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He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Hell, her mouth was pretty sexy, too. Her lips were just as full as the rest of her, and it was all too easy to imagine what they’d look like wrapped around his cock.
Quinn froze.
What the fuck am I doing?
Admiring her ass was one thing. Actively fantasizing about her—especially when she was right there—was something else entirely. It was the kind of thing that’d get him into trouble if he wasn’t careful. One more thought down that road and he’d be hard as a rock, and that would make for an uncomfortable situation.
What if…
Knock that shit off. Right now.
He forced himself to focus on something—anything—other than her. There wasn’t much else to think about. Things at the Rodriguez ranch had been going smoothly through the expansion. They’d brought in forty head of cattle and hired new guys to cover the increased workload. There had been a few hiccups, but nothing he and Adam and Jules’s cousin, Daniel, couldn’t handle.
The three of them had been best friends when they were growing up, and it’d been good to have them all back together again, now that Adam was in Devil’s Falls permanently, but that didn’t change the bittersweet feeling that came over him sometimes when he thought about the fact they should have been four instead of three. Their other best friend, John, had died thirteen years ago, but that didn’t make his absence any less noticeable. It was like a missing tooth—it didn’t hurt most of the time, but he was almost always aware of the empty space.
John’s death was the reason he’d told his old man to take a hike and gone into the cattle business. Life was too short. If one of the best people he’d ever known could have it taken from him in a split second, what the hell was he doing, going into an industry that he hated? All the politics and lobbying and manipulating to get ahead, and for what? More money that he didn’t need.
So he left, hell-bent on doing his own thing.
Quinn never felt more alive than when he was working himself to exhaustion, with the clear Texas sky over him and the earth beneath his boots. He wouldn’t give that up for all the money in the world.
He glanced at the clock. Four hours down, which meant they weren’t even halfway. Damn. It was going to be a long-ass trip if Aubry ignored him the entire time. It was his fault for throwing around sexual innuendos, but the look on her face had been priceless.
I’m paying for it now, aren’t I? Can’t get the damn pictures out of my head.
“Stop staring at me.”
He didn’t jump, but it was a near thing. Quinn stretched one arm out over the back of the seat and curled her bright red hair around his finger. “Can’t help myself.”
“Is that flirting?” She slapped his hand. “I really can’t tell because you’re so clumsy at it. Just like everything else you do.”
If that wasn’t a gauntlet thrown at his feet, he didn’t know what was. Quinn wasn’t normally this pushy with women—he didn’t have to be—but with her sitting there, looking all smug behind her bright green sunglasses, he wanted to… Fuck, he didn’t know. Shock her a little. “You know, I’ve been thinking—”
“Good God, don’t strain yourself.”
“—and I’m thinking that I need a better nickname for you. Sweet cheeks might be accurate, but no one in my family is going to believe I’d call the woman I’m in a relationship with something that…lowbrow.”
She tilted her sunglasses down to stare at him over the top of them. It made her amber eyes stand out all the more. “How about you call me nothing at all? Because that sounds ideal from where I’m sitting.”
“Nah. I’ve always been a fan of pet names.”
“One—I can tell. Two—save your pet names for your actual animals.”
She’d left that one wide open, but he chose to ignore it. Just this once. He twined her hair around his finger again. “I was thinking bunny.”
“You can call me bunny if you want to provoke me to actual physical violence.”
Yeah, it didn’t fit, either. He relaxed back into his seat, starting to enjoy the idea of this. “Cherry.”
“Hard pass.”
“Cookie.”
“No way.”
He wondered when she’d noticed that he was still stroking her hair. He hadn’t been lying when he said they would have to put on a good show for his family. That meant he had to get her used to him touching her, at least in these innocent ways. Or that was what he told himself as he kept playing with the ends of her hair.
And touching in the not-innocent ways?
To distract himself, he said, “Peaches. No, don’t look at me like that. You got to pass on three—that’s your limit. And you smell like peaches.” He leaned a little closer, keeping one eye on the road, and adopted his best Nicholas Cage voice, “I love peaches. I could eat peaches for hours.”
