Page 23 of Cowboy's Way

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After I deal with my beasts, I shower before loading Bruno onto my boat and head back to the clubhouse. I’m surprised to see Monk back and grab a pitcher of beer before joining him.

“Happy ending?” I ask about the job he was on.

“Happy ending that we got paid in advance. The daughter wants nothing to do with the guy, but he has her contact information now,” he answers with a shrug. “I heard you’ve got a girl.”

Letting out a sigh, I take a big gulp of my beer and wonder how I ended up surrounded by the biggest bunch of gossips on the planet. “I have a new neighbor,” I hedge as Beast sits down beside me.

“That the girl you ate out at the party?”

“Christ.” I throw my hands up as Beast reaches for the pitcher and takes a sip out of it. “I didn’t eat her outatthe party.”

“If she’s half as hot as I’ve heard, smelling like her pussy is a badge of fucking honor,” Monk contributes, managing to look like we’re discussing the weather as he strokes his white beard.

I can’t help the twitch of my eyebrow, because yeah, Faith is out-of-my-league hot, and I’d like to think we’d have spent today in bed if not for how disorganized my kitchen apparently was.

Once I realize that Demo has other business to deal with, I decide to call it an early night and head back home; only briefly pausing at Faith’s dock.

The last thing that woman needs is a man crowding her right now.

At least that’s the excuse I use. The truth is that I’ve seen her every day since I met her and that is unfamiliar territory for me.

Not including the women that hang out around the clubhouse, a handful of whom I’ve sampled over the years, I’ve never been one to seek out a woman continuously.

What’s the point? Once thenewwears off and they see me for who I am, they’ll just be disappointed anyway.

The only driving ambition I have is to hang out on my land, ride my horses, collect and sell the chicken’s eggs, cruise, and pick up bond or investigative work as needed.

I don’t have the first clue what a healthy relationship would look like or how I’d act in one.

Damn, even Monk, our chapter’s chaplain, pretends he’s single. The man thinks we don’t notice how he’s constantly sneaking off after Debbie.

Funny how the woman parties like she’s still in college, and technically she is, except she’s a professor nowadays. Who the fuck knows, maybe they have some naughty schoolboy-sexy professor thing going on.

The thought makes me cringe, so I shake my head and refocus on Faith.

Letting myself in, I leave the door cracked until Bruno finishes his business and joins me inside. Then I get to work.

Thankfully, Faith didn’t come across the panel Demo helped me create. We took space away from three of the rooms on the main floor and that’s where I keep my computer set up. I spend the next several hours backtracking my new neighbor until I realize how fucking stupid I am.

Looking up the county property records, I am able to pull Faith’s birthday and Social Security number. Knowing that she was from Los Angeles was like looking for a needle in the haystack, even when I expanded the years around her birthday.

And right around then is when I remember that she, very casually, mentioned that her mother forged documents.

Switching gears, I start combing through Las Vegas newspapers for the previous twelve months. While I have a vague idea of what I’m looking for, nothing really raises any red flags with me. Looking at the time on the bottom of my monitor, I shake my head.

Even across the country, it’s too late for me to call an old Army buddy of mine outside of Los Angeles, so that’ll have to wait for now. For a perfectly reasonable fee, the guy always delivers.

The thought of Owen makes me lean back, stretching to work out the kinks I always get from sitting too long. We went through basic together and were assigned to the same unit, but the guy always kept to himself.

I’d just always pegged him as a loner, and while I was dealing with my own shit, I never went out of my way to make friends. One of the rare nights I went out with the unit to celebrate a birthday or some shit, a fight broke out.

The last thing I wanted was to get arrested because two guys I barely knew decided to get into a pissing contest, which was on its way to becoming an all-out brawl. I turned, making for the back door, just in time to see that one of the locals was about ready to clock me over the head with a beer bottle.

It never made contact. Owen had seen it going down and dropped him before I got hit. We took one look at each other, nodded and ran out the back door and all the way back to base. In the years that followed, there were a few things I learned.

One being that he had gotten into trouble. A lot of it, and the judge, thinking that the teenager in front of him wasa little slow, had given him the option of jail or the military.

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