Hard Loving Cowboy

by A. J. Pine

  Kate turned up the wattage on her sunny expression as if an idea had suddenly lit up inside her. “Well, I love your dog, and it just so happens that I’ll be in town for a few days, so maybe I could help.”

  “I thought you were backpacking.” J.J. obviously didn’t want to take the bait, which meant she’d have to use another angle. Something other than her love for the dog.

  “My tent was damaged in the storm, which means I’ll have to finish out my vacation in town.” She nearly gagged on the word vacation. Maui was a vacation. Hell, she’d even consider Miami to be a decent vacation. Camping was so not a vacation. “I’d love to watch Bella while you work. Like a doggie day-care thing. I can pick her up in the mornings and spend the day with her so you don’t have to worry about her running off.”

  “That’s okay.” The man still stared at Kate like she was a lunatic. “She’s fine.”

  “It would be better for her than sitting around a lonely house all day,” Kate prompted. If the earlier reunion was any indication, this man loved his dog. So all she had to do was convince him it would be best for Bella. “I’ll take her on hikes, and we can play fetch. She can play with my new friend Naomi’s dog at the Hidden Gem. Oh, and I bet she’d love swimming in the river at the park.”

  His torn expression revealed that, yes, Bella did indeed love to swim. What Lab didn’t?

  “So you’d pick her up in the morning and drop her off after I got home?”

  “Yes. I’d love to spend more time with her while I’m in town,” she assured him. “You don’t even have to pay me.” Getting to know J.J. Alexander, aka the Snowboarding Cowboy, would be all the compensation she needed.

  * * *

  There had to be a catch. Why would some hotter-than-sin woman offer to watch his dog while he worked? For free?

  Jaden eyed Kate Livingston from behind the anonymity of his dark sunglasses. She sure didn’t look like she belonged anywhere near a backcountry trail. Her silky black hair had that perfect beach-wave thing going on, which he suspected she’d paid good money for. And her skin…it was rosy and flawless. Not lined from the sun like his. Her eyes were the most striking feature about her, though, so dark they were almost black and narrowed slightly in the corners like she had some exotic mix of genes.

  His body’s swift reaction to her raised his defenses. He’d met women like Kate. All sunny and rosy and completely fake. He’d even had a good time with a few of them, but those days were long behind him.

  To get his eyes off the temptation in front of him, Jaden glanced at Bella. His dog had attached herself to Kate’s side as though trying to convince him to close the deal. He could see the plea in those sorrowful eyes. Aw hell. He was such a sucker. Bella would love having the company. He’d worked almost eighty hours this week, and his poor dog had been on her own.

  What would it hurt? The woman—Kate?—hadn’t seemed to realize who he was. Bella liked her. And he liked the fact that he wouldn’t have to worry about the dog running off again, which would mean he wouldn’t have to spend another night tromping all over the mountain searching for her.

  Last night had been hell. He hadn’t slept at all. He’d hiked until dawn, yelling and whistling and searching until he’d had to go up to work. As soon as the crew had quit for the day, he’d gone home to print some of those lost dog posters he’d seen plastered to lampposts when he was growing up. Which now he wouldn’t need.

  “So what do you think?” Kate persisted. Yeah. Persistent. That was the only way to describe her. She looked like a woman who had no trouble getting what she wanted.

  “I guess it would work.”

  “Great! Oh, that’s so great.” A smile made her eyes sparkle. Something about her seemed so young. She was happy; that’s what it was. Happy all the way down deep, like Gram used to say.

  “We can start tomorrow,” Kate said as she hugged the dog again. “We’ll have so much fun, Bella! We’ll play all day! I’ll pick her up at eight. Okay? Make sure to send along everything she’ll need for the day. Food, her leash, any toys she’d like to bring, treats.”

  “Uh…” Jaden blinked at her. Damn Kate had a lot of energy. It felt like she’d boarded a speed-of-light train and he was hanging on the back. “Sure. Okay. That’s fine.”

  “I’ll need your address. And I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Jay,” he blurted. “My name is Jay.” He quickly rattled the address for his rental so he could get the hell out of there.

  “Very nice to meet you, Jay.” Kate leaned over and gave Bella a kiss on the top of the head. “I’ll see you both tomorrow.” With a twinkling wave, she sashayed back to her table, where one of her friends was waiting.

  “What the hell just happened there?” Jaden asked Bella on the way back to his Jeep. “Did you have to crawl into her sleeping bag?” Out of all the sleeping bags in the backcountry, his dog had somehow found the one that held a tempting, aggravating, overly cheerful Disney princess.

  “Couldn’t you have found some transient guy?” he muttered as he helped Bella jump into the passenger’s seat. “That would be a lot less complicated.” Something told him he wouldn’t be able to keep himself in check forever when Kate Livingston was around. And he’d eventually want to do more than look, seeing as how it’d been a damn long time since he’d had the opportunity. The first sight of her in the strappy little dress had him rubbernecking in a bad way. Not that he’d admit it to anyone else, but that was the only reason he’d seen Bella. He’d noticed Kate first.

  Jaden started the Jeep and drove away from Main Street, his eyes sticky with fatigue. All he wanted to do was go home and eat his bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and then fall into bed. Maybe he’d actually sleep tonight. For once he felt tired enough. But unfortunately, he couldn’t go home. Not yet.

  “We’ve got big plans tonight,” he announced, trying to muster some enthusiasm.

  Bella stuck her head out the window, her lips flapping as she sniffed the air.

  “Levi was an old friend of mine. Back in high school. He invited us over for a beer, if you can believe that.” Bella probably couldn’t, seeing as how they hadn’t visited anyone’s house since he’d adopted her.

  He turned off the highway and onto the familiar dirt road where he used to race bikes with Levi. The Cortez Ranch had gotten a major upgrade since he’d been gone. Originally, there’d been only one house on the property. Now there were four that he could see. Two were newer, one right across from the corrals and one farther up the hill tucked into a stand of aspen trees. That would be Levi’s house. He’d described it over the phone but hadn’t done it justice.

  It wasn’t obnoxiously large like the house Jaden had rented near the resort, but it was impressive all the same. Hand-hewn logs stacked one on top of another, stone siding coming halfway up the structure, and a copper roof that must’ve set him back a good hundred thousand.

  Jaden parked the Jeep and let Bella out, taking his time on the stamped concrete stairs that led up the front porch. Stupid that he was nervous. Levi had been pretty mellow at the store, but still…his team had turned on him. When he was winning competitions, they’d become like his family, but after the accident, they’d quit calling, quit inviting him out, quit acknowledging they ever knew him. As his ex-girlfriend and fellow USA team member had reminded him, it wasn’t personal. They simply couldn’t afford the bad publicity.

  His teammates hadn’t been nearly as bad as the random strangers, though. The people who had verbally attacked him on social media…and on the streets. It had all made him withdraw from everyone, everything. Social anxiety, they called it. He’d finally looked it up on the Internet.

  Bella whined and scratched at the front door, coaxing him onward as usual.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m going.” If it weren’t for the dog, he’d probably never get off the couch.

  Levi’s front door was as grand as the house—stained wood with an inlayed frosted window. He knocked, half hoping his friend wouldn’t be aroun
d. Maybe he’d forgotten or maybe something had come up—

  The door swung open, and Levi greeted him with a hearty handshake. “Glad you could make it.”

  Jaden kept his grip firm. “Me too.”

  Bella jumped up on Levi. “Happy to see you too, pooch.” He stepped aside. “Come on in.”

  Jaden walked into an open-concept living room with high arched ceilings, dark plank floors, and a stone fireplace that took up one whole wall. Even being brand-new and so extravagant, the place still had the cozy touches that made it a home—clusters of pictures and books strewn on the coffee table and some of Levi’s bull-riding memorabilia on the walls.

  “Let me grab you a beer,” Levi said, heading for the kitchen on the other side of the room.

  “Sounds great.” Jaden wandered closer to the fireplace to get a better look at the framed photographs arranged on the mantel.

  An image of a blond woman in a wedding dress—Cassidy, he presumed—stood out from the others. She was dancing barefoot in a grassy meadow, laughing, looking past the camera, presumably at her new husband. “That’s a great shot.” Not posed or unnatural, but spontaneous and full of emotion.

  Levi handed him an IPA and studied the picture with a tender expression. “That’s my wife.” He said it like it still surprised him. “Cass. Remember her? Cash’s little sister.”

  He vaguely remembered, but Cash had made sure that none of his idiot friends had come within a twenty-foot radius of her, so Jaden hadn’t known her well.

  “She’s a nurse in Denver. Working today.” He grinned. “Still have no idea how I got her to marry me.”

  “You lucked out, I guess.” That was a joke. Judging from the other wedding pictures, Cassidy looked as happy and in love as Levi. Something told him luck didn’t have much to do with it.

  The doorbell rang, sending Bella into one of her happy-barking fits. For being so anxious, she sure seemed to like meeting new people.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” Levi said over the noise. “I invited some other friends.”

  Tension laced up his spine, pulling his back tight. “Nope. Don’t mind at all.” It was crazy how casual he could force his voice to sound even when that feeling of dread crawled up his throat.

  He hung out by the fireplace while Levi opened the door, and Bella greeted the two new visitors with a nose to their crotches.

  “Bella, off,” he commanded.

  She obeyed but whined until they both gave her some attention.

  “This is Mateo Torres and Ty Forrester,” Levi said, waving Jaden over. “We trained together forever, and now we run a mentoring program when we’re not on the road.”

  “Nice to meet you.” He shook each of their hands briskly. Gram would’ve been proud of him remembering his manners, even when his throat seemed to shrink.

  “J.J. grew up on a ranch a few miles from here,” Levi told his friends. “We used to raise enough hell that his granny thought about sending him to boarding school.”

  “Not true.” Gram never would’ve sent him away. “She couldn’t get rid of me.” He forced a grin. Maybe after enough pretending, it would eventually start to feel real again. “There would’ve been no one to do the work on the ranch.” But Gram had loved him too. The way a mother was supposed to. He’d never doubted that.

  “I bet you’ve got some awesome stories,” Mateo said. “I’m always looking for new material that I can use to humiliate Levi.”

  Jaden took a sip of his beer and nodded. “I can help you out with that.”

  “I’ve got plenty on you.” Levi directed the words to Mateo as he went to get more beers from the fridge. He handed them out while the three men compared who had the worst dirt on who.

  Jaden stayed out of the conversation. If they’d watched the news in the last three months, they all had dirt on him, and he didn’t want to talk about the accident.

  Eventually, the pissing match ended, and Levi led them all out to the back deck. Bella followed behind and then trotted down the grass. It seemed his friend had chosen the prettiest spot on the property for his house, right up against the mountain, hidden in a stand of aspen trees. Evening sunlight filtered through the leaves, making everything seem calm.

  “House looks good,” Mateo said, examining the stone fire pit before flicking a switch to turn it on.

  “Yeah. Real fancy, Cortez.” Ty kicked back in one of the reclining chairs. “Let me know if you want a roommate.”

  “Yeah, Cass would love that.” Levi pulled two more chairs over and gestured for Jaden to sit.

  He had to admit…it wasn’t half bad sitting there on the deck with these guys, watching the sun start to sink behind the peaks. It was easier than he’d thought. No questions about the accident. No judgment in their eyes.

  “I’m thinking about buying some land so I can build,” Mateo said. “Got my eye on a piece of property right on the edge of town. What about you?” He glanced at Jaden. “You sticking around Topaz Falls or you got something else in mind?”

  “I’m still deciding.” Originally, he’d planned to take off as soon as they’d finished up the project at the resort. He owned a condo in Utah and a cabin in Alaska, but he didn’t have a home anywhere. “I guess I wouldn’t mind sticking around.” The statement surprised him as much as it seemed to surprise Levi.

  “That’d be great,” his friend said. “Just like old times.”

  Jaden couldn’t resist. “Only now you have a wife who wouldn’t take too kindly to you going up to the hot springs to drink beer and skinny-dip with Chrissy…what was her last name again?”

  They all laughed.

  “Cass would kick your ass,” Ty said.

  “True statement,” Levi agreed. He turned to Jaden. “But seriously, you’d love it here. Small town. Great community. Old friends. You’d be welcome.”

  Welcome. That one word sparked hope. Maybe Jaden didn’t have to live in hiding forever. Maybe he could come back to the place he’d always thought of as home.

  Chapter Four

  So this is where a professional athlete went to hide.

  Kate climbed out of her borrowed Subaru and walked up the driveway of what could only be described as an ultra-sleek modern take on a ski chalet. The squared structure had been built right into the side of the mountain, constructed mostly of stained concrete and floor-to-ceiling windows, which must’ve been made from some special type of glass because you couldn’t see anything inside.

  Standing in front of the heavy glass door, she suddenly felt an agonizing attack of insecurity. Since Jaden had judged her attire yesterday, she’d dressed more carefully for the part she was about to play. Immediately after their encounter, Kate had asked Everly to take her shopping so she could pick out a couple more earthy outfits. Today she wore fitted hiking capri pants with a bright pink moisture-wicking tank top. She’d pulled up her thick, wild hair, taking an extra half hour to make sure the bun looked genuinely carefree and messy. Which it wasn’t, of course. There must’ve been two hundred bobby pins holding it in place. But she’d hidden them carefully. Outdoorsy chicks wouldn’t spend an hour on their hair. They wouldn’t have changed clothes four times either.

  It wasn’t that she was nervous to see J.J. Alexander, necessarily. Though the man did have a certain presence that made it difficult to look away. It was more the fact that she had a very limited amount of time to convince him to do an exclusive with her. He didn’t seem especially open to interviews at the moment.

  But this was it. Her chance for a big story. The story that could make her career. She’d show his personal side. She’d take off his mask for the entire world and dig deeper and deeper until she captured his every emotion, the true heart of who Jaden Alexander was.

  “Jay,” she reminded herself in a whisper. She had to call him Jay. It didn’t bode well that he hadn’t even given her his real name, but he would open up. People loved talking to her. She made sure of it. Once, in journalism school, she’d gotten a three-hundred-fifty-pound colle
ge lineman to cry during an interview when she’d asked him about his favorite childhood pet.

  That in mind, she patted her messy bun into place and rang the doorbell.

  Squinting, she watched for a shadow to emerge from behind the glass door, but nothing happened. Tapping her foot, she rang it again. The distant sound of barking could be heard somewhere inside. Within a few minutes, Bella was bouncing and lunging against the door. Where was J.J.? Jay, she quickly corrected. Had he changed his mind about their arrangement?

  Right when she was about to turn around and stalk back to the car in defeat, the door opened. Bella hurtled outside, yipping and whining and covering Kate’s bare arms with kisses.

  When Kate looked up, she nearly fell over, and it wasn’t from Bella’s weight against her legs either. J.J.—Jay, God, that was going to mess her up—looked a lot different than he had in his stocking cap and sunglasses. His light brown hair was mussed into spikes, and he still had the sleepy eyes of a little boy. Except he was shirtless. And there wasn’t anything boyish about his bulletproof pecs and tight abs. Either he did five hundred sit-ups every day or the man had some crazy good genes. Or maybe he had a distant relation to the mythological gods…

  “Sorry I didn’t answer right away.” Drowsiness lowered his voice into a sexy tenor. “I guess I overslept.”

  “It’s no problem.” She hiked her gaze up to his eyes. How long had she been staring at his shirtless torso? And more importantly, had he noticed? “I oversleep all the time,” she babbled. “It seems like I’m always the last one rolling into work.”

  His head tilted as he studied her. “What do you do?”

  Oops. She had to be careful with questions like that. Lucky for her, he still seemed a bit groggy. “Boring stuff. Really boring.” She’d already made herself a vow that she would tell the truth as much as possible. “I edit stuff. Unimportant stuff that no one reads.” At least, that could describe her first few weeks at her new job. But once she wrote this story, things would change.