Page 33 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

And all three of them got a little loud, then, until Cat was forced to take desperate measures.

She screamed. Bloody murder.

So loud that a dog barked somewhere down the hill and more satisfyingly, all three of them jumped.

Then turned as one to stare at her in shock.

“Why areall three of youstanding around discussing me and what I do withmy lifelike I’m not right here?” she demanded.

She didn’t look at Wilder, who had advanced that notion previously, sure. But then he’d been happy enough to start arguing poker games and blood feuds and football grudges they still held from high school with her brothers, and it was too much.

They were alltoo much.

“Tennessee. Dallas. I don’t know why you’re out here in the woods tonight.” Cat glared at them each in turn until Tennessee looked away, his jaw working. “I certainly hope it’s an accident. You were out for a brotherly stroll in the lovely autumn darkness and happened upon us. Is that what’s going on?”

Dallas did not look away, but he did ratchet back the Army Ranger a little. Just a little. “I think you know it isn’t,” he replied.

“You’ve been acting weird,” Tennessee told her bluntly. “Suddenly you need a new job. Suddenly you’re out all night and hanging out at the Copper Mine. It has teenage rebellion written all over it.”

“Except, fun fact, I’m not a teenager,” Cat bit out when he showed no sign of retracting that statement. Her temper snapped, though she tried not to give into it completely. “I’m completely grown and have been for years now. If I want to dance naked on the pool table at the Wolf Den, then that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“How do you know that there’s a pool table in the Wolf Den?” Dallas asked.

Tennessee’s scowl darkened. “How do you know anything about the Wolf Den at all?”

“I’m done with this,” Cat announced, no longer caring if her brothers saw that she was mad at them.

She was. She wanted them to know that she was.

She reached over and grabbed Wilder’s wrist, and then yanked him with her as she started back toward the house. What was amazing was that he let her.

“Come on,” she said loudly, as much to the trees as to him—and, okay, maybe it was to her brothers most of all. “Since they’ve come out here and ruined this spot, we might as well go and sit in the house like civilized people.”

And she thought that there was some resistance, then, but she chose to ignore it. She walked and Wilder went with her, and that was a good thing.

If he’d balked, if he decided he didn’t want to go along with her, she wasn’t sure what she would have done.

But he didn’t.

He let her tug him along as she headed up the hill, and she kept herself focused on what was ahead of her. The house that waited there with too many lights on for this time of night, indicating that her mom was probably still awake.

Oh well,she thought as she walked.Might as well rip the Band-Aid off all at once.

Wilder was keeping pace with her. That was what mattered, even if she was pretty sure that if she looked back over her shoulder, he would almost certainly be smirking at her brothers as she towed him along in her wake.

She couldn’t really blame him.

And as she stormed back towards her mother’s house—the childhood home she’d never moved out of, something she found herself thinking about far too much now that she’d decided to work for Ramona at least part time—she found herself thinking not about her brothers emerging from the woods like a nightmare come to life, but the thing Wilder hadalmostsaid right as that happened.

They neededto talk? Was that ever a good thing?

Had he finally been about to brush her off, the way she had half-expected him to do every day since this had all started?

Was it possible that her brothers had actually been a reprieve?

The very idea made her feel sick. And foolish.

But then again, he could have pulled away back near his truck. He could have politely excused himself. He hadn’t. She had to think that meant something.

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