Page 3 of Charming the Cowboy
Even before she got a visual recognition on him, her body knew who it was. Immediately.
Her heart slammed hard against her breastbone, and she found herself struggling to breathe.
“Cooper.”
He looked down at her, down because she was so much shorter than he was. But he was almost impractically large. The scale was actually ridiculous. No human man needed to beoversix foot four. It was excessive at that point. Cooper Langdon was an excess of man and masculinity.
The Emperor card.
She gritted her teeth. She knew better than to be too sassy to the universe, because it tended to rebound on her, but she had the impulse to roll her eyes at whatever force was at work here.
She had been compelled to go into that saloon, and because she had resisted, something had compelled himout.
There had been no avoiding Cooper today, apparently.
But wasn’t that the story of her life? He was always there. She remembered having a date to homecoming her freshman year, and seeing him – a junior at the time – with his date, and she’d just wanted to die, because he was everything she wanted, everything a man was supposed to be, and she was with some poor reedy kid from D&D club, which was fine. Great even, sheloved D&D. But for some reason, in spite of her commonalities with her date…the Cooper of it all made it impossible for her to lean in to that date. To enjoy dancing with him. To even want to kiss him a little bit.
Though that could have actually been because he had clear braces and they got stained by the bright red punch he drank, and then it was all she could look at.
The specter of Cooper had effectively cock blocked her all through high school and beyond. And once she’d convinced herself that her fantasy was nothing but a childish holdover that wasn’t based in reality, she’d been sure she could
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“That’s fine. I was standing by the door. Which isn’t really the smartest thing to do.”
“I would have thought you had some kind of Spidey sense about that.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not psychic, Cooper. I’m simply in possession of a deep knowing.”
“Okay. Did you not have adeep knowingabout the fact that you might get yourself hit by the door if you stood right next to it?”
“I think that’s common sense and not deep knowing. I was just distracted.” She scrunched her face. “Actually,” she said, keeping pace with him as he began to walk. “I was hoping to speak to you anyway.”
“Were you?”
“I was. About the haunted hayride.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What haunted hayride?”
“The one I would like you to do.”
He stopped. He pushed his cowboy hat back on his forehead, and her breath caught in her throat. He was a singularly beautiful man. He had piercing blue eyes, a perfectly square jaw, and the kind of lips that made her want to cast love spells. Exceptshe knew better than to get into love spells. There had been a whole situation where her grandmother had attempted to do a love spell to counteract the curse, and… Pregnant by the side of the road. It was bad.
“You would like me to do a haunted hayride?”
“Yes. Please.” She was giving him her best insistent stare. She’d been told that she was very convincing. She only hoped that she was convincing when it came to him.
“And what’s in it for me?”
“I mean, I know that you’re hoping to get a permit to serve alcohol out at the ranch, and that you want to have your beer label served in town. It seems to me that a very good way to do that would be to participate. In community activities.”
“Is that like… bribery?”
“These are small-town politics,” she said. “Nothing is too petty. And I think you know that.”
He ran his hand over his face. She knew that he did, in fact, know that.
There had been some resistance to his family serving beer out of the ranch, even though it was ten minutes outside of the town proper. Still, there were always concerns about things that might limit people coming into town and patronizing the local establishments. Even though she was of the mind that you wanted good selection in an area. If you wanted to be a real draw. There had to be multiple places to stay, multiple places to get drinks, lots of local brands. She was of the mindset that the more was in fact the merrier.
