Page 22 of Her Cowboy Prince Charming

“Yeah.”

“Well, Levi is going to be a little bit suspicious if he goes upstairs to wake me up for Christmas morning and I’m not there.”

“Levi knows where you are.”

“He’s going to kill you. He’s going to murder you, and then...” She stopped. “What?”

“I said he knows where you are.”

“No. He can’t. He can’t know where I am. Because that would mean...”

“He came in here yesterday. He saw the shoe.”

“What?”

“You’re starting to sound like a broken record, sweet pea.”

“But there’s no way he can know. Because if he knew, you would be dead.”

“It turns out not. It turns out he respects you as a woman, and respects what you want.”

“No way. Not my brother. My brother is an old-fashioned hard-ass.”

“I had a talk with him.”

“So what, he just knows that we are sleeping together?” She winced. “I mean, that we slept together. Not that we are sleeping together. We just... We did the one time again. Because it was Christmas Eve. And it was the magic of the season and all of that.”

“That wasn’t it for me. And I made that pretty plain to Levi last night. Jessie... I was wrong to reject you back then. And I didn’t really do it to protect you. I thought I did. I did it to protect myself, because I knew that if you ever touched me...that would be it. I knew that it could never be a casual thing. And I was right. It can’t be. Not with you and me. This is real. This thing. And it was... I was on the verge of going out and really trying to make something of myself. And now I have. And you’re not twenty-one. And... I care about you. I always have.”

“No,” she said. “We can’t do that. We can’t do this.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because,” she said, almost sounding panicked. “Because that’s not... That’s not what it was supposed to be. And it can’t be that, anyway.”

“So when you tried to kiss me, you figured what? That I was going to sleep with you and walk away?”

“I hadn’t thought it through. I hadn’t... I hadn’t really considered it. I just knew that I wanted to kiss you. I didn’t want...”

“You didn’t want what?”

“I can’t do it,” she said. “Because it’s Christmas, and Dylan is coming back and everything is sad. Everything is always sad. And life is sad, and you can’t trust it. And Christmas songs are never going to heal the world. They’re never going to fix your life. The season isn’t magic. And even if it was, it’s over. Christmas is over. And we have to be, too.”

“I just told you that we don’t.”

“I can’t do it,” she said. “I just can’t.”

And she got her things together quickly, putting her boots on, and running out the door. Like she wasn’t headed to a place just a few feet away.

CHAPTER NINE

BYTHETIMEJessie got to the house, everyone was sitting in there. Around the Christmas tree. And there was Dylan. Her breath left her body in a whoosh, and she launched herself across the space. “Dylan,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck, like she always did. Trying to make sure that all of him was here. She had always hated that he had joined the military. She knew that Levi hated it, too, but that he didn’t oppose it, because he didn’t oppose choices they made as adults.

The fact that he had apparently proved when it came to her relationship with Damien.

Damien.

He was acting like he wanted this to be something. And she just wasn’t brave enough to do that.

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