Page 23 of His Cowboy Heart

Jules answered me with a demanding kiss. “No,” he managed to puff out when we were forced to come up for air. “No one.”

The green-eyed monster that had been eating me from the inside out since I’d heard Jules telling Brooks all about his three-day hookup with some stranger turned into a white-hot inferno of lust and need. Jules still had his seat belt on, so his ability to move was limited. It wasn’t a problem, though, because it gave me the excuse to lean farther across the console and take command of his mouth. Jules whimpered as his greedy fingers slipped through my hair so he could keep me from pulling away.

I could taste the salt on his lips and skin as I pressed soft kisses along his cheeks and jaw when we were forced to catch our breaths. The fingers that had been threaded through my hair were now toying with my beard. The simple move had me pulling back enough to look Jules in the eyes. His gaze was on my mouth, though, so it gave me every opportunity to study his reactions. He seemed fascinated by the neatly trimmed hair as well as the texture of my lips because he was caressing both like he wanted to memorize what they felt like. I pressed a kiss against his fingertip. That got his attention, and when he looked up and met my eyes, I shook my head in disbelief because it was real. That genuine curiosity, the sensual need, this strange sense of an unspoken promise… they were all there in his luminous green eyes.

I dipped my mouth and gently kissed him. “How bad does it hurt, really?” I asked.

Jules didn’t answer for so long that I was the one who had to lift his head. All the certainty in his pretty eyes began to disappear. I could practically read the younger man’s thoughts just by looking into his eyes. If I’d just kept kissing him, the haze of lust would have kept us both under its spell. Instead, my ill-timed question had woken something up inside of him. I had no clue why my question had caused him to mentally retreat from me, but that’s what was happening. Certainty was replaced with mistrust, laughter became fear, and the man I’d been so certain was a representation of the real Jules disappeared just like that.

“We should probably get going,” Jules said, moving back enough that there was no risk of our lips coming into contact as he spoke.

I held his gaze for several beats, but I lost the staring contest pretty fast because the man I was looking at was one I no longer recognized… actually, that wasn’t quite true. Ididrecognize him. He was once again the man who was way too young to have such a sizeable chip of mistrust on his shoulder. I thought back to the first time I’d met him. The unusual clothing, the makeup, the nail polish—how big a piece of him were those things? Did they bring him that same joy he’d just shown me? Or was I the sole reason for stealing that light? The one I’d never realized was even there.

“You’re right,” I agreed as I carefully released him and sat back in my seat. Between my body’s protests as I tried to tamp down my lust and my mind’s confusion over what exactly it was that had just happened between myself and the young man sitting next to me, I couldn’t come up with anything else to say. Once the car was moving, I focused on driving and our ultimate destination.

The hospital.

The last place I wanted to be.

Jules had sensed that somehow. Maybe not the hospital part, but he’d known as we’d been leaving the ranch that despite him being injured, I’d been the one suffering.

“I don’t like hospitals,” I said. I didn’t say the words because I was distracted. I didn’t say them to fill the awkward silence of the vehicle. I said them because they were true.

And it was something no one else knew about me.

Now someone did. Now there was another soul on the planet who’d been given a sneak peek into just one of the ways my mind worked.

I wasn’t expecting a response, so when Jules once again maneuvered his fingers so they were linked with the ones on my right hand, it scared me, but only because I’d been so afraid hewouldn’tdo it.

“I ran away from home,” Jules murmured. There was no humor behind the words, just hurt.

By the time I pulled the SUV into a parking spot just outside the emergency room doors, two things remained true.

One, we hadn’t spoken a single word to one another the rest of the way down the mountain.

And two, our fingers remained linked together until the moment I was forced to put the car in park.

ChapterEight

JULES

“Sir,are you sure you’re okay?”

As the guy with the second-degree burn on his arm, the nurse’s question probably should have been directed at me, but it wasn’t. The question was for Flynn, who was holding the passenger door of the SUV open while the nurse pulled my wheelchair to a stop.

I had the same question because Flynn sure as hell didn’t look okay. He was white as a ghost and looked ready to puke at any moment.

“Fine,” Flynn said curtly before leaving the door open and striding around the SUV to the driver’s side.

Milly, the nurse who’d wheeled me out of the ER despite the fact that I would have been able to walk the distance on my own two feet, seemed hurt by Flynn’s rudeness, so I did my best to thank her for all her help and got into the car as gracefully as I could.

The second I pulled the door closed, Flynn had the SUV moving.

Fast.

“I don’t like hospitals.”

He was on the run. He’d been running from the moment we’d left the ranch. I hadn’t really understood that until his palm had grown increasingly slick with sweat the closer we’d gotten to the hospital. Once we’d arrived, he’d escorted me inside, but when the nurse had asked if he wanted to join me in the treatment room, he’d barked something about needing to park the car and then he’d been gone. He’d never even asked if I wanted or needed him in the room for moral support.

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