Page 8 of Cowboy Bear's Hope

One kiss did not a relationship make, and even though I thought it was pretty nice—and by that I meant earth shattering—Dante clearly did not feel the same.

I was much better off having shoved the confounded man into the friend-zone where my desire for him should hopefully die a quick death.

Only, it wasn’t working.

I still dreamed about him. Still pictured him when I used my little personal massager in the dark of night when I was all alone in my bed.

Shit.

The bell rang, its sharp, familiar tone echoing down the hallways and signaling the countdown: two more hours to go.

I let out a slow breath, reminding myself that I could get through it.

Most days, being a school nurse was fulfilling.

The small victories kept me going—patching up scraped knees, soothing anxious students, and occasionally being the only adult who really listened to a kid in need.

But today wasn’t most days.

After Mr. Dryden’s little revelation about talking with Rosie, my mood had taken a nosedive.

Time crawled, and I was still reeling from that jerk’s words.

No father at home.

What did Dryden, or anyone else for that matter, know about mine or Rosie’s lives?

I never knew much about the man who’d fathered her. He wasn’t exactly my boyfriend or anything.

Just a guy I had a one-night stand with that resulted in me getting pregnant at just twenty-three years old.

That kind of thing happened a lot, right?

It didn’t make me a bad person. I wasn’t a tramp or easy or whatever else it was my own parents had said when I’d told them the news.

It took a long time for me to get over their rejection, but I was fine with it now. We didn’t need that kind of negativity.

My parents had no part in mine or Rosie’s life. Neither would anyone who talked down to me or my child.

Screw anyone who thought they had the right to that.

Her father was supposed to be just a one night stand. He’d been passing through town. Just another cowboy competing on the Northeastern circuit.

I’d seen him before. We’d flirted whenever he came to our own little Cow Country Rodeo. That year he’d been through a few times.

His name was Nicky Crowden.

He’d been big and handsome with the same crooked grin my Rosie had.

No, I didn’t regret a single minute of the night we’d shared for one simple fact. He gave me her.

Nicky showed up about two months after she was born. And again when she had her first birthday. That was when he’d cleaned out the emergency funds coffee can I’d kept in my kitchen on top of the fridge.

I’d had about six hundred dollars saved at the time and had been planning on using it to start a college fund for Rosie.

After that, I never heard from him again. And that was still too soon for me.

The bastard.

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