Page 19 of The Cowboy's Home
It was Skyler, but then, he knew that before he even saw the man. He knew by a million different signs. How long had he been fixated on this man, after all?
“Are you going out? I’ll come with you,” Skyler offered, and it was the sort of thing that normally would have pleased Craig to no end to hear. It was still pretty hard to get Skyler to do anything, although he was usually happy to go along with whatever Craig wanted.
But he was too angry. He hadn’t had the time to vent that anger, to let it fade away. Even so, he didn’t fully realize how upset he really was, not until he was face to face with Skyler, and alone, so that no one could hear but the horses.
“What the hell is going on?”
Not the way he would have chosen to bring the whole thing up, he thought. Of course, he had intended to ask, but he had thought to do so when he was calm and rational and able to ask in a much less confrontational way. Immediately, Skyler recoiled back, just a little bit. The man wasn’t good with confrontation, tended to retreat into himself, from what Craig had seen.
Right then, he didn’t care to let him.
“What do you mean?” Skyler replied carefully, his voice very neutral in a way that Craig couldn’t have managed at the moment no matter how hard he tried.
“You and Jessica. Fake boyfriend. What’s going on?” There was still, after all, the chance that there was some sort of logical explanation for all of this. In fact, knowing Skyler, there almost certainly was. Skyler was good with logical.
“Oh.” Skyler’s shoulders relaxed, and he went to perch on a bale of hay, his eyes a little wary still, but far less defensive. But Craig was still pissed, to the point where the horse, good at sensing emotions, stamped a front hoof and sidled just slightly away from Craig. “You know how I told you about my sister getting married?”
Craig nodded, finding that he could and probably should hold his peace, as long as he was getting the explanation.
“Well, she asked me to come to her wedding, but not to create conflict with our mother. I talked to Derrick about it, and he suggested that Jessica might come with me as a way to, you know, just sort of calm my mother down …”
Craig had heard of the termseeing redbefore, but he had always been fairly easygoing. It took a lot to get him annoyed. The way that Skyler was explaining this, it was doing nothing for his anger. He was suddenly very glad for the bulk of the horse between them, or else he might have done something stupid like grab the smaller man and pin him against the wall or maybe shake him.
“You needed someone to take to a wedding, so you’re taking her?” Craig said, barely able to believe that he was saying the words. They didn’t make any sense to him, why Skyler would do this. “And you weren’t planning to, you know, tell me about this anytime soon?”
There was a long, long pause, and then Skyler sighed and shook his head.
“It was all set up before you and I got together,” Skyler explained. Just when Craig was inhaling in a breath to say some more, probably unwise, things, Skyler continued. “But you’re right. I should have told you.”
Well, that took the wind right out of Craig’s sails pretty fast. It took him a second to catch up, but he did eventually. He didn’t see any sign of dishonesty in Skyler’s face, and he knew Skyler by now, he thought, well enough that he would have been able to tell if Skyler was telling the truth or not.
Actually, now that he thought about it, when did Skyler ever lie? He might retreat into silence, but if he said something, Craig had found that he would only say the truth. Of course, the issue could be getting him to say anything at all sometimes.
“So why didn’t you?” Craig asked, and his voice was much more moderate now. Skyler had said the exact right thing to calm him down.
“Honestly, I sort of forgot about the whole thing once it was arranged,” Skyler admitted, and once more, there was not a single, tiny little hint of duplicity in his voice. “I mean, it was all set up, and then I just sort of forgot about it.”
Craig patted the horse on the neck, giving himself time to think, but the anger was gone and he found that he could do so without the same rage clouding his thoughts.
God, he could have ruined everything there. The near miss of it was terrifying, now that he wasn’t buoyed up by rage.
“Besides, I didn’t think you would want to come with me,” Skyler continued on, and Craig looked at him thoughtfully in return. There was a question in that voice, and a little to his own surprise, he knew exactly how he wanted to reply to that question.
“I would have gone with you,” Craig admitted. Sort of a big deal, to admit to himself, much less to anyone else, that he would have gone to a wedding with a man, as his date, but for Skyler, he would have done it.
It’s not like anyone here would know. Seattle was a long way from this ranch just outside of Atwood, Kansas.
“You could still come,” Skyler offered, and Craig smiled suddenly, any last traces of anger that he might have felt utterly dissipating.
“I would like that,” Craig admitted. “I like traveling. And it’s fun to get to do it without having to work at the same time.” His traveling had pretty much exclusively been while he was in the military, and this would be a different sort of thing.
“Okay. Good,” Skyler replied. “So can I come with you? I can saddle up a horse right now.”
Craig’s smile turned into a grin, but he shook his head in response.
“You don’t need to saddle a horse,” he murmured, feeling daring and a little naughty after what had really been their first fight. It hadn’t gone that badly, but he felt the need to reassert his claim. “Because you’re going to be riding in front of me today.”
Thirteen
