Page 8 of His Cowboy Heart

It was then that I knew I had him. He was too damn responsive to hide his desire, but more importantly, he didn’ttryto hide it. I wanted to pull him down so he’d be straddling me. The chemistry between us was undeniable, so anything we did, from the gentlest caress to the deepest needy kiss, would end up with him flat on his back on the kitchen table, those slim legs of his wrapped around my hips and his gorgeous green eyes glassy with need as I reached for my belt.

As pleasant as the image was, it was also a very serious problem.

I’d already kissed him once and it was all I could think about. Every day, every night. I hated that because it wasn’t something I wanted in the long run.

I’d liked hooking up with strange guys in my past life, but sex was barely a blip on my radar these days. The life I’d chosen for myself didn’t have room for a sex life and something told me that even if it did, fucking this young man once wouldn’t be enough. Just like kissing him once wasn’t enough. I was already too invested in him and I couldn’t let that go any further. So instead of pulling him onto my lap, I reached into my jacket pocket to retrieve an item that I placed in his palm and then closed his fingers around it. The move had him catching his breath and opening his eyes.

“I think this is going to look beautiful on you,” I told him. As he opened his palm, I stood and eased my hat onto my head. I dropped a kiss to the top of his. “‘Mr. Fuck You’ isn’t going to work for me, so until you’re ready to trust me with your real name, I’ll have to come up with something else.” I paused for a moment before my runaway mouth said, “Thank you,sweetheart.”

ChapterFour

JULES

So it was true.

Despite all the guys I’d been with by the time I’d reached adulthood, I still had room in my stupid heart for the fairy tale that had plagued me from the moment I’d inadvertently stumbled across a gay porn website while I’d been trying to search the internet for the answer to why my chest always grew tight and butterflies floated around my belly whenever Matt Bixby looked at me from across the row of desks in my fifth-grade math class.

The stuff I’d seen on the website hadn’t led to the fairy tale I’d been waiting for, of course, but it had filled in a lot of blanks for me. After that, my brain had started to weave the fairy tale. Instead of the hot guy falling for the weird, quirky yet true to herself girl at the end of most chick flick movies, he always fell for the weird, quirky, unsure of himself, introverted nerd who also happened to be anotherboy.

The more I’d come to accept my sexual identity and the traits that had come with it, the more sensual my fairy tales had become. They’d always had the same happily ever after at the end, though, no matter how dirty the middle of the tale had been.

Right now, it was pretty damn dirty.

And hot.

Really hot… as in my dick feeling like a hot poker between my legs kind of hot.

Problem was, all of that was overruled by two things and they were both sweet.

Fucking, over the top, sugar rotting your teethsweet.

Despite the hard-on that had made it that much more uncomfortable to climb the stairs to my room, my hand wasn’t reaching for my dick. Instead, my fingers were caressing the shiny bottle of nail polish the cowboy had put in my hand just before he’d limped out the front door.

Sweetheart.

An endearment and a movie-worthy gesture all in one.

Welcome to Jules’s world ofkind of sorta happened but didn’t really mean what you wanted it to mean.

Throughout my entire sexual identity crises years, I’d always known that the body I’d been born in was the body I’d identified with, but damn, what I wouldn’t have done for just a few seconds to be the “miss” that the hot cowboy had wanted me to be.

As soon as the thought hit me, it turned everything else into an ugly mess of emotions and colors that had been swirling around in my head for years.

“Idiot,” I murmured to myself as I closed my hand around the bottle of nail polish. The fact that Hot Cowboy had grabbed the polish after the fray I’d had with the three assholes who’d taken issue with my purchase of the item in the first place didn’t mean anything. At best, he’d probably taken it and hung on to the little bottle to hand off to whatever woman he met next. The fact that he’d returned it to me and then topped the action off by calling me “sweetheart” had all been his way of getting me back for the rude way I’d treated him.

True, he had made me lose my footing on the stairs while carrying the laundry basket, but I doubted he’d done it intentionally. I had some aches and pains from the tumble down the stairs, but since I’d ended up wrapped protectively in Hot Cowboy’s arms when we’d come to a stop on the century-old wooden steps, my injuries had been paltry at best. The gash on Hot Cowboy’s head hadn’t been anything to laugh about, and if I hadn’t been so embarrassed that he’d mistaken me for a woman for thesecondtime in a matter of days, I would have insisted he lie down on the couch so I could watch over him to make sure he didn’t nod off into a sleep he’d never wake up from.

Just like after he’d rescued me from the assholes in the alley, the last few minutes had left me feeling the same way. Desperate, weak, confused, and worst… ashamed. Despite all the “straight” guys I’d been with who’d only hooked up with me because they could remind themselves that they’d only shoved their dicks into my mouth or ass because I looked like a girl, none of those encounters had left me wanting more. I’d always joked with Brooks about wanting to turn a straight guy gay, but I knew there was no such thing, and even if there were, the last thing I needed in my life were games that made me question who I was.

I’d barely closed the door to my room when I heard footsteps rushing up the stairs. I didn’t know why, but I quickly hid the nail polish in my pocket.

“Jules?” Brooks called at the same time that he threw the door to my room open. “Are you okay? I saw the laundry?—”

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “Just tripped on the steps.” With a forced laugh, I added, “Considering it was my first time doing laundry and everything came out the same color as when it went in, a little stumble on the stairs is nothing.”

Brooks didn’t laugh, which made me nervous. Despite having known each other for years, the man and I weren’t super close. For whatever reason, we shared certain things with each other, but somehow we’d silently agreed to where the line was drawn when it came to our personal lives.

“Where’d your stud do you today?” I asked with a waggle of my eyebrows. For some reason, I felt like a fraud. Actually, I’d felt that way from the moment I’d landed in Wyoming a few days earlier.

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