Should've Been a Cowboy by Vicki Lewis Thompson Read Free Book Online Page B

you.”
    She took a shuddering breath. “But it’s too one-sided. If we could just do it, then we could get it out of our system.”
    If he hadn’t been so jacked up on lust, he would have laughed. She was seriously kidding herself if she believed one time would satisfy them. It hadn’t the night in the hayloft and it wouldn’t now.
    He closed the distance between them. “You can’t believe that.”
    “That’s what I was telling myself while you were kissing me senseless.” She stepped back and bumped against the latched door of an empty stall. “It seemed like a perfectly logical idea when you were unhooking my bra and I didn’t have the self-control of a gnat.”
    He groaned. “You’re torturing me.”
    “I know, and that’s mean. We should just go back before this gets any—”
    A loud crash and a flash of light was followed by a low rumble and the steady ping of rain on the barn’s tin roof. The dogs came in and padded over to Alex, tails wagging slowly.
    “Butch, Sundance, go lie down.” He pointed to the tack room where they each had a bed.
    With twin doggie sighs of resignation, they left for the tack room. When he turned back to Tyler, the rain had started to pound on the roof in earnest, and she had her hands behind her back and under her shirt as if she intended to fasten her bra. He was losing ground.
    “I guess we’ll have to make a run for it,” she said.
    “We could, but it’ll probably let up in a few minutes. We could wait and see if it does.”
    She hesitated. “I suppose.”
    “So why not stop what you’re doing and unlatch that stall door? There’s a nice bed of hay in there.”
    Her lips parted and heat simmered in her gaze as it had earlier in the hallway outside her room. This time she didn’t look away. “You don’t give up, do you?”
    “Not when there’s something I want.” His heartbeat hammered in his ears, almost drowning the rattle of rain on the tin roof. “I think you want the same thing.”
    Her breathing quickened. “Now you’re the one torturing me.”
    “I can fix that.” Please let me love you.
    “Alex…”
    “Tyler…” He waited, willing her to turn and unlatch that stall door, yet knowing that she might not. If she decided to run out into the rain, he’d have to run with her, because she couldn’t arrive at the house dripping wet with him nowhere around. That would look bad.
    She finished hooking her bra. “I’m going to see how hard it’s coming down.” Breaking eye contact, she walked to the front of the barn.
    He scooped up his hat from the floor and followed her. If she insisted on making a run for it, he’d leave his hat on a shelf beside the door rather than ruin it in the rain. But he was still hoping she’d change her mind.
    She peered out the door into the gray light. Rain slanted across the landscape, blurring the outlines of the ranch house and the twin spruces in front of it. “I think we should go.”
    He put his hat on the shelf by the door. “I’m warning you, you’ll get wet.”
    She muttered something that sounded like I already am.
    If that was an admission of how he’d affected her, he wanted to hear it again. “What was that?”
    “Nothing. Let’s go.”
    “Okay.” He doused the lights, and once they were both out the door, he turned and shoved it closed.
    She yelped, and he swung around in time to see her land on her backside in the mud. He was beside her in three strides and leaned down to help her up. Except it didn’t work out that way. She managed to upset his balance just enough on the mud-slick ground that he went down, too. By throwing himself sideways, he avoided landing on top of her, but he had mud splattered all over his clothes.
    “I’m sorry!” She scrambled to her knees, rain dripping from her hair into her face. “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, other than the mud. Are you?”
    “Yes, but…I don’t want to track all this into that beautiful house.”
    There was a back way into the house