Page 17 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

Though she parked a good two blocks away so at least she’d get a walk in.

With her frozen, outrageously sweet caution hand, she strolled back down whatever street, smiling at the shopkeepers who were just then starting to open their businesses. If Sage’s Chocolates had been open, Sierra was fairly certain she would have bought out the truffle section, but she was saved from her own gluttony because the best sweetshop in all the world was closed.

She realized as she walked back up the other side of the street that she felt… giddy, almost. Like a kid on spring break.

If it made her wonder what she’d been doing all this time that she—

“Sierra. There you are.”

The giddy feeling crashed down and disappeared as if it had never been.

She turned toward the street, slowly, and it felt almost as if she was in some kind of strange dream. Like maybe if she just pinched herself she would wake up and she would be in her cozy bed in Boone’s barn, tucked up beneath that marvelous skylight.

That she wouldn’t actually be turning around to look in the window of an extremely flashy Range Rover to see her husband’s face.

But there it was. Matty was right there.

She surreptitiously pinched herself, but nothing changed.

Matty was leaning out the window, looking at her with his patented brand ofquizzical concern. As if he couldn’t for the life of him understand what she was doing or why, but he wasdeterminedto be supportive all the same.

She couldn’t remember the last time it had been effective on her, but it wasn’tforher. It was for anyone watching them interact. Later, if they discussed this interaction, they would talk about howcaringhe was. Howworriedabout Sierra he was, howpossibly distraught, but sokindnonetheless.

Sierra realized that she couldn’t remember when it hadstoppedworking on her either, only that it had.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Mildly enough.

Sierra froze. She couldn’t think of anything to say, which was ridiculous, because she knew there were a thousand things she should say now. They were all right there, right on the tip of her tongue—

But her tongue always got so tangled around him.

“What are you drinking?” he asked, but it wasn’t a real question. He made a low, tutting sort of noise. “After all your hard work? Sierra. Make this make sense. I go away for the weekend and come back to you backsliding and… what? What is this?”

The sweet, frozen coffee drink in her hand felt like an anvil. She looked down at it, then at Matty again.

“I left you a note,” was all she could think to say.

She knew he’d seen it. She’d left it in the very center of the black, gleaming marble counter in the kitchen that he didn’t like to ever see with even the faintest hint of clutter. It would have been the first thing he saw.

“Sierra, get in the car,” Matty ordered her.

He still had a smile on his face, and he still would have sounded indulgent from fifty paces, but she knew that tone. He was impatient. She was irritating him. It was almost ten in the morning on a Monday and she knew that he had better things to be doing this time. After all, he had taken over his father’s financial services firm here in Marietta. He had clients who depended on him to spend his life connected to the stock market back east.

That Sierra was an imposition upon him was something he’d never been shy of making clear.

And yet, to her astonishment, her body was obeying him even her mind didn’t want to. It was the most amazing thing. Before she knew what she was doing, or could manage to stop it, she wandered over to the passage side, opened it up, and got inside.

“Please do not let that horrible concoction melt all over my leather interiors, Sierra,” Matty told her with no hint of a smile or thatindulgencenow that she was inside the vehicle. “In fact, why don’t you throw it out? You don’t need to be drinking it anyway.”

Sierra felt something like dazed as Matty turned to look at her. She thought the would start driving off and she had a whole—possibly hysterical—flash of him just… dropping her off at their house and her meekly shuffling back inside, as if nothing had happened. As if she’d simply gone away for the weekend the way he had.

Supposedly to a conference in Atlanta.

The strangest part was that she couldfeelhow easy it would be. She could see it. Neither one of them would ever mention this again. It would be like it had never happened. Matty would talk to her father and she would simply go back to work tomorrow, and everything would simply roll along the way it always had.

But then she took a deep breath, thought of the way Boone had looked at her on his porch last night, and remembered who she was.

“I don’t care if my drink melts all over your car,” she told him, and she liked how calm she sounded. How unbothered. “I put everything I needed to say in my note. I don’t know why you’re acting as if you didn’t read it.”

---