Page 30 of The Cowboy's Best Friend

“Not Boone,” Ramona agreed, shooting a quelling look Cat’s way. “But I didwitnessBoone as he went about his romantic life.”

Sierra was stunned. “Boone has a romantic life?”

“Oh myGod,” Cat murmured to her beer.

Ramona fixed her cool blue gaze on Sierra. “I thinkromanticmight be a euphemism. Here’s what I know. He’s not available. He doesn’t do relationships. For all intents and purposes, he’s off the market, so the women who end up with him first have to chase him to make it clear they’re interested. When they do, and they always do, he lays out his laws.”

“He haslaws?”

“Sierra,” Cat said then. “This was news to me too, but the fact is, Boone will only sleep with women who are crystal clear that nothing will ever come of it. He doesn’t do repeats. And he is…” She trailed off.

“He was once described to me as a nuclear bomb,” Ramona said, almost kindly. “By a shellshocked survivor of the night with him. That’s all I’ll say. I don’t doubt that he can be sweet and kind and gentle, but he’s nomonk.”

“He’s deafly not celibate,” Cat threw in there, in case Sierra wasn’t getting this message. “And even if you wanted to believe that every woman around here is lying about him, I assure you that Wilder is not. Remember, all those brothers were single, together, and in the same pool for a long time. According to Wilder, Boone was a wrecking ball.”

Sierra shook her head and found herself laughing a little bit. “I feel like you’re talking about a complete stranger. This is the wildest conversation I’ve ever had.”

“Listen,” Cat said, “he’s not the one todateeither way. But if you feel like you haven’t blown your life up enough, who knows? Maybe a patented nuclear experience will blow it back up—but in the right direction.”

A topic she did not veer from much when Sierra drove her home.

She pulled down Wilder’s private drive a bit farther up the hill from Boone’s. And when she pulled up in front of his house, he was already waiting there on the porch, his mouth in an indulgent curve and a gleaming light in his eyes.

“I’m not drunk,” Cat told him. “I conducted myself as befits a lady, I assure you.”

“That’s a pity,” Wilder drawled. “I’ll have to do something about that immediately.”

He nodded Sierra. She waved back. And she saw them wrapped up in each other’s arms, kissing on the front porch like teenagers, as she drove away.

She really should have headed straight back to her farmhouse. There was too much bubbling around inside of her, and she felt…

It took a minute, but she realized that what she really felt wasangry.

Had Boone really had a secret life all this time? Her life and always been wide open to him. She was an open book. There was nothing he didn’t know about her, up to and including the sad state of her marriage.

Sure, maybe he didn’t know the details of every single mean thing Matty had ever said, but he knew the general shape of it all. And meanwhile he was wandering around Montana behaving like anuclear bomb? Whatever the hellthatmeant?

She couldn’t reconcile it in her head. It was like thatthunderingvoice he’d used down at the base of Copper Mountain was shaking her apart from the inside out and she couldn’t understand why her reaction to this news was so…physical.

She felt shaky everywhere. It was like her own limbs were trying to peel themselves off their own bones, and it was like shehurt, except she also couldn’t breathe right—

Sierra didn’t feel that she had any choice but to pull up to Boone’s house instead of hers.

She walked up to the porch and put her hand on his door, and for the first time ever she actually wondered if it would be open to her. But she had other questions, too, and they were coming at her fast, now. Like how and where was he performing all thesewrecking ballacts when he had always been so available to her? Night and day?

And why was he so dead set against relationships anyway?

She opened the door, was more relieved than she wanted to admit that it wasn’t locked, and walked inside.

Boone was where he always was, sitting there reading one of his books. There was nothing the least bit out of the ordinary here. There was nothing that suggested he was so sexually intense that the women who’d been with him considered themselvessurvivorsofwrecking ball nuclear attacks.

Once again, she felt something like dizzy. All these glimpses she’d seen a different Boone, and then everything that she heard tonight on top of it—it was impossible to find any solid ground.

“Everyone thinks I should date,” she told him.

She watched him closely, so she saw the way he swallowed. She thought he took a breath, long and slow, before he turned his head to look at her.

“Seems like a normal thing to do after divorce,” he said, and he sounded… exactly the way he always did. Measured. Calm. Safe.

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