AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Nash sat at his desk, and he swiveled toward her as she entered. “There you are.” He smiled at her. “Hadley gave you my message?”
“Yep.” He held out her folder and phone, and Maddy took them. “Thank you, Nash.”
“We’re still together for cornhole tomorrow morning?” he asked. His partner had been Lowry, another cowboy here at the ranch, but with Kyle gone all the time—either physically or just mentally checked out—she and Nash had become partners.
“Yes,” she said. “We’re close to being so far ahead, no one will be able to catch us.” She grinned at him as he raised his hand for her to give him high-five.
They laughed together as she did, and she said, “See you tomorrow.” She turned to leave and came face-to-face with Kyle.
She sucked in a breath, all cells now firing at her. “Hello, Kyle,” she said as pleasantly as she could. She had to work here with him; she had to be able to run into him and not make it awkward.
“You’re playing cornhole with Nash?”
“Yes,” she said. Their names had been changed on the family leaderboard for the past three weeks now. “You’re just noticing?”
He opened his mouth to say something but didn’t. His face fell, and he dropped his chin to his chest. With only the top of his cowboy hat showing, he said, “I’ve been comin’ by.”
“I’m never there,” she said.
He looked up, pure hope in his eyes. “You’re here now.”
Maddy studied his handsome face. She studied her feelings, and yes, she still had them for this man. Plenty of them. She hadn’t told him that she didn’t want to be second to his music career, at least not with those words.
“Kyle,” Nash said, and the tether between them broke as Kyle looked past her to his brother.
“Excuse me,” she murmured. She slipped past him and out of the office, then out of the lodge. She could breathe out here, and she did, drawing in a big breath that left her lungs scorching hot.
She still like Kyle Stewart a whole lot—at least the version of him he’d been before he’d signed his record contract. If that man ever came back to the ranch, Maddy would be there waiting for him.
ChapterTwenty-Six
Holly couldn’t believe she’d resorted to stalking. She supposed she wouldn’t go as far asstalking, but she sank a little lower in her seat as Silas’s tiny two-seater car went past the parking lot where she’d eaten lunch.
She looked over at the empty bag of chips on the passenger seat. They’d been her lunch, and that was the saddest thing of all.
“No,” she told herself. “You obsessing over Silas and who he eats with is the saddest thing of all.” At least she hadn’t told anyone else about her lunchtime activities. She didn’t go into work until four o’clock, and she didn’t have to report to anyone about what she did for lunch.
He hadn’t had anyone in the truck with him today, and Holly’s heart took courage at that. She wished it wouldn’t, because she wouldn’t go out with him even if he asked.
“Why wouldn’t you?” she asked herself. She reached down between the seat and the door and pulled the lever to lower her seat. She laid it flat and looked through the sunroof at the blue, cloudless sky overhead. The breath released out of her body, and Holly let her eyes drift closed.
There was no rule against dating co-workers at the Texas Longhorn Ranch. Holly didn’t do it very often, because the men who worked here usually kept day hours, and she worked from four to midnight. Honestly, she worked more than that, but she’d been trying not to show up at the lodge until four for the past couple of weeks. She needed some boundaries in her life, and she’d sat down with Daddy and had a good, long talk.
Just because there was work to do didn’t mean she had to do it. Just because her to-do list never ended didn’t mean she had to try to knock it out in one day.
She had to have a life too. She was trying, but she wasn’t sure how to expand her borders past this ranch. She rarely left, and she’d taken to this parking lot for an hour at lunchtime simply to say she got off the ranch every day.
She’d happened to see Silas driving by with Hadley Esplin one day. She hadn’t deliberately sought him out. Or followed him. He’d driven by, and she’d recognized the truck, and she couldn’t help that he went to lunch in town every day.
“He probably can’t cook,” she murmured. Her thoughts drifted away from Silas, then, thankfully. How she’d survived this past month of working with him, she didn’t know. Her attraction to the handsome, talented, muscular cowboy was intense and somewhat insane.
Holly dozed, the question of whether Silas was attracted to her or not circling in her mind. Sometime later, her alarm went off, and Holly groaned as she tried to find her phone. Her hands scrabbled over nothing in the middle console, and then she bumped against her open soda pop can.
She opened her eyes, intending to find the stupid phone and silence it. Instead, movement to her left—out the window—caught her eye, and she lifted up about halfway to see what it was.
It was a who, not a what.
Holly screamed, the sight of Silas’s gorgeous face only an inch or two from the window, peering in, sent adrenaline straight to her heart.
