Page 13 of Charming the Cowboy
Of course, she didn’t like to advertise her virgin status, and she really wasn’t happy that she had done it to Cooper just now. As if he could’ve thought she was even more pathetic than healready did. Not that Cooper had ever called her pathetic, she just had a feeling. A deep knowing, some might say.
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
She looked past him. The partial view of the ocean, gray and angry, the wind whipping up whitecaps on the surface. “You know, that’s fair.”
She glanced back at him.
“I mean, you can’t really believe in curses like that.”
“I’d love to say that I don’t. I would love to say that I’m not that fanciful. And maybe I could believe it if I’d never tried, Cooper. But I have tried. Either I’m cursed or there’s something fundamentally unappealing about me. Something fundamentally unattractive.”
“You are not fundamentally unattractive,” he said, his face suddenly going hard like stone, his jaw clenched tight.
As compliments went, it was hardly one. But it still warmed something inside of her. He was Cooper, after all. The object of so many unfulfilled fantasies.
He had been — to her — the epitome of masculinity and male beauty for such a long time, that hearing him say that, even if it was a little bit damning with faint praise, made her heart race wildly.
“You really think so?”
“Let’s… have less conversation about sexual curses, more conversation about decorating wagons.”
“Does it bother you?”
“It’s maybe not a conversation that I would choose to be in with my best friend’s little sister.”
“Well, we’re friends too, right?” She was pushing it, maybe. But if she were asked, she would say that Cooper was a friend. Not an intimate friend, maybe, but definitely a friend in his own right. They had just had lunch together, after all.
“Yeah. Of course. And still, I don’t know that this is a topic of conversation that I’m super into.”
“Well… It’s not like I’ve ever told anyone that before.”
She felt small and embarrassed, partly because he didn’t seem to know what to do with the information, which just confirmed to her that she was a total weirdo. An abject freak, honestly. Because what woman remained a virgin at twenty-seven because every man she tried to get it on with met some kind of humorously terrible fate? One good thing was that it wasn’t a medieval curse. If it were, they would probably be dead. As it was, no one had even been permanently maimed.
He winced. “Well, it’s nothing to be…”
“Are you trying to tell me that it isn’t embarrassing for me to admit that the last man I tried to hook up with had to be hospitalized?”
“Did he really?”
“Not for very long. The EpiPen did work. I gave it to him myself.”
“Well, see, you are pathetic. You performed a life-saving procedure.”
“After nearly killing him.”
“If he didn’t tell you that you couldn’t eat any shellfish, that’s kind of on him. I don’t think that’s a curse so much as poor planning.”
He looked pained. And honestly, she was also pained. She did not want to be in the conversation anymore. Because she had a feeling that Cooper couldn’t relate to this level of being… Awkward. Because he wasn’t. He was gorgeous and perfectly formed. He was everything that a man should be.
She was everything that a woman with a cursed bloodline should be, probably.
So, there was that.
“So. Wagon decorations.”
“I have some really nice Halloween decorations, and I can get them out, and bring them out to your place, and we can see what we think.”
“All right.”
