Should've Been A Cowboy & Cowboy Up: Should've Been a Cowboy / Cowboy Up

“Then we can’t...”

He wasn’t going to let this moment pass. “You can.” He started toward her.

She shook her head and backed up. “That’s not fair.”

“Let me decide that. I’ve missed touching you.”

She took a shuddering breath. “But it’s too one-sided. If we could just do it, then we could get it out of our system.”

If he hadn’t been so jacked up on lust, he would have laughed. She was seriously kidding herself if she believed one time would satisfy them. It hadn’t the night in the hayloft and it wouldn’t now.

He closed the distance between them. “You can’t believe that.”

“That’s what I was telling myself while you were kissing me senseless.” She stepped back and bumped against the latched door of an empty stall. “It seemed like a perfectly logical idea when you were unhooking my bra and I didn’t have the self-control of a gnat.”

He groaned. “You’re torturing me.”

“I know, and that’s mean. We should just go back before this gets any—”

A loud crash and a flash of light was followed by a low rumble and the steady ping of rain on the barn’s tin roof. The dogs came in and padded over to Alex, tails wagging slowly.

“Butch, Sundance, go lie down.” He pointed to the tack room where they each had a bed.

With twin doggie sighs of resignation, they left for the tack room. When he turned back to Tyler, the rain had started to pound on the roof in earnest, and she had her hands behind her back and under her shirt as if she intended to fasten her bra. He was losing ground.

“I guess we’ll have to make a run for it,” she said.

“We could, but it’ll probably let up in a few minutes. We could wait and see if it does.”

She hesitated. “I suppose.”

“So why not stop what you’re doing and unlatch that stall door? There’s a nice bed of hay in there.”

Her lips parted and heat simmered in her gaze as it had earlier in the hallway outside her room. This time she didn’t look away. “You don’t give up, do you?”

“Not when there’s something I want.” His heartbeat hammered in his ears, almost drowning the rattle of rain on the tin roof. “I think you want the same thing.”

Her breathing quickened. “Now you’re the one torturing me.”

“I can fix that.” Please let me love you.

“Alex...”

“Tyler...” He waited, willing her to turn and unlatch that stall door, yet knowing that she might not. If she decided to run out into the rain, he’d have to run with her, because she couldn’t arrive at the house dripping wet with him nowhere around. That would look bad.

She finished hooking her bra. “I’m going to see how hard it’s coming down.” Breaking eye contact, she walked to the front of the barn.

He scooped up his hat from the floor and followed her. If she insisted on making a run for it, he’d leave his hat on a shelf beside the door rather than ruin it in the rain. But he was still hoping she’d change her mind.

She peered out the door into the gray light. Rain slanted across the landscape, blurring the outlines of the ranch house and the twin spruces in front of it. “I think we should go.”

He put his hat on the shelf by the door. “I’m warning you, you’ll get wet.”

She muttered something that sounded like I already am.

If that was an admission of how he’d affected her, he wanted to hear it again. “What was that?”

“Nothing. Let’s go.”

“Okay.” He doused the lights, and once they were both out the door, he turned and shoved it closed.

She yelped, and he swung around in time to see her land on her backside in the mud. He was beside her in three strides and leaned down to help her up. Except it didn’t work out that way. She managed to upset his balance just enough on the mud-slick ground that he went down, too. By throwing himself sideways, he avoided landing on top of her, but he had mud splattered all over his clothes.

“I’m sorry!” She scrambled to her knees, rain dripping from her hair into her face. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, other than the mud. Are you?”

“Yes, but...I don’t want to track all this into that beautiful house.”

There was a back way into the house for exactly this reason. It opened into the utility room adjoining the kitchen. There was even a narrow, seldom-used staircase that led from the kitchen to the second floor, an addition made when three growing, often dirty, boys had needed to get upstairs without making too big a mess.

But at the moment Tyler looked as if she’d entered a wet T-shirt contest. Surely any red-blooded male would forgive him for neglecting to tell her about the back entrance into the ranch’s utility room and the staircase to the second floor.

“There’s a cleanup sink in the barn,” he said. “We can go back and get the worst of it off there.”

“All right.”

He felt a little bit guilty for leading her back into the barn, but not much. When he’d kissed her a few minutes ago, she’d kissed him back. Vigorously. Vows of chastity were all well and good for some people, but he and Tyler weren’t those people. They needed each other too desperately.

Maybe they’d clean off the mud and go back to the house without anything happening. It was possible. But he couldn’t imagine four more days of nothing happening. To his way of thinking, they might as well get started now.

This time he didn’t turn on the overhead lamps. Low lights mounted near the floor were on a dusk-to-dawn sensor, and they glowed softly, illuminating the floor so they wouldn’t trip over anything and creating an ambience that suited the mood Alex hoped for. Rain hitting the tin roof added another romantic touch.

“Thanks for not turning on the lights,” Tyler said. “I’m a mess.”

“Not in my book.” Even in low light, he had a good view of her yellow shirt plastered to her body. Her nipples made dents in the soaked material, and it was all he could do not to reach for her, mud and all. But the next move needed to be hers, not his.

She slicked her wet hair back and squeezed some water out of the ends as she glanced upward. “I like the sound of rain on a tin roof.”

“Me, too.”

She met his gaze briefly and looked away. “Where’s the sink?”

“At the far end, beyond the last stall.”

Her running shoes squished as she walked down the aisle between the rows of stalls. “Is there a goat in here, too? I seem to remember something about a goat.”

“Yep, there’s a goat.” He followed her toward the back of the barn. “His name is Hornswaggled, and he shares a stall with a mare named Doozie. They’re inseparable.”