Page 2 of Call Me Yours (Lodestar Ranch #4)

I know you. You’re the guy who always comes in second and gets mad about it, because no one deserves first place more than you.

If someone doesn’t laugh at your joke, it’s because they don’t have a sense of humor.

Someone gets promoted over you, they must have cheated.

A woman turns you down, she’s a bitch. The world never gives you everything you’re owed, and your list of grievances is long.

It’s not fair, right? All of that should be yours.

Because you’re such a nice guy . But guess what? No one owes you shit, and you’re trash.

That man she’d described? Yeah, I recognized him. But it wasn’t me. It was my fucking father. The man I swore I wouldn’t become. Hearing her say I was exactly like him, even though she didn’t know she was saying it, felt like a sucker punch to the nuts. I couldn’t catch my breath.

And, fuck, I hated her for it.

I held tight to that anger now, despite her smelling so damn edible. “As you can see, I’m not having a heart attack. The battery died.” I jerked my chin toward my truck. “And then the pig.” I jerked my head in the other direction, toward the pipe. “No cell service.”

“You shouldn’t be out here without a charged battery jumper,” she said, which was true and also, quite frankly, really un-fucking-helpful. “It’s stupid.”

“I used mine this morning and didn’t have time to charge it.”

My sister had left the light on in her Subaru. Thank god it was me out here in the rain and not her. I had bought her a rechargeable battery jumper while I was in town today because she would be living with me for the foreseeable future. It was sitting behind the driver’s seat.

Also uncharged, of course.

She twirled her umbrella again and stared at me like she was waiting for something. What the hell did she want from me? Rain sluiced down my forehead and dripped into my eyes while she stood there, perfectly dry, twirling her goddamn umbrella like she had all the time in the world, and my truck?—

Oh, god damm it.

I had to ask this woman for a favor? No. Absolutely not. She was a fucking bitch, and I would rather die of pneumonia than give her the satisfaction.

But the dang pig.

And Amy was waiting for me. If I didn’t get home soon, she’d decide to come looking for me. I didn’t want her out in this storm. She was used to the flat fields of Oklahoma, not the twisting roads of the Rocky Mountains.

“I’d appreciate a jump, if it’s not too much trouble,” I pushed out through gritted teeth. “I’ve got cables in my truck.”

She stopped twirling that fucking umbrella and her pretty pink lips tilted in a smirk. “No trouble at all.”

I grabbed the cables from my truck while she turned her small SUV around so our engines were facing each other and cut the engine.

I popped the hood and waved the cables at her through her windshield so she knew I was ready.

Chloe nodded and reached across the passenger seat to the glove compartment, pulled out a notecard, read it over with a little nod of her head, put it away, then pulled it back out and looked over it again before putting it away and shutting the glove compartment.

I cocked my head questioningly as our eyes met through her windshield. She arched an eyebrow and popped the hood.

“Red is positive!” she hollered, her voice muffled behind the glass. “Positive to positive, negative to negative.”

“Yeah, I fucking know,” I muttered to myself. I clamped the cables from her battery to mine. “Turn on your car!” I shouted back.

I waited a couple minutes with her engine running before starting mine. It roared to life. Thank fuck. I kept the engine running while I darted back into the rain, unclamped the cables, and shut both our hoods.

I rapped on her window, and she rolled it down an inch. “Thanks for your help. I’m good from here. You can go.”

With a crisp nod, she rolled the window back up.

The engine needed to run a little bit longer to get the battery charge up, and that fucking pig was still in the goddamn pipe. I squatted down and saw him lying on his side, like he had simply accepted that this was his home now.

“All right, asshole,” I muttered as I lowered myself to the mud. “How about you help me help you this time, okay?”

He snorted. It sounded like a swear word.

“You don’t fit. Why do you keep trying?”

Chloe’s voice came from somewhere down by my feet. I pulled my head out of the pipe to glare at her. “Shouldn’t you be halfway home by now? Go on, now. Shoo.” I waved my hands at her like she was a mangy stray dog.

She looked at the hole with narrowed eyes, sizing it up, and then back to my face. “I could fit.”

“Really.” I dragged my gaze up her bare legs, over her tiny denim shorts, up to the white t-shirt that would for sure go see-through in the rain. “You’re going to crawl through the mud wearing that?”

She crooked a finger at me and that was all it took because I was some kind of masochist, apparently. I rolled to my feet and prowled toward her.

“Take off your shirt,” she said.

Did I ask for an explanation? No.

Did I politely suggest she go fuck herself? Also no.

Did I do exactly what she said like a pussy-whipped sucker even though I would rather put my dick in a hill of fire ants than this woman’s pussy?

Look, I wasn’t proud of it.

I whipped my t-shirt off over my head and let the rain soak straight into my skin. It was ice cold, which I hadn’t expected. Thin though it was, my t-shirt had been better than nothing.

Her eyes didn’t linger as she traded me the umbrella for my shirt, and somehow that left me feeling even more exposed. I didn’t spend hours lifting weights and working out—actually working kept me in good shape—but I took pride in knowing women liked me out of my clothes.

Chloe was not one of them, apparently.

She turned her back to me. “Keep me dry.”

And I did that, too, even though it meant my entire backside was left out in the rain. Not that it mattered. I couldn’t get more wet than I already was at this point. She pulled her t-shirt off and handed it to me over her shoulder.

It happened so fast. Her shirt in my hand. Her back bare except for the lace band of her beige bra. The umbrella dappling red shapes across her skin like a stained-glass window. The small dark mole on the sharp apex of her shoulder blade.

And then my gray t-shirt tumbled down her spine like a closing curtain and she darted around me into the rain, calling “Don’t let my shirt get wet!” while I stood rooted where she left me, light-headed from holding my breath.

“Such a smart pig,” Chloe cooed behind me from the pipe. “I wouldn’t let him touch me, either.”

I huffed an aggrieved sigh, but that made me take a breath and the second oxygen hit my lungs my brain turned back on. I turned around and found her halfway into the pipe, her shapely ass pointed to the sky.

“Darlin’, I have as much interest in touching you as I do sticking my hand in a wasp nest,” I lied on a thick cowboy drawl. There was a thin line between loathing and lust, and Chloe Adams was unfortunately straddling it with those sweet thighs of hers.

She didn’t respond. Maybe she didn’t hear me, or maybe she knew I was full of shit. She knew what her ass looked like, after all.

“Got him!” Her triumphant shout was followed by that ass jiggling in those tiny shorts as she wiggled backward out of the pipe. “Open the door.”

I jogged to my truck, Chloe speed-walking behind me with the pig tucked protectively against her torso like a football, and opened the passenger door of my truck.

She placed the pig on the floor with a lot more care than the asshole who had tossed him out in the first place and then turned to face me under the umbrella.

Because, yeah, I was holding it over her head, even though she was now every bit as wet and dirty as I was, so what was even the point?

She glanced up at the umbrella, then cocked her head like she was wondering the same thing. Her gaze landed on her t-shirt in my other hand.

“Is it still dry?” she asked.

“Yes,” I grunted, more than a little bit offended that she even asked me that.

“Great.”

She grabbed her shirt and turned around.

This time I knew what was coming and stared up at the umbrella as though my soul depended on it because that was how it felt, like I might actually die from it.

The next thing I knew she was taking the umbrella handle from me as she shoved my filthy shirt at my chest.

“Good luck with Steve Junior!” she hollered cheerfully over her shoulder as she jogged toward her car.

It took me a second to realize she had not-so-subtly called me a pig again.

God, that fucking woman. I hated her.

But I lifted my shirt to my face and breathed in her sweet strawberry scent like maybe I didn’t.