Page 23 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

“That’s not how you go about it.” And he couldn’t help the surge of something almost tender inside him, very different than the one that had pushed him here tonight. When he would have said he knew very little about tenderness. “You’re practically begging for someone to take advantage of you.” But she only looked at him, clearly not comprehending what he was trying to tell her. “Don’t make yourself vulnerable, kitten. Not to me, not to anyone. That’s not how this works.”

“How would you know how it works?”

Her eyes were so blue it made him feel like he hardly recognized himself. “I’m the only one standing in this alley who does know how it works.”

“I’m not talking about sex, which you may or may not know how to do, I wouldn’t know.” And she glared at him when she said that. “But vulnerability? What does the great Wilder Carey, famous for leaving before dawn, know aboutvulnerability?”

He decided this was not the time to explore why Cat talking about his preferred behavior when it came to nights out hit him like a blow. Why it left him feeling something like empty. He told himself she didn’t know what she was saying.

“I’ll have you know that I’m perfectly secure in my masculinity and therefore more than happy to be emotionally vulnerable at the drop of a hat,” he told her.

But he realized as he said it that he would usually say something like that as a joke. With an ironic inflection, or a smirk. Tonight, on the other hand, he simply said it baldly. And it didn’t sit right with him.

Or with her, clearly, because she laughed. “The difference between you and me, Wilder, is that I’m not embarrassed that you know my feelings. What I’m fascinated by is that you would be. I’m the one who feels it. I already know how it feels. Why would it matter if you did too?”

“Because, Cat, if you tell me something like that, if I was less of a standup guy than I am, I might use it against you.” He couldn’t help the way his fingers moved over the soft expanse of her cheek. “It gives me power over you.”

“I don’t think that it does,” she said. And then her chin lifted. “And anyway, Iwantyou to have power over me. I have literally asked you, a thousand times, to have a particular kind of power over me, and you won’t.”

“It’s one thing to mess around, it’s another thing—”

“That’s what I’ve been telling myself all night,” she shot back at him. She leaned forward, a serious look in her gaze, and he let his hand fall to his side. “Why do you think I’m an idiot? I don’t have to have had four hundred boyfriends to figure out that when a man only wants to see you in private, won’t even commit to having sex with you, and ignores you on a public street, you should probably take to heart what he said about the fact that we were only evermessing around.” She shook her head. “But then you show up here like this tonight. You drag me into this alley. And then you kiss me like that, like I’m doing something wrong while I’m out here living life and keeping our secret. Which is it?”

“You shouldn’t expect anything from me,” he said, feeling something grim settle over him, and he shifted back away from her.

“Which is it?” she asked again. “If there are no expectations then why are you waiting for me in the woods? It sounds to me like there were expectations and they weren’t met, and that’s why you’re here, roaming around Mountain Mama late at night when everyone knows you prefer it over at the Copper Mine.”

“Maybe everyone doesn’t know me as well as they think they do.”

“You don’t want them to,” she said with a certain quiet, matter-of-factness that he felt like a spear through his heart. “You don’t want anyone to know you. That wouldactuallybe vulnerable and real, and I don’t think you know how to do that.”

And it wasn’t as if these sort of things had never been said to him before. They were usually shouted. They were usually words to mark the end of a situation that the other party had wanted more from than he did.

But Cat wasn’t shouting. She didn’t even seem particularly angry. Or even resigned, which he’d also seen before.

She leaned back against the side of the building and eyed him. “Your tragedy is that I already know all about you,” Cat said. “I heard my brothers complain about you in high school. I heard every girl who ever met you do the same. I’ve watched you do your thing on both sides of Copper Mountain. I’m sure that I could go pretty much anywhere in the Rockies and all the way east into the Dakotas and there’d be someone to tell another story about Wilder Carey and the things he gets up to. But I’ve already heard all the stories. I know the lore.”

Again, she delivered all of that so calmly. He couldn’t understand why it felt worse than if she’d punched him.

“For example, I know it’s really out of character that you stepped in to rescue me from the Wolf Den,” she continued, and laughed a little bit. “I don’t have to take a poll to know that’s not the sort of thing you normally do in a place like that.”

“Good thing I’m such an open book,” he growled.

Or maybe that was vulnerability he felt, after all. If so, it sucked.

“Good thing that I don’t want toreadyou,” Cat retorted with a roll of her eyes. “I know exactly where the library is located, thank you. That’s not why I’m sneaking out of my mother’s house in the middle of the night.”

“Maybe you’d better set the expectations, then,” he said.

Wilder realized immediately that that wasn’t the sort of thing he should have said at all. He was the one who made the rules. With a smile, generally, but they were his rules. And he always followed them. He never, ever allowed anyone to set terms for him.

And yet here he was. Standing here, staring down at this maddening woman as if he was the one who was—

But he couldn’t finish that. The thought alone made him too… precarious on his own feet.

“I don’t like feeling like your dirty little secret,” Cat said, quietly.

“I get that.” He wanted to put his hands on her, and he really didn’t like how difficult it was to keep himself from doing that. “But what’s the alternative? You think we should go have dinner with your brothers? How would that go? You think I should come buy you a drink in the Copper Mine one night? Just roll up, get to talking, then take you out to my truck afterward? What could go wrong?”

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