Page 3 of His Cowboy Heart

My eyes raked over the man’s body. He was slim and petite. The dust that clung to him couldn’t hide all the things I’d felt. Delicate hands with dark nail polish on them, his now even fuller pink lips, the paleness of his skin, and those eyes.

Those beautiful but now horrified eyes. I could practically see the wheels spinning in his head as he tried to process what had happened, both during the assault and after.

The after.

The after when I should have been helping him get cleaned up and caring for his injuries, including the shiner that was already starting to turn the cheek that I hadn’t been molesting black and blue.

“Jesus,” I muttered as I realized what I’d done. I might as well have been one of the men kicking dust over his body while he was curled up in a ball on the ground. “Hey, look?—”

“Don’t,” the man said softly. His uninjured cheek was flaming red, along with what little of his neck I could see. There was no missing the humiliation that had finally caught up to him before it had been misrouted by the kiss we’d shared.

That breath-stealing, earth-shattering, impossibly perfect kiss.

It might as well have never happened, based on the young man’s demeanor as he carefully pushed off the wall and, despite clearly being in pain, quickly brushed the worst of the dust from his upper body. All I could do was stupidly stand there. It actually took a nudge from my horse to realize how unbelievably rude I was being. I quickly searched the ground for the towel and canteen that I’d dropped right before I’d touched the young man’s cheek.

By the time I found the items and stood, the man was gone. Or at least on the way to being gone. He still had a good deal of dust on him, but his head was held high as he walked away from me and back toward the alley’s entrance. It would have been easy to catch up to him, to beg forgiveness for my behavior, to ask him to let me take him somewhere so he could get his injuries looked at, but I didn’t move.

I didn’t deserve to go after him.

Yeah, maybe I’d stopped the assault, but instead of focusing on the young man’s injuries, the dust covering his entire body, the globs of spit clinging to his clothes and the emotional trauma from being beaten and nearly pissed on by three bigots, I’d gotten caught up in a maelstrom of lust, need, and confusion, and I’d taken advantage of his vulnerable state.

I watched the man until he was gone before taking stock of what I’d just done.

I’d hurt him.

I’d humiliated him.

And I’d let him walk away.

Just like I always did.

“Par for the course,” I said softly as I reached for my horse’s reins. The big animal nuzzled my neck, leaving a trail of slimy saliva behind. Normally, the move left me smiling, but not today. I rewarded the horse with a pat and told him, “Sorry, buddy, I think you just officially became the second-best kisser in my life, and I don’t think you’re going to reclaim your title anytime soon.”

I bent over to grab my hat off the ground and immediately thought of how it had ended up there. God, those fingers running through my hair. Grabbing it. Controlling it.

A sharp nudge to the ass brought me back to reality. “Asshole,” I muttered even as my horse pressed his face against my chest. “You want to know the worst part, buddy?” I asked the stallion. “I never got to ask him his name.”

ChapterTwo

JULES

“Well,you got what you wanted, Jules,” I said to myself. “A cowboy of your very own.”

I let out a harsh laugh, which led to the sobs I’d been able to fight back long enough to get the hell out of the backwater town of the oh-so-wrongly namedEden. I’d been crying from the moment I’d been attacked, but I’d been able to hold off the ugly, snot-dripping, gut-wrenching sobs until every one of the last handful of buildings had long disappeared from my rearview mirror. At that point, the emotional grief of what had happened caught up to me and I lost it. When the road became too blurry to see, I was forced to pull over.

I opened the driver’s side door so I could get some air as I let the sobs, snot, and pain get their turn to batter my body. Funny that everything that was coming out of me now was a thousand times worse than the bruises and shame I’d suffered in that alley.

Since I couldn’t really see my surroundings, I used my beloved, once white Mongolian wool wrap to soak up all the crap that covered my face. Tears, dust, and the remnants of my mascara, blush, and shiny, clear gloss covered the long delicate strings of the very expensive wool from the front side. The back side was covered in God only knew how much of my tormenters’ spit.

Despite that knowledge and my somewhat drier and cleaner face, I kept the wrap on. I supposed it was my way of pretending nothing had happened.

Even that kiss.

Especiallythat kiss.

I forced the memory of the kiss to the back of my mind because I just couldn’t deal with it. I climbed out of the car and brushed as much of the lingering dust off my clothes as I could so there’d be less of it in the car. Brooks was going to freak when he saw the condition I’d left his expensive rental car in.

I sighed and sat sideways in the driver’s seat so I could look at the land that lay before me. Since I had yet to see a car on the road, I wasn’t worried about leaving the Range Rover’s door wide open.

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