Chapter 8 #2
“It is so,” said West. “She’s a natural.” All of the truths that he and Cassidy had confessed to each other seemed to spin between them. He knew she felt it too. This time, there was no obliviousness. And when their eyes caught and held, he felt the tension between them.
Dammit.
He wasn’t going to hook up with anyone else tonight. He just didn’t want another woman. He wanted Cassidy Wilder. Pretending that he didn’t know what he wanted, pretending that he wasn’t … him, that he could feel this kind of obsession and not be hell-bent on pursuing it was ridiculous.
That was the truth of it.
The problem was, he wasn’t a teenager. He had been reflecting on that earlier. If he were, then he wouldn’t think ahead to the consequences. To the fallout. But he was thirty-three years old, so he was thinking about it.
Cassidy’s family treated her as if she needed to be wrapped in soft blankets and kept safe.
As if she were a delicate baby they couldn’t afford to drop.
He could see why now. Because the way she’d joined them was incredibly sad.
Still, he thought they didn’t give her nearly enough credit. Because Cassidy was tough.
No, the possibility of hurting her wasn’t his primary reason for avoiding her. It was the potential cost to him.
He could see that she wanted Dalton. And maybe Dalton wanted her back. That would be the ideal thing for her.
She should get with the guy who had known her all her life, the one who understood her family and their dynamic. One her brothers liked. That would be the easiest, kindest thing for her. He would give her a few orgasms and move on.
Nothing that would hurt her.
Tempting. That devil inside him was tempting him.
“Sit down,” Jessie Jane said, grabbing him by the edge of his shirt.
“Then you get me a drink,” he said.
Cassidy ended up sitting down at the table, and so did Dalton. The others went off to get drinks.
“Weren’t you buying a drink for that woman?”
Dalton’s evil gaze slid over to him. “I was.”
“You should at least go tell the lady you got an offer you couldn’t refuse.”
Cassidy looked between the two of them, but Dalton got up and headed back toward the redhead.
“What’s happening?”
“I think you all intruded on his date.”
He immediately regretted his comment, because Cassidy looked wounded. Shocked, a little bit sick. “Cassidy,” he said. “Keep it together.”
Her face went scarlet. “What?”
“It’s obvious. That you like him. He just …”
“If you say ‘boys will be boys,’ I’m going to punch you in the face.”
“I would never say that. Because it’s a cliché, and I don’t deal in clichés. I like to think that I’m a little cleverer than that. But it is a typical Saturday night for him. The same as it would be for me.”
“That’s what you were here for too?”
“It was.”
“Oh great. So, he’s taking me away in a couple of weeks, and you …”
There was profound hurt in her eyes, and he could feel it throbbing between them. The unspoken thing. He wanted her to say it, and yet he didn’t want her to say it. Neither of them had chosen to be with her.
“Did you ever think maybe guys feel like they should protect you?”
“Oh, how nice for me.”
“Someone should.”
“My brothers do that,” she said. “Every day. It’s like their whole thing.”
“Then maybe don’t pant after a guy who sees you as a sister.”
“He invited me to go away with him.”
She was pushing back.
“And you want him?”
“Yes,” she said, leveling her gaze at him. He could see sparks in her eyes, but also uncertainty. And he could still feel that electricity pulsing between them that said she was holding back a fair amount of what she wanted to say, even while saying so much.
“At least he’s nice to you, I suppose.”
“So nice,” she said. But there was some bite to her words.
“So you know he won’t string you along,” West said.
“That is true.”
He could feel her misery.
“He’s jealous,” West said.
Cassidy looked at him. “What?”
“Well, he has an issue with me. With you working with me, I think.”
“Oh. Why would he be jealous of you?”
West raised a brow. Slowly. “Come on.”
“Come on what?”
“Are you going to pretend that what happened earlier today wasn’t a thing?”
“A … a thing?”
Right then the whole family converged back on the table. Well, everyone except Dalton, who was making good on his offer to buy the lady a drink but also trying to extricate himself. West was amused.
He’d made a little bit of chaos, that was for sure.
But while it amused him that Dalton was in some pain, he was not happy he hadn’t gotten to finish what he was saying to Cassidy. He wanted her to acknowledge what had happened, because he knew damn good and well he wasn’t alone in his attraction.
At this point, he wanted her to ache the way he did, even if he never did anything about it, and if that was perverse, then so be it. But he wasn’t embarrassed to want a woman.
Good job keeping yourself from getting entangled, dumbass.
His sister handed him a beer and turned toward him in her chair.
He leaned back and stared ahead while Jessie Jane kept looking at him.
Austin was telling some story about a phone call from his publisher, and his other siblings were hanging on his every word.
Cassidy was craning her neck to watch Dalton, who turned away from the redhead and started heading back to the table.
Cassidy got up and followed him to the bar.
West must have made a face because his sister inched closer.
“What. Are. You …”
“Nothing,” he said.
“It was so tense over here, I could have snapped the atmosphere with my teeth.”
“Well, don’t go biting anything.”
“I’ll bite you if you don’t behave yourself.”
“Jessie. Please.”
“West, I know, against my will, that you can have whatever woman you want, but I swear on a handful of Mom’s crystals that if you—”
“What are you accusing me of?” He stared blandly at his sister, who leaned in even closer.
“Cassidy is sweet.”
“She isn’t. That’s why you like her.”
Jessie Jane wrinkled her nose. “You know what I mean. And they’re all protective of her.”
“Yes, I know, they’d nail me to a wall, and hell, they’d do it just for fun, to be honest. They owe me one for the time I chucked Carson through a window.”
“And made out with his wife.”
“She wasn’t his wife at the time.”
“You just have a look in your eye, and I don’t like it, because when we were kids and you got that look, you often blew something up—literally—and I really don’t need you blowing this up for me.”
“The scandal would rock your political campaign.”
“No, it would make things dicey in my family.”
Right. It was her family. They would be her family. The Wilder brothers weren’t really a functional family—in a traditional sense—but they were close. And here he was, her actual family, getting it in the neck over her need to preserve this new family.
He’d be more wounded if he weren’t playing with fire and accelerant. Explosions weren’t out of the question, honestly.
“She’s sweet on Dalton,” he said, looking over at the bar, where Cassidy was lingering near the man himself.
He hadn’t meant to say that, because it was too close to admitting that he was starting to second-guess his intention to leave Cassidy alone.
“Oh. I know.” She kept her eyes trained on West. “But you do something to women. And I don’t get it, because you are my brother, but I also can’t deny it.”
“I’m not the big bad wolf. And even if I were, you put Little Red Riding Hood right in my path, Jess, so why complain about it now?”
“I didn’t think the virginal sister of your sworn enemies would be appealing to you.”
Vir—
Flynn chose that moment to lean into the conversation. “Show going well?”
Flynn was the only one who actually cared about the show, because its functioning was tied to his fiancée’s happiness.
“Going great. Cassidy is a phenomenal rider,” he said much more sincerely than usual. Under Jessie’s scrutiny, he was going to ease off the asshole pedal for the time being.
“I’m what?” Cassidy asked, sitting down across from him.
“A pain,” he responded.
Dalton sat down beside her. “He said you were an amazing rider.”
He’d said phenomenal, actually, and Dalton was lame. “Something like that,” West said.
“Oh well, don’t compliment me to my face.”
“I don’t want you to get too big for your britches,” he said.
She wrinkled her nose, and he found himself stunned by the expression on her face, and by the way she moved.
He had never, in his whole goddamned life, responded to a woman in this way before. Not ever.
He could only look at her while she turned to Jessie and Dalton and started telling them about rehearsal—all riding jargon, no talk about them, or what they’d spoken of, or what had happened when he’d held her in his arms.
He examined her profile, the easy slope of her nose, the soft curve of her neck.
Her lips were pretty. Bow-shaped, almost. She had a heavy fringe of dark lashes around those brown-green-gold eyes, but her appeal went deeper than a collection of features.
Because beauty was common enough, but there was something else happening here.
Something more. And he was completely captivated by the puzzle.
Obsessed.
His sister had recognized it too. She’d gotten his number and gotten it good.
She was also right, that when he had this kind of bee in his bonnet, shit got messed up, and he really didn’t want to mess any of this up.
He’d spent so many years holding things together. He’d been a terror when he was younger, but he’d gotten hold of himself. He understood himself now.
He was the way he was. His brain worked the way it did. He didn’t hate himself for it. But he also wasn’t so selfish that he thought someone else should have to deal with him. His parents had—
That wasn’t important.
He had a plan. Cassidy didn’t fit into it.
He might experience life as intensely as he ever had, but he had something now his teenage self hadn’t had—self-control.
He’d use it now.
He’d make it a game, resisting this need.
It was an adrenaline rush if nothing else. A thrill.
It was just one he hadn’t been looking for.
Not at all.