Page 10 of Her Cowboy Prince Charming

WELL,THISWASa fucking treat. He had screwed his best friend’s younger sister. The same younger sister he’d been running from two years ago.

Yeah. He had tried for a while to reframe that. But the fact was... When she had leaned up against him, twenty-one years old and too pretty for her own good, in spite of how she tried to hide her assets underneath baggy T-shirts, she was clearly a beautiful woman.

Hell, he’d known it since her twentieth birthday, when he’d tried to do some childish older-brother nonsense, going to wipe frosting on her face, and she’d caught his finger in her mouth and...

Shit, he’d felt that all the way down to his dick and he’d wished he could unfeel that, but he couldn’t.

She’d obsessed over him after that.

A year later she’d tried to kiss him.

He’d done the right thing. He had turned away from temptation. And the best thing was, he hadn’t let her know she was one.

If she ever touched him...there would be no in-between. It would be forever, or an explosion that would destroy them all.

He wasn’t going to risk it.

And then last night, when that woman in red had walked into the party, he felt like he’d been slugged in the gut. He hadn’t known quite what had drawn him to her. It was clear now. He was responding to old chemistry. Dammit. So now he had taken his best friend’s little sister’s virginity, in about the sleaziest way possible, and all that was left to do was plan a Christmas party with her.

While the ghost of Christmas past dogged his heels. Fantastic. Fan-fucking-tastic.

“I’m ready,” Jessie said, stomping back down the stairs, a black beanie over her brown hair, so low it covered her eyebrows. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and a pair of baggy camo pants.

And she was still sexy as hell because he knew what was underneath them now. She looked adorable. He hated that. He hated that quite a lot.

“Great. Let’s get a move on.”

They walked outside, and the ground was blanketed with snow. With that snow everywhere it just seemed harsh. Bright. Last night everything had been gauzy. Possible. And today in the broad cold snow and its reflected white light there was no hiding from what he’d done to Jessie Granger.

“How are you doing?”

“Oh, just fine,” he said. “Contemplating all the ways that Levi might kill me.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” she said. “I mean... I know your mom died. Sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “Me, too.”

He’d gotten pretty okay talking about it. It had happened. His mom, who had taken care of him, raised him all on her own, whom he had started to take care of in her later years, whom he loved, was gone. She wasn’t going to make him enchiladas anymore. She wasn’t going to ask him if he was working too hard. And he would’ve said no. No matter whether he was working too hard or not. He would never have changed his behavior. But she would have asked.

And it would’ve been good. Sometimes it hit him. That he really couldn’t call her anymore. That she wasn’t just down the hall. That nobody would ever care for him again the way that she had.

But most of the time, he was all right.

“I feel like I should’ve said something sooner.”

“Oh, you mean when we were realizing that we had sex with each other? Because the fact that you didn’t make me think of my mother right around that time is actually all right with me.”

She snorted, and then clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” he said. “If you can’t laugh about it, what’s the point of living through it? And by that I mean my mother’s death and the fact that I screwed you.”

“Levi doesn’t need to know,” she said. He took a big step over a fallen log, and stopped and watched as Jessie scrambled over the same one. “There’s no reason to tell him.”

“Sure,” he said, gritting his teeth. “We need to swing by my place.”

“Your place?” she asked.

“I just mean the cabin I’m staying in. There’s an axe inside, and we’re going to need it to cut down the tree.”

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