Rough and Ready (More Than A Cowboy 2)

I barely suppressed an eye roll.

“Yeah? That’s great,” he replied without any feeling.

“Think there are any openings for a ring girl?”

And there it was. She wanted something from him, and it wasn’t his brain. Nor his dick. Well, she probably wanted that, too, but she wanted his connections. She wanted a job as one of the women who, during a fight, walked around the outside of the ring carrying a sign with the round number on it. They wore minimal clothing, and her boobs would look perfect in the skimpy outfit.

She had no interest in him. It was fine to work connections to find a job, but she did it in the wrong way. Flirting with a guy to get a job only pissed me off since it only made her look stupid. Made it so a guy thought a woman could only get a job by flaunting her sexuality not her brains.

“Are the pizzas ready?”

He hadn’t answered her question, and the way her coy smile slipped, she’d noticed, too.

“Yeah, let me check.”

When she turned to grab the two boxes, bending down to retrieve them from a rack, her ass stuck straight out. It was a nice ass, damn her. Even running fifty miles or more a week, I didn’t have an ass like that. If I tossed a coin at it, it would definitely bounce right off.

Reed just sighed and looked away.

We were quiet on the walk back to our building. I was thinking about how he must have girls flinging themselves at him, some, like Claire, wanting him for their own gain. If there hadn’t been a counter separating them, I had no doubt she’d have jumped his bones if there was a chance he’d hook her up with that ring girl job. He didn’t seem all that interested, so maybe he had a girlfriend.

Of course, he did. He was gorgeous and a gentleman, no matter what he thought of himself.

I was a stuffy university professor who studied seven-hundred-year-old cathedrals and was afraid of elevators. I definitely didn’t have a ring girl’s body. I had boobs, but not the right cup size for the job or a guy like Reed.

4

REED

Harper had the sexy librarian thing down. Fuck.

I had no idea that prim shit worked for me. It was eight in the morning, and I was in the gym jumping rope, ten minutes into my stint based on the timer on the wall. She caught my eye through the windows to the parking lot. Yeah, she wore a knee length black coat and only an inch or two of her skirt’s hem showed beneath. Her hair was pulled back into a simple, sleek ponytail, and I saw a glint of diamond at her ears. She was gorgeous in that expensive, elegant way. She didn’t go flashy, no bedazzled shit. No tousled hair. She looked… effortless. It was her shoes that had me practically panting. Damn. She looked all prim and proper except for her four-inch heels.

Were all professors of medieval art this fucking hot? I had to wonder how many college boys filled her classes and had their dicks get hard just listening to her talk about stained glass windows and flying buttresses. Yeah, I’d looked that shit up online before I went to bed.

I wanted her to turn her fierce dark gaze on me, tell me I’d been a bad boy for talking in class and shut me up the only way she knew how—by sliding up the hem of that pencil skirt, climbing in my lap and taking me for a ride.

Fuck. I got a hard on just watching her unlock her car. That was something that had never happened to me before while jumping rope.

No, she wasn’t stuffy. No fucking way.

Gray came over, followed the direction of my staring and glanced out the window. While he might be my trainer and made me suffer on a daily basis, he worked out with me every morning. We’d already run our usual three-mile circuit on the streets, done a few rounds in the ring, and I was cooling down with thirty minutes of jump rope. It was mindless, so I couldn’t think of a better way to make the time pass than to watch my sexy neighbor leave for work.

The pizza had worked out well the night before. Besides it being low key and easy for Emory since she’d worked in the ER all day, it had given me the chance to talk with Harper alone. Taking her with me to pick up the order had made it casual. No expectations. But when she’d put on my coat and I saw how damn small she was in comparison to me, every protective instinct I had came out. I wanted to wipe away all her fear, t

o keep her safe, even from elevators or whatever the fuck happened to her to make her so damned scared of them.

With Gray and Emory, Harper had been funny and witty and relaxed as we all talked, but she didn’t come out and say why she was afraid of elevators. Not that I’d expected her to, but it would have explained a lot. Claustrophobia? Trapped once? Free fall?

At first, I’d assumed it was a lie, a lie to hide the fact that she really was scared of me. But as we’d walked to the pizza place, I hadn’t seen a hint of fear in her eyes. If she really was afraid of me, she’d have bolted again, not let me put my hand on the small of her back as we walked down the street. No, I’d seen surprise and interest instead. That interest, that spark of heat had me feeling, shit, something. She was gorgeous. She turned heads, especially mine, which was a fucking problem. Yeah, I wanted to get in her pants. Half the guys in the gym probably did after seeing her in those running shorts.

But that wasn’t it. She was interesting and quirky. Who the hell got a doctorate in some obscure art topic? I wanted to know how she liked her coffee, whether she liked the beach or the mountains and whether she preferred satin or lace.

She wasn’t the kind of girl to fuck and forget. She was more, and that was bad. I didn’t want more.

Hell, even if I did, I couldn’t. I was wrong for her. A bad choice. A dead end. If she knew my past, she’d all but sprint away from me. She was smart as fuck, gorgeous and deserved the whole two and a half kids and the dog and the picket fence shit. She deserved everything. And I was nothing.

That didn’t mean I couldn’t look and couldn’t wonder, couldn’t imagine pressing her over the hood of her car and sliding into her hot pussy. I groaned at the thought then quickly hid that sound from Gray with a cough.