Page 106 of The Rough Rider

“Everybody. Elsie. Me. Lachlan, so probably Charity, and Brody will be there scamming on beautiful women, and I think Tag even convinced Nelly to come out and dance.”

“Well, that is really something,” he said.

“Bring your wife.”

He made a dismissive noise in the back of his throat. “She already married me. I don’t have to keep on wooing her.”

“What exactly do you think is going to keep her happy, Gus? That ranch house that she’s had to do all the fixing in, and your dick? Because while I appreciate the confidence...”

“She hasn’t complained,” Gus said, his tone flat.

“I’m sure she hasn’t. But, eventually, it might become a problem if you never want to do anything with her. If you never want to go out, you never want to...”

“So concerned about my business.”

“Yeah, you were concerned about mine. If I recall correctly.”

“Rightly so. Elsie Garrett is a sweet girl.”

Hunter gave him a hard look. “Alaina Sullivan is a sweet girl. And you’re not a sweet guy.”

“Shethinks I am,” he said.

And Hunter just stared at him for a minute.

“What?” Gus asked.

“Hell. You better keep her happy. Because you’re not going to find a woman like that just anywhere. A woman who thinks you’re sweet.”

That stuck in a strange place in his chest. And he didn’t know what made him okay with talking to Hunter right now. Maybe it was because Hunter had a woman. A woman who happened to be Alaina’s friend.

It made him feel like Hunter might...get it. He let out a breath, long and slow.

“I don’t want another one anyway.”

And he realized that he’d admitted something he hadn’t even fully admitted to himself.

He didn’t.

He hadn’t wanted another woman for a long damn time. And the whole thing about how he was just going to find another woman to have sex with if he felt like it was...a lie. Had been from the beginning. Because he didn’t want another woman. Ever since that moment down at the lake when she’d been eighteen, he hadn’t.

Ever since Alaina Sullivan had turned his life inside out with her smile. Ever since he’d seen her—really seen her—and everything he’d thought about the world had been taken apart piece by piece.

“Then you better figure out how to keep her.”

“I didn’t think I was in any danger of losing her.”

“You aren’t. Now. Because seems to me that right now you two are head over heels in lust, and that will carry you for a while. But eventually you hit up against that wall.”

That pissed him off. Even more that he wanted his brother to keep talking as much as he wanted him to stop because the idea of losing Alaina was completely unendurable. “What wall would that be?”

“The wall of your extensive issues, my guy.”

There was no denying that was a thing.

“And somehow me taking her dancing is going to help with that?”

“You learning to live a little is going to help with it. You can’t... You’re so separate all the time, Gus. Find a way to be part of something. So that she can be part of things. Because otherwise...”

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