Hold Me Close (Bridgewater County 4)

If I was going to get slapped in the face by our new office manager, he had to know why. Hell, if I was going to get slapped with a damn sexual harassment suit, he deserved to know about that, too. He’d been pissed, and rightfully so. But no one had been angrier than me. Why had I tried to drive her away with sexual innuendo? Stupid. If I could go back to that day and do it all over, I would.

But I couldn’t. Instead, I was forced to apologize—so she didn’t quit before she even began—and behave like the perfect gentleman at work so that maybe, just maybe, I could earn her trust again. To prove to her I really wasn’t an asshole. And not just for my sake, although I wanted her more than I’d ever wanted anything, but for Ethan’s as well.

He’d finally met her face-to-face on her first day in the office and he’d felt it just like I had. The connection was there and it was real. She was the one we’d been waiting for all these years.

I’d known she was special at the rodeo, but I’d been such an idiot. I’d stupidly thought she was there to hit on the cowboys and I’d known without a doubt that I’d had to keep her from making a mistake.

Of course, I hadn’t known she was Rachel Andrews then. Still, she wasn’t buckle bunny material. She was too good for that. There was an innocence and purity about her that had made me want to toss her over my shoulder and haul her out of there. Keep her safe, keep her all to myself. And Ethan. Since I hadn’t been able to do that, I’d done the next best thing. I’d been a fucking idiot and tried to scare her away.

And I’d succeeded. Not only from the damn rodeo assholes, but from me. The only asshole she’d encountered that night.

Fuck. Some days I wanted to punch myself in the face for those things I’d said. In one moment of testosterone fueled idiocy, I’d gone and screwed everything up. Which meant that now Ethan and I were forced to sit and watch as she ate dinner across from Bob, the biggest douche canoe of them all.

Bridgewater was a small town. Everyone knew everyone, and while Hawk’s Landing was ten miles out, I’d heard all the gossip about this Bob guy. Despite Ethan’s warning about staring, I found myself glaring at the booth where Rachel sat smiling at the asshat.

God, she looked good. Better than at the office. While we weren’t fancy at the guest ranch, her outfits were always conservative. Professional. I knew she hid a gorgeous body beneath her modest tops and trim pants. I never missed the full curves of her breasts, the roundness of her hips. They’d be a perfect handful. At least. And those hips? I’d be able to get a good hold of them as I fucked her from behind, move her as I wanted as she rode me. I’d be able to see her face, to watch her as she came all over my cock. To see her green eyes flare with heat.

I wanted to muss her up, to have her chestnut hair wild over my pillow, to tangle my fingers in it.

I might have dirty thoughts where our office manager was concerned, but I was putting a ring on it. When I finally got my lips on hers, it would be my last first kiss.

But Bob? She’d be the first…of the week. Ma

ybe. If he hadn’t dipped his dick already. He was a player. He fucked and fled. He was nowhere near good enough for our Rachel.

Ethan seemed to know what I was thinking, took a swig of his beer. His voice sounded weary. “She’s off the clock. She can hang out with whomever she wants.”

“Yeah,” I grumbled. “Well, ‘whomever she wants’ is Bob Stevens from the hardware store.”

Ethan’s head snapped up at that and now he was the one craning his neck for a better view of Rachel. He was taller than me and leaner, but the guy could hold his own in a fight. Shit, I was already fantasizing about how we could take Bob out back and beat the crap out of him for having the nerve to ask out our woman. To even think about her, and I was sure he was. He wouldn’t have taken her to dinner if he didn’t expect to get her in bed after.

But Rachel wasn’t our woman. Not yet, at least. And all thanks to me and my big, stupid mouth.

She’d been working with us for a month now and each day had been a special kind of hell. We’d decided on day one we wanted her.

I’d known since the rodeo, but Ethan agreed after shaking her hand and seeing her soft smile. Watching her competently pick up where Emmy left off before she went to have her baby. Rachel wasn’t just beautiful, she was smart, too. Funny. Kind.

So we were stuck in a dilemma. We knew we wanted her, but she clearly wanted nothing to do with us beyond office hours.

Correction. Nothing to do with me.

She was polite and civil to me at the office but there was no misinterpreting her cold distance. I’d crossed so many boundaries at the rodeo when trying to keep her from the horny cowboys.

She wasn’t a buckle bunny. She wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of woman. I’d met my share on the rodeo circuit, and before that when I was in major league baseball. No, she had “relationship” written all over her and we wanted to give it to her. Both of us, together. And that was why I’d all but shoved her away in the stable that night. To keep her from making a big mistake. But the one who’d made the mistake had been me. She hadn’t been throwing herself at me. She’d been introducing herself. As Emmy’s fucking sister.

Yeah, chance blown. Because of that, she’d put up an invisible barrier between us that might as well have been made out of steel. Ethan, on the other hand, was the golden boy in her eyes. I’d seen the way she smiled when he greeted her in the mornings. Oh, she didn’t flirt with him—she was too much of a professional for that—but she wasn’t giving him the cold shoulder, either.

Lucky bastard.

Still, I couldn’t be too jealous. It was my own damn fault he and I were sitting on the sidelines pining over our sweet woman while she was on a date with the town’s biggest jackass.

Ethan and I had been best friends since we were kids. I’d grown up on the East Coast, but I’d come with my parents often enough. I’d always loved Montana and when I had the cash from my time in pro baseball, my parents had been happy for me to buy them out and enjoy their retirement. That had been when I was still playing ball.

It was Ethan who’d convinced me to give ranch life a shot with him as my partner when my baseball career was cut short by a shoulder injury. After three years in the majors, I’d had to suddenly find a new career. I’d assumed sports commentating or coaching, but neither had panned out. I’d been too bitter to linger, to be involved in a sport I could no longer play. I never imagined I’d turn out to be the co-owner of a Wild West guest ranch.

As always, my best friend had been there with a helping hand when I’d needed him most. He’d gotten his MBA and knew what the shit he was doing when it came to keeping the business in the red, hiring the right staff, marketing. Even trusting Emmy’s judgement on hiring Rachel. Some could say he was the brains and I was the brawn, but Ethan had twenty pounds of muscle on me. We’d always been close but my moving back to Bridgewater and working the ranch together had solidified our friendship.

Over two many beers one night, we realized we wanted the same thing, a traditional Bridgewater marriage. Not only did we want to share the business, but we wanted to share a woman too. The right woman. We’d just been waiting for her.