Page 28 of Cowboy Don't Go

“I won’t be making any more work for you,” Ray said. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

“It’s no trouble at all, Ray.” She looked flustered and flushed to Shay, but that seemed to have nothing to do with the early September heat. Sarah scrubbed her palms against her worn denims. “I’ll stop by later to make sure you’re all settled. If that’s all right.”

Ray nodded, finally meeting her eye after avoiding it for most of the conversation.

The two of them held each other’s gaze for a good ten seconds with some indefinable something going on before Sarah nodded and Ray and Cooper walked back to his new digs and closed the door. Shay definitely got the vibe that there was more going on between these two than met the eye. Literally.

“You didn’t mention that you knew Ray Lane,” Shay said after they’d gone back to the apartment.

“Didn’t I? We didn’t know each other well,” she said, still staring at the closed door. “Just acquaintances. But it was a long time ago.”

Sarah wandered back to the main house then, leaving Shay and Liam staring after her.

“What is up with that?” Liam asked.

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“Huh. Probably just our imagination that they seemed—”

“Right. No question. Just Mom being . . . Mom.”

As Sarah walked into the house, Liam and Shay exchanged knowing looks.

“Riii-ght,” they both agreed and went their separate ways.

*

It was late afternoon when Sarah knocked on the door to the apartment where Ray and Cooper were staying. Cooper was off working with Liam and everyone else had gone to town. When Ray answered, and saw her standing there, his hard façade crumbled.

“Sarah.”

“Hello, Ray. May I come in?”

He opened the door wider and let her in. They stood in awkward silence for a long moment before Ray gestured for her to sit on the comfy sofa near the electric fireplace.

They both spoke at once.

“You look—”

“You’re—”

“Sarah, I—”

Finally, Sarah took the lead. “I wanted to just say thank you for not saying anything about—”

“Us?” he finished.

“Yes,” she said. “About us, before we had the chance to talk.”

Ray rubbed his forehead. “Nothing really to tell, is there?”

The look she gave him belied that. But no one knew that better than him. “We never got the chance to talk after you were . . . arrested.”

“It was better that way,” he said. He didn’t really want to dig all this up again. There was no call to bring Sarah into this.

“Better for who?” she said. “I tried to visit you up there. Several times. I lied to Tom about where I was going. But they said you wouldn’t see me.”

“It needed to be over. We needed to be over. You had your family to think of. Nothing ever really happened, did it? Between us, I mean.”

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