Page 80 of The Cowboy Comes Home

She hadn’t been paying enough attention, so didn’t realize that they’d actually arrived at the pool. But she barely looked at the inviting water, because she’d also spotted that flashy, cranky pinto, ground-tied near the edge.

He was here. Nic had been right when she’d suggested she check here first. She let out a sigh of relief and slowed the borrowed horse to a halt. She wondered where Tucker was. He couldn’t be far if Splatter was here.

Lobo made that sound again, only now he was on his feet instead of sitting at the edge of the water. He looked ready to launch himself into the pool, his gaze fixed on something…

She let out a gasp when she spotted, over near the small cataract of water, something floating. A man.

Face down.

The gasp became a scream of his name, and she raced into the water. It was too shallow to really drown in for someone his size, but he could have hit his head, he could have—

He moved.

She stopped dead a yard away as he rolled over and scrambled to his feet. The water now came barely above the knees on his six-foot frame.

His naked six-foot frame.

He stood staring at her. She stared back, unable not to when confronted with the body she had stroked inch by gorgeous inch, now wet and glistening in the Texas sun. And suddenly the sun wasn’t the only thing overheating.

It was a long moment before she managed to speak. Or try to.

“I saw… You were face down, floating, and I thought… I was afraid you were…”

Understanding dawned on his face. “Now you know how I felt,” he said quietly.

And then she was in his arms, headless of the fact that her clothes were getting wetter by the moment.

“I’m sorry, Tucker. I’ve done nothing but think about it since…you left, and I realize I never looked at it from your side closely enough. I just knew how I felt, that nothing really bad would happen. Because it’s Last Stand, and we see to our own. What I should have learned the other night is that it could, and going in with the assumption it wouldn’t, could actually make it more possible.”

She felt him let out a compressed breath that was almost a chuckle as she pressed her cheek against his naked chest. “I think I almost understood that.”

He was holding her, but she couldn’t tell if it was because he wanted to or because she’d practically thrown herself at him.

A short, yipping bark came from right beside them. She looked down to see Lobo looking up at them, standing in a spot deep enough that he had to hold his head up high to keep it out of the water.

“Well, you sound happier than you did a minute ago,” she said to the dog.

“I thought I heard something, but my head was under and I—”

Emily’s gaze snapped back to his face. “Yes, it was. What were you doing? You scared me to death.”

“So now we’re even?” he suggested.

She liked that he was even joking about it, but the memory of that heart-stopping moment when she’d thought the worst overpowered it.

“Maybe. If you tell me what that was about.”

He shrugged, drawing her gaze to those powerful shoulders, already dry from the sun. “It’s just something I used to do…after I got hurt. Holding my breath, trying to go longer each time, to be sure my lungs were still working right.”

Of all the things she would have thought of, that wasn’t one of them, but it made sense.

“I thought you might have slipped on those wet rocks and hit your head.”

“Didn’t think I drowned my sorrows, huh?”

She went still, very still, because it had flitted through her mind. And been dismissed just as quickly. “You’re too strong a man for that, Tucker Culhane. You’d never take the easy way out.”

“That night…the night I left…I didn’t feel that way.”

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