Page 5 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

It was hard to make sense of his words when ninety-nine percent of my brain was occupied with the way his body turnedmundane tasks into poetry. Even the way he limped slightly, favoring the leg that had been broken several times over in a rodeo incident, was elegant. And in bunny slippers. It shouldn’t have been possible.

“Time me,” he repeated. His eyes glinted with challenge. “Sixty seconds.”

Time him? The man was starknakedand he wanted to play games? The whole situation was absurd. Zack Hale was clearly a deeply unserious man and I…I had never been silly in my entire life.

It didn’t bother me. I liked who I was.

But the way Zack looked at me made me want to test him. To see if he could do something I thought was impossible. I wanted him to prove me wrong. I wanted him to impress me. And somehow none of that seemed silly at all.

I pulled out my phone and swiped to the stopwatch on the clock app. “Go.”

He didn’t hesitate for even a millisecond—I had the stopwatch to prove it—before kicking off the slippers and tumbling over the back of the sofa. He landed on the cushions with a soft bounce that propelled him back onto his feet, now with a pair of black boxer briefs in his hand.

Convenient that he had a basket of clean laundry right there, I supposed, although I did wonder exactly how long it had been there.

Zack leaned against the armrest for balance as he pulled his underwear up to mid-thigh, then reached one long arm behind himself to grab his jeans. Both legs went on at once and he pulled his jeans and underwear up together.

My gaze stayed glued to the rapidly increasing numbers while Zack moved in a blur. “Twenty-five seconds,” I warned.

He tugged a white t-shirt over his head. I spared a millisecond of pity for my future self, who would never have the opportunity to look at that six-pack again.

“Thirty-three seconds,” I said.

He slipped his arms through a red-checked flannel. When his fingers moved at the neck like he meant to button the damn thing, I made a low keen of distress. He laughed. “Just teasing, darlin’.”

He was already onto his wool socks when I said crisply, “Thirty-nine seconds.”

He wiggled his right foot into one of the worn cowboy boots by the door, then braced his side against the wall while he went for his left. “Don’t hit stop yet. I’ve got one more thing.”

“Fifteen seconds left.” My voice was sharp with nerves.

Zack pushed his hand into the mess of coats and hats that hung on the wall and pulled out a leather belt with a shiny red buckle. He threaded it through the loops of his jeans with a rough efficiency that made my mouth go dry. His fingers were sonimble. Metal clanged against metal as he buckled it. “Time.”

I hit stop. “Fifty-eight seconds.”

Zack’s shit-eating grin could melt snow. “Well, would you look at that. And it’s eight on the dot.”

His hands went to his hips and my eyes went there, too, landing on the travesty of a belt buckle between them. It was a cherry-red enamel rectangle the size of my fist. RIDE, it proclaimed in shiny gold letters above a cowboy on a bucking bronco.

I wondered how many women had taken him up on that suggestion. Not that I cared. But I wondered.

“Let’s go, darlin’,” he said as he opened the door and motioned me to go through ahead of him. “You don’t want to have to tell your sewing club you were late because you were busy gawking at my crotch.”

“I’m not gawking.” I marched past him with a withering stare. “I’ve gone blind. My eyeballs are so horrified by your belt buckle that they’ve mutinied.”

He chuckled. “I’d take offense, but given what you’re wearing, I think it’s safe to assume you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I unlocked my car, frowning down at myself. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

“Nothing at all. Just tell me where the portal is to 1852. I don’t want to accidentally fall through.”

“I like my clothes. They’re comfortable.”

I hiked up my skirt to mid-calf so I could get into the car without dragging the fabric in the dirt. Zack tilted his head sideways, his body following, like he was trying to see what I had on underneath. But that couldn’t be right. For one, he couldn’t see anything more than my ankle from that angle. For another, Zack might be the only man in Aspen Springs who knew my name, but he had a very obvious preference in women, and I was not it.

“What are you doing?” I asked bluntly.

He jerked upright. “Trying to figure out what’s so comfortable about a skirt you constantly have to tug at just so you can sit down.”

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