Page 16 of At the Rancher's Pleasure

“Are you going to give me an explanation?”

Five seconds. Wow. Jules was getting impatient with age. And had anyone else demanded an explanation, he would’ve told them to go to hell but Jules was his oldest friend. Also, the asshole wouldn’t budge until he got an answer that satisfied him.

He was stubborn that way...

“You should never have asked Lexi to marry you,” Jules stated.

Brett sent him a “well, duh” look. “I know.”

“And you should’ve come to your senses a lot earlier than the day before the wedding.”

“Wow, really? Thanks for pointing that out.” He mixed the correct amounts of glucose and water and when his friend didn’t react to his sarcasm, he sent him a ferocious scowl. “If you’re going to make asinine observations then you can just piss off.”

“Touchy too.” Jules grinned. “Okay, well at least you got out of there before you said ‘I do.’ But that raises another question...”

And here it came...

“What the hell are you doing kissing the hell out of Sarabeth Edmond two weeks after you ditched Lexi Alderidge?”

“Good question,” Brett muttered.

“I mean she’s superhot for an old chick...”

Brett’s glare was hot enough to melt Jules at fifty paces. “She’s hot. Period. With no reference to her age.”

The other man lifted his hand and had the grace to look sheepish. “Point taken. My mama and sisters would skin me alive for making such a remark.”

Damn straight. Sarabeth was a decade older than him, but who the hell cared? Lust and need and desire and his goddamn body didn’t stop to count the years; they wanted what they wanted, and what they wanted was her.

“So, what’s happening between you?” Jules asked.

“I met her yesterday, Shaw. Nothing is happening between us.” Brett spat the words out.

“I’d believe you but you’ve kissed her in front of three of the biggest gossips in town, and I just caught you with your tongue down her throat. If I arrived any later, I might have had to bleach my eyeballs. And arrested you for public indecency.”

Point. Taken.

Again.

Brett rooted in the cupboard for a plastic syringe and a thin, supple plastic tube. “Nothing is going to happen between us.”

“Really? You going with that?”

He banged his forehead against the cupboard door. After a minute, he lifted his head to skewer Jules with a hot glare. “If we sleep together, if it gets that far—”

“It’ll get that far. Chemistry like that can’t be ignored.”

If Jules interrupted him one more time, he was going to thump him. “If it gets that far,” he repeated, “it will only be a fling, a couple of hot nights spent with a sexy woman. I’ll make damn sure she knows that she can’t expect anything more from me. The last thing I need right now is a relationship.”

His friend stared at him for a long minute before nodding. Then he stepped forward, slapped his back and Brett stumbled forward. “Can we get on with feeding the owl? Not all of us are wealthy ranchers who run their own schedules. I still have calls to make, work to do.”

“And I have your grave to dig,” Brett told him.

“You’ve been threatening to kill me for years. Just hold on until next week, I finally got a date with Mary-Jo on Friday.”

“God help her,” he muttered, handing Jules the syringe and the feeding tube. “How did you bribe her into going on a date with you?”

Jules turned away and lifted the gloves off the fence post. “Some women recognize class when they see it.”

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