Give In (Billionaire Cowboys #4)

Chapter 1

chapter

one

Clover

I have a system at airports.

It’s not a complicated system. It mostly involves getting to my gate with enough time to acquire a large coffee and a snack that I will feel guilty about and then eat anyway, finding a seat with a wall or a column behind it so no one can walk up on me unexpectedly, and spending the remaining time before boarding doing absolutely nothing productive.

It’s a good system. It works for me. I have refined it over years of being someone who finds airports mildly overwhelming and has learned to manage this through strategic carbohydrates and a defensible seating position.

Today the system fails at step one because the travel day from hell has already claimed my first two flights.

One mechanical delay and one missed connection.

By the time I reach this gate, I have approximately four minutes before boarding and zero time for coffee or snacks or walls to put my back against. I arrive breathless and mildly damp, and dragging my carry-on behind me.

The wheels have been working inconsistently today.

Mostly not working, so I’ve simply been pulling it on its side.

The gate agent scans my boarding pass, and I stumble down the jetway and find my seat.

I have a window seat, which is the one thing today has gotten right. I press my forehead briefly against the cool plastic of the window and breathe.

Okay. Okay. I am on the plane. The plane will take me to the island.

On the island is my sister, who is getting married in two days, and I have promised myself and Juniper that I will be present and cheerful and useful this weekend.

Instead of the version of me that once missed a flight because I got distracted by a bookstore in the terminal and lost track of time.

That was one time. It was a very good bookstore.

I am settling in, arranging my carry-on under the seat in front of me and locating my headphones, when I become aware of a presence in my peripheral vision.

I look up.

Oh.

The man lowering himself into the aisle seat two seats over is — there is no other word for this — enormous.

Not in an alarming way. In a way that makes the airplane seat look like a piece of furniture designed for a different species.

He is tall and broad-shouldered and wearing a dark Henley pushed up to the elbows in the way of a man who runs warm, and his brown hair is threaded through with grey in a way that does something very specific and unexpected to my nervous system.

He has a beard. A good one. Neat but not fussy, the kind that suggests intention without effort.

He gets settled with the economy of movement of someone who travels constantly and has long since stopped being bothered by it. Pulls out his phone. Checks something. Puts it away. He has not looked at me once.

I realize I have been staring for what is probably an impolite amount of time. I look away. I look back. He’s reading something on his phone now. I look away again.

I find my headphones and put them in without connecting them to anything, which is a move I employ when I want to appear occupied while actually doing nothing of the sort.

Then I stare out the window at the tarmac and the ground crew and the luggage carts going back and forth and I think about absolutely nothing except the man two seats to my left.

He’s older. Significantly, probably. The grey in his hair isn’t a streak or a distinguished touch at the temples; it’s threaded all the way through, interwoven with the brown like something that’s been happening gradually and has now arrived.

This does nothing to diminish the effect.

If anything it makes it worse. Better. I don’t have a word for what it makes it.

I look at him again.

He looks at me.

I look away so fast I pull something in my neck.

This is fine. This is totally fine. He didn’t see me staring. I was just looking in that general direction. My eyes were passing through that area of space on their way to somewhere else entirely.

I count to thirty. Then I look again.

He is already looking at me, and there is something at the corner of his mouth that might be the beginning of a smile, which means he absolutely saw me the first time and is now watching me pretend that he didn’t.

I look away again. My ears are hot.

The man in the middle seat, who has been in his own world with a paperback and a neck pillow this whole time, gets up to use the restroom before takeoff. There is a brief, impossible window of unoccupied middle seat between me and the large, handsome, definitely-watching-me man in the aisle seat.

I am looking right at him when he speaks.

“Do you need something, baby girl?”

His voice is deep and rumbly in the way of distant thunder, the kind that you feel in your chest slightly before you hear it with your ears.

It does things to me. Makes my insides feel all squishy.

Makes other parts of me damp and needy in a way that seems frankly disproportionate to the stimulus.

I’ve never had this kind of reaction just from a man’s voice.

I would like to study this phenomenon. Later. In private.

My mouth opens.

A strange squeaking noise comes out.

Awesome. Way to play it cool, Clover.

He smiles. It’s a good smile. A great smile. I can’t quite tell if it comes with dimples because his beard covers most of his jaw line and cheeks, but I’m fairly certain it does, and I’m fairly certain that information would not be good for me. He is definitely one hot silver fox.

“What’s your name, darlin’?” he asks, like a man who is entirely comfortable with the pace of this interaction and has nowhere else to be.

I clear my throat. “Clover.”

“Heath.”

He holds out his hand, and I lay my palm against his for a shake.

His fingers close around mine and I become briefly aware of how large his hand is, how completely it encompasses my own, and I have a moment of thinking that my hands are not small, I’ve never thought of them as small, and yet right now it feels like a child’s hand inside his.

“Nice to meet you, Clover,” he says.

“Yes,” I say.

He releases my hand. He is still looking at me with an expression of patient, unhurried interest that makes me feel simultaneously very seen and completely unable to form words.

Maybe I should ask him if he wants to join the Mile High Club with me.

And we would fit where, Clover? The man is a beast, and you are no petite fairy girl.

I glance at him to check for any reaction and when I don’t find one I’m fairly confident I kept that inside my head where it belongs.

His grin widens.

Oh damn.

“Um, did I say anything somewhat inappropriate to you a moment ago?” I ask.

He leans slightly forward across the empty middle seat, and I get the first hint of how he smells, which is warm and clean and delicious. “No,” he says. “Did you want to say something inappropriate to me?”

What I want is to take my panties off and hand them to this hot man candy. But that would be very inappropriate.

“So what do you do, Heath?”

“I’m a landman.”

“Oh, that has something to do with mineral rights, doesn’t it?”

“Exactly.” He seems pleased that I know this, which pleases me in return, which is a level of mutual pleasing that I find mildly dizzying at thirty thousand feet. “It’s an antiquated job title, but I suppose it does fit.” He settles back slightly, comfortable, unhurried. “What do you do?”

I laugh. “A little bit of everything. If you would have asked me that question yesterday, I would have told you I was a cake artist.”

“But today you’re not?”

“No. I got fired. Turns out, decorating a cake with actual icing is quite challenging.” I shrug. “They make it look so easy on Pinterest.”

“I’m sorry you lost your job.”

I put my hand on his arm. His forearm is warm and solid under my fingers. I remove my hand. “Oh, don’t be. I lose jobs all the time.”

His brows wing upward.

“I tend to get bored easily,” I say, “and if a job doesn’t keep my interest, I get myself into trouble.

” I don’t mention that I technically don’t need to work.

My family’s money affords me a very comfortable life without the necessity of employment.

Because that’s not conversation fodder for hot men you meet on airplanes.

Also, it just sounds pretentious and obnoxious.

Now he looks like he’s fighting a smile. “I’m going to need some examples.”

“Fair enough.” I turn slightly in my seat to face him better, tucking one knee up.

The middle seat passenger is still gone.

It feels like a gift, this temporary removal of the buffer between us, and I am aware enough of my own tendencies to know that I am going to fill it with words.

“Before the cakes, there was massage therapy. Went to school, got my license, and lasted all of two clients. As it would happen, I find touching naked strangers a little off-putting.”

He laughs. It’s big and boisterous and completely unguarded. It’s the kind of laugh that fills a space and makes people three rows up glance over. It is the best sound I’ve heard in a long time.

“Before that, I taught nursery school.” I shake my head.

“Big no there too. It is very difficult to teach tiny people that it’s impolite to touch others with snot on their hands.

I mean, I could deal with that; it wasn’t my favorite, but I was handling it.

But then came the day when half the class got hit with the norovirus.

” I pause. “I probably didn’t handle it well, but I knew if I stayed, things would have gotten worse, so I called 9-1-1 and fled the scene. ”

He’s still laughing, and I find myself watching the lines that fan out from the corners of his eyes.

Actual laugh lines. Deep ones, sexy ones.

Something about that, about knowing that this man has found the humor in life consistently enough to carve it into his face, does something warm and specific to my insides.