Page 36 of The Rancher's Rejected Bride

Oh my God.

And almost as if he could read my mind, Damian started glaring at me as well.

"Did I just—-"

"Don't even think about it," he warned.

"Make you blush?"

"The hell you did."

"But—-" I pointed gingerly to his cheeks.

"I've been drinking," he said shortly.

"Um." I couldn't help casting a dubious look at the tea set on his table, which was as classic as it went, with his porcelain cup filled with Earl Grey tea.

"Believe what you want," he snapped.

"Then I believe you like me," I teased.

His lip curled. "You'd like that, don't you?"

"Very much."

"Unfortunately...you're wrong."

Leaning forward, I whispered, "I think you're lying."

Damian leaned forward as well, but instead of whispering, he replied in a perfectly succinct voice, "I think you're crazy."

I barely managed to hold my laughter back. "Oh no." I clutched at my chest as I leaned back against my seat. "I think you just made me fall in love with you."

And this time, I saw it.

"Aha!"

It disappeared as soon as I spoke, of course, but by then it was too late.

"I know what I saw," I told him smugly, "and I totally made you smile."

"You're imagining things."

"No, I'm not." My singsong tone had his lips twitching, but this time I knew better than to point it out. "Do you live around here?" Although I genuinely wanted to know more about him, I was also hoping that little twitch would eventually turn into a smile, which I was willing to bet would be heartbreakingly sexy. "You do, right?"

He grunted.

"I'll take that as a yes, and since you live around here, you probably work around here, too, so..." I studied the way he was dressed as I tried to guess what his occupation was. "I'm guessing you do some kind of ranch work?"

Another grunt, but he also reached for his book at the same time and started making a show of reading it. Too bad for him, though, I was too thick-skinned (and crushing on him too hard) to care. "I don't know much about ranching," I told him, "so if I'm wrong about this, don't laugh—-"

"No."

"I haven't—-"

"Being a cowboy isn't a job title."

Oh my gosh.