Page 4 of Her Steamy Cowboy

She looks up, her hands stilling on the dustpan. “Yeah?”

The words are right there, pressing against my chest. All I’d have to do is open my mouth and let them spill out. But it’s clear that she’s already made her choice.

And it’s not me.

I clear my throat. “Be careful with that ladder.”

Something flickers across her face – disappointment maybe? – but it’s gone so fast I think I must have imagined it. She brushes hair behind her ear.

“Always am, cowboy.”

Chapter Two

LINDSAY

“I don’t understandwhy you don’t just tell Jace the truth,” my best friend Rachel says, stirring her martini with deliberate slowness.

The olive bounces against the glass with each rotation, creating a soft clinking sound that somehow manages to irritate me more than the actual words coming out of her mouth.

I take a long sip of my whiskey sour, letting the tartness linger on my tongue before I answer. “You know why.”

“No, actually, I don’t.” Rachel leans forward, her dark curls falling over her shoulders. “Please enlighten me.”

I trace my finger through the condensation on my glass and sigh.

Rachel and I are sitting in a corner booth at a local bar, the Pitcher’s Brew. The bar’s regular crowd mills around us—a mix of ranch hands and office workers trying to make the weird limbo between Christmas and New Year’s feel less empty. Country music plays softly in the background, some sad song about lost love that feels a little too on the nose right now.

“It wasn’t exactly a lie,” I reply weakly. “I do have plans.”

“Meeting your father for the first time in ten years isn’t just ‘plans,’ Lindsay.” Rachel’s vintage cat-eye glasses slip down hernose as she fixes me with that look—the one that says she’s not letting this go. “And you know that’s not what Jace thinks you meant. He probably thinks you’re going on some hot date, which we both know isn’t true. So why not just tell him the real reason?”

“Because I can’t. I’ve been trying to figure out how, but...” I take another sip of my drink, needing the burn of alcohol to continue. “How do you tell someone you’ve lied about your family for ten years? That you’re the daughter of a convicted felon who just got out of prison?”

The lies started the summer I turned fourteen, right after my dad went to prison for armed robbery. Mom and I packed up everything we owned and moved to Cooper Hills to start over.

New town, new school, new story—and telling everyone I’d never known my dad felt simpler than admitting the truth. I was just a kid, desperate to be anyone other than the girl whose father was locked up.

“Lindsay.” Rachel’s voice softens. “Your dad made his choices. You didn’t. Jace isn’t the type of guy to hold that against you.”

“You don’t know the Claytons like I do,” I reply. “Jace’s family is like something out of a Hallmark movie—four hot, perfect cowboy brothers running their family’s ranch, hosting Sunday brunches where everyone says grace and talks about their blessings.”

“So what’s your plan? Never tell him? Keep making up mysterious dates every time he invites you somewhere?”

I groan, remembering the hurt that flashed in Jace’s eyes when I told him I was “meeting someone” on New Year’s Eve.

“I just... I need more time. Dad just got out, and I haven’t seen him in so long. I don’t even know who he is anymore, or who I am around him.” My voice catches slightly. “Can’t I figure that out first, before I complicate everything with Jace?”

“Lindsay, is all of this really about your dad? Or is this about the other thing?”

I shift in my seat, knowing exactly what she means.

I’ve been crushing on Jace since the day I moved to Cooper Hills. But we’ve never been more than friends.

Sure, there have been moments—long looks across crowded rooms, late-night conversations on the ranch’s front porch, his hand lingering just a second too long when he helps me down from his truck. But neither of us has ever crossed that invisible line, and I tell myself it’s better this way.

Safer.

But ever since I moved back and Jace hired me as the ranch’s marketing coordinator, there’s been this... something between us.

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