Chapter 7 #3
The stables were nicer than any of the dwellings she had seen on the property so far. They were large and in beautiful condition, made with honey-stained log beams and a green sheet metal roof.
“I built this,” he said.
She gawked at him yet again. “You built it?”
“Yep. I went through a phase when I really wanted to learn about construction. Kept me busy. Hell, I’m using the skill set again to do my house.”
“You’re not building your house by yourself?”
“No. Not by myself.”
She remembered that he’d said he had a meeting with his contractor the other day. “You don’t have a contractor, though, do you? You’re the contractor.”
“Ouch. You got me.”
“You were just impatient with me when you said you had a meeting.”
“Something like that. Get out.”
He put the truck in park and smiled at her. The smile, combined with the command, did something strange to her insides. She found herself tumbling out of the truck on legs that felt like jelly and followed him as he walked into the stable.
It smelled pleasantly of horses and hay, and she felt her muscles relax just slightly. This was her comfort zone. “Horses were my first friends here.” The words tumbled out of her mouth, and she knew a little embarrassment. It was another thing she had never said out loud to anybody.
“I understand.”
“They’re very nonjudgmental,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t agree with that. I think horses are excellent judges of character. Maybe it didn’t feel like judgment to you, because they like you.”
“You’re being nice to me,” she said.
“Sorry. I won’t let it happen again.”
He went into the tack room and reappeared a moment later with a halter and a lead rope in each hand.
He gave one to her and then led the way toward the stalls that contained the horses they would be riding.
She went in to get Stardust, and even though she wasn’t familiar with the layout of the tack room, found it easy to begin getting her ready.
The equipment they had used had been new to her when they had first started, the different features of the saddle something she hadn’t seen up close before.
But it felt a little bit more familiar now.
Maybe too familiar, because rather than paying attention to what she was doing, she got lost in what West was doing.
His hands were large, sure as they moved down the horse’s body. He put the saddle on his mount’s back and lowered himself to tighten the girth.
She swallowed hard.
His shoulders were broad, his back muscular. His thighs were like tree trunks. She could see the outline of his muscles through the battered denim he was wearing.
And then she found her eyes skimming over his ass, and she immediately wanted to go outside and stare directly into the sun to burn out her retinas as punishment for the act.
There’s nothing wrong with looking. He’s handsome.
Something about that calm, internal observation stilled the beating of her heart just a little bit. But she did turn her focus back to her own task, because there was something else that moment of weakness had triggered inside her.
Recognition. Realization.
He was … He was hot. And maybe that was the beginning and end of why he created a reaction inside her body.
It wasn’t the complex dance she had made it in her head. The air of danger about him. The reckless, untamed nature she sensed inside him.
She felt uncomfortable around him because he was attractive, and she didn’t want to find him attractive. The end.
She had frozen, standing there with her hand on top of the saddle, staring down at a single patch of white on Stardust’s neck.
Okay. So he was hot. Big deal. It was obvious. She had known that from the beginning. The problem was that she found him hot. She personally, specifically, found West Hancock hot.
Of course, there were a lot of men she found hot, though many of them were actors or football players, rather than men she was interacting with on a daily basis. She should be relieved, honestly. That this was the source of the attraction.
Because that wasn’t unique. It wasn’t even interesting.
He was tall, he was muscular, and had the sort of angular face she usually found appealing. Who didn’t like a jaw that could cut glass? Honestly.
It was just that she was always worried—just a little—about that weakness in her parents’ DNA. The thing that drove them from bed to bed and seemed to let them down every time. Sex.
She wasn’t opposed to sex. But it was like …
A fire in the fireplace was fine. A fire outside the fireplace was a reckless danger that could burn down the mountains all around them.
Attraction was okay. It was the idea of acting on it that scared her. And this terrible feeling that maybe she didn’t know everything about herself.
Because all this time, she had been in that snow globe created by her family, and with West sometimes she felt brutally shoved outside it.
She cleared her throat and finished tacking up her horse.
“You good?” he asked.
“I am good,” she said, meeting his gaze full on and reassuring herself that the physical reaction she had to him was due only to his hotness.
There were no feelings behind it. This attraction was different from the way she felt about Dalton. That was why she hadn’t recognized it at first. Also, it had just come out of left field.
She thought about what she had told him. About her past. It was why she often viewed men as problematic until she got to know them. And why in many cases she didn’t get to know them at all.
She might have avoided anything terrible happening to her when she was a child, but she’d seen the way men treated her mother. She’d seen ugly things. Sex being treated as a commodity, and masculine power, strength, and position being used against women.
She didn’t think about it consciously very often, but she had a feeling that was where the predator/prey analogy had come from.
She had her wonderful brothers, and she had Dalton. But in general, trusting men wasn’t her default setting.
But West was hot. That was fine. It wasn’t an actionable item.
“All right. We can take the horses on over to the arena.”
He mounted his horse with ease, and she did the same, following him out of the stable and down the dirt road that would take them back to the arena. “I can’t wait to see you put together all the things you’ve learned,” he said.
She was trying to decide if he was being sincere, because he had been awfully sincere today, which was as unexpected as anything.
She wished that she were riding in front of him, so she wasn’t staring at his silhouette. At his broad shoulders, at the way his cowboy hat sat perfectly on his head. Or the way his athletic body maneuvered the animal with ease.
Or maybe just chill out and enjoy it?
Was that possible?
She’d had a crush on Dalton forever and a day, and that relationship felt so high-stakes. If he didn’t feel the same way, it would be torture because she’d still have to see him constantly for the rest of her life. If she did something stupid, then … Well, same result.
Anything that might happen with West was of no consequence. He was just pretty.
She’d gone twenty-five years without having random hook-up sex. She wasn’t going to lose her mind and jump on West.
Maybe this would be an interesting experiment, though.
There was something freeing about that.
He was an inconsequential stranger that she could bounce things off, and a man she didn’t want. So she could just appreciate the way he looked.
He turned and met her gaze just then, as though he could read her mind, and the sharpness in his blue eyes nearly sent her tumbling to the ground.
She grinned, but she knew it looked more like a grimace. He turned away from her, and his horse flicked his tail, as if he also had opinions on the situation.
But she didn’t have time to marinate on that for much longer because they arrived at the arena, and then she had to focus on doing the tricks they had been practicing.
“You know there’s going to be Christmas music playing while we do this,” he said.
“Great. Rhinestones, jingle bells. Holly Jolly everything.”
“Yep.”
“You don’t strike me as being especially Holly Jolly.”
“I’m not,” he said.
That intensity was back, and as he looked at her, she felt as if he could see straight down into her soul. She found it disconcerting.