Page 22 of The One Who Never Left: Colter

"How's work?" Vivi asked.

"It seems to follow me wherever I go," Sutton mumbled, looking back over her shoulder, casually so as not to attract attention.

Translation: absolutely not casually. She may as well have stood on the bar and rang a bell. But, hot damn, the way her body reacted was anything but casual. She blamed it on long-dormant hormones flickering to life and reminding her they were there. Nothing else.

Oh, who was she kidding, it wasn’t just a flicker, it was a Duraflame log exploding into a blue flame. It wasn’t just the cowboy hat. He had on dark jeans molded to long, hard thighs, and a black snap-button shirt with white stitching curling across the shoulders and chest in some fancy western pattern that made him look less small-town rancher and more like a country song women ruined their lives over.

She was five days sober from a five-year dry spell and her body had picked now, in a bar, in front of witnesses, to remember it had a pulse.

“Based on all that lash batting going on, you don’t seem to mind it as much as you’re telling us,” Jo said.

Sutton snapped around in her chair to face her friends. “What lash batting?”

“Oh, you know, the ‘come fuck me’ flutters,” Jo went on, twirling a toothpick between her teeth.

“There was no fluttering,” Sutton argued.

“You might want to reconcile that with your face.”

Sutton held Jo’s gaze so long her eyes began to water. “See. No fluttering.”

“Mm-hmm,” Jo said into her margarita, which was tequila sans the Cointreau and lime juice. “You look very calm, very unaffected and very one-martini-away from climbing that man like a decorative barn ladder.”

“I am not climbing anyone.”

Vivi snorted. “Sweetheart, your pupils dilated the second you noticed him at the other end of the bar. I’m surprised you’re not pregnant just from the way you’re looking at him.”

Betrayed by her own eyeballs. Add it to the list.

Sutton grabbed her drink and took a long sip that did nothing to cool her burning cheeks. “Can we not do this?”

“We could,” Vivi said. “But where’s the fun in that?”

“I’m serious.”

“Fine, how is work going?” Vivi asked.

“Good, I think. It’s hard to tell if he likes me or not. I mean, if he likes my work or not,” she added hastily. “He hasn’t talked about firing me, even though I let a llama loose in the clinic and it spit on several clients before Colter caught him, but he also hasn’t said a word about how to improve.”

“Accidents happen,” Vivi said, all friend-forward and supportive words.

“We were at a house call to a breeder and before we left, I accidentally put a male guinea pig in the same cage as the females. All thirty-five fell pregnant. He is now appropriately named Randy.”

“Fella must be the big pig on the block now,” Jo said without even a quirk of the lips. “The other guys must give him fist bumps when he struts through the farm.”

“It was a disaster. Now I have thirty-five guinea pigs to rehome. Do you want a new pet?”

Vivi’s eyes went wide with horror. “Don’t even let those words leave your lips. We have thousands of cows, a cranky bull, a litter of barn cats and two cattle dogs. Now they want to breed horses. We are animaled out at the ranch.”

"Thirty-five, Sutton," Jo said. "That's not a rehoming problem. That's a hostile guinea pig takeover. You're basically running a cult now."

“See, I work for him and I had no idea he was starting a breeding program. It makes it hard to get to know him.” Not just because he was her boss or because proximity blurred lines—though God knew both of those were doing plenty of heavy lifting—she needed to stay on alert to survive.

Every instinct in her body had been honed to measure men by what they could take from her, not what they could offer. Getting to know him meant letting him get closer to a life she had spent three years fortifying. One wrong read, one misplaced trust, and it wouldn’t just be her heart on the line, it would be Lynlee’s sense of safety, her world, and her certainty that adults stayed.

“What’s he like?” She kept her tone light, like she was asking about a coworker’s coffee order and not a man who held potential leverage over her personal and professional life—not to mention her child’s happiness.

Vivi smiled. “He’s smart, strong, and knows his way around anything with four legs—or two, for that matter. Then again, he is a Callahan.”