by Linda Kage
Except it was.
He cleared his throat and mumbled, “I’ll walk you to your car.”
He hoped he masked his thoughts sufficiently enough. He didn’t want her thinking he was so delicate she could wound him with a simple sentence. But damn. With her, his freaking pansy feelings were so delicate she could wound him with a simple sentence.
And she must’ve known it too because her brow puckered before her face drained of color. “I just…I meant, I’d feel it would be better if I didn’t give anyone the opportunity to ask questions, because…because I’m not too sure what the answers are.”
He bobbed his head. Right.
That would make two of them. He was full of questions, and didn’t know a single answer.
What had last night meant to her? What did it make them now? When could he see her again? Did she want to see him again?
God, he could drive himself crazy with all the questions. But he instinctively knew nothing would scare her off faster than bringing them up.
He shook his head and scrambled to his feet. “Just let me get the rest of my clothes on.” He busied himself, pulling his shirt over his head and sitting to jab his toes into his boots before he rolled up the sleeping bag. He’d just reached for his hat when he realized she’d been watching him, and he couldn’t read a single thought from her pensive expression.
Damn it. He didn’t like this. He did not like feeling more for a woman than she felt for him; especially this woman. If she wasn’t as into him as he was into her, he wished someone would just shoot him now and put him out of his misery.
Ignoring his own inner turmoil, he pushed to his feet. Offering her his assistance, he silently held his hand out. When she took his fingers, he felt the tremor in her and wondered what it meant.
Conflicted, he didn’t know if he should pressure her and trip her up as much as possible, trying to make her fall as headlong as he already had or if he should step back and give her space, let her decide for herself what she really wanted.
His heart encouraged him to push, blind her with lust until she could open her eyes and see what they were truly building together. But that felt deceitful. Wrong.
She had a life waiting for her in Dallas, a life he didn’t belong in, a life she loved, a life she already made very clear she would return to no matter what happened between them. Pushing her would only make her resent him and leave even faster.
Patience, he reminded himself. He just had to be patient.
* * * *
Jo Ellen couldn’t stop the niggling in the back of her brain. Cooper had walked her to her car at daybreak and waved her off with a pleasant enough smile, but deep in her chest something still felt off. She chewed on her lip as she climbed into her Kia for the second time that day.
After sneaking into her parents’ back door, she’d tiptoed up to her old bedroom without anyone realizing she’d stayed out all night. Not even Emma Leigh had bothered to ask her at breakfast what time she’d gotten home.
The deceit only made her feel worse. Not that she’d actually deceived anyone by refraining from telling them how she’d just experienced the best night of her life. Yet queasiness continued to stir through her abdomen. Maybe it came from the expression on Cooper’s face when she said she had to go before anyone realized where she was.
She’d hurt him. Again.
She hadn’t meant anything rude or vindictive or spiteful, but he’d looked crushed regardless.
She’d come to Tommy Creek to tie up loose ends, not unravel more. And she’d known—she’d known—someone would get hurt if she did anything with him. But honestly, she’d thought that person would be her, not him. Which only made her feel worse. The idea of hurting him hurt her right back.
She couldn’t leave Tommy Creek until she made peace with him.
Her sister-in-law had demanded Jo Ellen visit while she was in town, which gave her a good reason to get out of the house. And as luck would have it, the Gerhardt farm just happened to be on the way to her brother’s place. She pulled into Cooper’s lane minutes later.
No matter how much she told herself she only wanted to make amends with him, deep inside she recognized this was just an excuse to see him again. She felt so extremely alive and aware of everything whenever he was near. She craved that fulfillment again.
She spotted Loren right away, sitting on an overturned five-gallon feed bucket, shucking corn in the shade of an oak tree. A handful of chickens closed in around her and picked stray kernels from around her feet.
“Looks like I showed up just in time to help,” Jo Ellen offered with a smile after she parked her car and approached Cooper’s mother.
“Actually, no,” Loren quipped back, winking. “That was the last one.” She tossed her freshly shucked ear into a brown paper grocery bag sitting by her feet and dusted stray corn silk off her fingers onto her pants.
After she struggled to her feet, she began to bend to pick up the bag of corncobs, but Jo Ellen swept in faster, determined to carry the load for her. “I got it,” she offered, proud of herself for snatching the bag.
“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart?” Loren took the leftover wire basket full of husks and silk and shooed away the chickens, making them flutter off with indignant squawks of outrage.
Frowning as she wished she’d picked up the basket too, Jo Ellen fell into step behind Loren as she tromped off.
“Come to see Cooper, did you?” Loren asked over her shoulder.
Cheeks burning, Jo Ellen cleared her throat and ducked her chin. “Umm…well, yes. Is he around today?”
She glanced back at the house they passed as Loren trooped along the garden to a nearby fence. After the old woman dumped the contents of her basket over the top rung, a pair of muddy pigs waddled out of a doghouse to snort and root through the pile.
“You’re in luck,” Loren said as she turned back to Jo Ellen. “He’s working in the barn today. Why don’t you follow me inside and we’ll fix him up a snack. He didn’t eat much at noon, so he’s probably worked up an appetite by now with a powerful thirst for something to drink too.”
Jo Ellen nodded and swiped away a bead of sweat forming on her brow. Wondering how Loren could bear the heat, she watched in bemusement as the woman paused at the edge of her garden to snap a fully-grown cucumber from its leafy plant.
Noticing half the garden grew nothing but weeds dotted with a couple wild flowers, Jo Ellen motioned toward them. “Growing a prairie garden too?”
Lauren straightened, her joints popping and creaking. “No. I’m just letting that side rest for a couple years.”
Burrowing her eyebrows in confusion, Jo Ellen cocked her head. “Rest?”
“It’s an old custom farmers used back before they invented all those chemical fertilizers and such. They’d let half their fields lay fallow for a while to let the soil build back its nutrients all the crops from the year before had just sucked from it. The next year, they’d switch and plant the fallow side for a better yield and leaving the other half unplanted to rest up and recuperate.”
“Hmm,” Jo Ellen murmured as she glanced at the garden with deeper understanding. “And here, my mom used to order a load of manure to fertilize her garden.”
Loren grew somber. “Well…Cooper’s been so busy I didn’t want to bother him with that task, so I did this instead.”
Sensing a sudden tension in the air, Jo Ellen opened her mouth, but wasn’t sure what she wanted to ask exactly. She just wanted to know what trouble lay between Loren and Cooper that hadn’t been there ten years ago.
“Sometimes a man can be a lot like a farm,” Loren said in a conversational tone as she started for the back door of her house. “He lets his heart lay fallow for a while, and instead of his feelings dying out, they just go dormant, his emotions growing deeper and stronger as time passes. A person only needs to clear away the weeds on the surface to uncover them.”
Jo Ellen didn’t comment but she didn’t think she needed to. When Loren glan
ced back, Jo Ellen nodded to let Cooper’s mother know she had received the message.
Whatever heartbreak lay between mother and son, Loren definitely wasn’t removed enough from Cooper to warn a girl not to hurt her baby boy.
Jo Ellen fell quiet as Loren piled snacks into her arms. She wasn’t certain if Mama Bear had been warning her away or encouraging her, but she was certain she felt worse than ever about how her night with Cooper had ended. She wanted him to get hurt from whatever it was they were starting less than she wanted herself to get hurt.
Even as she worried, though, her skin tingled as she neared the barn, remembering how he’d looked first thing this morning in the hayloft, his bare golden shoulders glistening in the early sunlight as he slept wrapped up in the sleeping bag they’d made love in.
Warmth spread through her. Juggling the loaded plate and thirty-two ounce cup of iced tea Loren had piled on her, she trooped to the large opened barn doors and peered in, only to find him on the ground floor, standing half in and half out of a combine with his torso buried inside its guts. Her heart fluttered in her chest as she silently watched him work.
“Snack time,” she called.
He jolted and whacked his head on the inside of half-lifted hood.
She winced. “Sorry.”
Rubbing his noggin as he ducked out from under the raised engine cover, he stared at her, and then glanced at her filled arms before pressing his lips into a hard line. “My mother sent you.”
She wrinkled her brow as she approached. “You weren’t kidding when you said she keeps you well fed.”
“No, I wasn’t.” He hurried to relieve her of the cup and plate. “Thanks.”
“Is…is everything okay between you and Loren?” she asked the hesitant question as she watched him drain half of his iced tea.
Lowering the cup, he sent her a look that flickered with warning but immediately disappeared.
“Yeah. Fine,” he said, his voice flat with emotion, telling her things were far from fine. But if he didn’t want to talk about it, she wasn’t going to press. She had other issues to discuss.
He jerked his gaze away. “Have a seat,” he offered, motioning toward a pile of two huge tractor tires stacked on top of each other and lying on their sides.
She smiled at the faux seating and settled down. He eased beside her and ate a cookie as they sat silently, each staring at the combine before them.
Squeezing her hands together in her lap, Jo Ellen studied the combine with more attention than she’d ever given a piece of farm equipment before. Cooper’s presence filled the rest of her senses until she remembered what he’d been doing before she had interrupted him.
She frowned with worry. “Is it broken?”
“Naw,” he said around a mouthful. “I was just doing a checkup. The corn will be ready to pick soon, probably early next week if not before then. So I switched out the header this morning to prepare, and I figured I might as well tinker some more, make sure nothing looks like it might break its first day out.”
She nodded, staring up at the overgrown tractor. “These things are bigger than I realized. They seem enormous far away, but they’re even taller in person.” She stood to approach it. “I don’t think I’ve actually been this close to one before.” The tires alone stood as tall as she did.
Cooper set his plate of cookies down, wiped the crumbs off on his thighs and wandered up beside her. “Want to climb up and check out the inside of the cab?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
When she reached for the railing of the ladder, however, he reared back, glancing at her legs. “You’re wearing a skirt,” he said as if he’d just then noticed.
“I know.” She stepped up onto the first rung. “I wasn’t paying much attention when I packed for my trip here and I ended up shoving more skirts than shorts into my bags.”
He grasped her waist, steadying her, when she took her second step. The heat from his fingers scorched her.
“Are you sure you can climb wearing this thing.” With another glance at her bare exposed legs, he eyed her like a hungry buck spying a doe during the rut.
Belly quivering with a vivid reminder of the night before, she nodded. “Of course. It’s a loose-enough skirt I can move freely.”
He sucked in a breath, making her realize how seductive a person could take her comment. Unable to stop herself, she flashed him a knowing grin over her shoulder and turned away, titillated by the knowledge he could see up her skirt if he wanted to. Once she managed to finagle her way over the wheel at the top of the ladder and into the heart of the mechanical beast, she glanced back to watch him. He followed but remained on the outer landing as she entered the cab and peered around her. “Wow. Everything on the ground looks so small from up here. I’d never be able to operate something this huge.”
He chuckled and wedged his shoulders into the small cab with her, keeping his lower half outside. “You grow used to it after a while.”
Jo Ellen sat in the driver’s chair, allowing him room to squeeze in with her, but when he didn’t, she sighed. “Cooper, I came to apologize.”
He paused from picking at a clump of dirt off the metal floor and lifted his face. After studying her, his features lit with his famous heartbreaking grin. “Of course you did. And what unforgivable offense do you think you committed against me this time?”
Her shoulders slumped. “I realize what I said this morning didn’t sit well with you. And I just want you to know I didn’t mean to hurt—”
He reached out and set his fingers over her knee, hushing her. “Jo Ellen. Believe me, you don’t have any reason to apologize. You did nothing wrong.”
“But you didn’t even kiss me goodbye,” she argued.
His white teeth flashed. “Is that what this is about?” he asked before he let out a chuckle and eased closer. The look in his eyes had her belly tightening. “You came back for your goodbye kiss?”
She swallowed—gulped was more like it. “N-no. Of course not,” she rasped, but now that he mentioned it, “I certainly wouldn’t turn one down though.”
Even if she should.
She should stop this madness right now. Starting an affair with Cooper Gerhardt was a bad, bad idea. It couldn’t go anywhere except straight into painful, heartbreaking territory. Not only did they live so far apart, but they lived two different lives. Country and city wouldn’t mesh well for long before a million problems cropped up. And she’d want them to mesh. After last night, she knew she’d want more from him than was possible to take.
Then there was her inability to trust any man since Travis had dumped her. Getting too close to Cooper was dangerous.
But as he moved into the cab to crawl closer, she didn’t feel endangered. She felt alive, so very alive. She wouldn’t be able to say no if he continued what they’d already started.
Her heart thumped hard in her chest, but her brain kept short-circuiting, demanding her to stop.
With his light brown eyes intent on her face, he eased even closer on his knees.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone sit inside a combine wearing a skirt before.”
She trilled out a nervous laugh. “Oh, well…it’s this new thing I’m trying.” As if posing for a camera, she set her hand on her hip and fluttered her lashes. “What do you think?”
“I think I like it.”
Her breathing grew unsteady. He wouldn’t stop staring at her, and she couldn’t seem to look away either.
His dark lashes swept close to the tops of his cheeks as he slid his gaze low to her exposed calves before lifting his gaze back to her face. “So what about this old thing? Do you think my tractor’s sexy?”
Jo Ellen threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, Cooper,” she murmured on a thick voice. “Kenny Chesney couldn’t have said it better.”
When he grinned, she ran her fingers over his silken pale hair, delighting in his beautiful locks. “You make me smile,” she decided, though her grin fell as she studied the
perfect features of his face—sensual dark lashes, full lush lips, defined, expressive cheekbones.
Everything with him was better than it had ever been with anyone else. She didn’t want it to end.
His brown eyes danced with pleasure as he rested his chin on her knee and drawled, “Well, you know what they say about us farm boys. We know how to make all the pretty girls smile.”
Heart tripping over emotions she didn’t want to acknowledge, she silently took his face in her hands. He met her gaze with a puzzled frown but didn’t ask questions as he let her draw him up in front of her so they were eye level.
“Are you ever going to give me that goodbye kiss?” she asked.
His eyes glittered as he smiled. With the slightest shake of his head, he said, “No.”
Jo Ellen blinked. “No?”
He shook his head again, more adamantly this time. “No,” he repeated. “A kiss goodbye would mean you have to leave. And I don’t want you to go.”
Good Lord, she didn’t want to either. This man did things to her; crazy, beautiful, wonderful things. He made her feel sexy, stronger, alive, cherished. She wanted to consume him whole and carry a piece of him around with her always so she could be this happy for the rest of her life.
Her fingers traced the outline of his face, delighting in the texture of his skin, the warmth and vitality emanating from him.
“How about we make it a kiss hello then,” she decided.
His lashes fluttered as he inhaled. “That,” he answered, “I can do.”
When his lips met hers, a shockwave of sensation seized her, catching every nerve ending in her body and wringing them taut with pleasure, and not just pleasure of the body either; pleasure of the soul.
She felt like she was finally home.
Behind them, the barn doors gaped open wide. Anyone could wander in; his mother, a rooster, some traveling salesman. But Jo Ellen didn’t care. The soft crush of his lips, the secure weight of his body as he embraced her, the achy groan that rippled from the base of his throat only made her want more of him. More of this and everything else he had to offer.