Page 15 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

Good, he thought, since Wilder wasn’t much for dancing, It wasn’t that he didn’t know how. It was that, if he was going to hold a woman that close, why do it in public and with clothes on? He’d rather listen to guitar licks and gestures toward Led Zeppelin and imagine things a whole lot hotter thandancing.

Then he reminded himself, piously, that he was here to have a quiet beer with friends and neighbors. Not to imagine anything.

Once he made it to the bar he ordered his favorite beer and headed out back to the outdoor picnic tables that were a hallmark of summers here. Out here by the creek, beneath the stars, it was hard to imagine that a better life was available anywhere. He sat at a table with some of his oldest friends, listening to Wyatt and Logan Stark tell ridiculous stories about their fishing adventures while their brother Noah chimed in from time to time to make it clear which one of them was the bigger liar.

The same way they’d been doing since preschool. He took a little video and sent it to Ryder, making sure to indicate the empty seat at the table that he could have been sitting in, if he was here.

The same old Stark nonsense is not the lure you think it is, Ryder replied a few minutes later, when the lies had turned to tall tales about encounters with much scarier wild animals in the mountains.

Wilder told himself he was perfectly content.

So much so that he absolutely didn’t notice the very moment that Cat Lisle appeared. He didn’t notice the friends she was with, or the way she looked at him, then away.

He told himself he was hardly aware of her. Of the way she laughed, tipping her head back so that the late evening lights illuminated her face and found those coppery accents in her long, dark hair. He didn’t notice the magic she worked in a T-shirt and a plaid button-down thrown over a tiny pair of shorts. He didn’t notice that her legs had the touch of the summer sun all over them, and were even more shapely than he’d imagined they were when they’d been wrapped around him.

*

Looking at herdressed like a summer dream come true made him feel absolutely nothing at all. He told himself this again and again, hoping it might take.

Wilder then proceeded to go out of his way to pay her absolutely no attention at all.

And when she got up and left, she didn’t look back at him. Not even a glance.

Not that he was looking, of course.

So there was no particular reason that he made his own excuses not long after that, and drove around the big Rocky Mountain pines and the winding dirt roads out behind the feed store and around the little square where the library and the elementary school sat. He drove until there was nobody to see him turn down a road he had no business being on.

Then, once again, he bumped his way through the woods with the headlights off, stopping where he’d parked the night before.

A place he’d vowed to himself he wouldn’t come back to, but here he was.

And he made it worse, because he didn’t turn around and get out of there. He waited instead, having all kinds of arguments with himself to no avail.

Because the con list was ten miles long. The pro list was just: her. Cat.

So then there was nothing for it. He got out, and made his way through the trees until once again he could stand there like the kind of man he’d never been, looking up at the house.

Until he could see Cat sneak out the side door, then start pelting across the field, straight to him.

She hurtled into the cover of the trees and threw herself straight into his arms, as if she’d known for a fact that he would be there.

Right here, waiting for her.

Wilder wanted to ask her how she knew. He wanted to demand that she tell him what magic this was. What spell she’d cast on him.

But she was in his arms and Wilder didn’t bother asking questions he wasn’t sure he wanted the answers to. He pulled her deeper into the woods with him, not in the mood to set her down—though he did. Only so he could grab her hand and tug her with him, back through the trees to his truck.

Once there, he threw down the tailgate, jumped up, and hauled her up with him.

She still hadn’t said a word, but she smiled then. Wide.

And Wilder knew he was making a mistake as he spread out a blanket and lay down with her in the back of his truck, out here with no one around and only the night sky to see them. As he stretched out beside her and she pressed that body of hers up against his.

He was making a mistake, there was no question about it, but he didn’t stop.

Maybe he couldn’t, but that was a worry for another time.

He pulled her on top of him and let his hands wander where they liked. He tested out her curves, got his hands in her hair, and found his way beneath those layers she wore.

---