Page 9 of Bad Cowboy, Tennessee

I looked across the field toward my parents’ place again. I could make out one window upstairs glowing in the night, which was the guest room, where my sister Lily was staying for the next few weeks.With this man, apparently.

She’d mentioned that her boyfriend was a rancher from Montana, but I’d never met a rancher like him before.

Why did he know how to restrain me like a professional fighter?

Why did he seemgladthat I’d bitten him?

I needed to have a talk with Lily. Not that she ever listened to any cautionary things I said.

Draven’s expression was cold now, like he’d gotten bored of me now that I wasn’t posing a challenge to him. He frowned, his eyes scanning over me like I was just an obstacle, dark lashes flicking down and then back up again.

Now he was all business.

“Someone breaking in wouldn’t use the front door,” he said, his voice cold and clinical now. “They’d use that wide openwindow by the kitchen. You should know that, if you have a stalker. Now can you spare a bottle of that whiskey on your breath?”

I turned and went back inside at a fast clip, my bare feet pounding on the hardwood floors. I headed for my collection of liquor and closed my hand around the glass neck of a bottle of Glenfiddich Gran Reserva, the best bottle of scotch whiskey I owned. It had been a present from Kane on my last birthday, but I didn’t care right now.

Anything to get Draven thefuckout of here.

When I turned back, he was inside, waiting right by the front door. His arms were crossed, and his hat was on.

He looked even taller, inside the barn. Imposing. Like some sort of dark cowboy prince.

My chest tightened. Having him in here felt like having a live bomb inside my home with me.

Apparently he could sense my reaction as I shoved the whiskey bottle at him. He took it without looking, then spoke.

“Scared of me?”

“Just want you gone.”

His gaze was like green fire again. “I told you. If I came here to hurt you, it would have already happened. If I came here to fuck you, you would be bent over outside on your porch right now, and my cock would be shoved so deep inside you that you’d be saying my name like aprayeruntil I stuffed my fingers in your mouth to make you stop.”

Heat flooded my body. I almost felt dizzy. My cock started to harden now, some sick reaction to the intense adrenaline that had been surging through me all night.

I wasn’t turned on. Not a fucking chance in hell.

Or maybe that was a lie, a thought I wished I could believe.

But apparently my body responded in strange ways when I was full of one single, pure, burning fuckinginfernoof certainty:

I am never, ever going to let you under my skin, because I can tell it’s exactly what you want.

That was the only true power I had over a man like him.

Denial.

He was in Bestens. The town I loved so much. On my family’s property, in my barn. And he’d have to kill me before I let him ruin a single one of those things for me.

“Just take my whiskey and go,” I told him, keeping my voice plain and steady. “You won’t hurt me, and you won’t fuck me. Got it.”

My heart still slammed in my chest as I watched him walk through the open front door.

He turned back and met my eyes from under the brim of his hat.

“I never said Iwon’t,” he told me, his eyes flicking downward and widening a little, a satisfied look landing on his face. “Might want to change the sweatpants, by the way.”

I tore my gaze away from him, looking down to see that the outline of my hard cock was obvious through my light grey sweatpants.

---