Page 75 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

ZACK

Adam:

You planning on leaving your cabin today or nah?

Brax:

Don’t make us come get you.

Zack:

Fuck all the way off.

Adam:

Suit yourself. Brax?

Brax:

Meet you there in 5.

Heartbreak was bullshit and I wasn’t going to put up with it.

No, I was going to stay right here and become one with my old, cracked-leather sofa until it passed. Which, if I followed the usual trajectory of Hale men, should be any year now.

Brothers being brothers, they couldn’t even give me that.

At first I figured if I ignored the pounding on my door, they would go away, but that just pissed them off and made them louder. I pushed off the couch powered by a surge of righteous fury and wrenched open the door.

“What?” I demanded.

“That’s what we want to know,” Adam said as they shouldered past me into the cabin.

Brax crossed his arms like a principal facing down an unruly child. “What the fuck are you wearing?”

I stood tall and proud in my pink bunny slippers, black boxer briefs, and the cardigan Hannah left in my truck draped over my bare shoulders like a shawl. It was a tossup whether the unrelenting scent of her was my hell or salvation.

“It’s my house. I wear what I want. If you don’t want to look at it, you know where the door is.”

“You’ve been holed up in here for two days. What’s going on?” Adam asked.

“Two days? Dad fell down a whiskey bottle for a year when Mom died.” I jabbed my finger at Adam. “You were in a decade-long bad mood when your first wife left you.” I spun to Brax. “And you spent years following Essie around like a playground bully until you finally tricked her into marrying you.”

“That wasyouridea,” Brax reminded me.

“I had just finished two rounds of surgery and was high as a kite on pain meds. My point is, so what if I’ve been rotting on my couch for two days? I’m well within the grace period of Hale men acting like fucking disasters over women.”

“Wait…wait.” Adam braced a palm against the wall like he was about to keel over. “Are you saying this is about agirl?”

Brax let out a disbelieving guffaw. “No. It can’t be. The only girl trouble Zack has is remembering all their names.”

I split a baleful glare between then and sank back onto the couch, my butt finding the indentation that was slowly becoming permanent. “You know, I’m getting real tired of people telling me what I feel or don’t feel.”

You don’t love me, Zack. You only think you do because of all the sex.

Hannah’s words still echoed in my brain. Bullshit. Complete bullshit. I knew I loved Hannah the way I knew my blood ran in the soil of these Colorado plains. It was a goddamnfact.

Still, she had sounded so sure. And that made me question things. Not my feelings; I knew where I stood. But maybe where I stood was a long way from where Hannah stood. Maybe for her, what we had was nothing more than sexual chemistry.

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