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Two
Kit Carson wasn’t an idiot. Despite reports to the contrary. In fact, he had a pretty damned good head on his shoulders. He might make dumbass decisions out riding the rodeo, bold and rash and dangerous when he flung himself on the back of an angry bull, determined to see him in an early grave, but that recklessness had netted him a damn good portfolio, personal wealth and a hell of a lot of prestige in the rodeo community.
Not to mention the attention of a great many buckle bunnies. And so, it was to his great and eternal mystery that Shelby Sohappy got underneath his skin to quite this degree.
And it wasn’t recent. The womanalwayshad.
Dating someone else, engaged.Married.He had felt drawn to her like a moth to a flame. Like a deer in headlights. Like some other cliché he couldn’t think of right now. All he knew was that he really wanted to see her naked.
He could have his pick of women. He had. But there was something about her. About the way they sparked heat off each other, the way that he flustered her, that made him interested. But she was off-limits. She’d been off-limits for a long time, but in all honesty, he figured another man’s marriage was that man’s responsibility. He had never made a move on Shelby, but he figured whether or not her marriage put her off-limits was up to her. Now that the Carsons and the Sohappys were no longer enemies, well, that changed things a fair bit. Now she was going to be essentially family. And that meant there could be absolutely no... Nothing. Anything.
Because that would make things difficult for Chance. And Kit didn’t want to make things difficult for Chance. They had had a difficult enough life as it was.
Chance had found love, and good for him. Kit didn’t have it in him.
Losing their sister Sophie when they were kids had just been too much for him. The loss, the feeling of failure when all the caregiving he did couldn’t save her...
He’d been twelve and that weight had never shifted.
And more than that, the ongoing grief in the family.
He loved his mom, his dad, his brothers and his youngest sister, Callie, so damned much. And losing Sophie to a terminal illness had underlined how dangerous that love was.
Then there was Buck, his oldest brother, who’d been involved in a horrible car accident that had left him scarred, distant from everyone. They hadn’t seen him in years and there was nothing Kit had been able to do to fix it.
There was just so much pain to manage in his family.
Lord.
He didn’t want more of it. He never wanted a wife or kids. He didn’t even want a dog. He didn’t want to love any new thing.
That was the thing. He didn’t love Shelby Sohappy. He wasn’t even really sure if he liked her. He just wanted her. He was a man who knew that chemistry superseded common sense pretty much any day of the week. He had accepted that what they had was some kind of superior chemistry. The kind you couldn’t manufacture even if you wanted to. And you wouldn’t want to, but if you could, you would definitely direct it at somebody you’d never see again. Or someone who wouldn’t get tangled up in your life. At least, that was what was ideal tohim.
So yeah. Nothing much had changed. He couldn’t have her back when she’d been married. He couldn’t have her now. There had been a very small window where he might’ve been able to have her, but she’d been grieving. Fair enough.
He knew about grief. He knew how it changed you. How it fucked you up big-time. Changed the way that you saw the world. Broke down all the landscape inside you and didn’t bother to rebuild the damn thing.
Yeah. He knew about grief. And it was knowing about that kind of grief that made him all the more determined to stay the hell away from this woman.
Too bad they were going to be in proximity for the planning of this wedding. They wouldn’t be most of the time. He assumed that for holidays Chance and Juniper would go back and forth between the families, and Shelby didn’t have anything to do with the Carsons specifically. But just for right now the woman was squaring his path.
He did his best not to think about how soft her golden brown skin had been beneath his fingers when he held her there. Dammit she was beautiful. Her thick black hair was cut into a chin-length style that highlighted the heart shape of her face, her high cheekbones, her deep brown eyes. Her lips were full and dusky, a caramel color that he wanted to lick.
And he needed to not think of that. Not right now.
“There’s dessert.”
He looked across at the table where all the food was, and saw his mother setting three giant cheesecakes covered with caramel down onto the tabletops.
Dammit all. Caramel. That was really what he wanted to think about right now. In context.
Everybody made a grateful noise and he gathered around the table along with all of them, getting his piece and returning with it to the assembly point.
“The wedding is in just three days,” Juniper said, as if they needed reminding. “And we need to get everything up to the venue and get it all set up.”
“I don’t know why the hell you didn’t just get married at the Carson ranch,” Kit said.
Juniper gave him a scathing look. “I’m not letting you win like that.”
