Page 62 of A Baby for the Texas Cowboy
She turned off the water with a slap of her hand.
“That should be enough. I’ll bring you more ice. Do you want something to eat?”
“I want to talk. I want to figure out what is going on in that gorgeous, complicated head of yours.” He felt like he was gutting himself here.
Tinsley pressed her lips together. He saw the sheen of tears in her eyes, and her hands shook as she clutched them hard to her chest.
Her tears centered him. “I don’t care how long it takes me to prove this to you, but I am in for the long haul. I am not going away or giving up no matter how hard you push.”
She stared at the ice bobbing in the water.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” he asked softly, wanting so badly to touch her he ached.
She sucked in a deep breath, and his heart sang with hope.
“Take your bath, Anders,” she said, quietly turning away and reaching for something in the medicine cabinet. “This might help.” She pulled out a dark brown bottle. “It’s arnica. It’s for bruising.”
And then she walked out and left him with the very lonely and unappealing ice bath.
He’d barely settled in when Tinsley brought him more ice, but she was careful as she poured it into the bath. She wouldn’t meet his searching gaze, but she did wince in sympathy when he hissed as the ice piled in.
“Do you want something to eat?”
“No thank you.” He felt too unsettled to eat, but she wasn’t kicking him out so he’d take that as a win.
He soaked as long as he could stand it, then stood, toweled off, pulled his boxers back on, and rubbed on the arnica as well as lotion for sore muscles that Kane had recommended when he’d first joined the tour. He would have liked to ask Tinsley to rub the lotion in, but he’d already made their relationship only about sex.
Time to set a new path.
“Good luck with that, cowboy,” he muttered. He was going to need more than luck. He was going to need a miracle sprinkled with magic and peed on by a unicorn.
He hung up the towel, brushed his teeth, turned off the light and headed back out to the couch.
“Anders.”
He stopped.
“There’s not a bed in the second bedroom.”
He was very aware of that. That was going to be the baby’s room. Just like he had already started on a nursery in his wing of the house.
“It’s um…dumb for you to sleep on the couch, especially injured. It’s not like we haven’t…you know.”
He was torn. He wanted nothing more than to sink into the comfortable bed with her. He had helped to pick out the mattress and it had been, he realized, the first thing she’d allowed him to pay for. But he knew himself. If he lay with her, he’d want more.
“Tinz,” he began. Somehow in the dark as he stood in the doorway between her bedroom and the main part of the apartment, it seemed easier to communicate.
“Don’t call me that.” Her voice was sharp.
“Why?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Tinz or nicknames?”
Whiskey was one helluva nickname.
It had lassoed his attention and pulled the rope tight. And she’d lived up to the word—fiery, mercurial, sexy, indulgent, impossible to resist, savory, hot burn. He could extend the analogy all night.
