Tempting the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 1)

She didn’t know. Her desires were one Texas-sized blank, at a crossroads between navigating her dreams and being unable to recall why those dreams belonged to her. The past and future weren’t here. Not this night. All she knew was the present.

January stood, swiped the moisture from her cheeks, and mustered all the brightness she could into her voice. “Let’s go swimming.”

“What?”

“Like we used to. It’ll be…”

“Light and spontaneous?” This time, the two words had lost their bite.

January grinned, her mood buoyed by his snappy response. “I was going to say therapeutic. You can pry yourself out of those jeans before you’re sterile, and I can pretend I didn’t become Dear Agnes’s latest subject matter.”

“J—”

“Come on. I’ve been in a hundred different watering holes, all over the world, but this one is still the best.”

“One condition.”

“Anything.”

“You stop trying to work the ranch. Stay out of the way, here on out.”

She weighed this against the promise she’d made Mona. Nat was the boss. How could Mona argue with that?

January grabbed her hem with crossed arms, wiggled the cotton dress over her head, and draped the garment across her boots.

Everything but Nat’s eyes turned back to granite.

She jumped rock to rock until she reached the spring’s pool and dove in. Water sluiced warm along her scalp and embraced her with a familiarity she had craved for so long. When she surfaced, she blinked to clear the dampness from her eyelashes and glanced up at Tull’s Teabags.

Nat’s boots and hat already stood out in sharp relief against the moon-drenched rocks.

A grin nearly split January in half.

“Mona has a crowbar in her truck,” she called out to him.

“They’re not that tight,” Nat said as he nearly toppled removing his pants.

“Those put Dwight Yoakam to shame.” Not that she was complaining. Not one bit.

4

Nat expected a bra. Panties at the very least. But in ten years, he had forgotten the single most important truth about January Rose.

Expect the unexpected.

The moment she peeled off that dress, January was as naked as the day she was born. And all fucking reason trickled away between the rocks, headed for the Gulf of Mexico.

January called out something about the water temperature. God’s honest truth: Arctic Circle or Yellowstone’s magma pits, he wouldn’t have cared.

When they had taken a turn on the dance floor—for old times’ sake, he had convinced himself—he dismissed his inability to see past her unbuttoned neckline as an unfortunate angle and dim bulbs. He spent the rest of the two-step chastising himself for being a pervert with a razor-sharp memory to fill in the blanks.

For all he knew about her worldly ways, she probably had guys around the globe on the hook—a tan guy in Barcelona dumb enough to run with pissed-off bulls or a backpacking do-gooder in Nepal. Hell, she could have promised the plastic shrimp guy with the neck beard that she’d let him drive her wild if he swung back by to get her when she was done with this town again.

She wanted light and spontaneous? Like he used to be? He would punish her with the thought. Make her wonder if she ever really knew him at all. His thumbs hooked the waistband of his briefs…

And he promptly chickened out on the skinny-dipping part.

Nat climbed down the rocks in his underwear and entered the pool more like his grandmother than the free-balling companion January no doubt wanted. It wasn’t unheard of to bu