Page 35 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

But,we need to talk, he’d said.

“That’s all well and good,” Tennessee muttered. Cat thought that he looked like it was neither well nor good, but she didn’t argue. “Still, Wilder, the question remains. Why do you have a death wish?”

“After almost two hundred odd years of your family claiming that they are somehow more honorable than the rest of us,” Dallas added. “Honorable is not what sneaking around in the woods looks like from over here.”

“Then look somewhere else, Dallas,” Cat suggested.

“I can accept that you want to be your own person,” Dallas told her. “Hell, I applaud it. I’m the only one in this family who went away for a while and I get it. You want to do something different. But that doesn’t explain whathewas doing.”

Wilder sighed, and he did it a little theatrically. “It doesn’t surprise me that the two of you have somehow missed the fact that your sister is a beautiful, grown woman. Anyone would not only be delighted to date her, but would feel nothing but lucky if she let them.”

Cat looked up at him, her arm still around his waist, which meant his was across her back. They didn’t spend a lot of time together standing, and certainly not like this. There was something so tender about it. It made her feel warmed, and wanted, in a way that nothing else ever had.

Like he was hers.

Like he really was.

“We didn’t miss any of that.” Tennessee was growling at him. “We were just hoping for a higher caliber of man when she finally brought one home. Instead, it’s you.”

And because she was holding on to him, Cat could feel the way Wilder stiffened at that. She didn’t think it was visible to her brothers. The smile never left Wilder’s face. But she could feel that sudden tension in him.

“But you all seem to be under the impression that this is something it isn’t,” Wilder drawled.

And everything in Cat froze.

This was where he was going to do it.

He was going to tell them all that it wasn’t anything, that it was over, that he’d been about to end it before they’d interrupted her.

And it was going to kill her.

When it did, her brothers would kill him, because she was upset and they wouldn’t be able to stand that and she didn’t know how she was going to handle any of it—

“I’m deadly serious about your sister,” Wilder told them, in that quiet voice of his that seemed to fill the whole house. And found its way into her, too, until she felt as if she was shaking from the inside out. “And I am an honorable man, as it happens. Or I’d like to be.”

And Cat thought there was a whole world in the difference between those two sentences, and how could she know how he tasted and what his laughter felt like before it happened and not know what that was?

He shifted to look down at Cat and there was a glint in his dark eyes she didn’t understand. It made her shiver. It made her wonder. “What do you say, Cat? You want to make this thing legal?”

Once again, everything inside of her… stopped.

She tilted her head back to look at him, aware that in the periphery of her vision, her family was reacting to what Wilder had said—but she didn’t care about that.

What she cared about was what he’d said.

And there was a part of her—a large part of her—that wanted nothing more than to shriek with joy and toss herself in his arms and start planning a wedding before he could take it back. Cat was aware this was not, maybe, the healthiest response.

But there were only so many ways to handle a skittish man, and the primary one, as far as she could tell, was the one he’d been holding over her head this whole time.

Maybe marrying him would change his mind on that.

He gazed back down at her, and there was thatglint.

And she couldn’t forget that she was a Lisle and he was a Carey. That her brothers had questioned his honor and he was claiming it.

There was a part of her that had to believe that this was a bluff.

But the joke was on him.

---