Page 36 of The Holiday Heartbreaker

That she couldn’t have that dream.

Even just for a night.

The idea of it made goose bumps rise up on her arms, and she rubbed at them, trying to make them go away.

She didn’t live the kind of life that made that possible. She wasn’t the kind of person it was possible for, anyway. At least, she didn’t think so.

“I’ll get out of your hair,” he said.

“Great.”

And now it was time for her first therapy session, a good reminder of why she was here. She wasn’t going to allow herself to get derailed.

CHAPTER SIX

HE HAD ALMOST made a move. Very close. But then he had taken a step back, looked at her, looked at himself, and asked himself what he was doing.

She wasn’t a bar girl. She wasn’t a woman out on the town, looking for a good time. In fact, she couldn’t have made it clearer she wasn’t looking for anything. She was also a complication. She lived at the ranch, she had a kid...

Well, for the first time in his life, he showed a little bit of restraint. So he supposed he should be proud of himself for that.

He wasn’t, though. He didn’t do “proud of himself.” It wasn’t in his wheelhouse.

He was facilitating things today, not working with any of the clients but making sure that everything was set up when it needed to be, that the horses were taken care of. It was easy work, honestly, and he found himself wishing that there was something physical he could labor over to alleviate whatever it was Elizabeth was doing to him.

But no matter how busy he tried to keep, accomplishing other things, he just kept running into her.

And he happened to be right outside the main barn when she pulled up with Benny, who roared out of the car with a huge grin on his face. “We went for a hike for school,” he said.

“Really?”

It was weird, having a kid be so happy to see him. To have the kid want to tell him about his day. He didn’t even know him. But then, he supposed he had hooked him up with a chance to play with army men last night. So maybe Benny was just a fan because of that.

“Yeah, it was so cool. We identified different mushrooms. And one of the older kids told me that there were bears in the woods.”

Elizabeth looked startled by that. “Bears?”

“There are bears in the city,” Brody said. “Surely you must have figured there would be some out in the woods.”

“Well. I don’t really like the idea of him hiking around with bears for school.”

“Doesn’t seem any more dangerous than a lot of the other things that you can find in schools these days,” he said.

She pulled her mouth into a line, and lifted a brow. She was going to go ahead and make her very best effort to not be charmed by him. Which just made him want to charm her. And he had just decided he wasn’t going to do that.

“It’s not as bad as I thought,” Benny said, as if he was making a grave admission to his mother.

“Well,” she said. “Good.”

“It’s fun to have older kids in the class. And the third-graders get to take care of the little first-graders. We made sure they stayed on the trail.”

He could remember those days. They didn’t have a teacher that was quite as nice as Tala Everett, in fact, she had been a pretty strict, old-school schoolmarm. But he’d liked his days in the schoolhouse. It had been a nice reprieve from the reality of his actual house.

He could remember being Benny’s age, and feeling proud of taking care of the little kids. And definitely not feeling like he was one of the little kids.

“Did anybody put a frog in the teacher’s desk today?”

Benny looked horrified by that. “Why would anyone do that?”

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