Page 16 of Oops I Fell For The Cowboy Next Door

Her fingers are resting on my chest, right over the scar on my ribs. A fence wire incident from my twenties, ugly, healed thick. She traced it with her fingertip last night, after the second time, and asked how I got it. I told her. She kissed it. Pressed her lips against the raised skin, soft, deliberate, and then laid her head on my chest and fell asleep before I could figure out how to breathe again.

The cabin is cold. Fire's been dead for hours. Her bedroom doesn't have great insulation, and I can feel the temperature difference between the air above the blankets and the warmth underneath where our bodies have been generating heat all night. She shivers in her sleep, burrows closer, and my arm tightens around her automatically.

Cattle need feeding. East herd needs checking. There's a section of fence along the upper pasture that's been sagging for a week. I've got a list in my head that runs from dawn to dark, same as every day, same as every day for twelve years.

None of it moves me out of this bed.

Because she's warm. And she's here. And the quiet in this room doesn't sound empty. It sounds full. It sounds like someone else's breathing and the rustle of sheets when she shifts in her sleep and the soft hum of a cabin that has two people in it instead of one.

At five-thirty, I ease out from under her arm. She murmurs something, rolls into the warm spot I left, and goes still. I pull the blanket up over her bare shoulder. Stand there looking at her for a beat too long.

My clothes are scattered down the hallway. Jeans by the bedroom door. Shirt in the living room. One boot by the couch, the other near the front door. I dress in the dark, moving quietly.

The fireplace is dead cold. I stack new logs, get it going from the embers that are barely alive at the bottom. Takes a few minutes of coaxing, but the flames catch, and warmth starts creeping back into the room.

Her kitchen is small. Coffee maker on the counter, bag of grounds from Hilda's beside it. I make a pot. Strong, because that's how I make it. Then I remember the milk. Open her fridge. Add a splash to one of the two mugs I pulled from her cabinet.

Two mugs. Both full. One black. One with milk.

The simplicity of it does something violent to my chest.

I carry hers to the bedroom. Set it on the nightstand. She's still asleep, face half-buried in the pillow, lips slightly parted. I lean down and press my mouth to her temple. Barely a touch. She doesn't wake.

The morning chores take two hours. I move through them fast, efficient, my body on autopilot while my brain stays in her bed. Bucky gets saddled. The east herd gets checked. The sagging fence section gets a temporary patch because I don't have time for proper repairs today, and the reason I don't have time is that I need to get back to her.

I need to get back to her.

Twelve years on this ranch, and I've never said those words about anything except the land itself.

My phone buzzes while I'm unsaddling Bucky at the barn.

Mom:

Calling Sunday as usual. Anything new?

I stare at the screen. Anything new. My mother has been asking that question every week for twelve years, and the answer has always been some variation of nothing. Weather, cattle, fence repairs. The safe trinity of a man who's built his life around things that don't leave.

Me:

Met someone.

The phone rings eight seconds later.

"What do you mean you met someone?" Mom's voice is sharp with the urgency of a woman who has been waiting a very long time for this particular phone call.

"The new tenant next door."

"The one in the Mackey cabin?"

"Yeah."

"Tate Michael Rawlins. You tell me everything right now or I'm driving up there."

So I tell her. Not everything. Not the part about her bed, or the way she tastes, or the sound she made when I pushed inside her. But I tell her about the fence line. The porch step. The creek deal. The kitchen kiss. The terrible coffee with milk.

Mom is quiet for a long moment. Then she says, "Your father fixed my porch step the week after we met. Before we were even dating. He just showed up with a hammer."

My throat tightens. "I didn't know that."