Page 20 of Ride Me Cowboy

Mack looks at me again and apparently heeds the warning in my eyes because she chooses her answer carefully. “I think it’s tougher than it looks.”

Beth’s shoulders dip slightly. She looks, for the briefest moment, crestfallen.

“You’re probably right,” she says, in a soft voice, with a polite smile, as she reaches for her wine, and my whole body seems to catch fire.

“We’re not talking about getting you to string fences,” I hear myself say. “You ever been on a horse, Beth?”

She turns to face me, and I see her slender throat shift as she swallows. Her eyes are swarming with feeling. Anxiety, uncertainty, gratitude. My gut rolls.

What the hell am I getting myself into?

She shakes her head. “Until I met Rowdy, I’d never even touched one.”

Beau lets out a low whistle. “What a deprived life you’ve led, Manhattan.”

The smile she flicks him is less complicated than the looks she gives me. And way more natural. The knot in my stomach tightens, and morphs into something else. Something I really don’t like. Because not once in my whole life have I felt jealous of my brother. Of any of them. We’re all the same in some ways, different in others, but we make it work.

But there’s something about the way Beau chats to Beth that looks so easy and effortless.

“I think you might be right.”

“Lucky for you, we can change that,” Beau’s saying. “If there’s one thing we’ve got plenty of at Coyote Creek Ranch it’s horses and saddles.”

“I’ll fall off,” she says.

“My brother here’s just about the best teacher in Arizona,” Beau says, turning to wink at me in a way that makes me want to throttle him. If he comes on too strong, she’ll run. I just know it.

Beth sips her wine, cheeks pink, looks at me and then away again. “I’ll think about it.”

“Make sure you do,” Beau presses, and I catch Mackenzie rolling her eyes before I take a long, necessary drink of my beer.

Chapter Seven

Beth

WHEN CHRISTOPHER WOULD DRINK, he would really, really drink, and I can’t tell you how much I hated that. Not just because he was a mean drunk, but because he’d reach a tipping point of wanting to sleep together, every time he was drunk, and the smell of his whisky breath and the weight of him on top of me turns my stomach when I remember it.

So even though I’ve had three glasses of wine over dinner—a delicious pulled pork and cornbread—I’m aware that Cole has sat on his second beer all night, taking a sip here and there, but otherwise maintaining an air of easy authority and control.

It’s a very sexy, reassuring trait. It makes me glad I changed my mind and decided to join them. I mean, I wasn’t going to. In fact, I was determined not to. But then, seeing him walk in here, that tight ass and jeans, his sexy, confident swagger, had me staring at the sign for The Silver Spur while I screwed up my confidence to actually come inside.

“You wanna give it a go?” Mack asks, and I realize I’m staring at the mechanical bull across the tavern.

I shake my head quickly. I’ve seen people getting on that thing all night, laughing their heads off before being thrown to the ground. I can’t think of anything worse. “I’m good,” I reassure her.

“It’s nothing like the real thing, anyway.”

I stare at Mack. “You’ve been on an actual bull?”

She laughs then, in that way she has, and I’m glad Cole warned me about her, because if I hadn’t been prepared for her acerbic manner, I might have been offended tonight. But it’s just Mackenzie. Like Cole said, she doesn’t mean anything by it. In fact, if anything, I kind of like her no bullshit approach to conversation. At least with Mackenzie, I know where I stand.

“We all have,” she says, and I hear the pride in her voice when she groups herself with these guys. The fact she’s one of them.

“No way,” I shake my head and shudder, looking around the table.

“It’s kind of a rite of passage in these parts,” Cole says, and my insides tighten.

When I arrived, there was one seat spare at their table. I don’t know if he’d left it for me, or if it was just happenstance, but it wasn’t near him, and all night, I’ve had this growing, insatiable wish that we were sitting together. I imagine our knees brushing underneath the table, and the fizz of warmth that would spread through me, or our hands bumping as we reached for drinks and ate our meals.

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