Page 7 of The First Day of Breeding Season
I growl.
When he drives off again, she kicks her boot heel in the dirt. “It didn’t take me long to pack up this morning. I know you said to come in the afternoon, but I figured…”
Translation:I’m still the eager mini-me you were expecting. I wanted to come as soon as possible.
Fucking hell.
B. Hughes is a girl.
And I’ve promised to spend the summer closely mentoring her in the science of cattle breeding.
CHAPTER 3
BRYNN
Drew just stares at me for a long, painful moment after I tell him I packed up quickly.
Stares. At. Me.
Which, based on the terse email style I’ve gotten used to, I’m guessing is all I’m going to get out of him.
I thought he might be more welcoming.
Drew is just so…so…grumpy.
I knew he was curt in his emails, but I still thought this was going to go differently—on every level.
Not this horrible, obvious conflict playing across his rugged features. A muscle ticks above his jawline and those dark eyes churn stormily, like he’s trying to solve a problem.
Me. I’m the problem, and one he wasn’t expecting.
Which means he was expecting something else.Someoneelse.
“Did you think I would be older?” I push to the full extent of my five-foot-nothing-ness. Up close, he’s so much taller than me. “I’m about to graduate. I’m almost twenty-two.”
He laughs abruptly, hollowly. “Jesus Christ, you’re twenty-one?”
I drop my hand back to my side. “How old is Theo? Benji?”
His eyes narrow even more. “That’s not the point.”
Oh.
Oh.
“Because they’re men.” My throat tightens. I drop my eyes, but that only puts his work-drenched t-shirt in front of me. The damp streaks of sweat enhance the heavy muscles of his chest, and the worst thought I could possibly have in this moment flutters into my mind.
He would look so good in a shower, washing all of that off.
Horrified, I close my eyes, but it’s too late. I now have a new up-close fantasy of Drew Lowry that’s ten times more intimate than anything I imagined when he was just a guy on the other end of an email who I caught glimpses of on YouTube.
I thought about histhighs, sure. But not his bare chest. Not soapy, sudsy water sluicing overhis muscles.
“Because it doesn’t matter that I’m nearly twice their age,” he murmurs, low enough that I could, for a second, pretend that he didn’t say it at all.
“Open your eyes, sweetheart.”
In disbelief, I blink up at him.
