A Good Old-Fashioned Cowboy Read online

  She got even redder. “I have...never had so much as a passing thought about your literacy.”

  “Haven’t you?” He tapped his finger on the pad between them. “You can keep this. Look it over and make any changes you want. I’ll come by tomorrow and we can talk materials.”

  “Materials,” she echoed. She cleared her throat, then frowned. “I’ll probably have a lot of changes. Is that going to be a problem?”

  Browning had the strangest sensation then. It was a lot like the way he felt when he imagined his future shop and his grandfather’s tools.

  He knew that Kit Hall and her very serious bangs were already a problem.

  But he wasn’t ready to think about the ramifications of that, so he didn’t. He grinned instead, because that was easier. Always. “I don’t believe in problems.”

  She sniffed. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “But I will take you up on your challenge.”

  Did he imagine that she looked faintly alarmed?

  “Challenge? What challenge? I didn’t challenge you.”

  “You did. You challenged me to read romance novels. Then we discussed the challenges of literacy in rural communities and, frankly, grew closer for it. I’m wounded you don’t remember, especially because it was twelve seconds ago.”

  Kit was vibrating again. And breathing a little bit fast, which was all the parade he needed.

  “Fine. I’ll bring you a romance novel tomorrow. And will eagerly await your critique.”

  “You don’t sound eager. You sound annoyed.” He shook his head. “I have to wait until tomorrow?”

  She searched his face and Browning, always sure about women and what they saw in him, found himself wondering what she saw. It was a disconcerting sensation. He straightened then swiped up his hat as he stood.

  And when he realized he was rubbing absently at his chest, because it was tight, he dropped his hand.

  Kit mumbled something that sounded like damned hands. Then she reached down behind the counter and came up with a fat paperback. She slapped it down between them.

  “Here,” she said.

  “That looks used.”

  “It is loved, Browning. Deeply. It’s one of my favorites and if you can’t handle it—”

  She made as if to take the book back, but he snagged it first.

  “There’s not a lot I can’t handle, Kit.”

  Her mouth fell open slightly. “You know my name.”

  “I know your name.” He considered her a moment, and that bright glow that didn’t seem to fade from her cheeks. The longer he looked at her, the brighter she got. It made that ache in his chest seem to pulse straight through him. “And I have a challenge for you in return.”

  “I didn’t agree to any challenges. I agreed to lend you a book. Note the word lend. I expect it back in the same condition, by the way.”

  “I’m not an animal.”

  “The exact same pristine condition.”

  “Fine.” He put his hat on and thumbed the brim. “For every romance novel I read, you have to do something fun.”

  “I don’t need a fun intervention, thank you. I have fun all the time. My life is a nonstop carnival ride of fun. Ask anyone.”

  He ignored her. “You won’t decide the fun thing. I will.”

  She scowled at him, her hands on her hips, which he appreciated, because thanks to the shroud, he hadn’t been entirely sure she had hips.

  “I don’t know why you think I’m interested enough in whether or not you stunt read good books to commit myself to some horrifying barter situation with you, but let me hasten to assure you that I really am not. At all.”

  “Come now, Kit,” Browning chided her. “There’s no need to lie. I think we both know you’re interested.”

  And then he took advantage of the stunned look on her face and sauntered out the door, grinning all the way.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “GIRLS WHO WHINE stay on the vine,” Hope singsonged at Kit.

  “I’m not whining. I don’t whine.” Kit did not care for the round of sniggers that greeted her protest. She glared balefully around the farmhouse kitchen at her friends. “All I’m saying is that I actually like salmon. Or I did. Now that love has been trampled. Abused. Mashed into whatever it is you’re making, Charity.”

  “Salmon mousse in endive leaves,” Charity said brightly, her attention on the mixing bowl in front of her.

  “We need to get the salmon out of the house.” Pru’s voice was serious, her gaze even more so. “By whatever means necessary.”

  “Terrific. Now we’re not only the weird friends who moved into June Gable’s farmhouse as a group, unmarried and resoundingly unloved.” Kit was sitting ramrod straight in her chair at the farmhouse table, her arms crossed, glaring at the green cabinets. She was fine. Fine. “Now we’re also the ones who crash potlucks with salmon appetizers.”

  Hope sighed. “Salmon mousse in endive leaves is clearly an hors d’oeuvre. I would think somebody from the—” She was clearly about to say the city and win herself a trip to the slip jar, but stopped herself. “From New York City would know that.”

  Kit glared at the tray of leaves Pru was assembling. “Hors d’oeuvres are merely appetizers with performance anxiety. Whatever city they’re from.”

  “Are you...projecting?” Pru asked.

  “Certainly sounds like projecting to me,” Charity said. To her mousse.

  Hope was also seated at the kitchen table, though she was not participating directly in the current salmon operation as she was flipping through one of the ancient magazines. Hence her whining comment. “Rule number forty-three. Do not room with a girl who’s a sad sack as she’ll only drag you down with her.”

  Pru whistled at that. Charity bit back a laugh. Hope cackled.

  “I’m not whining. And I’m not a sad sack.” Kit glared at her friends again, expecting them to jump in with soothing remarks. They did not. She felt herself falter. “Am I?”

  “Of course you’re not a sad sack,” Charity said loyally. Into the silence.

  Hope shrugged. “Not all sacks can be happy, can they?”

  “It’s not so much that you’re a sad sack.” Pru eyed her critically. Kit deeply regretted asking the question in the first place. “But you do dress like a sad sack. Like, literally, you’re wearing a sad sack right now.”

  “It’s called a balloon dress, Pru.”

  “It’s July. The Fourth of July, in fact, and it’s hot, Kit. Why are you wearing a balloon anything?” Pru shook her head. “I would give you a pass on a water balloon. That’s how hot it is.”

  “I find balloon dresses darling,” Kit said. Through her teeth.

  “No one else does,” Hope muttered. She looked up as if she could feel the way Kit gaped at her. “What does Browning think?”

  Browning. The last thing in the world Kit wanted to think about was Browning West, the things he could do with lumber, the way he grinned, his hands, and...anything else to do with him, ever.

  Therefore he was the only thing she thought about.

  “Did I not mention that the first day he came into the shop he asked me if I was grieving?” Kit didn’t know why she was giving them that detail. It was like throwing blood in the water and sure enough, the sharks came for her at once.

  In the form of three pairs of very solemn, very concerned eyes.

  “You know you didn’t tell us that,” Charity said chidingly, putting down her mixing implements.

  “Because if you had,” Hope said in the same tone, “we would’ve made you change your clothes.”

  “I know you think that you’re the most fashionable of us all,” Pru chimed in, sounding faintly impatient. “Because you were geographically adjacent to actual fashion houses, but you’re not in Manhattan anymore.”

  “And you�
�re not an editor anymore, either,” Charity added. Then, like Hope, she reacted to Kit’s glare. “I thought it was your editorial uniform, or something.”

  “You’re in Oregon now,” Pru said briskly. “It’s time to stop wafting around the streets of Jasper Creek like you’re that woman.”

  “Audrey Hepburn?” Kit supplied. Tartly.

  Pru smirked. “You wish.”

  And that was how Kit found herself in cutoff shorts and a skimpy little T-shirt at Jasper Creek’s annual Fourth of July potluck lunch some hours later, following the extra-special centennial parade through the (few) streets of town. She had succumbed to the indignity with very little grace.

  “I have very sensitive skin that does not care for direct sunlight,” she’d snapped at her merciless friends.

  “And I have this amazing new invention called sunscreen,” Hope had snapped right back.

  While Pru had muttered something beneath her breath that sounded a lot like princess.

  Kit insisted on wearing her own sandals. She did not care that the platform wedges were entirely too high for a picnic that took place on the lawn outside the historic city hall building. She would walk across the grass in these shoes if it killed her. She would not mince, or tiptoe around, or appear to even notice that she was walking over uneven ground in high heels for no apparent reason.

  “You’re really showing us,” Charity said from beside her as they waited for Pru and Hope, who had been tasked with delivering the latest salmon offering to the potluck table—though Kit doubted the assembled throng was going to go for mousse and endive over Mrs. Kim’s pigs in a blanket.

  “I’m glad you appreciate the statement I’m making,” she said airily.

  “It’s a statement all right.”

  “I don’t like your tone, Doctor.”

  Kit whirled around, preparing to storm off in mock high dudgeon but instead slammed into a wall.

  A vast brick wall of the male variety.

  Browning.

  Exactly who she didn’t want to think about. Much less touch. His hand shot out to grip one elbow like he expected her to pitch forward, and God help her...his hand. Her shoes gave her four extra inches, which should have helped, but she still had to crane her head back to look up at him.

  “Careful,” he rumbled at her, in that way he did. “You’re going to break an ankle in those shoes.”

  “Why are you so obsessed with my shoes?” she demanded, far more breathily than necessary, but his hand was still on her and her heart was drumming and how was she supposed to breathe?

  “Can’t say that I consider myself obsessed so much as appreciative.”

  Browning took his time looking down toward her feet. A long time, with a lot of detours along the way, and Kit had never in her entire life felt so...exposed. And not in a brick-wall sort of way. The thing about balloon dresses and various other floaty layers and shrouds and all the rest of the things she liked to wear was that they were all smoke and mirrors. They floated about, this way and that, hiding most of her from view. She liked it that way.

  Pretty girls worry about the prom, her father had always told her, peering at her over the stacks of dense, important books in his study. Smart girls worry about Princeton.

  But she had been bullied into wearing skimpy little shorts that barely made it to the middle of her thighs. And a T-shirt that she’d claimed was pornographic the minute she’d pulled it on.

  “I think what you mean is that it fits,” Hope had said.

  Pru had nodded. “Turns out you’re not shaped like a balloon.”

  But neither the shorts nor the T-shirt felt as if they fit. Not with Browning looking at her the way he was. Everything felt too tight. Kit was much too hot. She told herself it was sunburn, the heretofore unknown rolling kind that swept over her from her head down to her toes and made her feel like she was melting from the inside out.

  Browning finally dragged his gaze to hers again. And sadly, dropped his hand. “Deeply appreciative, Kit.”

  “I’m going to take a hard pass on this entire interaction, thank you.”

  Kit did not glance down at her elbow to see if he’d left scorch marks behind. She could feel them.

  “We made a deal,” Browning said then.

  She had come to realize in the weeks that this man had taken over her life, that his grin was not the happy-go-lucky celebration of sloth and sin she’d always imagined it was. It was steel straight through. How did no one else seem to see that?

  “We made a deal and I’ve upheld my end of it.”

  He had read two books of her choosing. He had delivered his verdict on both, proving himself irritating, male, and wrong. Still, he’d read them. Which meant Kit had subjected herself to his brand of fun on two occasions.

  She had been expecting something shocking. Or dirty. Adult truth or dare, maybe.

  “I’m not in high school,” he had told her when she’d foolishly said something like that in the store one morning. “This isn’t the girls’ bathroom, Kit.”

  And then he’d forced her to eat watermelon with him while sitting on the back of his pickup truck so that they could have a seed spitting contest.

  “That was disgusting, not fun,” she’d pronounced afterward.

  Browning had only grinned, hot and wicked. “You just hate that you lost.”

  The second so-called fun excursion had involved tequila shots in the Rusty Nail. Kit and her friends had been there anyway, forced to act out the usual ridiculous slips they’d pulled from the jar on the way out that night. Hers had been to laugh wildly at anything a man said in her presence, because men like girls who do not challenge them, but find them funny.

  “I don’t think you need tequila,” Browning had said when he found her at the bar. “But it sure is fun.”

  “Everybody needs tequila,” she’d retorted. Then she’d remembered herself and had laughed uproariously.

  Until he’d shaken his head, laughing too.

  And Kit knew that if not for the slips, she’d have spent that entire night in a corner, glaring. The slips allowed her to be silly. The truth was, they gave her an excuse, because all she knew how to do was be overly, endlessly serious.

  The rest of that night had gotten a little blurry, though Kit distantly recalled that smile of his. And the way his hands had felt—those hands—when he’d rested them at her waist out there on the dance floor.

  If she thought too much about the fact she’d been out on a dance floor at all, she might swoon, so that was one more thing she wasn’t thinking about. Active amnesia, she liked to tell herself. Use it and love it.

  “I don’t owe you anything from our deal,” she protested now, squinting at him in the Fourth of July heat. “The bargain was very specific. You have to read another book.”

  “I stayed up late last night finishing that book,” he said, sounding vaguely offended. “You’re going to have to explain the appeal of a biker to me. I don’t really get it.”

  “What’s not to get?” Kit frowned at him, then frowned harder when he grinned. “He’s an outlaw who makes his own rules. Obviously that’s universally appealing, or neither one of us would be standing here in Oregon, a state that was pretty much settled by rule breakers who refused to stay put back east.”

  “That’s certainly one take on the Oregon Trail.”

  Kit drew herself up, fully entering what her friends called her Lecture Mode. “Whether or not you personally relate to an outlaw biker is neither here nor there. He fulfills a need in the heroine. He can’t be tamed, but he lets her hold him, all the same. She can’t trust the world she lives in, but he lives in his own world and protects her. It’s beautiful, Browning.”

  “If you want a ride on my motorcycle, Kit, you can just ask. You don’t have to make it a whole thing.”

  That...made everything stop. “You have a mo
torcycle?”

  She tried to envision that, something that was entirely too easy, God help her.

  “Wow. You’re actually not scowling at me for three seconds. Be still my heart.”

  “I guess that makes you a weekend warrior,” she said, in a desperate attempt to get her balance back. “Isn’t that the phrase?”

  “It is not,” he replied. “At least, it’s not the phrase you should use when you owe me an adventure.”

  Kit realized she’d completely forgotten the fact that they were standing there in full view of the entire assembled population of Jasper Creek. She knew her parents were around here somewhere, though she’d been doing her best to avoid them. Well. Not her mother, who she snuck over to see sometimes for lunch, but her father. She could scent Lawrence Hall’s disappointment on the summer breeze so there was no need to subject herself to the close-up version.

  Once again, she was happier than she’d ever imagined she could be that she didn’t have her phone...though she was starting to wonder if she was the one avoiding her father or if he was the one avoiding her. Her stomach twisted at that. Normally he would have sat her down so she could regale him with tales from civilization, as he liked to call it. She kept telling herself that if she had her phone, he would have called a million times already instead of listening to her mother’s secondhand updates.

  But what if he hadn’t? What if he was watching her right now, along with everyone else, wondering how she’d turned out to be such a disappointment?

  Kit swallowed, hard, because it almost felt like she might sob.

  She focused on Browning. Maybe a little ferociously.

  “I thought, for fun, we could attend this annual potluck,” she said, and shifted her body backward. Just to put a bit of space between them. “The good news is, we’re already here.”

  “I have a better idea.”

  He didn’t say anything else. Instead, he looked at her. Very strangely, she thought.

  “What?”

  “Is that...a lasagna, or something?”

  Kit followed his gaze down to her own hand as if she’d forgotten that she was carrying a hatbox.