Page 26 of Take Me Away, Cowboy

“Is that going to be weird for you? I’m not interested in her like that,” Owen said. But as the words came out of his mouth, words he hadn’t uttered since high school, they rang untrue. An image of Paige coming to the door in pajamas that didn’t leave much to the imagination came to his mind, and he couldn’t shake it. Brad didn’t seem to care.

“You can be—that wouldn’t be weird. She’s my kid sister, but she’s an adult. A well-traveled adult, I might add. She can take care of herself.”

“That’s the impression I got,” Owen countered. He drank long and steadily from his beer, the bubbles sliding down his throat, cool and welcome.

“That’s also the problem. She’s been taking care of herself for so long now that I don’t remember the last time she let anyone get close enough to really know her. The closest she got is probably her ex, but that dipshit didn’t get in, not for real, or he never would have left her.”

“What happened there?” Owen asked. He took another sip, hiding his curiosity behind the glass. The more they talked about Paige, the more insatiable he became in all things related to her. He didn’t know where the compulsion came from, only that it seemed a good idea to pursue it.

“Rich, powerful admin for Docs Without Borders. They dated for a bit, then he cheated on her. She took him back when he promised he was sorry, that it was a one-time thing, even though all of us were ready to hang the guy by his groin off a ledge. Turns out the only thing he was sorry about was having to choose between the two women. He’d been playing them both, apparently, and Paige took it pretty hard. She said she loved him, but the more I find out about the guy, the less I believe she actually did. I find it a moral impossibility, someone like her falling for him.”

Owen let that roll around for a bit. He didn’t know Paige well, but was certain without a shadow of a doubt that the ex was an idiot, and worse, for thinking he could pull a stunt like that with a woman like her. A doctor living with almost no pay in a foreign country to take care of sick kids? Not a chance. Someone like that was a rare gem you didn’t just discard for a chunk of fool’s gold no matter how appealing a chunk it might be.

“Jesus,” was all he could get out.

Luckily, their burgers arrived, making it easy to think while they added ketchup, mayo, and Owen added some fries to the sandwich.

His mouth salivated as he inhaled the smell of the medium-rare meat and the cheese that sizzled on top of it. He’d eaten half a pound of fried cheese but found that he was still ravenous. Farming was proving to be a nice excuse for eating whatever he wanted.

“Yeah. Don’t tell her we talked about this, though,” Brad said with a full bite of the burger in his mouth. “She hates him right now, for good reason, and doesn’t like anyone to know how much the schmuck got to her.”

Owen mimed zipping up his lips and tossing the key and made sure he kept the silent promise by taking a quarter of the burger out with one chomp.

“Moral of the story, though, is be careful. I like having a guy my age I don’t want to punch in the face to grab beers with, so I don’t want to see you get hurt. She’s leaving in a week, and I know from cleaning up the wreckage more than once she tends to leave a trail of broken hearts in her wake.”

Owen nodded, his mouth empty, but his mind full. He heard every word Brad said, trusted that the guy had pretty good insight into his own sister’s psyche. Still, he wasn’t warned off the way he would have been if he’d been given the same “hold off” speech about anyone else. He wouldn’t admit it to Brad, but the unspoken challenge in her brother’s warning was an added edge to Owen’s need to be close to Paige. As he picked at his fries and Brad moved on to talking about his incomplete novel—he was stuck on the protagonist, trying to find a way to make her stand out off the page, something to make her three dimensional—Owen’s thoughts drifted to his day so far.

It was barely noon and he’d had breakfast, found the wrath of mother nature via black bear, seen the woman he was interested in just out of bed, fixed the fence, had a damn good meal at a place he’d have flown by if Brad hadn’t suggested it.

Which led to Paige. He’d planned on getting her attention a little later that morning, enticing her with coffee and conversation, and asking her to hit the trails with him.

Brad rubbed his stomach with a contented smile on his face as Owen settled the bill. Well, there was no reason he couldn’t pick up with his original plans for the day a little later than he’d first hoped.

“I devoured a crap ton of mysteries between missions, so I’d be happy to give you my thoughts on the female lead.”

“I’d like that,” Brad said, standing and arching his back in a satisfied stretch with a moan to match. “Tell Paige I said hi, and I’ll see her on Sunday for the family dinner,” Brad added, saluting Owen with a knowing grin as if he’d read Owen’s thoughts about his plans for the afternoon.

Owen smiled and got in his truck. After a huge lunch and two tall beers, preceded by hard, manual labor, he normally would have racked out when he got home, maybe followed the nap with a couple more beers. Now, though, his pulse quickened as each mile brought him closer to home, and to Paige.

Somehow, the wordshomeandPaigegave him the same feeling. One thing was certain—if the bear didn’t get the best of Owen, he was pretty sure what would.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Ride

When he pulleddown his drive, she was the first thing he clapped eyes on. In a small, thin, white tank top and a snug pair of jeans, tan cowboy boots that looked like they’d seen a hard day’s work, and a ball cap rounding out the all-business look, his pulse didn’t just quicken, it raced like a mare in heat.

Somehow, she looked as at home in her element there, squatting with a dowel in one hand, a bag of mulch next to the other, as she did in the pictures in her apartment—on the beach, bikini-laden, tanned like a local.

She dug two long, skinny but shallow trenches parallel to each other. Seamlessly, she began transferring seeds from a pouch she pulled from her back pocket—where they hid in those painted-on jeans, he left to his imagination—to the trenches, covering them with mulch from the bag. She walked both rows repeating the same process, and he was mesmerized.

Her hands must do so many more complicated tasks with her profession being what it was, but right then, he couldn’t imagine a more perfect use of them.

Well, dammit, actually he could, but thoughts of what that might be made him blush and stumble where he stood at the corner of their properties. He let out a “whoa” as he lost his footing, and flushed an even brighter shade of crimson when Paige looked over.

She scowled; her lips twisted into a knot. The “I’m-mad-at-you” pose she attempted looked much cuter on her this time around than it had that morning. Her hands were filthy, so she settled for folding them back, resting her wrists on her hips instead. Owen fought a smile, biting the inside of his cheek to keep his lips from betraying him.

“I see you did pack shirts in the move, after all,” she quipped.

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