Page 10 of Claimed By the Cowboys

I take a deep breath and smile. “Hi, Dalton.”

He winks at me through the glass.

Dalton is still tall, but less tall than Brent. He’s muscled more subtly, but I know exactly how strong he is from watching him work with his horses. His brown hair, messy as always, falls into his eyes, and his lips quirk, dimples showing in the corners.

Dalton doesn’t smile often. But mostly he does… for me.

I smile back. “Just got off the phone with Blaire. She says hi.”

“I say hi back, and not just because she scares the shit out of me,” he jokes.

I roll my eyes as Dalton pulls open the driver’s side door. I hop down, taking the hand he offers to help me get out of the truck. The calluses on his palm are rough. And I can’t help but picture how they’d feel on my skin.

“Piper?” he asks. He looks at my hand, a little confusion fogging his gaze.

Oh. We’re still holding hands. Whoops. Clearly I got so stuck thinking about the darn calluses that I forgot to be a normal human.

I quickly pull my hand from his. “Sorry. Thinking about something Blaire said,” I lie.

Dalton nods his head, his normal somber expression settling in.

“Let’s get you inside,” he says. One of his big hands presses on the small of my back, and I shiver again at the heat there.

If Dalton has a reaction to that, he mercifully keeps his opinion to himself. I let him shepherd me up to the house, the whole time vividly aware of his hand on my back.

Yeah. I need to do something about this.

Egg qualityechoes in my mind, but I shut the thought down. What the heck is wrong with me? I’m a wreck.

Swearing off men is well and good. It’s not like I’m some kind of sex fiend. I just can’t help but feel like time is slipping by me as I do my whole man-reset thing. The nurse’s message rings in my mind, but I shake my head to get rid of it.

Choosing this isn’t bad. It’s a good thing, in the end, and it will lead to the right future, the one that I want. The one I can’t have with my friends, because I don’t want to ruin our friendship.

A vision of raising kids with the guys flashes into my mind. A vision that’sheavilyinfluenced by a thought of how it would go tocreatesaid kids with one of them. Or all of them.Whew.

I mean, maybe I’m ovulating or something. I don’t do birth control because it makes me feel crazy, but this might be worse. I never used to be a sex-crazed lunatic like this. But I think I need to spend some quality time with my battery-operated boyfriend, because for the second time today, one of myfriendsis making my mind go to very, very dirty places.

Places that I’m not going to go with them. Ever.

Because with my luck, I’ll lose all three of them if I do. And that outcome is way, way worse than being a little horny.

“Good lord, Tate. It smells incredible in here,” I call out as I step over the doorway.

“Piper! Give me a second!” he calls from the kitchen.

Dalton helps me with the light jacket I put on to combat the early summer post-sunset chill, and I don’t bother to wait. I head into the kitchen, ready to see what Tate is putting together. I stop at the threshold and just close my eyes.

“My god. Can chicken even smell that good?”

“They don’t call it marry-me chicken for nothing,” Tate says with a laugh in his voice.

I crack an eye open. “What are you trying to say?”

“Oh, nothing. It’s the chicken, not me.” He smirks.

Out of all three of them, Tate is the most openly flirtatious. Sometimes I overthink what his actions mean, because they’re… kind of a lot. But it is also his personality. Tate’s never met a stranger, so I try not to take it personally.

Like, he’s not flirtingwith me.He’s just flirting because he’s awake and breathing and that’s what he does as part of the whole process of being alive.

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