Page 19 of The Heartbreaker Next Door

“Thank you Mister Dean. Can I stay with you?”

“Oh no, I don’t think…that’s not…” I stumbled over my words. “Dean has work⁠—"

The tension that always seemed to hover over Dean’s shoulders was gone, replaced by a kind of dry exasperation as he cut me off. “If you’re going to keep bringing your kid to work, you may as well let him shadow the CFO. I run a tight ship.”

Mav beamed, clearly interpreting this as an invitation to return any time or to stay.

“You don’t have to⁠—”

“I know,” he cut me off again, his statement filled with authority and finality that had me wishing there was a fainting couch nearby because I felt a very big swoon coming on.

“Thanks, but I’m sure you have work to do,” I said as I tried to herd my four-year-old son toward the door, but he wriggled free and approached Dean’s desk with the fearless intensity of a child who’d just scored a major win.

“Are you the boss?” Maverick asked.

Dean leaned back and regarded him. “One of them.”

“And you have a real horse?”

“Yes.”

Maverick’s eyes widened, starstruck. “Can I have him?”

Dean paused. “No.”

Maverick thought about this, then pointed at Dean. “Can I have you?”

Dean, master of the deadpan, looked at him for a long moment. “That’s not usually how job offers work. But I’ll keep you in mind if my schedule opens up.”

I felt my entire face go up in flames. “He’s not—He doesn’t— Mav, buddy, we talked about this, you can’t just ask for people⁠—”

“Yeah-huh, Daddy used to say that you were his and he was yours,” Mav relayed, putting my business out in front of a man I truly didn’t want to think of me as a damaged, single mom. “And Daddy had Bruno and Bruno was ours so that means I could have a horse, too.”

Bruno was my ex’s cat, so I saw the logic that Mav was working with. If he had Dean, then he’d have Dean’s horse.

My cheeks instantly heated. “That’s not the same⁠—”

Dean held up a hand to halt my flailing. “It’s fine.” He looked at Maverick with what I could only describe as amusement. “For all the things you could be used for, a horse is not the worst.”

I wanted to disappear into the carpet, but Maverick was already rifling through the candy dish on Dean’s desk.

“I should get back to my office,” I said, attempting to salvage a shred of dignity.

“Probably wise,” Dean said, but his eyes had softened at the edges.

As I guided Maverick out, he looked back at Dean with pure, undiluted hero-worship. “Bye, Cowboy Boss!”

Dean lifted two fingers in a salute. “Make sure Deputy Neigh Neigh stays off that leg.”

Once we got back inside my office, Mav picked up his iPad once more, and I leaned against the wall, clutching the sewing kit to my chest. My heart was thundering. Not just from the search-and-rescue adrenaline, but from something else—a weird, disorienting tenderness at the way Dean had handled my son. Like he was secretly fluent in kids, or at least in Maverick.

I walked to my desk, trying to shake off the after-effects of that encounter. Maverick was already plotting Deputy Neigh-Neigh’s triumphant return to the rodeo circuit, while I tried to steady my hands enough to send a thank-you email to Bethany at Ever After Blooms.

But my composure was shot. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Dean bent over a stuffed horse, hands steady and patient, treating my son’s emergency with a gravity he didn’t even give to most adults. It was so unexpectedly sweet, so weirdly intimate, that it rattled the cage of my carefully maintained man moratorium.

This was bad. Very bad.

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