Page 26 of Cowboy's Christmas Wife

Daryl shook his head. “I don’t want it to be,” he admitted.

Laura smiled and curled into him. “Okay,” she said. “I should probably head back to my room soon.”

He checked the baby monitor and showed Laura: Lily was fast asleep. “Do you need to run just yet?”

“I guess not,” she said. “Did you have something in mind for us to do?”

Daryl pushed himself above her, waggling his eyebrows at her. “I can certainly think of something,” he said, and she could feel him against her hip, already hard again.

Laura let out a chuckle. “Oh, I think I can feel that something now.”

“Fancy that,” he said and kissed her.

FIFTEEN

“Stupid shit,” Laura grunted as she tried to get a bolt off the toilet so that she could move it. When she and Daryl were there the other day, she’d noticed that it kept running, so she thought she’d try to figure out what the problem was today. She’d started by flushing it to see what would happen.Bigmistake. It overflowed, flooding the bathroom. From searching online, it sounded as if there was some kind of leak, and the recommendation was that she move the toilet to see if the pipe had a hole in it or something. She had been trying for hours to get the bolt off, but it felt like it was welded on tight. She had considered getting a bolt cutter and just replacing the whole thing. In frustration, she kicked at the toilet, but besides a pain that radiated up her leg, the toilet did not move. Laura let out a little scream of frustration.

“Laura? Are you okay?” Daryl called. He appeared in the doorway, clearly concerned. Her frustration waivered at the sight of him: they had stayed in his bed until the wee hours of the morning, and while she was tired from getting up early with Lily, she couldn’t regret the hours she spent with him. She could practically still feel his hands on her body.

“Oh, um, what are you doing here?” she said, trying to play it cool. Although, now that she was thinking about it, whatwashe doing here? She’d told him that she’d planned to come today, he’d been the one to suggest that she call Georgina about babysitting Lily again, but he hadn’t said anything about coming to meet her.

“I had to come into town to get some supplies, and I saw your car here. I thought I’d see if you wanted to grab lunch together before I head back to the ranch. Are…are you okay?”

“The toilet is stuck,” she said, feeling a little embarrassed. It seemed like such a small thing to have her so rattled—but she’d been fighting with it for ages and had made zero progress so far. It was pretty discouraging. The house still needed a ton of work, and with the hearing coming up, she wanted to be ready to move back in, but she was starting to doubt her ability to handle it all herself with just determination and YouTube tutorials.

“Want me to take a look?” he asked.

She didn’t—she wanted to be able to do this on her own—but she needed him to look at it. She couldn’t have the toilet backed up every other flush. And if there was a serious problem with the pipe, she needed to know sooner rather than later. “Yeah,” she said and stood.

He moved passed her, and the heat of his body seemed to seep into her. Laura wanted to roll in that heat. Daryl fiddled with the flusher for a moment, looked at the mess she’d made of trying to get the bolt off, and made a noise. “I’ll be right back,” he said and rushed out of the room.

A few moments later—long enough for her to try again to get the bolt off and think about kicking the stupid toilet again when she failed to do so—Daryl came back in with a drain snake. “But the bolt—” she started, but Daryl reached over and got the bolt turning with what looked like very little effort. Frustration and a bitter anger blossomed in her chest. She had been working on doing that for the last two hours.

“You loosened it up,” he said, looking back at her. He was trying to humor her, maybe even comfort her, but it rang hollow to her.

Laura snorted. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “Just get on with it, okay? I’d like to be able to use this toilet when Lily and I move back in.”

His face twisted, and she was abruptly aware of how rude that sounded—as if she couldn’t wait to get away from the ranch when nothing could be further from the truth.God, I can be a bitch, she thought with a sad sigh. “Sure thing,” he said.He doesn’t deserve my attitude; not when he’s being so nice. She watched as he moved the toilet to the side and snaked the drain, and she choked when he fished out a sodden teddy bear. The smell coming off the bear was horrific, and she quickly grabbed a bag for him to throw it into. After taking the bear outside, they both scoured their hands in hot water with lots of soap. Twice.

“How did that even get down there?” Laura asked and handed him a paper towel.

Daryl winced as he dried his hands. “It was probably a kid of a renter that flushed it. Use the plunger to move it slightly, and it fixes the problem for a little bit. They probably didn’t think to tell anyone.”

“Or they didn’t care,” Laura added.

He nodded. “Or that,” he said.

Laura had never hated Clark more than in this moment, not even through the spectacle that their divorce had become.If he’d cared even the smallest bit, this wouldn’t have happened, she thought. “Clark didn’t care enough to check on the house,” she told him bitterly. “He told me that he had it covered, that he would take care of it and that everything would be fine, and I’m such a moron that I believed him.”

“You’re not a moron,” Daryl said. “Your husband told you that he would take care of something; how could you have known that he was a lying piece of shit?”

His soft, comforting words did nothing to make her feel better. “Ishouldhave known,” she insisted, “or I should have insisted on looking after things myself. The house is in my name; it’s not tied up in the trust, but I turned it over to him anyway.” Tears stung behind her eyes, and she rubbed at them in an attempt to make the tears go away.

Daryl reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “You trusted the man you married,” he said. “I’m new to this marriage thing, but I think that trusting your spouse is supposed to be a given, right?”

Laura sighed and rubbed at her eyes again. “I never trusted him.”

“What?”

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