This Time Around

by Stacey Lynn

  Six

  Cooper

  At six-twenty the next morning, I was at the barn, leaning against the side of it and waiting for Rebecca instead of helping myself inside like I’d done yesterday.

  She’d said everything she needed to by telling me the horse, Stormy, belonged to her husband, and my first impression of meeting her had been correct. She might have allowed me to be here, but my presence wasn’t wanted. So, I was determined not to overstep bounds and instead, learn everything she could possibly tell me.

  And who the hell knew? Maybe someday I’d be picked for a role where living on a ranch would be useful.

  I’d gone back to the guesthouse last night, not exactly wanting to leave her alone, but knowing she needed it by the way she intentionally kept space between us. Expecting to toss and turn, like I had for months, I fell asleep almost as soon as I’d stripped off my clothes and fallen into bed. I hadn’t even had the energy to pull up my laptop and start streaming a television show, the typical way I drifted off to sleep.

  And for the first time in months, I didn’t wake to the memory of Camilla.

  I woke up to the scent of fresh air, the sky still dark, and five o’clock showing bright on the small alarm clock on the nightstand. I was up a half hour before I’d set the alarm for, and felt more rested than I had in who knew how long.

  I’d been exhausted for years, fueled by dreams and accomplishments and the thrill of the next movie, but even before I caught Camilla cheating on me, I’d been considering slowing down some, perhaps looking into some producer roles instead of putting all my eggs in my acting basket, regardless of how lucrative it was. I’d even talked to Max about my options more than once.

  He hadn’t mentioned any of this when he brought up the idea of me heading to Kansas, but I knew it’d been on his mind. He needed me back with a clear head on what I wanted to do moving forward.

  I owed him the respect to take that time and consider it.

  I was wide awake and highly caffeinated and cleaned up by six fifteen when I headed out of the guesthouse. Three smaller barns were sprinkled around the land I could see, one of them definitely the chicken coop based on the sounds echoing from that direction. There were lean-to’s where several tan and white goats moved slowly, hooves on a circular feeder that enclosed a large pile of hay.

  For a moment, I’d considered searching for Rebecca and the goats, but I held back, choosing to give her that space she wanted. So I was at the barn, waiting, one foot propped up on the side, arms crossed, in casual jeans and a black short sleeve shirt and the ball cap I’d worn as my disguise pulled down low over my eyes to block out the bright rising sun, well before six-thirty.

  The sound of footsteps kicking up gravel on the walkway grabbed my attention and I turned toward the noise as she came around the corner.

  “Good morning,” she said, jumping as she noticed me.

  She was dressed much like me in short sleeves and denim jeans along with a different pair of cowboy boots from yesterday. From the jeans to her boots, everything she wore was worn and faded, the boots scuffed, the leather bent and wrinkled.

  And damn, she wore it all well, including the gray cowboy hat, rimmed around the edges, her dark black hair pulled back into a ponytail at the back. It contrasted starkly with her pale pink shirt.

  For the first time, I put a word to her.

  Fucking gorgeous. Which were two words, but the descriptive curse necessary.

  Shit. I did not need to be attracted to this woman. Not only was it pointless, it would serve as nothing other than a distraction from why I was there.

  “Good morning,” I grumbled out and tugged down on the bill of my hat. She didn’t need to either see my cringe at my gruff tone, or the look on my face that would scream desire.

  I pushed off the wall and shoved my hands to my hips. Last night she needed the lack of eye contact, today I did. “Ready to put me to work?”

  She hesitated for a moment, only her legs and boots in my vision, but I still caught the hitch in her breath. “Let’s go, Hollywood,” she finally said. My head snapped up and crap…I really didn’t need to see her grin. It was the first time she’d smiled at me and it was dangerous. “Show me what you got.”

  She walked around me, intent on her destination, with the confidence of a woman who was ready to put me in my place and it took me a minute to catch my breath.

  For that moment when she smiled, it hadn’t just made her more beautiful, it had reached her eyes.

  And that felt like the greatest award I’d ever won, better than any Golden Globe.

  I followed her into the barn and found her in a room that held dozens of saddles and other foreign looking equipment, my eyes catching on the way the denim snugged her ass before I could block it out of my mind.

  “You do know I’m from outside Buffalo, New York and not Hollywood, right?” I rested my shoulder against the doorframe, watching as she yanked down equipment and set it on a bench.

  She looked at me and grinned. Again. “You are?”

  The surprise in her voice was honest and I shook my head, pushing off the wall and walking to her. She’d need help with all that crap she was plunking down. “Not very often someone who makes it in Hollywood is actually from there.”

  “Huh.” Her mouth pulled down and she shrugged. “Well, whatever. The nickname suits you since you live and work there now.”

  I let it go. She wanted to give me a nickname, I’d let her.

  “What are we doing in here?”

  She turned to me then and that grin turned into a full-blown smile, almost knocking me back a step with the beauty in it. “We’re going to ride some horses. I need to check on the cows that are expecting, probably move the heifers to a different pasture, and I need to check on hay fields today. We haven’t had rain lately—”

  Woah. I lifted my hand. “You realize I understood about five of those words, correct?”

  Her jaw fell open and her eyes widened. Then, the sweetest blush hit her cheeks. She grabbed a saddle from the bench and practically shoved it into my chest. “This is yours. And by the end of the day, you’ll understand it all, I’m certain of it.”

  She grabbed her own saddle, a handful of what I assumed were reins and she walked out of the room, raising her voice as she kept talking.

  “I’m going to put you on Blue. He’s about ten years old and although he’s one of the largest horses, he’s also one of the most gentle. He’ll be good to start on.”

  She dumped her saddle on another bench, and I kept walking, waiting until she unlocked a sliding door and pushed it open.

  I was suddenly face to face with a gray and white horse and blue eyes so light they were almost clear.

  “Holy crap. He’s enormous.”

  “Seventeen hands, like I said, one of our largest, but you’re a tall guy and can handle him.”

  I chose to trust her. Her voice was all business and confidence. I was scared shitless but trying to hide it.

  “Okay then.” I turned and smirked at her. “Teach me everything you know.”

  For a moment, that easiness in her expression faltered, but she pushed through it.

  Twenty minutes later, we were on our horses, and she was guiding me out of the penned area.

  And there I was, learning how to be a cattle rancher.

  Seven

  Rebecca

  “I’m telling you right now, Rebecca, if you don’t get your butt into town tonight, I’m sending Jordan out hunting for you tomorrow. I haven’t seen you in so long I’ve forgotten what you even look like.”

  I rolled my eyes at my friend Brooke on the other end of the phone as she kept talking.

  “Wait. Are you blonde? Brunette? A redhead? See, I can’t even remember.”

  “I haven’t been blonde since that disaster junior year of high school.” I smiled at the memory of trying to force my jet-black hair to a platinum blonde color as Brooke laughed. It had resulted in me looking more like a skunk with s
triped hair than the runway model look I’d been trying for.

  “Oh yeah, I’d almost forgotten.” Little liar, Brooke remembered everything, including that I’d been avoiding her phone calls for the last two weeks, which she was now determined to get to the cause of. Hence the threat of sending Jordan my way. “Seriously, you’re coming and you’re talking, even if I have to get you drunk to do it. You’re hiding and I don’t like it.”

  “I’m not hiding, Brooke, I’m busy.”

  “I’ve heard that before, too.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not lying now, I’m telling the truth.” I tapped my pen on my desk in the office where I’d been recording cattle information Cooper and I had taken that day. Some days I swore that eighty percent of the work on the ranch was paperwork.

  Plus, I really didn’t want to tell Brooke about Cooper. So far, in the two weeks he’d been here, he hadn’t once had an excuse to leave the ranch, and the few times I’d had deliveries, he’d hidden in the barn when I asked him to.

  At this point, I was no longer clear if I was hiding people from him, or if I was hiding him from people. Either way, I wasn’t sure I was ready to explain any of it.

  I also knew Brooke wouldn’t give in.

  “Okay. I’ll come tonight.” She screamed and I pulled my phone from my ear, cringing at the noise. “I also have something to tell you,” I said when she quit screeching. “And, I’m only telling you because I know I can trust you, but Max sent someone out here to help me this summer—”

  “Your uncle Max?”

  “Yes. And I’ve been busy getting him acclimated to everything. That’s it.”

  She paused, her silence the weight of a bull on my chest.

  “Him?” she finally asked.

  It wasn’t my place to tell her about Cooper, but at some point he had to figure I’d talk to someone about him.

  Plus, I was beginning to think I had to. Things between Cooper and I were getting weird. Like, we were friends. Maybe. Sort of?

  Twice now he’d come over to have dinner with me which we’d eaten out on the patio, but more often than that he’d shown up while I was sitting outside, going over spreadsheets or perusing farming magazines and he hadn’t hesitated to refill my wineglass or sit with me.

  The last time I went into town I stocked my fridge with beer for him.

  So, yeah, we were friends. Yet, when he left at night and gave me that hand flip on his way back to the guesthouse, there was this weird lingering feeling in my stomach. There was an even stronger disliked feeling in my chest when I saw him in the morning, already in the barn, cleaning out the stalls and brushing the horses.

  Like my thoughts alone had conjured him, Cooper appeared in the doorway to my office. I gripped the phone tighter at his presence, and the way he always casually leaned against a doorframe with his broad shoulder, but there was never anything casual about his expression. He was always focused, intent on whatever I was teaching him.

  He’d even been there the morning Paisley had delivered her kid, who he immediately named Pepper because it was all gray and black.

  Cooper had smiled, and not caring the kid was still covered in slimy amniotic fluid, he’d picked it up and held it to his chest.

  He smiled at me so hard my chest ached from the beauty of the moment. “That was the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” he’d said, and set the kid back down by Paisley.

  Now, he was in my office, KU hat in his hands in front of him, curling the bill, frowning at me.

  “I’ll be there later,” I told Brooke. “And I’ll tell you what I can. I promise.”

  “Good. I’ll put Andrew on standby as our driver.”

  Her husband didn’t need to be on standby. He always drove us home when we went out.

  “See you soon, Brooke.”

  “Can’t wait to see you.” I was smiling at the sweetness in her tone but dropped it when I looked back at Cooper.

  “Everything okay?”

  “You going out tonight?”

  We spoke at the same time and he grinned at me, flipping out one of his hands. “You first.”

  “That was Brooke, a relentless, pestering friend I have who’s insisting I meet her out.”

  “Ah. I see. So why do you look like you’re going to puke?”

  He wasn’t altogether wrong. I ignored that he essentially said I looked like crap. I most likely did after an afternoon spent doing paperwork. It was my nemesis, but I had to get better at staying on top of it.

  My fingers drummed on my desktop. “Being in town isn’t easy for me. Everyone knows—”

  “About Joseph,” he tried to helpfully supply.

  It wasn’t. There was something I didn’t like about my husband’s name coming from Cooper’s lips. I flinched whenever he said Joseph’s name.

  Cooper and I rarely talked about either of our spouses and on the rare times we did, my throat tightened when I talked about Joseph. Yet it still felt easier to talk about Joseph to Cooper than to other people. Perhaps because he didn’t know him and didn’t have his own memories or respect for a man I still didn’t know if I still loved or despised. At the very least, I figured it was because we could understand each other’s pain in ways others couldn’t imagine.

  And some nights, as I sat by the fire or got ready for bed, I didn’t feel the same cursing grief after I’d talked about my husband. He was there with me, always, but occasionally, I went to bed with a peace surrounding me instead of soul-sucking despair.

  I wasn’t sure if I liked the peace and why I had it or hated it.

  “And there’s you,” I said.

  “Me?” Brows slowly arched and his spine straightened.

  “I told Brooke I had someone here helping me at Max’s insistence. I didn’t say who, but it’s just…I can’t lie to her, either.”

  He shoved his hat onto his head and adjusted the bill. “I hadn’t realized the position I’d put you in being here, I guess. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not that. I would lie to Brooke if I could. But I literally can’t. She’s a human lie detector. At the least, she’s a Rebecca-style lie detector.”

  Cooper grinned. Not for the first time I noticed how tan he was becoming. The pop of his white teeth shone more richly against his olive skin. Nor was it the first time his smile warmed me to the tips of my toes.

  I pushed past the unwanted sensation.

  “I have to go though. People gossip more when I hide away too long.” It’d been months since I’d been to town for anything more than grocery errands, and I’d even taken to having the animals’ feed and mineral blocks delivered so I didn’t have to set foot into the feed store.

  Ranchers talked. A lot.

  He lifted his KU hat, swiped his forehead and resettled it. Pushing off the doorway, he walked toward my desk—toward me with a gleam in his eyes I hadn’t yet seen.

  “There’s only one solution then.”

  “What?”

  “I go with you.”

  That couldn’t happen. Eighty percent of the people in town or at The Tavern on Main wouldn’t recognize him. That still left too high of a risk someone would. And at least sixty percent would care I was with a man, regardless of who he was.

  “You can’t.” My ponytail whipped my neck as I shook my head. “What if—”

  “Leave that to me. I could use a night out too, and this way if someone gives you problems, I’m there to handle it.”

  That definitely couldn’t happen. Jordan would hear about it. And I hadn’t even thought of my brother. He’d called and left a handful of messages over the last couple of weeks I hadn’t bothered to return, and his last one was irritated enough I knew he was already bound to show up. If I went to town with Cooper, that visit would be imminent.

  “I’ll call Brooke and cancel. Maybe have her here instead.”

  I reached for my phone, but before I could pick it up, Cooper’s hand covered mine.

  “What’s going on?”

  I squeezed my eyes
shut. Opening them, I avoided his gaze and dipped my head.

  His hand covering mine grabbed my attention. Cooper was so much larger than me. Larger even than Joseph though I always tried to forget I was even comparing the two. Now it was impossible. His hand was warm. Long, thick fingers with dirt caked into his knuckles and beneath his fingernails showed just how hard he’d really been working.

  Calluses on his fingers and palm rubbed against the back of my hand. And in between his fingers was the shine of my ring.

  I yanked my hand from beneath his and shoved it into my lap.

  My flesh burned. How dare I even think of another man touching me. And liking it.

  “Rebecca.”

  At my name, I jerked my head up. “What?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He was almost as relentless as Brooke. And in the KU hat, they’d probably become best friends in no time. When Brooke wasn’t scouring Nordstrom’s sales to be as fashionable as possible on her budget, she was decked out in royal blue and crimson to cheer on the Jayhawks.

  She was also part of the twenty percent who would recognize him. Crap.

  “Maybe it’s best if you don’t meet Brooke at all.” It came out harsher than I intended.

  Shock flashed in his eyes right before something else appeared.

  Disappointment. It cooled the room by ten degrees and I fought a shiver.

  “Want to tell me why?”

  No, thank you very much. There was no way to get out of the hole I was quickly burying myself in.

  “What if someone recognizes you?”

  “If that’s the problem, no need to worry. I have a wig that worked for me getting here.”

  “Oh.”

  Satisfied, he grinned. “What time are we leaving?”

  “Seven.” He nodded and turned toward the door. He had to understand.

  “Cooper. I haven’t been seen with a man since…” I couldn’t finish the thought and I looked at the window to hide the tears in my eyes. “People will talk.” I barely managed to choke it out. “They talk enough.”