mouth with my hand holding the beer. “You thought I’d like being your fuck buddy?”

“Stop putting it like that. It sounds so—”

“Emotionless?” She flinched at the word, rocking back like I’d physically slapped her. “That’s it, isn’t it? I said I liked you, I said I wanted to get to know you, so you figure, you’ll get back in the saddle with men and use me to do that for you.”

Her chin was trembling and her eyes grew wet. And fuck me if she didn’t look so damn adorable, so sexy. She was beautiful even while pain tightened her jaw and confusion wrinkled her brow. “I wasn’t trying to upset you.”

“I get that.” I chugged the rest of my beer, tossed it into the garbage can. Goddamn this hurt. Deep inside in my gut.

“Cooper.” Rebecca’s strained voice made me close my eyes. She’d been so sweet earlier, so brave.

I’m trying.

Her earlier words slammed against my skull with the weight of a hammer. She was trying to move on.

Would it be so bad to be used? Not if it got me into her body. But I was tired of being used by women for my body.

“What?”

“You’re leaving, you know. Whatever this is between us, is temporary. At the end of the summer, you’ll still leave me.”

I knew that. Of course I knew that. I’d just been the dick who hadn’t really considered what that’d do to her despite Jordan and Kelly’s warnings.

“So you admit there’s something between us.”

“It’s temporary.” Her little hands curled into fists like she was trying to be brave—trying to keep me out. And suddenly I got it. She did like me, she was just scared to. That, I understood.

My lip curled. “We’ll see.”

I headed toward the back door and opened it, glancing at her over my shoulder. “Thanks for dinner, Rebecca. It was delicious.”

I had to get the hell out of there before I did some dumb shit thing like take her up on this stupid plan.

Sex was never emotionless. We could pretend there was only physical pleasure involved, but that pleasure burned a memory into your brain, creating a permanent connection.

There was no way she could use me physically and not be tied emotionally.

I was three steps out to her porch, chest heaving and burning, hands aching with the need to punch something when I pulled to a sudden stop.

I wanted her tied to me emotionally.

If I had to fuck her to get that to happen…would it be so bad?