Page 58 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

He nudged his sister’s arm, and she pulled free from me. “I picked up a box of books last week at the used book store in town. Why don’t you get them settled into the library?”

Her eyes lit up. Damn. No wonder Jeremiah had won blood ball. Strategy sure as fuck wasn’t the parthewas missing.

“Is that okay?” she asked me hesitantly. “Do you mind?”

Like I was going to stand between her and anything that made her happy. I’d face a whole pack of demented, possessive brothers before I did that.

“I don’t mind.” I pecked her cheek and squeezed her arm. “I’ll come find you in a minute, okay?”

Hannah’s smile was like the sun coming up. It brightened everything in its path.

Totally worth it.

The beer hissedlike a sigh of relief as I popped the top open. I eased into one of the cedar Adirondack chairs that faced the fields and mountains and tried not to moan.

Jeremiah had taken a few hard hits himself, but he didn’t slouch or relax into the chair. Like Hannah, he seemed to believe the straighter the spine, the closer to heaven.

“You did better than we thought you would.” There was grudging respect in his tone as he tipped his beer back for a swallow.

“I lost,” I pointed out.

“Yeah. But we thought you would quit.”

I grunted. Tapping out of the game with Hannah’s eyes on me? Not an option. She didn’t care about shit like that, but I did. It didn’t matter that I knew down to my bones that I did not have a snowball’s chance in hell against an elite special forces team, I would go down fighting.

“So,” Jeremiah said, real casual like.

“So,” I said cautiously.

“What’s going on with you and my sister?”

My eyebrows went up. “That’s none of your business.”

“The fuck it’s not.” His tone remained pleasant despite his words. He reminded me of a rattlesnake giving a friendly warning with a shake of his tail before the strike.

The last thing I wanted to do was get into it with Hannah’s big brother, but this man was sorely in need of some boundaries, and I was going to lay them out for him.

I leaned forward. “You track her phone. She allows it, so it’s not my place to put a stop to it. But the relationship between her and me, that’s no one’s business but our own. She’s your sister, and I’ll grant you that her past earns you the right to enquire after her health and well-being. But you need to be asking Hannah those questions, not me. I don’t speak for her.”

He considered me with a tilt of his head. “You ever cross a line I don’t like, that makes it my business.”

“If I ever cross a lineHannahdoesn’t like, she’ll decide whether to make it your business,” I corrected.

He wanted to fight me on it. I could see his annoyance in the tick of his jaw. But then he shook his head. “Yeah. I can live with that.”

“Good.” I meant it. Hannah thought the world of her big brother, and trying to come between them was a losing proposition.

He studied me, tapping his finger against his beer can. “Holly thinks you’re good for her. She likes you.”

I shifted, wincing as a bruise on my hip made contact with the hard wood of the chair. Fully half the hits I had taken out there came courtesy of Holly. “What makes you think that?”

He ducked his head behind his beer can, but I still caught a fleeting glimpse of his smirk. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

I supposed he had a point. Blood ball was the perfect opportunity to make a death look like an accident, and there was no doubt in my mind that Holly could accomplish it.

“Seems Hannah told you about Nevada?” Jeremiah asked slowly, like he was feeling me out before showing his hand. “About our family and her…husband?”

Husband. My jaw clenched so hard my teeth clacked. “You mean the middle-aged asshole who thought it was fine and dandy to marry a child?”

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