Page 43 of Ride Me Cowboy

I stand up on the tips of my toes, so he can hear me, and steady myself by putting a hand on his chest. Not strictly necessary, but far too tempting to resist. “It’s so busy.”

He shifts his head in agreement. “Friday night. People always come in to blow off some steam. What can I get you?”

I glance at the bar. “Just a soda, thanks.”

He puts a hand in the small of my back, guiding me deeper into the crowd. “Everyone’s over there,” he says, and I glance in the direction he’s gesturing, to see Beau and Austin at a table beneath a huge stag’s head. Beau lifts a hand in salute. I don’t want to move away from Cole. Just the way his hand is resting at the base of my spine brings back a thousand memories. I woulddo anything to go back in time to that night andnotstop what was happening between us.

But his hand falls away, and he moves toward the bar, leaving me to weave through the tables alone. Beau and Austin stand as I approach, and even Mackenzie smiles. Caleb walks up almost directly after me. The table this week is bigger, and I take one of the empty seats, aware that there’s another empty one beside it, and another spare seat down the end.

“Hey, Manhattan. You got a drink?”

“Cole’s grabbing it.”

He appears almost straight away, two sodas in his hands, one of which he passes to me. I can hardly breathe, waiting to see where he’ll sit. My nerves stretch and pull, hoping, silently willing him to take the seat to my left, but he doesn’t. He says something to Caleb, who gestures to the seat beside him, and Cole saunters around to it without a backwards glance.

The disappointment is real.

Beau quickly starts up a conversation, and Mackenzie joins in, correcting him half the time, sassing him the rest, so I can hardly keep up because they so obviously have a well-worn routine. She looks so young, but she can clearly hold her own with these guys, and out on the property.

They’ve been talking about moving the herd—I really have no idea what that involves but I gather they go out on horseback and ride behind the cows, shifting them across the fields—and Mackenzie is a part of that. A part of all of this.

I wonder if she finished school, or wanted to go to college? Or maybe being out here on a ranch was always it for her?

I ask her, when Beau heads to the bar to order some food. “Did you grow up around here?”

Her features tighten perceptibly. “No.” She sips her drink.

“But you must have grown up on a ranch?”

She shakes her head.

It’s obviously not something she wants to talk about, so I let it go—who am I to push someone when I have so many secrets I’m keeping?

“Well,” I say, “you seem like a natural.”

I glance across the table to find Cole’s eyes resting heavily on my face. Caleb’s talking to him, and he’s nodding, but his eyes are just…on me. Like he doesn’t even realize he’s looking. My skin lifts with goosebumps; my blood turns to lava.

“I’m from just outside of Phoenix.” Mackenzie’s voice draws my attention back. “Just a small suburb, on the outskirts.”

I sip my drink, waiting to see if she wants to give up anything else, or if that’s it.

“It was only my mom and me. And we never really saw eye to eye, you know?” She stabs her straw in her drink, swirls it around so the ice clinks against the glass. “When I was fifteen, we got in a huge fight, and she told me to pack my things and get out. So, I did.”

My jaw drops but I quickly mask it. She doesn’t want sympathy, or surprise. Mackenzie is as tough as nails and her upbringing, I gather, is a part of that.

“How did you end up here?”

She looks at me like she’s sizing me up. Working out if she can trust me. After a moment, she shrugs. “I didn’t. Not straight away.” Her eyes take on a hardness, a look of remembering, and not liking. “Sure wish I had though.”

I swallow, feeling sorry for the fifteen-year-old she’d been.

“I spent a couple of years on the streets.”

I can’t help it. I make a soft sound of surprise.

“It’s okay, you get by.”

It wasnotokay. “You must have wanted to go home.”