Brokedown Cowboy

The woman rolled her eyes and gestured to her friends to move on. “Sorry you aren’t in the mood to play, honey,” she said, her parting shot as she wiggled back over to the other side of the bar.

Liss snorted. “Can you believe that?”

“What?”

“Obviously, they did not think I was pretty enough to be your girlfriend.”

“I don’t see why they cared.”

She arched a brow. “Do you really not see?”

He shook his head. “Not really.”

Liss looked closely at his face to see if he was being serious. “Because she was hitting on you. Now, I don’t think my being your girlfriend would’ve deterred her, but I think she wanted to insult me first.”

He waved his hand. “I doubt she was hitting on me.”

“Yes, she was. Women must hit on you all the time.”

“Maybe.” He shrugged, the gesture more uncomfortable than casual. “I don’t really care.”

She should not be happy to hear that. She should be concerned. “You don’t care at all?”

“I’m not in the market for anything.”

“That woman was not in the market for a relationship, Connor. She just wanted...you know, naked stuff.”

“I’m not really in the market for that right now.”

She should not be happy about that, and she should not be interested in exploring the topic further. “Not at all?”

“No. And don’t try to change my mind. You said that you were going to support me being where I wanted to be. Eli has already pushed me about it. Jack won’t shut up about it.”

“I just... I figured...”

One of the new waitresses, someone Liss didn’t know, set their food down in front of them. Both in red baskets, piled high with french fries. “What did you figure?” Connor asked, eating a fry.

“Well, I figured at this point you would be in the market for that. If you had not...gone to market already, so to speak.”

“I don’t have enough energy to fill out my insurance paperwork. Why would you think I had the energy to screw somebody?” He took the top bun off his hamburger and started squirting ketchup on the patty.

Her stomach twisted, and she did her best not to examine it. “Because, typically, it’s something people make time for.” She should talk, since she’d been single for two years, and there had been no screwing.

Connor shrugged and took a bite of his hamburger. “I didn’t come here to get a psychological evaluation. I came here to take out my rage on the cows by eating their brethren. So we can drop the subject now.” He set the hamburger down and looked at his thumb, which had a spot of ketchup on it.

He raised his thumb to his lips and licked the red sauce from his skin. The sight of his tongue moving over bare flesh, even his own flesh, sent an arrow of longing straight down between Liss’s thighs.

“Okay, fair enough.” Yes, she was more than happy to abandon this line of conversation.

“Hey, guys.”

Liss looked up, and Connor looked behind him, to see Jack standing there. “Mind if I pull up a chair?”

“Please,” she said. Anything to break the weirdness of this moment. Why were things weird? Was it because she had moved in?

“Glad you’re here, Jack,” Connor said. “As soon as I finish eating, I’d love to kick your ass at darts.”

“You’re welcome to try.”

Jack joining the group added an air of familiarity, of normalcy. A much-needed injection of it, after the roiling jealousy she’d experienced watching Connor get hit on, and the flash of heat that had assaulted her only moments later.

She had to get a grip. Because, like Connor said, he was in no place to hook up. And even if he were, it wouldn’t be with her.

She wouldn’t want it to be her, anyway. Some things in life are too important to screw up with sex. Her friendship with Connor was one of them. She had decided that years ago, and other than one brief lapse, a few months where she had thought things might be changing between them, she had always thought that.

It was true then; it was true now.

Connor was the best friend she’d ever had, and she would do anything to protect that friendship. Anything.

CHAPTER SIX

CONNOR WAS GETTING a late start to the day. Fortunately, his team was good, and he knew that the animals would be taken care of. Still, he hated oversleeping. But he, Jack and Liss had stayed way too late at Ace’s last night, flinging darts at the board, laughing about stupid stuff and in general ignoring the reality of life.

Reality that had slapped him in the face pretty hard this morning when his alarm had gone off. It wasn’t just the fact that they had stayed at the bar late. Once they’d made it home, Connor had had a hell of a time sleeping. It had been as if something was sitting on his chest, making it impossible to breathe, impossible to do anything but lie there, sweat beading on his brow, panic rising in his throat.

Not for the first time, he wished he had accepted medication for his anxiety.

But when the doctor had offered it a couple of years back, Connor had just laughed it off and said he didn’t need a pill when a beer would do the job. But he was getting tired of the hangovers. He was tired of the anxiety, too. Hell, he was tired of all this shit. He would never have thought he’d be the kind of guy to become a head case over a little grief. Or a lot of grief.

It seemed as if he might be, though.

I don’t have enough energy to fill out my insurance paperwork. Why would you think I had the energy to screw somebody?

A flash of last night’s conversation popped into his mind. Had he really said that to Liss? Yeah, he had. He didn’t suppose it was normal to still be this tired. To still be this overwhelmed by what was left. But then, there was nothing normal about losing your entire future. All of your plans. Everything you were.

The finality was the worst part. It just happened. Unexpected, fast. Jessie had gone out to visit with her friends. A normal night, nothing unusual at all.

And she hadn’t come home.

Just like that, every plan for the future gone.

And he was sort of stubbornly sitting here in the present, afraid to plan for a future he’d never wanted in the first place. One where he was alone, single. But here he was, and now... He couldn’t readjust, not again.

He let out a heavy breath and walked to his dresser, jerking open the bottom drawer and digging for some underwear. And there were none. Because he didn’t keep up on his laundry, because he sucked. He sucked at taking care of himself, and he had sucked at taking care of his wife.

Of course it was too late to fix a marriage that had been put asunder by death. But it wasn’t too late to fix the situation with his underwear.

He walked downstairs—wearing nothing but yesterday’s underwear—and headed toward the laundry room. Hopefully there was something in the dryer. He was not the best at keeping up on laundry. Because laundry was terrible. But sometimes he ended up with one or two baskets full of clean clothes, just sitting in there, because he hated to put things away.

Liss had accused him of being a man-child on more than one occasion. He was starting to think she might be right.

It was a pretty sad-sack thing, now that he thought about it. A grown man not being able to see to his own household. But Eli had always done that when they were growing up, after their mother had left. And then Connor had married Jessie, and she had handled all of it. It wasn’t a great excuse. He had always expected for it to be taken care of, and it had been. While he had spent his days working himself blind on the ranch.

He’d intended to change. Because Jessie had asked him to. And because she deserved for him to.

Only then it had been too late.

So he’d gone right back to how he’d always been. Because there was no one to be different for. No one to be better for.

And because of that, he had no clean underwear.

He opened up the laundry room door and saw two baskets filled with clothes on the floor. He opened up the dryer door, and there was a full load in there, too. Okay, he was bound to come up successful in this pursuit.

He started to dig through the dryer and realized pretty quickly he wasn’t looking at his own clothes. He grabbed a basket and stuck it underneath the opening to the dryer, pulling the clothes that were inside out and into said basket.

His hand got caught around something lacy and flimsy, and he looked down and froze. Well, he had found clean underwear. They just weren’t his.

For a full ten seconds he sat there and looked at the mint-green panties that were in his hand. They were delicate, feminine. And very, very tiny. He had never imagined that Liss wore underwear like this beneath her rather sensible outfits. Well, in fairness, he had never thought about Liss’s underwear before.

But he was thinking about them now. He couldn’t stop himself from running his thumb over the soft, flat waistband. He swallowed hard, lifting them up so that he could see the shape.

It was a thong, which was very unexpected. Even more unexpected was the quick image that flashed through his mind of what Liss must look like wearing them. A shadow of copper curls beneath the flimsy lace, and the round, shapely ass that would be displayed to perfection.

He dropped the panties back into the basket and stood up, taking a step back as if there was a rattlesnake in there amid the clothes. Since when did he imagine Liss in her underwear? More important, since when had he noticed that her ass was shapely?

He never had, not consciously. It must be something his subconscious had absorbed. Some kind of male instinct he had thought long destroyed busily cataloging desirable feminine attributes even while his conscious mind was shutting it out.

He reached into the basket next to the one containing Liss’s clothes, stripped off his old underwear and quickly pulled on a new pair, before jerking the laundry room door open and walking out into the kitchen.

Unfortunately, just as he walked in, so did Liss.

Her eyes flew wide, and she took two steps backward, her cheeks turning bright pink. “Sorry.” She turned and walked out of the room as quickly as she had just walked in.

“Dammit,” he growled, stalking back to the staircase and heading back to his room as quickly as possible.

He put on a pair of tan Carhartt pants and a black T-shirt, before going back downstairs to do some damage control. Although, really, there should be no damage to control. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen him in various states of undress over the years. It just felt more inappropriate, because he had just been handling her panties.

“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.

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