Page 31 of The Cowboy's Second Chance Bride

“Hello, dipshit. You just gonna sit there all day?” Sabrina asked.

I turned to find her standing by my seat. “Dipshit?”

“I tried all the names. Dipshit was the one that worked. Weird that.” She gestured to the front of the plane. “We’re here and ready to disembark. Where were you? Were you planning an escape? That you’d stay on and have your pilot fly you back to Seattle and bail on us?”

We’d taken my company jet, which seated sixteen and had sleeping quarters. Both the pilot and flight attendant were staring at me with smiles that asked questions more than projected kindness. They were stuck on board until I got off. I was holding everyone up.

How long was I in a fugue?

I quickly stood and immediately towered over Sabrina. “I doubt you used any other name to get my attention.”

“It’s your word against mine.” She turned on her heel and strode out of the plane. Dressed in figure-fitting dark jeans, a gauzy white blouse, and turquoise cowboy boots, she looked like a rich girl who’d grown up out West. Her long black hair was in a thick braid down her back, and I wanted to tug on it like a dumb middle schooler who didn’t know how to talk to girls so antagonized them instead.

I had single-handedly built a multimillion-dollar business in under ten years, and this leggy woman with a pink birthmark where her spine ended and her ass began had turned me into a dimwit. As I watched her ass sway seductively, I couldn’t burn away the memories of all the times I’d kissed said birthmark. I hoped this fake dating would kill me and put me out of my misery. I was in a paradoxical hell. I wanted to be around her and dreaded it at the same time.

I grunted in self-derision. “Dammit all,” I mumbled.

“What’s that?” she asked as she took the stairs down to the tarmac, glancing over her shoulder with a bewitching smile.

I caught a waft of her spicy perfume. My dick twitched. “I think I left something back at the office.”

I was so attracted to her it was stupid. I always had been, from the minute I’d seen her thirteen years ago at a party at some dumb frat house. And here she was, better than ever. God help me.

“You’re not at work, Cal. Forget about it.”

I wished I could. I really wished I could.

Paul was already across the tarmac of the private airport, where a large, black SUV was waiting for us. My mother had thought ahead. I opened the back cargo space and started throwing bags in. I needed to get to the ranch and away from everyone.

I was about to close the hatch when Sabrina grabbed my arm. “Wait. Let’s get a picture.” She spun me around so the airplane was behind us. And behind that were the mountains. She stood slightly in front of me but to my side and held out an arm to take a selfie.

She looked over her shoulder at me. “Get in the frame, Cal. All I can see is your big, dumb chest.”

“You think my chest is big?” I leaned over her shoulder.

“And dumb.” She smiled and took the shot. She studied it before giving a one-shoulder shrug. “It’ll have to do. I’ll hashtag it ‘getting my getaway on.’ Oh, look,” she said, opening up my app, ProtectedLove. We’d put the beta on our phones before making the trip. “Over a hundred people have signed up to test the app.” She tapped her screen. “And just like we asked, a bunch are from this area. That’s encouraging.”

She was thinking about the job, and here I was thinking about her body.

“Get in the car.” I gave her a nudge in the back to get her moving. But instead of going around to the right, she took the back seat directly behind the driver’s seat, where I was sitting.

“I can’t wait to see where you became you, Calvin,” she said.

Hard money on her kicking the back of my seat the entire hour drive to the ranch.

“I didn’t always live out here. I spent a lot of time in a boarding school, but this is where I came back to when I wasn’t in school and didn’t have to be with my parents.” Essentially, when I was allowed. I always had to downplay my love for the ranch because to like it meant my father would take it away.

In the three years we’d dated, I’d never once even thought to bring Sabrina here. I hadn’t wanted the ugliness of my homelife to touch her, and though the ranch was, for all intents and purposes, a happy place, it also served as a reminder of all the things I didn’t have and the thing every kid wanted—a happy, safe home. So in college, when we’d had a chance to go home, I’d always picked Sabrina’s Texas ranch, my other refuge.

I caught her eye in the rearview mirror. “My mom and sister live full time on the ranch.”

She nodded and didn’t ask any other questions, which surprised me. She’d never met my family except for the one time she met my dad. I’d explained about being estranged from my dad, and she’d accepted that with blind faith. I sometimes wondered how my life would have turned out had I married Sabrina in Vegas and my dad met her afterward. Would Dalton still have gone on the attack? Would he have come between us and broken down all we had?

“I contacted a very good friend of mine, a reporter out here.” She put a hand up to stop Paul. “I was off the record. I trust her immensely. I told her about the app, and she signed up. She said she’ll help with some press with whatever we need. Do a story if we want. She knows what’s up, and she suggested that she take pictures of the first date we select from the app. I don’t know if you’ve played around with the app, Cal, since we put in our info, but one suggestion was that we take out horses and go sightseeing, and I really liked that. It’s a great first date.”

“That’s a terrible first-date suggestion. That stranger could murder you,” I grumbled. Sure, there was truth to it being somewhat unsafe, but my reaction was more related to how quickly I wanted to do this.

“You’re not a stranger. That’s why the app suggested it. Whoever added the section to explain why the activity was being suggested was a genius.”

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