Page 14 of A Sweet Chat for the Cowboy

“I figured. I don’t want to give you their numbers. Trust me. I’m protecting you.”

Good grief, what was the deal with these brothers? This was a natural breaking off point, and she didn’t want the conversation to end, so she scrambled for something else to say. “What kind of a name is Wolfgang?” She’d heard it before, of course, but never in real life. Of course, this wasn’t exactly real life. She could be talking to a twelve-year-old girl in Siberia for all she knew.

“My mom didn’t really think things through.”

“So you’re not the only one with an interesting name?”

“Definitely not. She named my brother Kash. After Johnny Cash, but everyone thought she just liked money.”

“She named him after Johnny Cash, but she spelled it wrong?”

Chapter 7

“Like I said,” Tuckertapped into his phone, “my mom didn’t think it through. She was a great mother, but naming us wasn’t her strength.” Now he felt bad for insulting his mother. She’d really only wronged Denver and Kash. The rest of them had made out okay. And he couldn’t exactly use Denver as an example. She might not connect the dots since most of the state thought his name was Zion Denver, but she might. She seemed pretty smart.

“It’s good to hear you had a great mother. I did too. I’m sorry that you lost yours. She must have had her hands full with a bunch of boys.”

Had he told her there were a bunch of them? He didn’t think he had. Of course, he’d saidbrotherswith ans, so she knew there were at least three of them.Calm down, he urged himself. He hadn’t given anything away. He leaned his head back to stretch his neck. Texting for this long was giving him hunchback pain.

He needed to break this off. Oddly, he didn’t really want to, but he had to because he didn’t want to give her the wrong idea.

“Do you have any sisters?” she wrote.

“No.” Much to his mother’s disappointment, but Tucker was glad it had worked out that way. His father had been so hard on them. Maybe it was a good thing that God had spared any little girls from that.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to pry.”

He hurried to type, “You didn’t. I’m sorry that I was short. I’m not usually the wordy type.”

“Oh, good. I was scared I had annoyed you.”

“You didn’t.” She wasn’t annoying himat all.Quite the opposite. He was enjoying talking with her. So maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he went out with her once. It wouldn’t hurt anything to go on a date, as long as the brothers never, ever found out. If he ended up marrying a woman named May, he would lie and say it was a different May.

He took a big breath and typed, “I know you said you’re busy with your spook work, but we should go out sometime.” Then he tapped on the backspace button so fiercely that Sundance looked up to see why the couch was shaking. He couldn’t ask her out. Not yet. Because the second she figured out who he was, she was going to be intrigued by Denver, and then she might keep going out with him because of his movie star brother.

So he had to get to know her a little better first. To make sure that she was worth it.

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