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Which added another layer of guilt to all of her other problems.
She was too young for them. Too problematic. They knew her story, the trauma she lived with, and never made a move. Because they were waiting for a sign from her. One she couldn’t give.
Her resolve weakened at night. She never stopped thinking of them while she was alone in her bed and they were in their room. Sometimes, she heard them making love and wished she could join them.
Almost as if cued by her thoughts, Hawk’s eyes darkened, the heat in them sending fire into her core. She licked her lips and turned away.
“It would be easier to buzz off my hair, though,” she scoffed. “I hate having to touch it up all the time. I just kind of hate it.”
As stupid and trivial as it might sound, she missed her longer hair. When she was younger, she’d twisted it into elaborate styles and played with it all the time. She missed the weight of it, and the way it slipped around her shoulders when she turned her head. She even missed sitting at her dressing table at night and brushing it until the length shone like silk.
“I’d love to see it grown out,” he said. The sound snapped off, and when she looked back at him, he’d pressed his lips together and his jaw flexed as if he wanted to say more but didn’t.
“You know I can’t. Not here, not in Daly,” she whispered.
Leaving him at the kitchen, she glanced over the grill’s wall-cut to find the diner had filled with cowboys who’d come into town for the Wednesday night chicken-fried steak special. Most days, the dining room looked as if it had been lifted right out of the 1950s, with its chrome fixtures, kitschy decor, and the red or blue gingham that Leena changed out each season.
On Wednesdays, though, the restaurant was so full, all you could see was shoulder-to-shoulder burly cowboy bodies.
“You can,” Hawk called to her in a low tone. “We’ll talk about it later, okay?”
Dev didn’t answer, pretending she didn’t hear him, as she pushed through to the front of the house. She pasted on a smile and thrust away the apprehension that immediately tried to take hold when she left the sanctuary of the backroom.
A lot of women might be afraid to enter a room crawling with men—all horny, single cowboys in a town sorely lacking women—but the plain fact was, this was Daly. She was safer here than anywhere. Each and every one of these men would protect her with their lives.
Most people thought the Daly Way was about Daly’s leaning toward relationships involving one woman and multiple men, but that was only part of things. At the core, all these men believed women were to be cherished, always treated like precious treasure. Try to do otherwise, and a man might find himself buried where no one would ever find him.
Yeah, it was frontier-like justice that the sheriff probably wouldn’t condone. And no, she didn’t know of it ever being enacted, but the threat existed—like the proverbial dusty paddle in an old-school principal’s office.
So yes…Dev was completely safe here. Heck, she would probably be safer if they actually knew her gender. But all these guys thought she was just asexual Devon, interested in neither man nor woman.
She glanced around, searching out her coworkers.
Leena was working one half of the seating, and Xana served the main dining room. While Dev had been in the restroom, all the tables in the primary portion of the restaurant had filled, and a queue of guys had formed, trailing out the entrance and stringing along the front of the building.
The door hung open, letting in the chilly Wyoming air. The heater over the entry tried to battle the cold, but it did no good against the frigid November night. She shivered. Some people, mainly the diner’s staff, weren’t decked out in heavy Carhartt’s.
“Hey,” she called, gruffing up her voice in a way Xana couldn’t get away with. “Who’s here for takeout?”
A few hands went up.
“Who’s planning to dine in?”
More hands went up.
“You know the drill. We need you to make two lines, yeah? Righthand side for take out. Eating here on the left.”
The lines started to reform, and she pulled out her order pad. Pen poised to scratch down what the first cowboy wanted, she went to the head of the queue for takeout. “Have you already put in your order?”
“Nah,” Curly, a ranch hand from the Flying D, said. She was pretty sure that wasn’t his given name, but she had no idea what his actual name might be. She quickly took his request then handed it back to Cannon in the grill area.
Cannon raised a brow, smirking. “Let me guess. Chicken fried?”
“Does anyone order anything else on Wednesdays?” she laughed.
“Only weirdos,” Hawk answered.
Grinning, she shook her head and returned to the customers.
