Page 33 of Charming the Cowboy
“Of course not. I’m more than capable.”
“Are you? Because my memory is that you got a little bit tipsy in that wagon.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I live in an attic, and I manage to climb up a ladder and get inside every night. I don’t need help getting in the wagon.”
Also, if he touched her, she might explode. Or he would explode, honestly. Because the universe would do its thing and make sure that she didn’t get even the barest amount of pleasure out of that contact.
She scrambled into the back of the wagon, just to prove that she could. So there.
And then she settled against the back, as he climbed up into the driver’s seat, and slapped the reins so that the horses would move forward.
“Oh wow,” she said, clinging to the haybales as she got used to the motion.
“Don’t worry. We’ll take it really slow. I can’t have you falling out.”
She turned her head, and he turned his, and they were quite a lot closer than she had imagined. “Oh. Well. I promise I won’t. Need you to catch me.”
But I might want you to.
She thought it, she didn’t say it. She knew better than to flirt with the man. It was a really bad idea. She swallowed hard and looked away from him. Then she started running through her story in her head, because she was going to have to tell it soon. And it was different to tell it than it was to text it.
They pulled up to the designated spot for the wagon, and she clasped her hands in her lap as they waited.
“It’s a good story,” he said.
“What?”
“Your story. I didn’t feel like maybe I… was as complimentary as I should have been over text.”
“It is hard to gauge tone over text.” Of course, it was hard to gauge Cooper’s tone everywhere.
“Well, it’s a nice story. I wish I could believe it.”
“What?”
“Well, it’s about everybody being together after they die, isn’t it?”
“I wasn’t actually thinking about it that way.”
But when he put it like that, yeah, she did feel like a little ghost sometimes. Wandering, hoping to meet up with her dad again. She looked for him and the birds all around her, and repeating numbers on the clock, in the tarot cards. She wondered if he looked for his dad anywhere. Or if, like he just said, he was so unable to believe in any of that that he couldn’t even draw comfort out of things like that.
“You don’t see your dad ever?”
“He’s dead, Eliana.”
“I know that. That’s not… That’s not what I mean. I see my dad in the wind. I see him when the flowers bloom. I see him in my brother’s smile. It’s hard for me to remember him now, but I feel him. I can’t hear his voice, but I know what it was like to have him with me. To have him love me.”
“I find that too painful to remember.”
That made her chest clench tight. After all these years, he still found it too painful.
“I’m sorry. That’s… It’s really awful.”
“You don’t find it painful to remember your dad?”
“Memories are all I have. It’s painful that he’s gone. But if I got rid of the memories… What would there be?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Except a legacy. In my case, that’s what I have. I have that ranch, and I need to make a brewery work. Because it’s what he wanted. He didn’t want us to have to ranch hard forever. He didn’t want to have to do it. He wanted more, and I want to make more happen. In his name, in his memory. It matters to me.”
