Page 61 of Knot Her Cowboys
“You guys don’t have a chef right now. I may not have done a lot of work recently, but it’s not like I forgot how to do everything. I’ll work for room and board.”
“Like hell you will,” Cooper scoffed. “The job comes with that. We’ll pay you the regular salary.”
“All right. I do have my omega trust, so it’s not like I’m hurting for money.”
“We pay fairly here. If you’re doing the work, you’re getting the money,” Cooper insisted. “If you don’t need it, you can do whatever you want with it.”
“How did you end up with an omega trust?” Cash asked. “Doesn’t really seem in character for the assholes you rolled up with.”
“Bryan insisted on it, so I made it my condition to quit working. Bruce didn’t love it, but Bryan played into Bruce’s obsession with public perception, asking him how it would look if it came out that they weren’t taking care of their omega. People might think it was because they couldn’tafford to, and that was about all it took. Bryan was always the more reasonable of the two, and even if he was a jellyfish with Bruce a lot of the time, he did try, and I’m grateful he pushed for my financial security.”
“I’ll set you up a trust too,” Cash offered. “Only condition is you have to meet my parents and tell them we’re bonded so they can stop being up my ass about finding someone.”
“Cashy, I don’t need your money, but I would love to say hi to your parents.”
“Well, you’re getting my money anyway, so deal with it. What name do I have to put on it?”
Cooper sat up. “What do you mean? You know her name. Why wouldn’t you put that?”
Cash tapped my ankle with his. “Our little miss changed her name when she bolted.”
“Why?”
“Easier to hide.” I shrugged.
“But what did you change it to? Should we not be calling you Riley anymore?”
My cheeks warmed. “I still like Riley. The name change was more a necessity, and I just got used to it.”
“Are you being a little chickenshit on telling Cooper what you changed your name to, honey bun?”
Cash looked so fucking smug. If I were a less evolved person I’d smack that shit-eating grin right off his pretty face, but luckily that was one habit I had never picked up from my mama.
Morgan leaned forward in her seat, eyeballing me. “Why are you being so evasive? Did you change it to something ridiculous?”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. I wasn’t going to get out of telling him. I took a deep breath, trying to control the twist of nerves in my belly, but it did little good. “I changed it to Anne Harris.”
Cooper couldn’t have looked more surprised than if I had gotten up and kicked him in the balls. “AnneHarris?”
My cheeks were so damn hot I was surprised they didn’t incinerate right off my face.
It took Cooper two attempts to form actual words before his question finally came out. “You took my last name?”
I couldn’t quite tell what the expression on his face was, maybe some amalgamation of awe, frustration, and desire.
“Yes.” I swallowed hard. “I know you probably thought it was easy for me to let go, but it wasn’t. I kept pieces where I could.”
Cooper huffed out a breath and took another long drink. “I guess that’s why I could never find you in the papers.”
I tilted my head, examining him. “Why were you looking for me in the papers?”
“I was looking for your restaurant that I assumed you would open one day. I didn’t have any other way of finding you, but I knew you wanted to do that, so I checked every so often.”
Cash laughed. “And by every so often he means daily. We had a whole trip planned for the day you’d pop up.”
I turned back to Cash, trying to figure out how I felt about all of that, and how it might have gone if things had turned out differently. “You were going to come to New York?”
“That was the idea. Been on the back burner for years, but ready to roll out if his snooping ever led to something.”
