“To be honest, I never paid attention to all that. I was too busy making business for other people to mind.”
“Guess you did leave behind a legacy. A couple of effed up marriages, a bad reputation…”
“I’m not back to live up to my fucking reputation,” I snap, harsher than I intend. “I’m just here to try to be a good uncle, a good brother. Only girl I’m spending my downtime with lately is my sixteen-year-old niece.”
“Andrea? No wonder you get along,” she says archly. “You’re at about the same maturity level.”
I whistle through my teeth, but I can’t stop grinning. “Ouch, witch. You’re not gonna show me any mercy at all, huh?”
“Would you want me to?”
“Point taken. Less fun that way,” I mutter, lingering on her. My smile fades as I give myself permission to take her in again, watching how easy she guides that horse like it’s an extension of her own petite, beautiful body. “I think I like you this way.”
Her gaze locks on mine.
There’s this moment where we just look at each other.
It makes me wish like hell she wasn’t off-limits, that she wasn’t a prospective seller I was trying to woo, that my whole damn business didn’t hinge on convincing the world’s prettiest porcupine to play ball.
I can’t cross that line.
I’ve got a sense of ethics I didn’t have when I was younger—even if I had to have it beaten into me by bad experience.
Messing around with her when her ranch is at stake could wind up hurting her real bad in the end.
I won’t do it.
That’s what I keep telling myself desperately as those pale-blue eyes hold mine and our horses drift closer together until our knees almost touch.
I’m fascinated by the Cupid’s bow of her lips. The way summer sweat beads on her jaw in this fine mist, the high dip of her waist, the slender, tautly toned tuck that swells out into a long slope of tempting stomach and curved hips.
This woman’s built to ride.
And I’m not talking about horses.
We’re so close our thighs brush along the lengths of our horses’ flanks. My mouth throbs with a wicked need.
I could do it.
I could lean down right now and—
There’s a rustling in the scrubby brush just up ahead of us.
The only warning before this huge brown shape comes rocketing out of the bushes, skittering into our path.
Both of our horses stagger back, but neither of them rear or startle or bolt.
Before I’m really thinking about what I’m doing, I whip out the old Colt pistol hidden underneath my open flannel shirt and holstered on my hip, firing it in the air.
The cougar must feel cornered between these big old horses and that line of bushes.
It holds its ground for a moment, laying its ears back and snarling as it crouches down.
Then it turns sharply and bolts away in a flash, its sandy hide almost blending into the ground as it crashes through the brush and disappears.
We stare at the place where it vanished for a minute before I lower my arm, check the Colt, and then socket it back into its place at my hip.
“That was interesting,” I grunt.
“She probably has cubs around here somewhere. Just defending her babies.”
There’s actually a touch of admiration in Libby’s voice—and not a hint of fear.
She’s definitely a tough one. Knows her away around and knows what can and can’t hurt her.
I like that.
To distract myself from wandering thoughts, I lean down and rub Plath’s shoulder. “You’ve trained these two pretty well. Didn’t spook at all.”
“I know my horses. And I make sure they’re good to their riders as long as their riders are good to them.” She tilts her head at me. “Where the hell did you learn to shoot, flyboy?”
“Other than here?” I grin, straightening in the saddle. “Pilots don’t just fly. They hand out some heavy artillery.”
“A missile ain’t the same thing as a handgun.”
I laugh. “And neither is a wing-mounted gatling gun, but you can’t even get past grunt level if you don’t certify in firearms training with a hell of a lot more than my old Colt here.”
We both nudge our horses into moving again, heading forward now at a walk. The terrain starts to get a little more rocky, strewn with more scrappy brush that could hide another cougar, a snake, who knows what around these parts.
Libby eyes me, then sniffs. “Please. You’re just a flyboy so you don’t have to get dirty slumming it with the other soldiers on the ground. You make your messes from far away and rocket out of danger.”
“Ouch. So your old man was in the Navy, huh?”
A startled sidelong glance darts my way. “Way before I was born, but yeah. How’d you know?”
“Because sailors can’t stand us ‘flyboys.’ We get to jet off and have all the fun while they’re stuck on the water.” I smirk. “Hell, I’d tell my kids to hate the Air Force, too, if my only job in the military was to play water taxi for the big boys.”