Page 17 of Claimed By the Cowboys
The stuff I had around my office wasn’t expensive or classical, just a hodgepodge of things that had caught my eye over the years.
My gaze roved down the line a ways, to the framed print on the wall. Three girls making eyes at the lone server behind the counter at the malt shop—each of them with a frosty milkshake clutched in their hands.
Burbling and growling noises erupted from my empty stomach, a reminder of how hungry I was.
Though, I was thankful for the newfound peacefulness of my office. In the week since Piper arrived on the ranch, it’d been like night and day. I used to spend the first few hours of my day trying to wrangle Maisie, in addition to my own work. Or, sometimes if she was having a rough morning, I would have to dedicate all the pre-lunch hours to getting her breakfast, dressed, and occupied until I made or got her lunch and put her down for a nap. On those days, I could easily expect to make up for the lost time late into the night.
With Piper on the ranch, my mornings had been blissfully silent. I’d been able to focus, perhaps a littletoo hard, only surfacing from work when my body bordered on failure, rather than on the whims of my four-year-old daughter.
Just as I was about to break down and empty the packet of honey roasted peanuts into my gullet, there was a knock at my door.
“Come in,” I called on instinct.
“Sorry I’m so late!” Piper squeaked, whisking into my office with a big tray balanced in her arms, the white plastic baby monitor clipped to her back jeans pocket. “Maisie was having a hard time going down for her nap, and then I was fighting with the toaster. It ended up taking me forever to get lunch together for you and the boys,” she chimed happily, sweeping herself through the center of my office and toward my desk.
It took me a second to realize that she was trying to figure out where to put the tray of food. Her low-cut tank top and skintight high-waisted jeans provided more distraction than I’d care to admit.
“Oh, you can put that here,” I blurted, scrambling to brush away the papers from my desk.
“Here you are. Turkey club, side salad, and one of the blondies I just took out of the oven.” Piper beamed, unloading each plate onto my desk with care.
Everything looked delicious, from the sandwich, cut into neat triangles, to the dessert bar studded with nuts and chocolate chips.
“Thank you, Piper. This all looks great.” I glanced up from my feast to find that Miss Collins had already left my desk, and her back was to me as she inspected the contents of one of my packed bookshelves.
“Oh my gosh! Are these real!?” she exclaimed as she lifted a set of three ashtrays of different sizes shaped like hedgehogs, nested inside one another like wooden Russian dolls.
I felt my pride swell at her recognition. None of my pack mates had that kind of taste.
“Good eye! They are, in fact,” I confirmed, taking a bite of the sandwich.Goddamn, it had been a while since I’d eaten something that delicious in my own house.
“Oh! These are gorgeous!” Piper squealed with delight when she found the collection of small, colorful glass-enameled brass beetles I’d found at a craft fair in Green River. “May I?” she asked brightly, fingers already poised above a delicate iridescent blue-green damsel fly.
“Please, by all means.” I nodded to her, happily munching on my sandwich.
“So beautiful!” she breathed reverently, delicately turning the trinket over in her careful fingers. “I used to absolutely love going to antique shops and flea markets in between research papers and chores on the weekends.” Despite her smile, a sadness cut in at the edges of her honeyed voice.
“We’ll have to go pickin’ sometime. I know some good spots, the kinda stuff a city girl has probably never dreamed of sifting through.”
The words were out of my mouth before I could think better of the offer, but I found I didn’t mind it.
“Oh, I would love to!” she chimed, a finger reaching for the point of a silver spur on the far legal bookcase. “I can’t even begin to imagine the kinds of treasures we’d find,” she giggled, allowing her index finger to spin the little silver star-shaped spur around with a metallic jingle.
“There are a few local spots that I keep a secret so that I don’t have any competition for the good stuff,” I admitted, unable to stop trying to endear myself to her, those sky-blue eyes and sandy freckles all but completely disarming me.
“I’ve barely seen any of Sweetwater Springs,” Piper admitted, turning away from me for a moment to let her fingers run across the delicate carved blond wood of a folded fan laid closed before a line of leather-bound books about bookkeeping andaccounting. “It would be really nice to get to know some of the local spots, especially since I’m going to be staying here.”
I nodded to her in silent permission, letting her know she could pick it up. Piper, understanding the gesture, took the fan in her hands with the reverence of a museum worker, her clever fingers delicately unfolding it to reveal a smattering of pale blue flowers with sage green leaves painted on teensy silk panels.
She fanned herself for a moment, making a show of batting her eyelashes at me playfully over the top of it, making me laugh. I was gathering up the nerve to suggest that Saturday might be ripe for a visit to old Hattie’s Antique Barn when Clay’s voice barked from just beyond the open office door.
“Where’s that damn seasonal supply catalog!?”
Before I could shout a response back, Clay stomped into my office, hands braced against his lower back, a sour look already on his grizzled face. “Oh, so I see at least one of us has gotten lunch,” he grumbled, crossing his massive arms across his broad chest, his square jaw jutting out as he pouted at the sight of my half-eaten feast.
Piper, who had been an absolute ray of sunshine a moment before, suddenly clouded over. Her eyebrows pinched, the corners of her mouth turned down in a frown.
Still, her voice was sweet as honey as she responded to Clay, her hand frozen with the lovely fan still open just beneath her chin. “So sorry, Mister Blackwood. I merely stopped to admire some of Montana’s things.”
