Cowboy to the Core

by Maisey Yates

  She allowed her thoughts of Lola to push the conversations from the night before outside of her head. Allowed her jaunt around the arena to fill her senses. The breeze in her face, the dust in her nostrils.

  She didn’t need to keep replaying that conversation over and over.

  None of her brothers had come after her. And no one had said anything to her about it this morning.

  Due in large part to the fact that she had scampered out of her house early and eaten in the mess hall, making sure to avoid Wyatt and Lindy as she did.

  She didn’t regret it.

  She lived in a small cabin on the property, the one that McKenna had lived in before she and Grant had gotten married. It made it pretty easy for her to come and go as she pleased, and if she wanted to go unseen, it wasn’t that difficult.

  Not that she ever had occasion to be sneaky, really.

  She finished up with Lola and moved on to Gus, getting a little kick of exhilaration as she took him up away from the property and up the winding trail into the mountains. It was what she’d been craving last night, but she had decided that not going out riding in the middle of the night was probably the better part of valor.

  Gus was a dream horse, in Jamie’s estimation. He was so responsive and in tune with the rider, which was one reason he was bound and determined to fight someone like Gabe.

  He was a horse who needed the trust of his rider, not a rider who wanted to control him overmuch. Far too soon, she was finished making her loop with Gus, and it was time to move on to the other tasks. She started with cleaning out water troughs, which was fine, if a bit boring, but she had told Gabe that she could do any of the work, and so she was going to.

  The motor in the gate she saved for last.

  Finally, it could be put off no longer, and she found herself standing in front of the giant metal beast, the motor out of the box and in her left hand, red toolbox at her feet. She could do this. She could figure it out. She shifted her shoulders, bunched them up by her ears and let them fall.

  There was a slim slip of paper in the box that seemed to contain instructions, one side in English, and Spanish on the other.

  Both completely foreign to her in this context.

  She rooted around in the toolbox until she found some that seemed to match the picture, and stared at it. She supposed that she had to start first by dismantling the motor that was in there. And to do that she had to...

  She checked the instructions. “Disconnect the power,” she muttered, finding a line that ran up to a box by the gate and examining it. There was a place where it seemed to connect, and she couldn’t see why simply pulling it out wouldn’t solve her problem.

  So she yanked on the cord and hoped for the best. It came out easily, and she assumed that was that portion of the job done.

  And then came the job of unscrewing a zillion fiddly screws.

  By the time she had been working on it for at least fifteen minutes, she had sweat rolling down her face. And it was making her enraged. Because the motor was hung up on something, or attached somewhere where she couldn’t see it, and she couldn’t get the damn thing out. There was no indication on the instructions where this piece might be. And she would have thought that if it was attached, she would see the source of said attachment in the instructions for installing the new motor.

  Except that she didn’t.

  She gritted her teeth, urging herself to keep going, not allowing herself to let out a primal scream that would alert everyone around her to just how annoyed she was.

  Thankfully, she still hadn’t seen Gabe around all day.

  The last thing she wanted was for him to see her struggling with this. And she had the passing thought that perhaps her struggling with this had been his aim in the first place.

  But she would be damned if she would be defeated. If she would let him treat her like anyone else. She was... She was going to figure this out. Blast and damn, she was going to figure it out. She growled ferociously, ignoring the fact that the muscle that ran from her neck along the top of her shoulder was starting to feel like it weighed a thousand pounds. “This is stupid,” she muttered, jerking and twisting the motor, moving her head to the side and trying to see what she was missing.

  “Everything okay?”

  She turned around sharply, so very aware of the fact that her hair was plastered to the front of her face, that her cheeks were probably red, and that she had sweat beaded up on her forehead. And there was Gabe. Looking pristine and perfect in a white cowboy hat and a black T-shirt that seemed far tighter than was necessary.

  She wasn’t sure that she had ever really noticed a man’s chest muscles before. But in her defense, this particular man was basically wrapped in a second skin posing as a T-shirt. It looked so solid.

  He looked so solid.

  Clearly, fiddling with tiny screws out in the boiling sun had fried her brain.

  “I’m fine,” she said, not making a move at going back to her work, because if she did, then he would only realize that she was in fact having difficulty. And she didn’t want him to know that.

  “Just a little... A little motor,” she said, waving her hand that was clutching her screwdriver. “That’s easy. No big deal.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, I needed it done today, and I figured I would assign it to you, seeing as you are just like all my other ranch hands.”

  “You’re right about that. The other thing is, I know how to read instructions. Pretty groundbreaking, I know, but I’m damned awesome at it.”

  “It looks like it.”

  “Yep,” she said, backing up slightly.

  “Aren’t you going to keep going?”

  “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

  “Oh, I’ve got nowhere else to be,” he said, his lips working up into a smile. “Nowhere at all.”

  She swallowed hard, then turned her focus back to the task at hand. And she couldn’t hide the fact that she was struggling for more than a couple of seconds. She grabbed hold of the motor again and gave it a twist, and still it refused to budge.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “There might be a trick to that.”

  She turned around to look at him. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No. Why would I kid?”

  “There’s a trick?” she asked, aghast.

  “Yeah, if I remember right.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Well?”

  “I thought you didn’t need help,” he said, lifting a shoulder.

  She took a step forward, shaking her screwdriver in his face. “Gabe Dalton, I will skin you with this.”

  “Is it that hard to ask for help, Jamie?”

  “I wouldn’t need help if there wasn’t a trick.”

  “Sometimes in life it’s not all in the directions, honey. It’s not going to kill you to ask for a little bit of advice from someone who knows what he’s doing.”

  “You set me up.”

  “Maybe I did.” Those blue eyes locked on to hers and somehow it felt like he’d put his hands on her. “Maybe I didn’t. But you’re not going to find out if you don’t ask.”

  “I would rather drown in a sea of beetles,” she said, lowering her brows.

  “That seems extreme.”

  “What is this? Some kind of Mr. Miyagi ranch hand thing? Are you wax on wax off-ing me?”

  “No. But the thing is, I’m your boss. And if I assign you to do something, I expect you to do it. And if it’s not in your wheelhouse, I expect you to let me know. And then I expect you to ask for help. If you can’t handle that, we have a problem.”

  “Fine,” she said, blowing out a breath. “Show me your trick.”

  “The thing is,” he said, leaning in, “when we installed it, the housing ended up getting bent, and we folded part of it over an
d put an extra screw through...

  “Want a hand with the screwdriver?” he asked. He was so close now, his scent filling her nose, his big body right next to hers. She could feel...something like a vibration in the scant air between them and it made her skin feel itchy. “I can show you.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” she said, refusing to hand the screwdriver to him.

  “If you insist.” He wrapped his hand, rough and calloused, around hers and guided it back behind the motor.

  Her body jerked forward, and her heart lurched right along with it.

  He let go of her, but she was still trying to catch her breath even as the screwdriver butted up against what felt like the head of the screw.

  She swallowed hard. “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  She started to unscrew it quickly, trying her very best to ignore the extreme sensations his touch had created in her body. It was ridiculous. And stupid.

  Except, she couldn’t remember when the last time was she’d been touched like that by a man who wasn’t family.

  Never. Pretty much never.

  But this wasn’t about him touching her hand. It was about him being a butthead, who had given her this task knowing that she wouldn’t be able to finish it without this little bit of intel. She arched her shoulders back, bumping into his, not on accident, and then finished undoing the screw. After that the motor came out easily.

  She scowled at him, then turned around and looked on the ground for the replacement part.

  “Do you need help with that?”

  “That depends,” she said. “Is there a trick to that, too? Something that you booby-trapped?”

  “I promise you I didn’t set out to sabotage you. But I did assume that if you needed help you would ask.”

  Oh, he’d totally planned this and she would never believe otherwise. She gritted her teeth. “Well, I haven’t seen you around all day. Where exactly have you been?”

  “I slept in for a minute,” he said. “And had to take care of a little bit of admin work.”

  “Slept in?”

  “I went out last night,” he said, a lopsided smile on his face.

  Those words, combined with the roguish expression, made her stomach curl. No. He wasn’t different or unusual or unpredictable.

  He was everything she’d always thought he was.

  He’d hooked up with some poor, unsuspecting woman last night who probably hadn’t realized all his sweet whispers were damn dirty lies. And now he was wandering around like everything was just fine and dandy.

  And in his world, it was.

  “That doesn’t seem responsible,” she said, her tone stiff. “You know, seeing as you’re the boss and all.”

  “I am the boss,” he said. “Which is just one of the reasons that I get to do it if I feel like it.”

  She gritted her teeth and returned to the task at hand, bound and determined to get the rest of it done without his help.

  Without him touching her again.

  He was still worrisomely close, and now that she had been close enough to smell him, it seemed like it was all she could do. Smell him. He didn’t stink. No. Instead, he was like cedar and dirt, a little bit of sweat, that was somehow enticing.

  She had been smelling dirty, sweaty men her entire life, and why this one man’s sweat should make her want to get closer instead of recoil, she didn’t know.

  It shouldn’t be different.

  He wasn’t different.

  She put all of her focus on installing the motor, ignoring the fact that Gabe was still standing behind her. She knew that it was taking her probably twice as long as it would take him to do. Even if she could figure it out, it still wasn’t her forte. But she managed to get it in, and when she reconnected the power, she sent up a small prayer that the thing would actually work. When it actually did, her breath left her body in a rush of relief. Thank God.

  “There, that went pretty well. After you asked for help,” he said.

  She shot him her deadliest glare, which she had on pretty decent authority was quite deadly.

  “Well, if you need any motor installed in the future, obviously I’m your person.”

  “Eventually, there will be too much horse business for you to see to for any of that nonsense.”

  “I mean, here’s hoping.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” she said.

  “Do you need a drink?” he asked.

  She was tempted to say no, but she was hot and thirsty and he’d certainly made his point that if she found a way to be stubborn for the sake of it, he’d make her suffer. “Some water would be good.”

  “There’s water in the office. Just come this way.” She knew that there was an office space in the barn, but as far as she could tell, it was rarely used. He opened the door for her on their way into the barn, and she didn’t think to protest, and then he did it again when they stepped into the office space, and he led her toward a mini fridge that was filled with soda and bottled water.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s nice.”

  “Feel free to help yourself whenever you’re out here working. Sorry. I should have shown you that on the first day.”

  “Well, since today is only day two, I think I’ll get over it. So what was today about?” she asked. “Really.”

  Considering the discussion she had last night with Wyatt, Bennett and Grant, she honestly did want to know. What exactly he was doing. How he saw her. She didn’t want to do anything quite so vulnerable or sad as asking him how he saw her, but she was curious about a few things.

  “Honestly, I think you’re great with the horses, Jamie, but I think you have an issue being told what to do. And the reality is, I’m in charge, and I’m going to need you to take orders sometimes. And I need to know that if I leave you in charge when I leave, you’re going to be able to get everything done. Not just by doing it yourself, but by getting the right kind of help if necessary.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I can do that.”

  She didn’t want to do it. But this was one of those weird, unwinnable discussions. If people were concerned about her—her performance at work or her feelings—they would hover more. And what she didn’t want was that hovering. That feeling she needed to be looked after.

  But she also didn’t like asking for help.

  She still hadn’t made a move toward the fridge, and he suddenly leaned down, reaching past her, so that she took a whole breath of him.

  All that skin and sweat and man, in a way she hadn’t quite thought of man before.

  Then he took a bottle of water and held it out in her direction.

  She opened the bottle and took a step back, suddenly becoming conscious of just how hot she was when the cool liquid slid down her throat. “Is there anything left you want me to do today?”

  “I was actually wondering how you would feel about another trail ride. I know that you took Gus out earlier, but I’d like to see how Gus and one of the rescue horses I got a while back do on the trail together. We can save it for tomorrow if you want...”

  Jamie’s only real option was heading back home, and since she wasn’t really eager to hang out with her brothers after last night, she was ready to jump at Gabe’s offer of riding, even though it would mean more time in his company.

  Right now it was preferable to dealing with her family.

  A little shiver settled in her stomach, rippling through her body.

  Time spent with Gabe. It made her feel such weird things.

  Weird and not entirely unpleasant.

  Maybe she was a little interested in feeling more of that, too. It was better than feeling the same old things all the time, anyway.

  “A trail ride is just fine by me.”

  “Great,” he said. “I’ll pack us up some sandwiches.”

  “Sound
s good to me.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  GABE FELT LIKE a fucking dolt for asking her to go on a ride, particularly after the way his body had reacted to being so close to hers when he’d helped her out with the motor.

  That had been a dumb-ass move, too. He shouldn’t have touched her.

  His reaction to her didn’t exactly make sense. She was pretty, it was true, but she was young, and she was a tomboy. He tended to be a little bit more of a magpie when it came to women. Attracted to the obvious and the shiny, rather than the simple and down-home.

  Jamie was a down-home girl, that was for sure.

  Gabe had never put much thought into his type of woman. He had roots that were low-class as hell, and he figured his taste went right along with that, and he didn’t much care.

  He liked what he liked. Big hair, a lot of makeup, rhinestone jeans.

  Nothing wrong with that.

  But then, in all reality, his body was probably just enjoying the kick of arousal it got out of proximity to a woman at all.

  There was a thrill to it. Meeting someone he’d never been with before and wondering what might happen next. Knowing that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be permanent.

  Wouldn’t have any lasting consequences or emotional entanglements.

  It was bungee jumping. A little thrill, but you knew you wouldn’t fall straight to the ground.

  Relationships were jumping off a cliff. And he had no earthly interest in that.

  He liked the thrill without the risk. Without the promise.

  Without the chance of failure.

  Hooking up was tough to do in Gold Valley, mostly because he knew a lot of the women, and was sure to see them again after an encounter, which was not his favorite thing.

  That was all.

  He was just being a basic bro. She was a woman, and so his body was searching out whether or not she was possible. She wasn’t, and that was the end of that story.

  Basic or not, he had roast beef sandwiches and Diet Cokes, and he figured that was a decent enough offering. By the time he got back out to the barn with his pack full of food, Jamie was standing outside the barn with the horses prepared.

  She had redone her braid, which had been escaping in great chunks after the fight she’d had with the motor. She was wearing a black cowboy hat, with no adornment whatsoever, and holding the reins for both horses, one in each hand, her hip cocked to the side.