Solid Gold Cowboy, Maisey Yates [best young adult book series TXT] 📗

she could remember, without pacing herself to exhaustion, driving across half a state or tossing and turning for hours, Jordan fell effortlessly, deeply asleep.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHEN LAZ WOKE UP the next morning, he could smell bacon. And he still felt sated and satisfied after a night spent in Jordan’s arms. That sex... The woman had blown his head off.

And now she was cooking for him.

He shook his head.

Yeah, it was what she had been hired to do, but this felt different.

It just did.

He had to wonder why.

Guilt crept over him. Guilt at the speech he’d given her. At what he told her about how he intended to keep his life separate.

It was true, though.

It was all he had to give. All he had.

But he got up, and had breakfast with her, and instead of going out to his wood shop, he ended up taking her back to bed.

And when she got down on her knees and took him into her mouth, her blue eyes a wild spark as she looked up at him while she pleasured him, he figured it was all right that for now, this was all he wanted to do.

He called his bar manager and told her that he wouldn’t be in tonight.

Instead, he made dinner for himself and Jordan, and she baked a cake. Then they made love on the floor of his house in such a way that he almost felt like he needed to apologize to the portrait of his grandmother that hung at the end of the hallway.

And it went on like that. For days.

Because he felt like he’d found something in her that he never anticipated. She made him want to disrupt his schedule. She made him not care so much about being at the bar every night.

He didn’t feel quite so compelled to go out and check on the ranch personally every afternoon. He just let his foreman handle it.

What he wanted had been reduced to his little house. What he wanted had been reduced to Jordan’s arms.

And what surprised him was how okay that seemed.

He had consciously gone out of his way to never wind his life around another person’s.

To never need them. And he was skating perilously close to something he had always vowed he never would. He felt guilty about the things he’d said to Jordan when they’d first gone to bed together, but he stood by them too.

There were just some people that were better off solitary.

Some people who didn’t bend that well because they would just break.

And he was one of them.

He finally gave in and went to work after about a week of being at his place with Jordan, and it was a good thing. Because she was going to have to leave soon. She was going to have to go back to her job. Or maybe not. Maybe not. They hadn’t really talked about it.

But that will amount to her basically living with you.

He gritted his teeth. Sure. That wasn’t going to work. He did know that.

But one afternoon when he ventured down into town, he walked into the Western wear store and perused the stock. And inside he found a black suitcase.

Inside, the suitcase was lined with loud, retro cowboy art. Horses and men with six-shooters held high in the air. And it was funny. A little bit of hidden strangeness inside a sedate-looking bag. And it reminded him so much of Jordan he had to get it.

Which was how he found himself hauling a suitcase up to the house that night while he blew off his regular shift.

When he walked into the house, Jordan was standing at the stove, stirring a pot.

“Oh,” she said when he walked in. “I didn’t expect you for dinner. I have a cake in the oven but...”

A cake. She baked him a cake.

All over his house little touches of care were evident. All these things that she’d done for him.

You paid her to do them. Don’t go making it sentimental.

“I brought you this,” he said, shoving the bag toward her.

She blinked. “You... You brought me a suitcase.”

“Because the flowered one is all wrong. This is what you like. You don’t want anything as loud as that flowered thing.”

“You’re right,” she said, staring at him, wide-eyed. “I don’t.”

“It’s got... I mean it’s got cowboys inside of it.”

She blinked. “You shoved a couple cowboys in there for me? That was thoughtful of you, Laz, but you’re about the only cowboy I can handle.”

He unzipped it, and showed her the lining. “It’s just... It’s interesting inside. But you have to work hard to find that out. Like you.”

It was very strange, and he was pretty sure he was hovering around the edge of a romantic gesture, but having never actually done one before, he didn’t really know.

“Laz,” she said. “That is... The nicest thing. And... And you’re right. It is exactly what I want. It’s exactly what I would choose.” She let out a hard breath. “I love you. I just... I’m not expecting anything back. But I love you. And I needed to say it.”

Something went tight inside of him and twisted.

It was like the world had gone still and his heart along with it. Jordan. Beautiful Jordan who had turned his world upside down the first day she’d walked into his bar, loved him.

Not another man, but him.

And he had no response to it. There wasn’t one.

Not in the whole, dark well of pain inside of him.

“Right. Well. When do you start work back up again?”

She blinked, looking as if she’d been slapped. “I... Next week.”

“Are you any closer to finding yourself a place to stay?”

“No,” she said.

“How about above the bar. There’s a place up there you...you helped me use it one night. I can have it cleaned and it would be ready for you quickly.”

“You don’t... You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.”

And he realized that he was basically offering her a position as his kept woman. And he could have offered her that apartment