Page 6 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

But there was noise from behind them as the door to the bar swung open and a group of loud, bleary-eyed folks poured out onto the street, hooting and hollering enough that Wilder took it upon himself to shift them once more. He steered her down the block a ways and stopped when he could maneuver her back toward the door of the tattoo shop, into the entryway alcove and out of the flow of any further traffic that might come down the sidewalk.

And he wasn’t too proud to block the exit, too. Just in case she got any bright ideas.

“What?”Cat demanded. She crossed her arms over her chest, which did not improve Wilder’s mood any, because all these good intentions on his part did not keep him from noticing her. In all the wrong ways. “You keep staring at me like you expect me to bare my soul. Why would I do that? See again how we’re not friends, we’re not even friend-ly, there’s a whole Wild West blood feud, it’s none of your business anyway, the list goes on and on.”

“Consider this a toll,” he suggested. “Like it or not, you’re going to have to pay it if you want to walk away.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s illegal. This not actually being theWildWest any longer.”

“By all means, call the sheriff.” Wilder laughed. “Better yet, call Atticus. I’m sure he’d be only too happy to come all the way down the mountain with his deputy star pinned to his chest, so you can explain to him what it is that you object to about what’s going on here. And thenhecan take you back home to your brothers and you can all explain it to them, too. In fact, I’ll call him right now myself.”

He watched her fume at that, as expected. Atticus Wayne was a deputy of the Crawford County Sheriff’s Department. The actual sheriff was here in Marietta, but Cowboy Point was remote enough and sometimes inaccessible enough that Atticus operated fairly independently—especially in the dark of winter.

But the key point was that the deputy sheriff of Cowboy Point maintained excellent relationships with all the business owners around, which included the Lisle brothers. He also wasn’t opposed to a drink or two at the Copper Mine when he was off duty, and was friends with them, too. He was also friends with Wilder and all four of Wilder’s brothers, but he figured Cat knew that already. No need to rub it in.

Involving Atticus was not likely to help Cat any.

He was pretty sure he could see her come to that conclusion herself.

“What do you want?” she asked, and her blue eyes seemed more shadowy, then.

“I told you what I want. Tell me what the hell you think you’re doing.”

“Looks like I’m out here doing the exact same thing you’re doing, Wilder. You should be able to recognize it when you see it.”

He leaned in then, and wasn’t that he forgot that his back was to the street and all of Marietta, but he couldn’t seem to focus on anything but the woman in front of him. “Chances are, the worst thing that’s going to happen to me on a night out is that I sleep in my truck and wake up with a headache. The same can’t be said for a pretty girl like you, Cat. That’s just reality.”

She blinked at that as if he had said something astonishing instead of purely factual, but then she blew out a breath.

“You’re not going to understand,” she told him after a moment. “Because you’re not a girl. You don’t have two completely overbearing older brothers.”

“I just have the one,” he agreed. He thought of Harlan, who was about as steadfast and dependable as they came, though he would never say thattoHarlan. He preferred to give his older brother a hard time, as was his right. “But the really annoying thing about Harlan is that he’s usually right.”

Cat sighed. “Tennessee and Dallas are medieval. They know what they got up to when they were in high school, so they made sure that no one ever dreamed of getting up to that with me. They didn’t ask me whatIwanted, naturally.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “I thought when I graduated that they’d acknowledge that I was all grown up, but no. They didn’t. They haven’t. Absolutely nothing changes, year after year.” There was that fire in her blue eyes again, then. “They scare off anyone who strays too close to me. And maybe I could see their point when I was a teenager. But I’m not a teenager anymore. I’m twenty-four and half the girls I went to high school with have their own families by now.Istill have my childhood bedroom. I work in the store with my mother. And I live in the same tiny postage stamp of a town where everybody knows me and I can never, ever do anything unless I want someone picking up the phone and telling my brothers about it. Immediately.”

Wilder eyed her. “What is it that you want to do?”

She threw out her arms in a gesture of pure exasperation. “I don’t even know. That’s the point. Maybe I want to get ridiculously drunk and have one-night stands I’ll regret bitterly in the morning. Maybe I want to drink tequila and dance on table tops and make a fool of myself, so that everyone whispers about me when they see me coming.”

“I don’t think you want any of that.”

“Maybe I do.” She dropped her arms. “Or maybe I just want the opportunity to make my own mistakes, learn something from them, and grow. Or cry. Or move to a beach somewhere and do restorative yoga. Or do whatever the hell it is people do when they’re actually allowed to have their own life experiences.”

Wilder was of the opinion that life came looking for a person and not the other way around, but he didn’t tell her that. She was too worked up.

And she didn’t think she’d like it if he told her that the flush on her cheeks made her even prettier. An observation that was a simple fact, that was all.

“Tonight all I really wanted was to dance a little bit with an exciting man, have a drink, get too close. See if I liked his hands on me. I don’t know.” Cat blew out a breath that was closer to a groan. “What do you come to the Wolf Den for?”

“Whiskey,” he told her flatly. “And loose women.”

“Maybe I’m a loose woman,” she countered. “How would I know if I’ve never had the opportunity to… loosen?”

Wilder shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Iknowthat I don’t,” she threw at him. “I’m sitting around, waiting for my life to begin, but it’s not going to. Nothing’s going to change if I don’t change. And I’m tired of being good. I’m tired of being told who I am, what my personality is, and what my life is going to look like. I’m sure that when they feel ready, Tennessee and Dallas will rustle up some inoffensive, bland little man that they’re confident they can dominate, and present me to him like a prize. When maybe I don’t want to get married at all. Maybe I don’t think a man who would kowtow to my brothers is particularly attractive.” She threw her hands in the air again. “Nobody knows, because I’ve never had the opportunity to experiment with any of this.”

“And you think that getting cozy with some creep in fake leather in a dive bar is going to be the gateway to the brand-new you, is that it?”

---