Page 92 of A Cowboy's Bride
Jake resisted the urge to stumble them somewhere private. Instead, he kept kissing her as his entire body strummed with desire. When they finally broke apart, gasping for breath, Jake was stunned.
Infuriating to the core, Tansy grinned. “See? Sometimes spontaneity is fun.”
He focused on staying upright as she shimmied her feet back to the ground. He needed to say something, anything. Maybe even apologize.
Nope, couldn’t do it.
“Thanks for the great start to the new year. I’ll see you around.” Tansy patted his cheek then vanished between one breath and the next.
Jake stood there and tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.
He was still trying to decide the next morning as he stared at the coffee maker, willing it to spit out liquid faster.
Ten o’clock, and no one else had appeared in the house yet. He figured Aiden and Petra had a good reason to be MIA—with Jinx out of the house, they’d spent the night in their new apartment. They were probably still cozied up together. Declan was up, but still in the barn.
Jake was regretting his New Year’s Eve choices more than a little, and he stood by the coffee maker and drank an entire cup before refilling and easing his way to the table.
He stared out the window and watched as an old beat up minivan turned off the highway and down the drive. Probably somebody dropping Jinx off after her night away.
Well, to hell with it. New Year’s Day. It was time to set some goals. That’s what people did on New Year’s Day, right?
He nabbed his notebook and turned to a fresh, clean page. He wrote GOALS at the top and a set of numbers to the side, one all the way to ten. He stared at the page for a moment then in the first spot wrote down, crisp and clear…
1. Learn to be more spontaneous.
What the fuck?
He all but glared at the journal.Thatwas not what he wanted to write. That wasn’t what he’d been thinking about at all, and he pressed his hands to his temples, begging for the pounding to die down.
Tansy’s fault. The word she’d used the night before had still been echoing in his head.
He examined the notebook page with disgust. Everyone had their quirks, and he was honest enough to admit this was one of his. Either he crossed it out or he ripped out the damn page, neither of which sat well. He decided to just leave the damn sentence there for now and let it be annoying.
Someone knocked on the door. Jake was already on his feet even as he checked the time. New Year’s Day and they had a visitor?
Oh. What if it was Danielle? What if somebody else needed their help?
He hurried forward and jerked the door open, staring down in shock at a wildly grinning Tansy. She held a plastic container toward him, jamming it into his hands.
“What’s this?” he demanded.
“Welcome to High Water brownies,” she announced happily, slipping past him and hauling a rolling suitcase after her.
She closed the door then turned back, tugging the container from his fingers. “Thanks. Those are for me.”
“You said they were welcome brownies,” he repeated.
She nodded eagerly. “They are. You don’t know how to bake that well, and I wanted brownies. Since I’m now living here, they’rewelcome home, Tansybrownies.”
She twirled and headed farther into the house.
Jake shook his head, trying to get her words to settle in his brain and make sense. Nope, wasn’t working.
He stomped after her into the kitchen. “What do you mean, you’re living here?”
She put the brownies on the counter before twisting to face him. She brushed her hands together as if knocking off crumbs then thrust one forward. “Declan and Petra hired me. Hi, I’m your new live-in cook.”