Page 157 of My Cowboy Freedom
I blew out—whoosh—and looked at the stars. Counting. “That’s not what—”
“’Cause I heard that shit loud and clear.” He cocked a brow at me. “You think I ought to give her a chance to tell me to fuck off in person and you think the reason I haven’t done that yet is I don’t have the balls.”
I gasped. “That isn’t what—”
“And just because you’re a big, dopey, optimist son of a bitch, and I would tear off my own left testicle to make the world the way you want it,Iwill do it.”
“Wait.” My heart did a showy, spinning plummet, right into Skyler Brody’s pocket. “That’s—”
He made a fist and thumped it against his heart. “I’ll call my mother tomorrow. I will give her a chance to surprise me, because you asked me to.”
Good Christ.
His vulnerability tore at me.
“Don’t.” My voice was hoarse. “Don’t do it.”
“What?”He glared at me.
“I said, don’t do it. Don’t call her.”
All of a sudden, the breadth of my stupidity floored me.
I knewmyparents. I didn’t know his.
I’d had a lifetime of experience manipulating my family and Skyler might be defenseless against his.
“What if she’s awful to you?”
“What if she is?” he asked.
Without looking at him, I said, “I couldn’t bear to see you hurt.”
“Aw”—he patted me awkwardly—“it’ll probably be okay.”
My voice was fearful. “Will it?”
“No,” he said. “But giving something a chance to be good is much better than expecting that it won’t be. You faced your past. I should face mine. Sounds like a plan to me.”
He appeared to have made up his mind.
“All right, then.” Sky turned to glance one way and then the other. “How do we get back?”
“This way.” I didn’t know if I saw better than he did in the dark or if I just knew the way. I took his hand and pulled him in the right direction.
“Speaking of which. Nobody’s gonna thank you for tromping your man scent all over out here, you know.”
“Who’s going to know?” he asked.
“The deer will know. Let me just close up the blind and we’ll go back.”
Later, under the dome light of the mini-truck, Sky looked awfully relieved. “I didn’t want to say but that was a little claustrophobic.”
“A laughable observation in the mini-truck.”
He let me pull him in for a kiss—grudgingly at first—but then he fully participated.
His whiskers tickled, and my back hurt from hunching over the gear shift, but his kisses threatened to sweep my seat from under me. When I opened my mouth to his, he did this thing with his hands—a long, slow caress from my shoulders to my neck and then around my throat, up, and up, digging into my hair, petting me...
