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“No.”
He nodded. “Okay, good.”
“Good? What does that mean?”
Cord leaned down, that infusion of rose to his nose making him feel strong and capable. “It means I’ll handle it.” He started to move away from her, but she caught him quickly.
“You’ll handle it? Handle what?”
He cut her a look out of the side of his eye. “Askin’ your daddy if it would be okay if I asked you out to dinner.” He dang near tripped over his own feet, but the Lord was really watching out for him, because he didn’t.
Jane fell back, and Cord turned and looked at her. “What?’
“You’re going to call my dad and ask him if we can go out.”
“Yes.”
She blinked those blue eyes at him, pure shock in them. That melted away as she smiled, ducked her head, and moved her fingers as if tucking her hair behind her ear. It was all up in a ponytail, though, and Cord recognized the motion for what it was. She was flirting with him.
“Is that all right?” he asked, facing her fully.
Jane looked up, and their eyes met. Fireworks exploded in his stomach, and Cord sure did like this woman. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “That’s just fine.”
He nodded, his jaw setting. He had to get himself under control before they went out, because he couldn’t be showing her all of his feelings on the first date. If there even was a first date.
Besides, he still had an incredibly difficult phone call to make, and Cord had no idea how to have a conversation with Gray about his daughter.
23
Jane left her office in the city, ready for the weekend ahead. She loved math and numbers, because they made sense to her, unlike so many other things in her life.
Namely, the stunningly handsome Cord Behr. The past fourteen years had been kind to him, and he hadn’t lost any hair and gained plenty of muscles working her family’s farm.
Jane had minded her father and stopped flirting with the cowboys who worked and lived on the farm, and that had included Cord.
Hers had been an innocent crush, of which she’d had dozens from the ages of fourteen to probably twenty-two, when she’d graduated with her bachelor’s degree in accounting.
She’d gone back to graduate school and completed that before starting at a firm in Colorado Springs. The environment hadn’t been good for her, and Jane had called Hunter to find out if there might be room for her at HMC in the accounting department.
Of course there was, and Jane had started at the beginning of June, in a job she actually really liked, with a far better work atmosphere than her previous job.
The only problem was the long commute, but once her parents had gone to Coral Canyon for the summer, Jane had opted to stay out at the farm to help her mother take care of the house.
Deacon lived there too, but he wasn’t exactly skilled in the domestic cleanliness department, and Jane would not allow her mother to return to a house that looked like a frat boy had lived in it for three months.
She’d moved to a ten-hour day and worked Monday through Thursday, taking a three-day weekend to spend time out in the country.
Growing up, she hadn’t particularly enjoyed being so far from civilization, but now, she craved the quiet in a way her teenage self had loathed. She still loved the city, but she needed an escape every now and then.
She’d always liked cowboys, and she could admit that Cord was one reason she’d chosen to stay out on the family farm. He was simply delicious on the outside and so sweet on the inside.
She’d come on too strong last week, and Cord had said she’d call her daddy and talk to him about the two of them going out. Jane had never seen her father as angry as he’d been the night he’d confronted Jane about the incident in the gardening shed with Cord.
“You can’t do that, Jane,” he’d said, his voice rough and cold. “He’s a man, and you’re a girl, and you could ruin someone like him.”
Jane hadn’t truly understood what he’d meant at the time, but she did now. To her, she’d been flirting innocently, and Cord had flirted back. He’d always been a bit of a flirt, even now, but Jane had never known him to go out with anyone.
He still hadn’t asked her out, and she wondered if he’d called her father yet. Impatience built inside her, and once she made it to her car and had left the city behind, the country road in front of her, she dialed Daddy.
