How to Train a Cowboy

by Caro Carson

  “I like your opinions.” He had one hand on her to keep her balanced on his knee, but his other hand was resting lightly on his other thigh. Emily gently slipped her fingers over the back of his hand and under his sleeve again, running her fingers a little way up his forearm.

  “You don’t think there’s a chance it won’t work, do you?” He turned his hand palm up. Her fingers slipped down the smooth inside of his arm. “I vaguely remember being that optimistic, back in my twenties.”

  “Back in your twenties? What are you now? Sixty?”

  “Thirty...” His voice trailed off a little, the most unsure she’d ever heard him sound about anything.

  Surely the man knew how old he was. “Thirty-what?”

  “Just thirty.”

  She laughed a little, all part of this wonderful, bubbly, freedom-filled night. “You said ‘back in your twenties’ like it was eons ago. To paraphrase what some guy told me tonight, you’re not missing out on life. You’re only thirty.”

  He moved his arm so her fingers had nothing to do, but since he’d moved it in order to touch her face, knuckles smoothing over her cheek, she didn’t mind.

  “Eight of those years were in the Marine Corps. And since then—” He hesitated again. “I didn’t intend to meet a beautiful woman tonight and have her relying on my opinions to change her life.”

  “But you did, and I’m glad. Your take on the master’s degree was perfect.” She looped her arms around his neck, as if that would keep him close. It was an odd thing to think. It wasn’t like the man was going to stand up and dump her off his lap and walk away. But he was backing out of the conversation, and she didn’t want him to go.

  He’d hinted at something about his time after the Marine Corps. “What were you doing in Chicago that was so awful it drove you to drive all the way to Texas?”

  He was silent, but she had the feeling this was one of those deliberation points. She saw the subtle change in his expression as he made his decision and looked directly at her. Captain Graham, maybe, was going to lay it on the line. “I was getting an MBA. You are taking advice on the master’s degree from a man who just dropped out of a master’s degree program.”

  She sat back a little, she was so surprised. In the moonlight, those pasture-green eyes were almost gray, but the look in those eyes was still so direct, so unflinching, even when he was telling her something he thought was negative.

  He spoke a little more softly. “I could try to make myself look better and tell you I’m taking a sabbatical.”

  “Don’t do that. You look too good already.”

  His smile came and went too quickly for her to catch it with the pad of her thumb.

  She traced his serious bottom lip instead, the way he had touched her mouth when she’d first told him he would be coming back to ride horses with her. “But it’s not a sabbatical, is it? You don’t belong there, and you’re not going back.” The way he watched her lips form every word made her feel like she was saying something erotic.

  He stopped staring at her mouth. “I know what your parents would think about you going horseback riding with a man who dropped out of his graduate school and doesn’t have a job. I’d have to agree with them.”

  She frowned and put her arm back around his neck. “But you do have a job lined up. You finished your time in the military, you worked at a safe job you hated and you tried graduate school. That’s not so awful.” She wanted to kiss him, but she kept looking in those gray-green eyes, looking for some sign that her point was getting through to him. “Now you’re going to work with your uncle in the middle of nowhere for three months. It sounds like you need the break to reboot. Reset.”

  She couldn’t stand being this close and not kissing him, just a gentle press of her lips on his soft lips. “After that, you’re going to come and find me.” Another kiss. The man had such a hard body, a hard expression, but such soft lips. “I’ll be right here, or somewhere nearby, and I’ll have the horses ready.” Another kiss.

  He remained silent, but he kissed her back. Every time.

  “I am going to make you feel so good, Ben Graham.”

  She could make him feel so good right now. She’d love to lay him back right here in the cargo area, right here with the old duffel bags and the new bedding. With her hands, with her mouth, with her body, she’d make him forget every worry. She wanted to smile over his lips the way he’d smiled over hers, then give him one glorious moment of pure pleasure.

  But he was torturing himself for some reason. He wouldn’t let her take that burden off his shoulders, not even for a night.

  Someday. Three months from now? But at this moment, she couldn’t continue to sit on a muscular thigh and be protected by a warm hand and have her every kiss returned. It made her want more. She needed to do something with all this physical passion. It was all mixed up with her exciting new plans. She was not going to waste another year of her life. Not even one semester. She was going to start living now. She was going to break that calm surface. That triple cartwheel was so close she could taste it.

  A triple cartwheel. She’d never pulled one off before.

  No time like the present.

  “I know the perfect way to celebrate. It’s kind of a bucket list thing around here that I never got to do. We should join the polar bear club. Go swimming now, while it’s winter. We’ll celebrate not finishing our master’s degrees.”

  “Plunging into freezing water doesn’t sound like a celebration.”

  “You’re a big chicken if you don’t do it once you’re challenged.”

  “You’re crazy, Emily Davis.”

  “I double-dog dare you to join me.”

  Silence.

  “Silence is not an answer, Graham. This is an official double-dog dare to keep up with me.” She pushed off his knees, backed up a step and took the towel off her shoulders. She tossed it into the SUV, then started pulling down the zipper on the side of her dress. “You’re too slow. I’ve got less clothing to take off than you do.”

  She let her dress drop to the ground.

  Damn him, he was doing that marble-statue thing. She’d wanted to see his eyes bug out of his head. She wasn’t sure how much he could see in the dark, but her bra was pretty much just a thin bit of something see-through. He must have felt that there wasn’t much to her bra in the front seat, but he hadn’t seen it yet. In bra and panties, she turned toward the lake and started walking. Faster. A lot faster. It was cold.

  He didn’t exactly shout after her, but he used that Marine Corps tone on her again. “Get back in the car.”

  “That command didn’t work last time you said it, either.” She looked over her shoulder as she kept walking. “But it is sexy in an over-the-top, macho kind of way. What else you got that’s over-the-top and macho?” She turned around and walked backward, keeping one arm over her breasts in that skimpy bra. “Let’s see it.”

  “Emily, damn it.”

  Her bra had a front clasp. She undid it and wriggled out of one arm strap, then the other, all the while backing farther away from Graham. Keeping her arm over her breasts, she held the bra out to one side with her other hand and dropped it on the ground.

  It was like dropping a start flag at a racetrack. Graham pushed off the tailgate and started heading toward her, taking long strides, kind of angry-sexy, very no-nonsense. “Emily. Enough. It’s really too cold for this.”

  It was really was too much fun, teasing her bodyguard. She kept backing up. “I’m going in the water. If you are, too, you might want to get those jeans off. Once they’re wet, they’ll never dry.”

  Then she had to drop her arm to pull down her panties. She gave Graham less than a second to take in the full frontal view before she turned toward the lake and started running.

  Chapter Eleven

  That beauti
ful girl was insane.

  It wasn’t until she was nearly at the dock that Graham realized this was no game. Emily was really going in, damn it all to hell, and it was dangerously cold. The lake itself was dangerous. There was no way to know what lay below the surface. There was no way to know how deep the water was.

  Too late, he started running after her, barefoot in the dark, pulling off his shirt and throwing it to the side.

  She hit the dock running, just out of his reach. He had to stop, taking big, braking steps as he came out of a full run, cursing as he jerked his belt open and shoved his jeans and underwear off, but he was too slow, too slow.

  Emily leaped for the rope at a run. She caught it high, so high that as she swung out over the water, she was far above the surface. He had only a second to pray that the water would be deep enough for her to plunge into safely from that height—and in that same second, the image of her in the moonlight was burned into his mind. She was beautiful, young and whole and all skin—please, God, deep water—as she let go of the rope and threw herself into a flip.

  She hit the water hard. Went under.

  Graham kept his eye on the entry point as he ran for the end of the dock. Just as he was throwing his arms forward to launch himself off the dock in a shallow racer’s dive, Emily broke the surface with a cowboy’s yee-haw. For a split second, his shoulder screamed with pain at being forced into the diving position, but then he dove just beneath the surface, and the shock of the cold knocked that pain out. The cold made everything hurt.

  He surfaced quickly, right near Emily, who was still finishing the haw in her yee-haw. He shook his head once, hard, to throw some water out of his hair. A fully bellowed oo-rah was the only way to handle the shocking cold.

  Emily laughed.

  Graham used the palm of his hand to send a wave of water right at her beautiful, crazy face. As she squealed, he started to laugh, and then they were laughing together, bobbing in the freezing reflection of the moon as if they were co-conspirators in some grand joke.

  For about two seconds.

  “It’s flipping cold,” Emily said, and she started swimming for the dock.

  He beat her there, but only to turn around and grab her outstretched hand and haul her in. She put her hands on the dock and kicked to get up on it, and Graham helped her with a solid hand under her bare backside. Third time’s the charm for that.

  He hauled himself out, an easy press of arm muscle that didn’t bother his shoulder, which still wasn’t painful because it was so damned frozen. Emily was way ahead of him, running down the dock. He walked. He thought for a second that she was yelling another yee-haw, but she was yelling freez-ing.

  Hell, yeah, it’s freezing. Little idiot. What did she expect? He scooped up his jeans as he stalked past them and realized he was laughing. This was insane, skinny-dipping in Texas with a woman who was old enough to know better.

  Old enough. Up ahead, she bent over to scoop up her underwear. Lust hit him hard, blinding him. His navy shirt was hard enough to find in the dark without the distraction of a nude Emily as she shook dirt and leaves off a skimpy excuse for a bra.

  Yet he couldn’t stop smiling. The water had been so shocking, every thought had been obliterated—except Emily. Catch Emily, be with Emily, help Emily.

  Laugh with Emily.

  You don’t walk away from this, Ben. You run toward it.

  Acting on that crazy-clear thought, he started running after her. When Emily stopped to pick up her dress, he was close enough to see that the laughter in her face had been replaced by concentration. She was shivering to the point that she had to swipe at the dress a couple of times before she hooked it on her finger and headed for the SUV.

  Just as she threw her clothes into the back, he caught up and touched her, hand on her waist, but only to push her away from the back of the SUV. “Back seat’s warmer.”

  Water from her long hair poured over his wrist. He opened the door and chucked his jeans over to the far seat, but he didn’t have to push her in this time. She climbed in fast, holding one hand below her perfect belly button, her fingers splayed to serve as a fig leaf—pretty damned effectively—and one hand trying to cover both breasts, doing a thankfully poor job of it.

  It was hard not to laugh even as his teeth threatened to start chattering. He cursed loudly on general principle, because that’s what anyone did in the military whenever conditions sucked, and he hustled to the back of the SUV and started pitching towels over the back seat so they landed on Emily, who’d started cursing, too.

  “Holy frigging crackers, it’s cold.”

  She had the tone of voice right. The vocabulary needed work.

  He fixed it for her under his breath, shivering now as he stepped back to close the hatchback and shut out the cold for Emily, but he was still grinning at crackers. Emily didn’t think she did cute well. She was wrong.

  Then he was diving into the back seat, too, but only to haul himself halfway over the front seats to reach the ignition and start the engine. It would take a few minutes for the engine to be warm enough to turn the heater on, but at least he could get the built-in seat warmer going for Emily.

  He turned around to hit the button for the rear bucket seat’s warmer. Emily was staring at him so hard, he jerked to a stop. Well, damn. The interior lights had come on with their opening of the passenger door, so everything was well lit, nice and bright, as he stood completely in the buff. He’d been giving her an eyeful of his flank, his back, and now...his front. His bent thigh provided some modesty, at least. Probably. Depending on her angle.

  The back seat was pretty spacious, but they were still almost on top of each other because the center console made them share this half. Emily was huddled under the towels, for the most part. Glimpses of her arm and leg among the twisted towels were almost as erotic as seeing her completely nude. But it was her face, that expressive face, which arrested him. She was biting her lip in a way that might mean she was a little intimidated, maybe, but the lip she was biting curved into a smile of appreciation.

  If he blushed, he’d lose his man card. Confidence, cockiness—whichever it was, he called upon it to wink at her. “Got a towel I could borrow?”

  “Sure. Help yourself.”

  Even in a sexually charged moment, she could make him smile. He grabbed the towel from the top of the pile on her, since it wasn’t actually touching her skin and wouldn’t leave her exposed. She arched her back and hissed in a breath anyway, reminding him for one second of her sexual response to his touch on her breast earlier in the evening, but then she was sitting up and turning around in her seat.

  “All this c-cold water keeps sliding down my back.” She grabbed one of the towels and started drying the leather. “I’m just going to g-get out of your car for a moment.”

  “Not this time.” Graham covered her hand when she grabbed the door handle. He held the bunched-up towel in his other hand and held it over his groin, in case she felt like she needed to put space between them for modesty’s sake. “You’re shaking with cold. I know you have a thing about getting out of my SUV, but you’ve got to stay and warm up.”

  “I have to go squeeze this water out of my hair or I’ll n-never warm up.”

  The towels were in her lap and she clutched one to her front, but now that she was leaning forward to get out, Graham could see all that long hair plastered to her back, sopping wet. “Go ahead and do what you’ve got to do in here. It’s only water. The carpet will dry.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Says the woman who just went skinny-dipping in January. Come on, hurry. You’re staying too cold, too long.” He hit the button for the seat warmer on the other, dry seat, then twisted back to the front to reach the dashboard and start the heater.

  When he turned around again, Emily was avidly watching him while she scooped all her hair
to one side. He tried to get out of her way as she bent forward and started to twist it with shaking hands, wringing it out like a towel, but she raised one eyebrow and nodded toward his backside. “If I wasn’t so c-cold, I’d really be enjoying this.”

  “You do live a wild life, sweet girl.” His words were light, but the water on her exposed back was making him cold just to look at. He sat on the edge of the seat, pushing her legs over to make room, and used the towel in his hand to rub her back briskly.

  “Do you have a c-comb or brush?”

  “I want to get you in that dry seat first.”

  She gave her hair one last twist, clear water dripping onto the carpet of the floorboard and their feet. “You first. Then you can p-pull me over, like you did in the front seat.”

  She was too shivery, too huddled into herself to climb over that console. He rubbed her arms briskly, while she kept clutching her towel to her front. He dried himself off even more quickly. His jeans were on the dry seat, his gym bag on the floor, so he had to move them, climb over the center console without totally flashing Emily and reach over the back seats for the comforter. He reclined the seat to gain more room. If Emily were lying back, then her face wouldn’t be so close to his body next time he reached for the dashboard. The footrest they’d joked about earlier came up automatically when the seat reclined.

  “Do men always show off the size of their f-footrests?”

  He wanted to laugh. Even frozen, she was funny to him. “Dry your feet off. Leave all that water over there.”

  She smacked at the water and the leaves that were stuck to her feet with a towel. Finally, Graham sat, picked up Emily and lifted her over the center console so she was cradled in his arms again, just as she’d been in the front seat.