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“You going to put your shirt on?” she asked.
“Not planning on it.”
She took several deep breaths, and he could see that she was trying. Trying to not be outraged. Trying to not be angry.
And she was all of those things, but he could see that she was trying.
She felt guilty about hitting him. She shouldn’t.
He’d been an asshole. That was the truth of it. And maybe, maybe, she had deserved it. But what he had gotten afterward had been well deserved, as well.
It was the truth. “Listen,” he said. “I started a fight with you, so you don’t need to feel guilty about fighting back.”
“I don’t feel guilty. I feel as if I let myself down. That’s it. I have a personal ethic, and this was not it.”
“Okay,” he responded.
“You know, you could try to not be condescending to me.”
“Only when you try to not be condescending to me.”
She shook her head, and water droplets flew off the ends of her pigtails. “Our issue is that we are too different,” she said. “We don’t see the world the same. At all. You are an absolute hardheaded, stubborn pig of a human being, and you don’t care if you get in an altercation. I absolutely...do care if I get in a confrontation.”
He couldn’t help it. He laughed at that. The same way she had laughed when he’d called her a carrot.
“Yeah. I mean, that is true. Way too different.”
“You don’t value the things that I value.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. And I’m not worried about that, carrot. Truly, I’m not. You’re the one who came here. You could leave.”
“I can’t, though,” she said. “Because I...I have to make it work.”
“Why?”
“Because I do,” she said. “Because I do. Okay?”
“Fine. But this is the thing. You made your little pond bed, so you have to deal with it.”
“I said that I would finish out the week. I’m going to. I’m going to.”
And he could’ve told her right then that she was wasting her time. But he didn’t. Maybe it was the pile of paperwork sitting in his office, or maybe it was something else. He didn’t know.
But they rode, wet and half-dressed, back to the ranch, and when they got to the barn, he got off his horse and reached his hands up, offering to help her down, too. She looked furious, but reached down, almost reflexively, and he gripped her by the waist and lifted her off.
And she just looked at him, those ferocious green eyes burning into his and making his heart speed up.
The woman got his blood pumping harder, faster.
He’d been furious, frankly still was, but he wasn’t dead to the attraction that burned between them.
He didn’t want to call it that. Didn’t want to acknowledge it. But there was no way around it. She was gripping his forearms with her hands, and when her eyes met his this time, they were worried.
She was afraid of this.
Maybe that was why she hissed and spit quite so loud.
But he could show her. He could show her there was nothing to be afraid of. That it would feel good.
