by Maisey Yates
“Liss?”
“In here,” she said, her voice sounding muffled.
He walked toward the living room and into the room, just in time to see Liss scrambling up from the couch, throwing one of the decorative pillows back onto the cushion. She looked at him, her lower lip sucked between her teeth.
They just sort of stood there, frozen, staring at each other.
Then a gust of air tried to escape Liss’s mouth, turning into a sound that was somewhere between a growl and a snort.
He frowned. “Are you laughing at me?”
Her shoulders shook, her face turning redder. She shook her head, still biting her lower lip.
“I’m serious, Liss. You just saw me in my underwear, and you’re laughing? I have to figure out if I’m insulted by this or not.”
She shook her head again, sitting down on the couch, her face getting redder, the shaking in her shoulders getting increasingly violent.
“Either you’re having a stroke, or you are laughing at the sight of me in my undies.”
She released her lower lip and heaved in a deep breath, a guffaw escaping a second later. “No! No.”
“You’re not laughing.”
“No,” she hooted, “I’m not laughing.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Not at the sight of you in your underwear. I mean, not like you think,” she said, breathless. “It was just so absurd. You were looking at me. I was just looking at you. I happened to walk in and you were in the kitchen, and you were pretty much naked.” She was rambling now, but it was a whole lot better than the alternative.
Because things were kind of jumbled up in his head. And for some reason, he was still picturing her in her underwear, even though he was the one who had been caught in his.
“I thought you were at work.”
“I forgot my cell phone, so I came back because I didn’t have any important appointments this morning. I guess this is a part of negotiating the living situation.”
“I guess.”
She cleared her throat. “Really, though, it’s nothing I’ve never seen before.”
He tried not to be offended by that comment. As though any man in his underwear was exactly the same as him. Really, he had no place to be offended by that comment. Because the sight of him mostly naked should not be remarkable to his best friend. And yet, his masculine ego—which along with his nice-ass radar, was not as dormant as he had believed—was slightly dented.
“True. But then, I’ve seen plenty of women in their underwear—” only one, now two, in person and others in pictures, but Liss didn’t need to know that “—and that does not mean that you’re going to be prancing around in here in a state of undress.” He regretted saying that the moment he did, because it brought to mind those images he was working so hard to banish. “Are you?”
“No. Would you rather I act completely scandalized? Should I have had you fetch the smelling salts?”
“I don’t have smelling salts. All I have is barbecue steak rub. I don’t think it’s the same.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“Okay, so here’s the deal. I won’t assume that you’re not in the house anymore. And I won’t come walking downstairs in my underwear.”
“Deal.”
“Okay,” he said, taking a step away from her, rubbing the back of his neck. “I suppose you need to get back to work. I know I do.”
“Yeah, I should.”
He nodded, a thread of tension stretching between them, and he wanted to banish it. Wanted to do something to get rid of it, because this wasn’t normal. “Great, I’ll see you for dinner.”
“I might go out with Jeanette,” she said quickly.
“Okay. I’ll see you later, then.”
“Yeah, later.”
Connor turned and walked out of the room. It was probably a good thing Liss was going out tonight. After only a couple of days of cohabitation, he felt as though they could maybe use a little space.
But this was normal, this adjustment period. Connor hadn’t lived with anyone in a few years, and he’d lived with Jessie for a long time. Even then, they had a lot of miscommunications and a lot of ups and downs. There was no reason to believe it would be any different with a roommate.
He opened the door and took a deep breath, banishing all the weirdness that lingered inside him. There was no time to worry about any of that. He had a ranch to work on.
* * *
SHE’D HAD FANTASIES about Connor before. Here, in the darkness of her room, she was woman enough to admit that. And yes, she had seen him without his shirt on. They spent a lot of time on the lake, down by the river and on the beach. Copper Ridge was surrounded by water and they, like most of the other residents, made the most of it.
But somehow, seeing him in his underwear was different. Because it wasn’t just his perfectly muscular chest, with a very perfect amount of chest hair sprinkled over it. Or his washboard flat abs and the tattoo that was starting to drive her crazy. No, it was combined with the full scope of his very muscular thighs, compliments of years in the saddle, and, it just...well, and...the very prominent bulge at the apex of said muscular thighs. There. She’d admitted it.
It was burned into her brain now. The image of him standing in his kitchen nearly naked, looking as if he’d just been slapped upside the head with a two-by-four.
She rolled over onto her stomach and buried her head beneath her pillow. She had to be adult about this.
She snorted and rolled back over, uncovering her face. That was the problem. She was being adult about this. Very adult. With lots of adult thoughts and desires and needs.
What were you supposed to do when your adult needs were for your best friend and roommate? Where was her handbook?
“Ignore it,” she said out loud, “like always.”
It was the only thing to do. They would have to go on as though undiegate had never happened. She was just having a little Connor relapse due to the close proximity. Probably not aided at all by the recent amount of time she’d been spending taking care of him. And definitely not helped by her extremely long bout of celibacy and singledom. When things settled down she would have to focus on getting a date. Yes, that would help. A little bit of normalcy, a man who wasn’t Connor filling her time.
Yes, that would help. And if in the meantime, she spent just a little bit of time thinking about how Connor had looked in his underwear, well, she was only human. It didn’t mean anything. Just a little healthy female-to-male appreciation.
That was her story, and she was sticking to it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE MORNING THE INSURANCE settlement money went into Connor’s bank account he felt as if there was a timer ticking down. And there was a part of him—a much larger part of him than he might have imagined—that wanted to take the money and go down to Cancun. Just disappear from all this for a while, from Copper Ridge, from responsibility.
But he couldn’t do that. Because of the ranch, because of his family, because Eli’s election was coming up, and he had to be there for that.
Damn responsibilities. He would rather have a margarita.
But his family needed him here, and if there was one thing he wouldn’t do, it was abandon them. Their mother had walked out when things had gotten tough, and Connor wasn’t going to do the same.
No, he wasn’t his mother in this little play. He was the one who was left behind.
He was a lot closer to being his father.
He gritted his teeth. No, he wasn’t. He saw to his responsibilities.
Like getting the barn built?
Yeah, he had to get the barn built. He had enough money to hire a crew to come out and get it done, which meant he needed to get started as soon as possible. There
was no excuse. Maybe that was something else Liss could help him with.
Liss. That was also feeling slightly difficult at the moment.
And it was his fault. Because she had seemed fine after their little mostly naked run-in a few days ago. But his brain had latched on to the vivid image of what she might look like in the mint-colored thong and hadn’t let go. It was starting to drive him crazy.
On the long list of things he never wanted to talk to anyone about was the effect grief had on his sex drive. It just wasn’t something anyone needed to know about. Yes, they all had a fair idea he wasn’t getting any, if only because it was a small town, and they all lived in each other’s pockets.
Okay, the town at large didn’t know, but Eli knew that he didn’t see women coming back to the property, and Jack knew that when he left the bar with a woman, Connor always left alone.
They wouldn’t have to ponder his actions too hard to figure that out. Plus, he had admitted as much to Eli during the world’s most horrific conversation a few months back. But what he hadn’t admitted was that it was more than not feeling like engaging in a flirtation or a hookup.
It was that his give-a-damn was busted on such a bone-deep level that he didn’t even fantasize about hooking up. It was pretty easy to abstain when you didn’t even feel like jacking off to deal with a morning erection.
A morning erection that had become a lot more insistent since Liss’s thong had come into his life.
Connor groaned and scooped up a pitchfork full of manure from his horse’s stall and chucked it into the back of the truck. He was going to deal with this the way he had dealt with it back in high school. Hard work. That was, in his experience, the world’s most effective boner killer. Except for the obvious. And he wasn’t going to do either obvious thing. For equally obvious reasons.
“Hey, Connor, did that pitchfork do something terrible to you?”
Connor turned and saw Eli standing at the entrance to the stalls. “I’m shoveling shit, Eli. How excited am I supposed to look?”
“All right, fair enough. You just don’t normally look actively angry while doing it.”
Connor stuck the pitchfork into the shavings and leaned against it. “I got my insurance money today.”
“Well, damn,” Eli said, monotone. “Those bastards. Finally settling the score with you. I have half a mind to go and slap handcuffs on them.”
“I didn’t ask for your sarcasm.”
“I don’t know why you’re standing there looking so upset about finally getting what you’ve been working toward for the past few months.”
Connor winced internally. But he was not about to have the same argument with Eli that he had already had with Liss. “I guess it’s just time to rebuild. And I have a hard time feeling very enthusiastic about rebuilding. I don’t have a great track record, Eli. I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I tried to do the best I could by this ranch. By the family. But every time I try to make something better, nature finds a way to burn it to the ground, for lack of a less obvious metaphor.”
Eli frowned. “I know things have been hard, but everything that’s happened...do you really think that’s all about you?”
“Sure, or I have a lightning rod above my head. It’s either that or it’s random, Eli. Tell me which one is supposed to make me feel better.”
Eli rubbed his hand over his forehead. “I doubt anything I could say would make you feel better. Except that no matter the answer, you have to keep doing things.”
“Sometimes I’d rather not.”
“That was what Dad did,” Eli said. The total lack of judgment in Eli’s voice made the statement even worse. As though he couldn’t blame their dad, and wouldn’t blame Connor, either. But Connor would. Connor did.
“Yeah, well, it’s not what I’m going to do. I work, don’t I? I work the ranch every day. Not leaving it to my kids to do, not that I have any, but you get the point.” Connor let out a long, slow breath. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that anything new I bring onto this ranch seems to die.” He met his younger brother’s gaze. “Tell me that’s not true.”
“I can’t,” Eli said, his voice strained. “Connor, you’re probably the only person on this earth more connected to Jessie’s death than I am. I was there. I was the one who had to tell you. I feel it. The brutality of it, the suddenness of it. I feel it down to my bones. Please know that I don’t take what you’ve been through lightly. And when I tell you I think you need to move on, when I tell you that I want to see you happy, it’s not because I don’t realize what you went through. Because I was there, Connor.”
Connor knew Eli was talking about his reaction to his wife’s death. Eli was the only witness to that moment, and he was probably the only one who remembered it with any real clarity. Connor could hardly piece together the memory, and it was probably all for the best. The moments after the words had left Eli’s mouth had been a blur.
* * *
IT WAS LATE, and the only person he’d been expecting was Jessie, so the knock at the door was a surprise. Connor opened the door, and his brother turned to face him, something in his expression strange. Wrong. The porch light was on, a ring of gold surrounding Eli’s frame.
Eli stepped inside, not saying a word. Another thing that seemed wrong.
“Connor, go on and sit down.”
He complied, because he’d never seen his brother look quite so desolate. Not even when their mother had left. Not even after their father had died.
“There was an accident tonight,” he said, his voice breaking.
And he didn’t even have to finish the sentence, because right then Connor knew. His whole body went cold, and something in his gut turned, and he knew. He knew it wasn’t Eli, his brother, just paying a visit, but a sheriff’s deputy doing his duty. A brother doing his duty.
“Jessie died tonight, Connor.”
* * *
THERE HAD BEEN nothing after that. Just a kind of strange buzzing in his head that wouldn’t go away. And he was aware of saying things, but not of what he’d said. He couldn’t remember anything that had happened after Eli spoke those words. He couldn’t remember the rest of the night or the whole next day. A full twenty-four hours that were gone forever.
A gift, he imagined.
“Even knowing that,” Eli continued, “I want you to have more.”
But Eli didn’t know everything. And Connor knew, in spite of his brother’s good intentions, he thought he understood and empathized a bit better than he did.
“I want you to have what I have,” Eli said. “I didn’t think I wanted to find love, but then I met Sadie. And everything changed.”
Everything changed.
For some reason that part of the sentence stuck out in Connor’s mind. But he didn’t want to overthink it. “Yeah, and after what we’d been through as kids, deciding to go ahead and get married wasn’t the easiest decision for me. But that’s what happens when you fall in love,” Connor said. “I know Sadie is this new chapter of your life, and I think because of the timing, you don’t quite equate it with me losing Jessie. But that’s what it is. What if you lost her, Eli? Would you want someone else?”
Eli looked away. “No,” he said, his voice rough. “But I only mean it... I was afraid, too. Remember, we had this discussion. That love came here to die. But I found love again, and there was no room for me to stay scared when I found it. Just stay open. And...maybe start small. Like with building a barn.”
Connor cleared his throat. “I can do that.”
“If Jack were here, he would suggest adding sex to that list.”
Heat burst through Connor’s veins, because that word had become inextricably linked to the mint-colored thong. “I don’t want to have this discussion with you. We tried
it once. Let’s never repeat it.”
Eli shifted, obviously uncomfortable. “Well, I don’t want to have the discussion. I just worry about you, dammit.”
“Stop it. I don’t need you to worry about me. I need you to focus on your woman and your campaign.”
“Speaking of my campaign, and speaking of your barn...”
Connor crossed his arms over his chest. “What about it?”
“If you can get the barn built in time, I’d love to have a party out here on election night. We’ll set up a TV and watch the results and we’ll have a party. A big barbecue.”
“Sadie has bewitched you. Because only six months ago you would’ve gagged and died thinking about having a party here.” Connor rubbed his chin. “Come to think of it, last time we had a party here, planned by Sadie, you burned my fucking barn down.”
“And I’m willing to take the risk again. Because a barn is meant to be used.”
Connor gritted his teeth and forced his brain not to apply that statement as a broader metaphor for life. Or for his dick.
“Fine. If it’s on track to be structurally sound by election night, it’s yours.” And now the construction of the barn was for someone else, and that meant he had to get it done. “I’ll make some calls today.”
Eli took a step forward and slapped Connor on the back, which was about the closest they ever got to a touching moment. “Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”
“This is your ranch, too. You live on the property. Name is on the deed. It’s not a favor. It’s your right.”
“Stop trying to act like you’re a 100-percent-mean son of a bitch,” Eli said. “It’s only about 85 percent.”
Connor flipped him off and grabbed the pitchfork again. “You going to stand there all day, or are you going to help shovel?”
Eli smiled. “Guess I’ll go get my own pitchfork.”
* * *