Page 4 of My Cowboy Temptation

Chapter 2

Brody

I’mbusy updating the receipts on my laptop while drinking a cup of coffee with Lucas Castle the morning after the break-in at the girls’ place when Callie sweeps into the kitchen. I eye the clock, confirming it’s close to ten, and she’s still as late of a riser at twenty-four as she was at fourteen.

“Hi, Dad,” she says and leans down to kiss Lucas on the cheek. She raises her gaze to mine, a smile playing on those soft, full lips, before she slowly straightens up.

The woman is so fucking beautiful and sensual that it hits me hard in the gut. Where was the little girl in the pigtails and the pink cowgirl boots who used to look up at me with such a sweet, happy smile when she won Miss Junior Rodeo at twelve?

Because standing before me is a fully grown woman who is filling my head with thoughts and images that are more than enough to damn me to hell forever.

And yet, I still can’t help but drink her in, from the top of that silky, raven-colored hair that falls in waves down her back to the tips of those old, worn boots that she’s had since she was sixteen.

Nothing she’s wearing now is particularly sexy or flashy. Her shirt is a simple, long-sleeved red flannel that’s buttoned low enough to reveal a glimpse of full, ripe breasts, breasts that I’m betting would fit perfectly in the palms of my hands. Her jeans fit tightly around her full ass and hips, leading me to wonder what they’d feel like squeezed in my hands as I—

Damn it, you bastard. Get your head out of the fucking gutter.

This is Callie. Your best friend’s daughter. A woman completely off-limits.

“Morning, sweetie,” Lucas says, thankfully unaware of my perverse thoughts. “How’re you feeling?”

She smiles sweetly at him, which is my first inkling of trouble. “Like I need to go out for a ride.”

There it is. Even after a rough night where she could have been seriously injured, if not killed, by the psychotic maniac who broke into her place, Callie still doesn’t know what’s in her best interest.

God. I remember the depth of the emotions that ran through me when Lucas took that call last night, and I could hear Callie’s panicked voice coming through the receiver, filling me with fear and murderous rage at the person who did whatever was causing her to come unglued.

Then when I arrived at her place and saw the fear in those gorgeous green eyes, saw her chin tremble, it nearly undid me. Without thought to consequences, I pulled her against me and held her close, needing to know she was safe as much as I needed her to feel safe.

She was everything I remembered but somehow more, seeing as how the last time I held her like that, she’d been a kid, and I hadn’t the slightest intention toward her other than paternalistic.

What I felt for her last night and now is most definitely not.

She pours herself a cup of coffee and brings it over. Her eyes still on me, she takes a careful sip, then licks her lips far too salaciously to be appropriate, and I can’t help but imagine what else I’d like those lips wrapping around right now.

Damn it.

I’ve known Callie since she was a baby. Watched her daddy teach her to ride her horse when she was three years old, witnessed her cry when her mom took off on both of them when she was six, and made a not-so-subtle threat to the little Chaney shit to keep his paws off her when she outgrew her training bra by the age of thirteen.

Something about the girl has always kicked up my protective instincts, but always in a paternalistic way—until she was seventeen years old and kissed me that night in the barn.

Of course, I’d pushed her away and steered clear of her that night and for the next few months until she left for college. It was the right thing to do. She was too young, too naive, too immature, and too fucking off-limits for a man who’d nearly come of drinking age by the time she was born.

When Lucas told me that she was coming back to Castle Creek, I hadn’t been alarmed. I was sure that whatever Callie Castle had stirred in me that night so long ago had been long past put to bed. All the same, I managed to avoid running into her during the weeks she was in town, just as a precaution.

Then I caught her sailing out of the coffee shop—figuratively and literally—and in that instant, as we stood there staring at each other, I saw the mature woman she’d become somewhere in the years since leaving town. A young woman with all the right curves and valleys, with lips that I imagined testing against my own as I ran a hand through that dark-as-night silky black hair, as my other hand reached for those full, pert breasts that I would have killed anyone else for touching.

But the fact remains. She’s still a woman strictly off-limits. Not only because I’m old enough to be her dad, but because her own dad, Lucas Castle, owner of the ranch where I’ve been living and working since I was fifteen years old, has been my best friend and as near as a brother to me these past thirty years as anyone’s ever been.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Callie,” Lucas finally says about her bid to go riding.

“Dad, I love you, but I’m just riding on Castle land, land I’ve known since I was three years old. I’ll be perfectly fine.”

Hell, I know that tone just as Lucas does, and I can see him relenting.

“Fine,” Lucas says and sighs wearily before glancing over to me. “But I’m sending one of the guys to keep an eye on you. Anyone you can spare, Brody?”

Anyone I can spare? Sure. But would just anyone be able to keep up with the impetuous, spoiled Callie Castle? Unlikely.

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