Page 10 of Risking it for the Cowboy

“You chickenin’ out and changing your mind?”

“No.”

She unlocked the door, heart racing to be sharing this world with a perfect stranger when she’d never brought anyone in here before except Heart and the occasional university inspector, and swung it open, the filtration fan rushing their ears.

She motioned him to follow as she flipped on the lights, pointing to the hooks along the metal frame. “Suit up.”

He stepped over the threshold. Into her hidden paradise, where Jason couldn’t harm her. The future she’d made for herself when the past had left so much egg on her face and bruises on her skin.

He picked up a sterile jumpsuit off the hook, holding it out to inspect it up and down.

“Man, this is E.T. style,” he teased, but as his eyes connected with hers, that cryptic look of contemplation burned. “You one of them geniuses?”

She shook her head, cheeks flaming, and bit her lip. “Just resourceful, I suppose.”

He was still eying the next door, as if unsure what lay beyond.

Glancing back again as if ready to leave, as if the night had gotten too weird. “Gotta say, I wasn’t expecting this when I took you out tonight.”

Was she freaking him out? She had become so awkward. Heat suffused her cheeks.

She looked away, fiddling with the zipper on her suit. “You can, uh, it’s okay if you wanna go instead. I’m kinda, you know…”

Lame, Charlie! You’re lame! Who gives a shit about this stuff except you!

Silence, as memories wisped like an umbra through her thoughts. She fiddled harder, when a callused finger touched her chin. Turned her face back to his.

“Kinda what?” he gruffed.

She swallowed and stared up into his sparkling blues. “Lame,” she breathed, then laughed it off. “You shoulda’ picked a different girl tonight. You’d’ve had more fun.”

He inspected her a moment longer, murmuring, “Naw, I think I picked right.”

Embarrassment exploded on her skin. Raced through her veins. Then he eased his legs into the baggy jumpsuit and zipped it up. He was staying?

“Hair net.” She pointed as he arched a brow.

He took off his Stetson and plucked a blue, bouffant cap from a box bracketed to the metal frame of the greenhouse and stretched the surgical-grade disposable bonnet over his head. “Do I look like the school lunch lady yet?”

She smiled as she, too, zipped up a suit over her body, twice as baggy on her as it was him, which thankfully made room for her skirt wedging up to her hips, and kicked aside her boots, slipping her feet into sterile rubber boots instead. “I don’t have boots big enough for you. But you can use those booties. Cross my heart, it’s nothing weird in there.”

He leveled a knowing smirk at her and gestured at his getup.

She laughed again. She’d been laughing a lot with him. “Just a fragile ecosystem that can’t get contaminated nor can any pollen escape or else I’m gonna have boatloads of paperwork to complete, a decontam unit will have to swoop in … So much paperwork.”

He stretched the disposable shoe covers around his boots, maxing out their length and pulling on the seams.

Then reached for the gloves before she had a chance to tell him. “Yeah, yeah, gloves.”

“Okay, no touching,” she said as he slipped his arms around her waist and bent for a kiss.

He froze. Then lifted his hands up in surrender again—

She laughed. “I meant, the plants. You can touch … uh … me…”

He leaned into her ear. “Careful what you wish for, Flower Girl,” he whispered, then planted a kiss to her earlobe instead. “You might get it.”

Energy crackled. Her body, a livewire at his taunt as she opened the door into the greenhouse and ushered him in, because it had been so long since she’d felt this rush, that lust.