The Cowboy's Wife For One Night

Sandra stepped aside and Lucy breezed into her place. Jack tensed, wondering if he was about to get disemboweled.

But Lucy hugged him, a tall silky vine, and she leaned up to whisper in his ear, “You’re making my sister sad.”

“It’s not my intention,” he said quickly.

Lucy leaned back, assessed him for a moment and clearly found him lacking. “It never is, is it, you ass,” she whispered and stepped away.

Her hips bounced to the beat of the music on the radio and she smiled at Jack, as if she hadn’t called him names. “Margarita?”

“What?” he asked, feeling like he’d stepped down the rabbit hole. This place had felt more or less like a waiting room the past few weeks. A cafeteria. And suddenly it felt like a bar.

Or a home.

“It’s Saturday,” Tim said, as if he’d been waiting his whole life for just such a day. And his eyes on Lucy indicated he’d been waiting for just such a woman. But that was the power of Lucy.

Every woman liked her.

Every man wanted her.

“Sandra’s making tamales,” Walter said, slicing limes with a steady hand. There was something different about Walter, like a light had been turned on. The old man’s eyes practically glowed and Jack wondered how many margaritas he’d had.

Jack’s stomach growled.

“Go,” Sandra said, pushing Jack toward the table, toward Mia where she sat, propped up on pillows, spending so much energy pretending she didn’t feel him or see him or even notice him, she could power the ranch for a month.

He remembered her eyes on him in the shower the other night, the way she’d followed the touch of his hand on his own body. He’d known, watching her, turning the screws with his words, that she’d wished his hand had been hers almost as much as he’d wished it.

She wasn’t impervious. But she was building that damn tower around herself higher and deeper every day. Keeping herself safe. Keeping him out.

And having Lucy here only helped her cause. Reminded her of all the ways he’d hurt her over the years. And it wasn’t like she needed a whole lot of help in that department.

But maybe having Sandra here helped him.

A few weeks ago he’d felt inert, lost in his own life and directionless. But now, this moment, he felt himself begin to roll toward a destination. Something he wanted.

A home.

Someone to love.

He leaned over the back of Mia’s chair and kissed the top of her head. She jerked so hard she nearly broke his nose.

“How are you feeling?” he whispered, his hands on the warm, tender skin of her neck. He could feel her heart beating, the cadence of her breath.

You don’t love her, he told himself. Because love wasn’t safe. Look at what loving him had brought her. It proved his theory that love offered nothing but pain.

But I want her, and right now that was enough. Maybe they could find that happy middle ground. Affection and respect and lust were powerful emotions, strong ones. You could build something with those tools. Something real, like she wanted.

Love was too capricious.

He just needed her to see that.

“Fine,” she said too loudly.

He made her nervous and he stroked his thumb over her neck, just to be the devil, before dropping into the chair beside her.

Lucy stared at him like a guard dog straining at her chains, but Sandra smiled as she turned back to the tamales.

“You know what you’re doing, boy?” Walter whispered from the other side of him.

“Yes,” he whispered back. “Yes, I do.”

The night was turning into one of those nights Mia used to dream about. Her family, Jack, everyone she loved around a table, laughing, eating Mom’s homemade tamales.

The right side of her body was electrified, crackling with energy from Jack’s closeness.

She’d expected him to be warned off by her family’s arrival. Good lord, Lucy was doing her best stern sister act and Jack seemed impervious. Worse than impervious. He seemed motivated by it. The sterner Lucy got, the cozier Jack got. His leg brushed hers more times than she could count. His arm draped across the back of her chair, his thumb brushing her hairline, for half the damn dinner.

And that was bad. It was really bad, but what was killing her was how he seemed to hold court in her home. He told stories, funny ones, scary ones. Ones about Oliver that she knew were hard for him and he didn’t once show it. He poured drinks and helped clear dishes.

Even Lucy seemed to have trouble holding on to her grudge.

Lord knew Mia’s grudge had bitten the dust before the second pitcher of margaritas had been made.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Poland,” Lucy said, stretching out her long legs that looked even longer in the leggings she wore under her breezy green tunic. If Mia wore that she’d look like one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. “I’ve heard there’s a beach where amber rolls onto the sand because there’s a forest under the Baltic Sea.”