Hard Riding Cowboy Read online

  Her lips twitched. Well. She’d never think of him as Little Calder Reid ever again. That was for sure. “All men do. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a really good one.”

  “Oh, I’m aware of that.”

  She laughed. And she didn’t feel like laughing at all. At least, she hadn’t a second ago. She didn’t know how she could be angry, turned on and amused all at the same time.

  Something thick and hot stretched between them. Need. Oh, she wanted him. She wished she could have him. But there was...no point.

  “I just can’t,” she said, finally. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to yourself.”

  He began to get dressed, and she felt like an idiot standing there naked. But, she wasn’t sure she could bend over and move around to get dressed in front of him either. Things bunched up and rolled when she did that. She would rather stand there in more prime positioning naked.

  Conversely, while Calder moved around, nothing jiggled, or rolled. Muscles shifted and bunched, smooth golden skin moving over that tight physique.

  And damn, that man’s ass.

  It was a thing of beauty.

  The man was like a sculpture that had been brought to life.

  She wished she had touched his butt more. Wished that she had looked at him longer. She wished they’d had a bed.

  Sex against the wall was all well and good. But there was so much they hadn’t... Done. So much they wouldn’t get to do because she was being practical.

  It was like finding the world’s best playground and only going on the swing. And only swinging once.

  It was depressing.

  Completely dressed, Calder straightened and treated her to a grin. “I’m going to go finish that floor.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “I’m going to finish the floor. And then tomorrow I’ll do the flooring here.”

  “But I just... I just said we weren’t having sex anymore.”

  “You also told me how stressed you are. And explained this whole situation. I’m going to help you, Lauren. I already said I was doing it for nothing. I didn’t have sex with you as payment. I wanted to have sex with you. I’d do it again. But if you don’t want to, that’s fine. You better understand this about me. If I say I’m going to do something, I will damn well do it. I’m not playing games with you. If I start a job, I finish it.” It was the conviction in his voice that shocked her. The absolute certainty. He held her gaze. Unflinching. “I started this. I’m finishing it.”

  He moved toward the door, then paused. He reached out, gripping her chin, and tilted her face up toward him. Then he dipped his head low and kissed her, firm and hard on the mouth. He lifted his head, those eyes blue eyes boring into hers. “You know my feelings. If you change your mind, you can count on the fact they won’t have changed.”

  “You don’t know that,” she whispered.

  “I do. Yes, I’m twenty-nine. I’m younger than you. I’ve never been married. I don’t have kids. But I know my damned mind.”

  Then he walked out of the room, and a few minutes later, she heard the sound of him pounding boards together.

  And she honestly felt like the pages of her planner had been torn out and scattered all over the place. Like she had no idea what her world was anymore.

  Or what she wanted.

  And the strangest part about all of it was that she wasn’t even that sad about it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN LAUREN GOT up the next morning she had half a mind to try to avoid her mother. But, it was impossible. As soon as she got up, she saw her mother in the kitchen. Her daughter Ava was already up, sitting at the table with a mug of hot chocolate and a piece of buttered toast.

  “Good morning,” Lauren said.

  Ava looked up at her, then back down at her breakfast. The stony, teenage silence was getting old. It had been all she had gotten from her daughter since they’d moved back to Gold Valley.

  “Nice to see you, too, Ava,” she said, determinedly overbright. “It’s a beautiful day outside. I hope you do something other than lie on your bed and morosely text.”

  “There’s nothing to do here,” she said.

  “If you’re bored,” Lauren’s mother put in, “you can always pick up a few extra chores.”

  Ava made a growling sound in the back of her throat and picked up her toast, devoting all of her focus to it.

  “Don’t growl at your grandmother,” Lauren said.

  Her mother gave Lauren a sympathetic look but didn’t make any comments to Ava. Delores Bishop would not have held her peace at all, had Lauren growled at her when she was a teenager.

  But, her parents had definitely mellowed a little bit as grandparents. She supposed that was the way of the world. It stuck in her craw sometimes, though. Because she certainly hadn’t been allowed to have moods and attitudes.

  And really, if her mother had chastised Ava, Lauren would have probably resented her stepping in and co-opting her role as parent. So there was that.

  “What’s your plan today?” her mom asked.

  “I have to go back over to the house. There’s flooring to finish. And once that’s done, we can actually schedule the inspection. Then, hopefully we’ll get a close date and... All of our things can come out of storage.”

  “You did the right thing moving back,” her mom said. And, Lauren supposed that made up for her ease on Ava.

  “I know,” Lauren said.

  Unbidden, flashes of last night burst into her head. All the wrong things she had done with Calder Reid.

  Her mother would not be in support of that.

  But it didn’t matter because Lauren wasn’t going to be doing that again. No, she was not.

  “I’ll take the girls downtown,” her mom said. “Maybe we can do some school shopping.”

  Lauren imagined that Ava would have a lot of opinions about school anywhere other than Portland. But she was going to have to deal with it.

  “Thank you,” Lauren said. “For helping out. If I had to do all of this by myself, I don’t think I’d be able to.”

  Ava got up, saying nothing as she shuffled out of the room.

  “Hopefully, someday my kids won’t hate me,” Lauren said.

  Her mom sighed. “Someday, they won’t. But, you didn’t think that I knew what was best for you either.”

  Ouch. That stuck hard in Lauren’s ribs. Even harder because in many ways, Robert had been the wrong choice, and her mother had been right. But if she hadn’t married him, she wouldn’t have Ava and Grace, and she didn’t regret that part of her life one bit. Which made it all... Complicated.

  Which, she supposed, was actually a decent thing to realize.

  That sometimes her kids would do something she didn’t approve of.

  That they might even be bad choices, or not the ideal choices. And there would be good in that anyway.

  Her mom and dad, to their credit, hadn’t cut her off for what she did. They’d come to her wedding. They’d dealt with Robert’s hard-drinking friends and relatives who’d felt that was required at a wedding.

  Once they’d realized her mind was made up, they’d supported her.

  “I loved him,” Lauren said. “I mean, I wasn’t just rebelling against you. Just so you know.”

  Her mom, turned to her, hugged her quickly. “I know that. I mean, I didn’t know that for the first couple of years. But when you actually married him, had the first baby...”

  “I would’ve stayed with him,” Lauren said, quickly.

  I know,” her mom said. “And you would have been unhappy.”

  She thought of last night again. Of Calder. Not of the sex, but the way he’d worked on the house. The way he’d promised to finish what he’d started. He was so different from her late husband. “Not with everything,” sh
e protested. “Not with the girls.”

  “You deserve better than that.”

  “Why?” Lauren asked, going over to the coffeemaker. “I didn’t make the right choices. I didn’t choose the right man. I chose the exact kind of man you warned me about. So, I’m not exactly sure why I deserve happiness now. Don’t you reap what you sow?”

  “Yes,” her mom said. “I believe that you do. But I also believe that you don’t deserve to be miserable for your entire life. Should you suffer forever?”

  “I thought I was going to have to.”

  Her mom shook her head. “I was strict with you because I worried about you. And some of my fears for you did come true. And I very much didn’t want you to lose your husband. I especially didn’t want the girls to lose their father. He was...”

  “He wasn’t quite bad enough to spit on his grave,” Lauren said. “But... Now I realize that things are easier without him. And I feel bad. I feel guilty. I’m glad that I got back here. Glad that I’m not with him. I don’t think I would’ve been brave enough to leave ever. Because it’s not like he was abusive. He was just...”

  “You didn’t love him.”

  Lauren shook her head. “Not anymore.”

  “No matter how it happened, that part of your life is over now. Don’t you deserve something better? Something different?”

  She couldn’t take those words on board. Not now.

  The sad truth was, as she stood there in her mother’s kitchen, all she could really think was that she deserved to be exactly where she was standing. Really, she deserved to be married to Robert still, while he lived. To have to live with her choices for the rest of her life.

  This was actually a little bit of deliverance that hadn’t required any action, bravery or thought on her part.

  If she was a little bit lonely, if her girls were angry at her...

  Well, those were the seeds she had planted.

  It was all fine and good for her mother to say she wanted Lauren to feel differently now, but she hadn’t raised her to feel differently. She had raised her to think deeply about her choices, and to understand that what she did in the moment was going to impact her future.

  And Lauren hadn’t listened. Because it had been inconvenient. Because it had been prescriptive, and unfair. And Lauren had been convinced that she knew better.

  And still, standing there in the kitchen she could get back inside the head of that eighteen-year-old girl who had basically run away from home to marry that charming redneck she’d met on the beach. The one who’d stolen her heart and her virginity in very short order. Of course it had felt unfair when her parents had told her she was being crazy. That she needed to think about her future. That her future might not be the easiest with a man like him.

  But she had felt like they were Romeo and Juliet. Destined and doomed all at the same time, and she had felt like she had no choice but to follow her heart. She’d had such pure conviction, even now she could feel it echoing inside her.

  Wasn’t it right to fight for love?

  But she had been wrong. Catastrophically.

  Even three years on the other side of it she was still sorting through what all of that meant.

  Well, she had decided what it meant. That she couldn’t just follow her heart. That she needed to make plans and follow those instead. That she needed to think.

  That she needed to think about other people, and a whole lot less about what she felt she deserved. What she felt she knew.

  “I better go,” she said.

  “Do you want your dad to come over and help?”

  Right. And explain the giant, burly cowboy working in the house.

  “You know he can’t get down there onto the flooring. He’ll never get back up again. We already discussed this.” That was true.

  “Yes,” her mom said. “Although, he would never admit it.”

  “No. Which is why it’s just better if I let him have his pride and enlist you guys to watch the girls.”

  “Yes, you’re right about that. But I worry about you.”

  “I’ve got it handled,” she said.

  But as she gathered her things, and headed out toward her car, she wondered if she had anything handled at all.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME Lauren showed up, Calder had been waiting in the driveway with doughnuts and coffee for twenty minutes.

  She pulled up and stepped out of the car, her blond hair blowing over her face, her expression cautious when she saw him. And his stomach felt like it had been kicked by a horse.

  “I brought breakfast,” he said.

  “That was... Really nice of you but I already...” She shook her head. “I guess I didn’t. I had coffee. But I wasn’t really feeling hungry.” She eyed the doughnuts. “I’m feeling a little bit hungrier now.”

  So was he. Starving. But, not for doughnuts. For her.

  He really, really didn’t want for things to be finished between them. Once wasn’t enough. He didn’t think there would be an enough, not with her.

  Of course, he had to sort out what that meant. Because it wasn’t just her.

  Though, here it felt like it.

  It was tempting to believe he was making a place here just for the two of them.

  He waited for that idea to terrify him. But it didn’t.

  He wondered if his dad had felt confident every time he’d found a woman he wanted to marry. And his father had done it more than once. He wondered if his father had ever once questioned his own authority or motivations. His own judgment. He doubted the old man ever had.

  And he should have.

  It made Calder wonder if he should question himself a bit more right now than he was.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said. “I think doughnuts and coffee are best had on a blanket.”

  “Why are you being so nice to me?” she asked, cautiously reaching out and taking the cup of coffee from his hand. Their fingertips connected, and desire stirred in his stomach.

  “I like you,” he said. “And I haven’t said that to a girl since seventh grade.”

  “Hey,” she said as they walked toward the house, their shoulders bumping together. “I thought you liked me when you were in seventh grade.”

  “I did,” he responded. “But you were a little bit out of my league. I figured I would aim for an easier target.”

  She shook her head. “Then you say things like that, and you sound a lot more like a regular old guy.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  They paused in the doorway, looking at each other. He was just a regular old guy. Not actually any better than her late husband, not in a measurable sense. It wasn’t like he had ever been put to the test. Wasn’t like he’d ever been asked to give up anything he enjoyed in order to be a better partner.

  He’d never been in a real, long-term relationship.

  In the abstract, he didn’t see the appeal in it.

  Lauren Bishop wasn’t abstract.

  “I think the world is full of regular guys who try to do just a little bit better when they meet a woman who’s extraordinary,” he said. He wasn’t sure who the hell had put those words in his mouth, because he wasn’t any kind of poet. But they were true enough.

  She gave a little half role to her eyes, then looked down, as the two of them took their seats on the blanket, and she opened up the box of doughnuts, purely as a distraction method, he was sure. “And what makes you think I’m extraordinary?”

  “This house is a pretty good indicator. The way you’re working on it. The way you’re working for your kids. You know, I love my dad, Lauren. I really did. I do. But I don’t think he was going to win any father of the year awards. What he did he did for the ranch. He didn’t do it for us. As far as the women he married... He did that for himself. What he found with Chloe’s mother... That was something
else. It was something special. It just so happened that she was an extraordinary woman. But make no mistake, as someone who lived through being abandoned by his real mother, someone who lived with a father who was distant at best... I see that what you’re doing here is extraordinary. For your kids. And just from the little bit you told me about what you’ve been through...”

  “So your attraction to me is still... A caregiver thing?” She wrinkled her nose.

  He laughed. “No. Although, I guess you couldn’t prove different.”

  “Thank you. For everything. You’re being astonishingly nice.”

  “It makes me pretty damned sad that the act of me bringing you coffee and a couple doughnuts seems extraordinarily nice. You deserve better than that.”

  “There’s been a lot of talk today about what I deserve.”

  “Oh yeah? It’s pretty early in the morning for there to have been a lot of talk at all.”

  “My mother. She thinks... That I need to forgive myself.”

  “Do you?” He met her gaze and she looked away.

  “I don’t know. Though, I’m not sure that I’m punishing myself so much as... Just trying to make sure I don’t make the same mistakes twice.”

  He thought of everything she’d told him about her husband. And he turned his next words over carefully. Because she wasn’t a woman he could play with, and he didn’t want to. He wanted...

  His life had been fine until she had shown up. Totally fine.

  And now it felt empty. And the only moment he felt like there was something real, something full, was when he was sitting with her.

  “The thing is, at any point your husband could have changed. He could have fixed those problems. You did what you could. You make it sound like you were the only adult, the only person, involved in that relationship. And that just isn’t true. He could have done better for you. He could have done better for Ava and for Grace. Those are not your mistakes. They’re his.”

  Her daughters whom he hadn’t even met. And why should he have met them? He’d been in her life for two days. And they might have had sex, but that didn’t mean anything. In his world, historically it hadn’t meant anything at all.