Daddy's Virgin (A CEO Boss Romance Novel)

I pressed my lips together, not sure I wanted to let him in any more than I already had, but nodded anyway. He was my boss. If he wanted to drink a cup of coffee with

me in the mornings, what could it hurt? And it might not be so bad learning more about him. As much as Lacey teased him to his face, she sure did praise him enough behind his back.

“Okay,” I said.

His smile grew, and I felt a little tingle at how happy I’d made him just by agreeing to drink some coffee with him. Before it could go much further than that, I told him goodnight and escaped to my car.

Chapter Eleven

Pete

Monday

Coffee wasn’t enough, I’d decided over the weekend. I needed more. As long as we were on the ranch, Emma would never relax enough around me to really open up. I needed to take her somewhere else, shake things up a little by getting her out of her element.

I waited for her on the porch before sunset. She’d arrived earlier and earlier last week, finally getting to the farm an hour before the sun rose on Friday. It wasn’t even six o’clock when she came up the driveway in her little sedan, the headlights cutting through the hazy dark.

“Stay,” I said to Riley, who obediently didn’t move a muscle as I got up and walked out to Emma’s car.

“Morning!” I said.

She turned quickly, gasping at my sudden appearance. “Morning. I didn’t see you.”

“Let’s go out for breakfast before we get started with the day’s work. There’s a place I like in town.”

She watched me, her eyes too dark to read in the lack of light…not that I’d ever been able to read them in full sunlight.

“Don’t worry,” I said with a smile. “I won’t take it out of your pay!”

She didn’t laugh, but she nodded. She seemed smaller without her hat on, like she’d shrunk five inches overnight. “Okay.”

We drove to town in my truck. The ranch was only a fifteen-minute drive from the western edge of Round Rock, which was where the Texan was, an old diner that had been serving the same country dishes since before I was born.

“They open at six,” I said as we pulled into gravel parking lot. I’d kept the conversation going singlehandedly the entire way. Maybe this hadn’t been the best idea, after all. She seemed tenser than I’d seen her all week. I climbed out of the truck and waited for her to follow me. If the food at the Texan didn’t warm her up a little, I didn’t know what would.

I held the door open for her, enjoying the sweet vanilla scent of her as she walked by and the tickle of her auburn-tipped hair as the wind blew it across my outstretched arm.

“You have to meet the old timers,” I said. We walked over to the round table in the corner, all but one chair taken. The old guys called out to me as we approached. The leader, Big Tom, took a good long look at Emma.

“Hey, Petey,” he said, smiling up at us. “Come join us.”

“I can’t this morning, Big T. This here’s Emma. I just hired her last week. She’s my breakfast date for today.”

I looked over at Emma. Her cheeks were blazing red, but the rest of her face was serene and unaffected as usual, her pretty mouth pressed into a thin line. Had I embarrassed her in front of the guys by calling this a date?

“I’ll catch up with y’all tomorrow morning. We’re gonna get something to eat before heading back to the farm.”

We sat down at a booth and grabbed the menus already on the table. While Emma’s eyes were averted, I took stock of her thick hair pulled back into a ponytail and tousled by the wind, the deep v of her t-shirt plunging down from the bottom of her long neck to the tops of her rounded breasts. My eyes darted to my own menu as soon as she looked up at me.

“What’s good here?” she asked.

“You were born and raised in Round Rock and have never been to the Texan?”

She lifted her chin in that defiant way she had. “My daddy didn’t believe in eating out when he could make a perfectly good meal for us at home.”

I could appreciate that. “My daddy used to bring me to the Texan most days before school. He had a game he liked to play to see who would end up paying for coffee. It was always a lot of fun. Things sure could get pretty damned competitive over a tab of a few dollars!”

That drew a smile out of Emma. I even saw some teeth. I counted that as a victory. I was getting into that safe slowly but surely.