Page 28 of Lost and Lassoed

I didn’t back down, though. I held his gaze, daring him to try me. He reached out, and it felt like someone had kicked me in the back of the knees.

I thought he was going to touch my face, or tug on my ponytail. Instead, he reached into the cabinet behind me and grabbed a mug.

Then he put one of his big hands on my waist and pushed me aside so he could fill his cup.

Chapter 14

Teddy

I made it through my first week as Riley’s part-time babysitter mostly unscathed, except for that weird shit in the kitchen last week. The way Gus’s eyes had tracked up and down my body kept pushing its way to the front of my mind no matter how hard I tried to push it back. I had to shake my head to loosen all of the dirty thoughts that came with the memory.

You would think that after I’d slipped my vibrator (yeah, I brought my vibrator to work—leave me alone) between my thighs last night to the thought of someone I don’t even like, this would be out of my system. He wasn’t. Every time my thoughts drifted, I thought about the way his nostrils had flared and the way he’d looked at me and the way his hand had felt on my waist.

Dirty thoughts about Gus Ryder? Gross. Maybe I needed to start sleeping with the vet again. The vet had a name—Jake—but it was so much more fun to refer to him as just “the vet.”

I spent Thursday and Friday at my house, catching up on laundry as much as I could, hanging out with my dad, makingsure he was set with meals while I was gone, mowing the lawn.

It was a little past six on Friday when I got a text from Dusty.

Dusty Fucker:Dinner?

Dusty was a few years older than me—Wes and Cam’s age—and had always been a good friend. His last name was Tucker, but he’d been in my phone as Dusty Fucker since I got a phone in seventh grade.

After high school, he’d disappeared. Left Meadowlark and spent over a decade cowboying around the world. He started in Montana, went to Utah and then Canada. A few years later, he was in Argentina and then Australia—always riding horses, always doing seasonal jobs, never staying in one place for too long.

Until last year.

He’d come back home to work for Gus at Rebel Blue and hadn’t shown any signs of leaving yet. But I had a feeling he would later this fall, after Cam’s wedding, when the girl he’d been in love with since he was sixteen was officially married to another man.

I texted him back.

Me:Diner in twenty?

Dusty Fucker:Need a ride?

Me:Happy to hear chivalry isn’t dead, but no.

Dusty Fucker:See you there.

I did a quick change into a pair of jeans and a black tank top with thicker straps, then slid on my silver cowboy bootsfor that little extra something. I left my hair down, since I’d put some effort into washing and styling it this morning.

I looked at myself in the mirror, double-checking that the outfit I put together in my head looked as good in real life as it did up there.

When I went out to the living room, my dad was sitting in his chair playing his guitar. It sounded like Clapton.

“I’m going to dinner with Dusty,” I said. “You going to be okay?”

My dad smiled. “Teddy. You’ve made me enough meals for the next three weeks. I’m fine. I’m the parent here, you know.”

“And a damn good one,” I said with a kiss on his head. “I’ll be back soon. Or do you want me to stay out so you and Aggie can have an illicit rendezvous?”

Hank let out a hearty chuckle that told me I might be right. “Get out of here, Teddy.” I blew him a kiss and headed out the door.

The bummer about going to the Meadowlark Diner was that it was right across the street from what used to be the boutique. The redFor Rentsign on the front door felt like a kick in the shin.

When I’d started getting serious about the boutique—started trying to make it something bigger than a small-town clothing store—I had this dream that someday when Cloma was ready to retire, she’d leave it to me.

And now I was faced with the ghost of my dream every time I drove down Main Street.

---