Chapter 5 #2
As if he mattered. As if the sun and the moon and the stars hung on him.
You know. It happened once. You fucked it up. You hurt her.
He burned that desire to the ground. All those pathetic, needy thoughts.
Cassidy was twenty-five years old. He was thirty-three. He was way too old for her, and he wouldn’t know what to do with her even if he got his hands on her. Well. That wasn’t true. He would know full well what to do with her body.
But when it came to her emotions, her heart, he didn’t have the first idea of what to do.
He watched the deferential way Dalton treated Cassidy.
Was it more of the coddling she got from her whole family? They seemed to be nicer to her than they were to anybody else. Or was it something more? Had he been wrong in his first assessment of how Dalton felt about her? And if so, then …
Well, probably a good thing for Cassidy.
Probably.
“Dinner is ready,” Austin said, holding up a tray of meat that he had taken off the grill.
There was a table set up to the side of the fireplace with sides and plates. It was cold outside, but the fire mitigated the chill.
Still, it was December. So West had to wonder if Austin really didn’t want him in the house.
He looked over at the mountains, and suddenly, a hand came into view holding a bottle of beer. “Drink?”
He looked up and saw Cassidy.
“What?”
“Oh, how funny,” she said. “Usually, I’m the one reduced to inane questions when we talk. Beer,” she said. “For you.”
He reached up and took it, and their fingers brushed. He gritted his teeth. “Thanks.”
“Sure. I can’t believe you’re just sitting over here brooding.”
He frowned. “I don’t brood.”
“You do.”
“I do not,” he said. “I’m a man of action. Brooding is inherently passive.”
“I don’t think so. Brooding exudes a whole vibe.” He stared at her. Blandly. She cleared her throat. “It does. You do. You were … Brooding gives off electricity.”
“Not generally,” he said. He made eye contact with her, tried to convey his meaning. If he was giving off electricity, it was because she was sensitive to what was happening between them.
Right, he scoffed. She’s gazing at Dalton Wade like a puppy, and at the same time she wants to climb you like a tree.
Except, once he had the thought, he couldn’t deny it, not really. He wasn’t so inexperienced to believe that what he felt was one-sided.
Maybe that was just what he was telling himself. Because he was already pathetic. Sitting here unwillingly at a family gathering without a plate of food.
“Do you want me to get you some food?”
It was like she was reading his mind.
“I don’t need you to—”
“You’re a guest. I’ll get you a plate.”
Before he could protest, she was off again, practically scampering like a bushy-tailed squirrel as she went to the table and put a steak on his plate, along with a roll, macaroni salad, and some green beans.
She thrust the plate into his hand moments later.
His stomach growled. “Thank you,” he said.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had said thank you with any kind of sincerity.
He couldn’t remember the last time someone had earned his thanks. Because he couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done something for him. Cassidy turned, got a plate of food, then stood looking first toward Dalton, and then toward him.
“Come to me. You know you want to.”
She looked genuinely torn, and then she made her way to him, no adoration in her eyes, but a sense of duty.
She cleared her throat and took a seat on a rock beside the lawn chair he was on.
“You want the chair?”
“No,” she said, looking ahead. “I don’t need to be coddled.”
He smiled. “Okay. Touché. But what if I’m not coddling you? What if I’m just being chivalrous?”
“I don’t believe it. Not of you.”
“That hurts.”
“I don’t think it does.”
“You don’t know me.”
“You don’t know me. But you were trying to talk some kind of stuff earlier.”
“Oh, are you trying to say that I was talking shit?”
She snorted. “I don’t have any problem saying that if I mean it.”
“Okay.”
Don’t flirt with her.
He cleared his throat.
“You did good. Earlier,” he said, because that was the only thing he could think to say that wasn’t mean or sexually charged.
“Thank you.”
“Yeah. I’m nice.”
“You’re not.”
He shrugged. “You got me.”
“Okay, now you’re going to make me feel bad.”
“Why? I was mean to you earlier. I called you coddled.”
She held her fork out at him and made a stabbing motion. “So you admit it. You were being mean.”
“A little,” he relented.
Doing a great job not flirting.
“It’s not that my family coddles me. It’s just that they’re nice to me. Because I was abandoned when I was a child.”
“You mentioned that,” he said.
He wanted to ask her about it. About what exactly had happened. Why her mother had left her, what her childhood was like before. He couldn’t remember ever having that sort of impulse. Maybe that was why he exhibited a rare show of self-control by not asking her.
Because it was weird that he wanted to know. That he wanted to hear something about her life, wanted to have a conversation with her, rather than just sleep with her.
It wasn’t that he thought women were good for only one thing. It was just that he didn’t have close relationships.
He was a loner. That was fine. He had alienated pretty much everyone in town with his behavior as a teen. If he could’ve had friends, they would’ve been the Wilders. Because they were the only people in town as wild as he, but the Wilders hated the Hancocks, so that hadn’t happened.
He had … people he socialized with. They were part of the Wild West Show. But that was it. Sex was a shallow endeavor for him. Therefore, his relationships tended to be shallow.
Cassidy had gotten him dinner. She had sat down next to him after giving him a beer. Maybe that was what had triggered the strange feeling that he wanted to know more about her.
But that would be foolish. And it definitely wouldn’t be honest. Because he didn’t have staying power, not outside the bedroom, anyway. And he knew it.
It was easier when he just found her annoying, but the problem was she wasn’t.
He wanted to be able to push her away.
She was making it difficult.
And he was enjoying this obsession too much to do it.
That was bad. It was very bad.
And there wasn’t much he was willing to do about it. Because he was also a man who indulged himself. That was part of following his impulses.
Cassidy Wilder wasn’t an impulse. She was a nice girl.
And he would do well to remember that.
“Thanks,” he said, looking down at his plate.
“For?”
“Coddling me.”
She was spinning out, even now that he was talking to his sister and not her, she was … buzzing. As if she’d just done another trick ride, as if she was experiencing an adrenaline rush from climbing a mountain or something.
Silly, because West wasn’t a mountain, he was just a man.
She was, in some ways, experienced with men. With their nature. She’d seen it all growing up. She was lucky nothing had happened to her. That no one had touched her or assaulted her because her mother had exposed her to strangers that she never, ever should have been around.
But while she remained personally untraumatized, she was also wary of men. She’d seen how they commodified sex. How they used power over women. She didn’t like it. What she’d witnessed had made her very wary.
She was, in other ways, inexperienced, though.