Page 5 of Call Me Yours (Lodestar Ranch #4)

CHLOE

Present Day

Dad

Your mom had a bad flare up this week. We tried to stay on top of everything, but it got away from me. I’m sorry.

Chloe

No worries. I’ll take care of it.

Fucking Mondays, man. I would cry about it, but who had the time for tears.

I stared morosely down at the mess— my mess, because I had held the door for a harried mom juggling a crying toddler and a stroller and she’d thanked me by accidentally clocking my shoulder with her massive diaper bag, sending my avocado toast and iced mocha careening to the sidewalk.

Ice cubes and milky chocolate puddled at my feet, the avocado toast face down.

Flecks of green and brown splattered my jeans.

Half a cherry tomato landed on the toe of my sneaker.

Dammit. I’d had big plans for that iced mocha.

I was going to sit my tired ass in that wicker chair, enjoy fifteen minutes of August sunshine, and let the chocolate and caffeine wash away the remnants of this morning’s hangover—courtesy of the Sunday Scaries that had culminated in drinking too much and texting my situationship for one last round of let’s not ruin this with labels before he left for his totally epic, bro motorcycle ride across Argentina—and the stabbing in my uterus that meant my period was inevitable.

My period had always been a sporadic motherfucker, so thank heaven for small mercies or whatever.

I put a reminder in my phone to get an STI check in six months, scooped up the empty plastic cup and dumped it into the trashcan, and dropped into the chair with a pathetic whimper.

Money being what it was—never enough—I couldn’t afford to replace my lunch.

I had blown the rest of my weekly fun money on last night’s bottle of wine.

Ten minutes. I wasn’t going to cry, but I could give myself ten minutes to sulk so I didn’t drive mad. And then I needed to pull myself together and get to my parents’ house in Evergreen, twenty minutes from Aspen Springs.

From Dad’s texts, I guessed there was a small mountain of laundry waiting for me, along with the typical billing and paperwork Mom handled for Dad’s farrier business when her joints weren’t swollen from lupus.

It was how I spent most Mondays after my 6 a.m. to noon shift at Jo’s.

I didn’t mind, but I knew today was going to be a long one, and I still had a pile of my own paperwork to do tonight to prepare for the week’s therapy sessions.

Two thousand supervised clinical hours down, one thousand to go before I could take the exam and become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker.

Just one more year of working two jobs and duct taping my family together in the cracks of my free time. If I could survive it.

Breathe, Chloe, breathe .

I tipped my head back and glared at the world. The Colorado sunshine was annoyingly bright. The morning birdsong was annoyingly loud. The cramps were annoyingly painful. And the cowboy coming my way with a goddamn pig on a leash was annoyingly hot.

I turtled deeper into my gray hoodie with a feeling that the universe was against me. “Get the hell out of here, Steven.”

His dark eyes narrowed at me. “Your shift ended ten minutes ago.”

“Are you stalking me now? I don’t have to be on duty to tell you pigs aren’t allowed.” My gaze dipped to the animal snuffling my sneakers. “And neither are pets.” I leaned my head against the brick wall behind me and closed my eyes with a weary sigh.

“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded.

I cracked one eyelid open, decided it wasn’t worth the effort, and closed it again.

“You’re what’s wrong with me,” I said on reflex, but my heart wasn’t in it.

Between the pounding in my head and the stabbing in my uterus, I had nothing left for rage, not even for someone as deserving as Steven. Alas.

There was a pause. I knew he hadn’t left because Steve Junior was still snuffling my shoes, but I lacked the energy to do anything about it.

“You look like shit,” he said. “Are you sick or something?”

The concern in his voice sounded genuine. I must have truly looked like I was knocking on death’s door. “I am not sick, Steven. I am hungover. Not only am I hungover, but my uterus has decided that now is the time for a little home renovation and is scraping those walls clean with a rusty knife.”

Steven made a disgusted noise. “Too much information. I don’t need to hear about all that lady shit.”

That was about what I expected from Steven.

“Did you know that girls can get their periods as young as nine or ten? If a nine-year-old girl can handle the monthly trauma of bleeding from her vagina for five days straight, then you, a full-grown adult man, can damn well survive hearing about it. Or are you really that fragile?”

There was a beat of silence during which I started to think maybe he had finally walked away, but no such luck. “So, you’re just going to take a nap here?”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I was going to gird my loins with an iced mocha and avocado toast before I go to my parents’ house, but alas.” I indicated the brown sidewalk. “Life had other plans. So now I’m pouting.”

Steven blinked. “It’s Monday,” he said like this had just now dawned on him.

“It really fucking is,” I groused. “But I don’t know what that means to you.”

“Nothing. I just—nothing.”

“Great. Can you leave me alone now? I just need ten minutes to get my head on right, okay? Leave me to my wretchedness.”

Steven didn’t look remotely sympathetic to my plight. His eyes narrowed like my misery was a personal affront. “For fuck’s sake, Chloe,” he growled. He thrust the pig leash at me. “Don’t let Stevie eat anything.”

I tipped my head back to look at him as his words trudged through my pickled brain. “Stevie…the pig?”

“No, I talk about myself in third person now,” he deadpanned before swinging open the glass door and striding inside.

Leaving me with the leash and a lot of questions.

“What,” I asked of the pig, “is going on here?”

Junior did not answer. He—I discreetly peeked— she was too busy staring longingly through the glass door like a loyal dog waiting for its master’s return.

A moment later Steven reappeared, placed an iced mocha and hot coffee on the table in front of me without a single word, and went back inside. Junior tugged at the leash like she meant to follow him.

“Listen, honey.” I pulled her closer and tied the leash to my chair. Hopefully her love wouldn’t drag my seat out from under me. “That man in there? He’s no good. Sure, he’s nice to look at, but underneath the brown eyes and hard muscles is a steaming pile of hot garbage. He’s not a good person.”

Junior sat back on her haunches like she intended to be here a while.

I stabbed my straw through the lid, flinching at the horrific squeak of plastic rubbing against plastic, and took a long gulp of my iced mocha. Maybe it was the placebo effect, but my uterus instantly unclenched at the hit of chocolate and caffeine.

The squeak got Junior’s attention and she looked at me. I swore her little piggy eyes lingered pointedly on the iced mocha delivering pain relief, courtesy of Steven McAllister.

“Okay, yes, he brought me coffee, and presumably he’s getting my lunch, too. And yes, he did save you from being a coyote’s dinner—although technically, that was me. His shoulders were too broad.”

I frowned, because there it was again, the image branded on the back of my eyelids that had plagued me relentlessly since that rainy night three weeks ago.

Steven shirtless, tanned skin slick with rain, nipples peaked and muscles taut from cold, looking like he had stepped out of a cowboy calendar.

It was a cosmic injustice that Steven McAllister, asshole extraordinaire, was packaged up like a Wrangler wet dream.

“Sometimes bad people do good things. There’s a lot of gray in people.”

I frowned again as I fiddled with my straw.

There was no reason for Steven to help me.

Hell, there’d been no reason for him to save Junior.

Actually, there’d been plenty of reasons for him to walk away.

The rain. The mud. The pig that definitely didn’t want his help.

And still, he’d stayed. Even when saving Junior had clearly been impossible, he’d kept trying.

And that was why I hadn’t left him there. Well, that and I’d also felt bad for Junior.

“My point is that an iced mocha and a six-pack abdomen do not make up for everything else. Do you know what he did, Junior? He purposefully spooked a horse my best friend was riding. She was bucked off into a fence. Bruised her ribs and a whole lot of other body parts. And do you know why? Because she turned him down. That’s the kind of guy he is.

” I looked up to see Steven shouldering his way through the door and finished on a hurried whisper, “So maybe love him a little less, okay?”

Junior ignored my advice. She trotted right over to Steven and gave him an affectionate headbutt on the knee as he set the tray of food in front of me.

“There you go, princess,” he said, with an extra dollop of sarcasm on princess . He dumped a bowl of salad on the ground and gave Junior a pat on her flank. “There you go, honey.” No sarcasm at all.

“Thank you,” I grumbled begrudgingly. I had to force the words out.

Not because of the nickname—that didn’t bother me at all.

I hated feeling sick and tended to be insufferable when I had so much as a sniffle.

A hangover was even worse because I did it to myself.

I deserved the nickname. I was being pathetic, and I knew it.

But why was he being so nice about it?

And it was a weird kind of nice, too. Because on the surface, Steven was always nice.

He had manners. He knew how to hold a door and all that.

But underneath that charming veneer was an absolute jackass who thought the world owed him something, like he had done humanity—and especially women—a huge favor merely by gracing us with his presence.