Brokedown Cowboy

CHAPTER SIX

CONNOR WAS GETTING a late start to the day. Fortunately, his team was good, and he knew that the animals would be taken care of. Still, he hated oversleeping. But he, Jack and Liss had stayed way too late at Ace’s last night, flinging darts at the board, laughing about stupid stuff and in general ignoring the reality of life.

Reality that had slapped him in the face pretty hard this morning when his alarm had gone off. It wasn’t just the fact that they had stayed at the bar late. Once they’d made it home, Connor had had a hell of a time sleeping. It had been as if something was sitting on his chest, making it impossible to breathe, impossible to do anything but lie there, sweat beading on his brow, panic rising in his throat.

Not for the first time, he wished he had accepted medication for his anxiety.

But when the doctor had offered it a couple of years back, Connor had just laughed it off and said he didn’t need a pill when a beer would do the job. But he was getting tired of the hangovers. He was tired of the anxiety, too. Hell, he was tired of all this shit. He would never have thought he’d be the kind of guy to become a head case over a little grief. Or a lot of grief.

It seemed as if he might be, though.

I don’t have enough energy to fill out my insurance paperwork. Why would you think I had the energy to screw somebody?

A flash of last night’s conversation popped into his mind. Had he really said that to Liss? Yeah, he had. He didn’t suppose it was normal to still be this tired. To still be this overwhelmed by what was left. But then, there was nothing normal about losing your entire future. All of your plans. Everything you were.

The finality was the worst part. It just happened. Unexpected, fast. Jessie had gone out to visit with her friends. A normal night, nothing unusual at all.

And she hadn’t come home.

Just like that, every plan for the future gone.

And he was sort of stubbornly sitting here in the present, afraid to plan for a future he’d never wanted in the first place. One where he was alone, single. But here he was, and now... He couldn’t readjust, not again.

He let out a heavy breath and walked to his dresser, jerking open the bottom drawer and digging for some underwear. And there were none. Because he didn’t keep up on his laundry, because he sucked. He sucked at taking care of himself, and he had sucked at taking care of his wife.

Of course it was too late to fix a marriage that had been put asunder by death. But it wasn’t too late to fix the situation with his underwear.

He walked downstairs—wearing nothing but yesterday’s underwear—and headed toward the laundry room. Hopefully there was something in the dryer. He was not the best at keeping up on laundry. Because laundry was terrible. But sometimes he ended up with one or two baskets full of clean clothes, just sitting in there, because he hated to put things away.

Liss had accused him of being a man-child on more than one occasion. He was starting to think she might be right.

It was a pretty sad-sack thing, now that he thought about it. A grown man not being able to see to his own household. But Eli had always done that when they were growing up, after their mother had left. And then Connor had married Jessie, and she had handled all of it. It wasn’t a great excuse. He had always expected for it to be taken care of, and it had been. While he had spent his days working himself blind on the ranch.

He’d intended to change. Because Jessie had asked him to. And because she deserved for him to.

Only then it had been too late.

So he’d gone right back to how he’d always been. Because there was no one to be different for. No one to be better for.

And because of that, he had no clean underwear.

He opened up the laundry room door and saw two baskets filled with clothes on the floor. He opened up the dryer door, and there was a full load in there, too. Okay, he was bound to come up successful in this pursuit.

He started to dig through the dryer and realized pretty quickly he wasn’t looking at his own clothes. He grabbed a basket and stuck it underneath the opening to the dryer, pulling the clothes that were inside out and into said basket.

His hand got caught around something lacy and flimsy, and he looked down and froze. Well, he had found clean underwear. They just weren’t his.

For a full ten seconds he sat there and looked at the mint-green panties that were in his hand. They were delicate, feminine. And very, very tiny. He had never imagined that Liss wore underwear like this beneath her rather sensible outfits. Well, in fairness, he had never thought about Liss’s underwear before.

But he was thinking about them now. He couldn’t stop himself from running his thumb over the soft, flat waistband. He swallowed hard, lifting them up so that he could see the shape.

It was a thong, which was very unexpected. Even more unexpected was the quick image that flashed through his mind of what Liss must look like wearing them. A shadow of copper curls beneath the flimsy lace, and the round, shapely ass that would be displayed to perfection.

He dropped the panties back into the basket and stood up, taking a step back as if there was a rattlesnake in there amid the clothes. Since when did he imagine Liss in her underwear? More important, since when had he noticed that her ass was shapely?

He never had, not consciously. It must be something his subconscious had absorbed. Some kind of male instinct he had thought long destroyed busily cataloging desirable feminine attributes even while his conscious mind was shutting it out.

He reached into the basket next to the one containing Liss’s clothes, stripped off his old underwear and quickly pulled on a new pair, before jerking the laundry room door open and walking out into the kitchen.

Unfortunately, just as he walked in, so did Liss.

Her eyes flew wide, and she took two steps backward, her cheeks turning bright pink. “Sorry.” She turned and walked out of the room as quickly as she had just walked in.

“Dammit,” he growled, stalking back to the staircase and heading back to his room as quickly as possible.

He put on a pair of tan Carhartt pants and a black T-shirt, before going back downstairs to do some damage control. Although, really, there should be no damage to control. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen him in various states of undress over the years. It just felt more inappropriate, because he had just been handling her panties.

“Liss?”

“In here,” she said, her voice sounding muffled.

He walked toward the living room and into the room, just in time to see Liss scrambling up from the couch, throwing one of the decorative pillows back onto the cushion. She looked at him, her lower lip sucked between her teeth.

They just sort of stood there, frozen, staring at each other.

Then a gust of air tried to escape Liss’s mouth, turning into a sound that was somewhere between a growl and a snort.

He frowned. “Are you laughing at me?”

Her shoulders shook, her face turning redder. She shook her head, still biting her lower lip.

“I’m serious, Liss. You just saw me in my underwear, and you’re laughing? I have to figure out if I’m insulted by this or not.”

She shook her head again, sitting down on the couch, her face getting redder, the shaking in her shoulders getting increasingly violent.

“Either you’re having a stroke, or you are laughing at the sight of me in my undies.”

She released her lower lip and heaved in a deep breath, a guffaw escaping a second later. “No! No.”

“You’re not laughing.”

“No,” she hooted, “I’m not laughing.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Not at the sight of you in your underwear. I mean, not like you think,” she said, breathless. “It was just so absurd. You were looking at me. I was just looking at you. I happened to walk in and you were in the kitchen, and you were pretty much naked.” She was rambling now, but it was a whole lot better than the alternative.

Because things were kind of jumbled up in his head. And for some reason, he was still picturing her in her underwear, even though he was the one who had been caught in his.

“I thought you were at work.”

“I forgot my cell phone, so I came back because I didn’t have any important appointments this morning. I guess this is a part of negotiating the living situation.”

“I guess.”

She cleared her throat. “Really, though, it’s nothing I’ve never seen before.”

He tried not to be offended by that comment. As though any man in his underwear was exactly the same as him. Really, he had no place to be offended by that comment. Because the sight of him mostly naked should not be remarkable to his best friend. And yet, his masculine ego—which along with his nice-ass radar, was not as dormant as he had believed—was slightly dented.

“True. But then, I’ve seen plenty of women in their underwear—” only one, now two, in person and others in pictures, but Liss didn’t need to know that “—and that does not mean that you’re going to be prancing around in here in a state of undress.” He regretted saying that the moment he did, because it brought to mind those images he was working so hard to banish. “Are you?”

“No. Would you rather I act completely scandalized? Should I have had you fetch the smelling salts?”

“I don’t have smelling salts. All I have is barbecue steak rub. I don’t think it’s the same.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

“Okay, so here’s the deal. I won’t assume that you’re not in the house anymore. And I won’t come walking downstairs in my underwear.”

“Deal.”

“Okay,” he said, taking a step away from her, rubbing the back of his neck. “I suppose you need to get back to work. I know I do.”

“Yeah, I should.”

He nodded, a thread of tension stretching between them, and he wanted to banish it. Wanted to do something to get rid of it, because this wasn’t normal. “Great, I’ll see you for dinner.”

“I might go out with Jeanette,” she said quickly.

“Okay. I’ll see you later, then.”

“Yeah, later.”

Connor turned and walked out of the room. It was probably a good thing Liss was going out tonight. After only a couple of days of cohabitation, he felt as though they could maybe use a little space.

But this was normal, this adjustment period. Connor hadn’t lived with anyone in a few years, and he’d lived with Jessie for a long time. Even then, they had a lot of miscommunications and a lot of ups and downs. There was no reason to believe it would be any different with a roommate.

He opened the door and took a deep breath, banishing all the weirdness that lingered inside him. There was no time to worry about any of that. He had a ranch to work on.

* * *

SHE’D HAD FANTASIES about Connor before. Here, in the darkness of her room, she was woman enough to admit that. And yes, she had seen him without his shirt on. They spent a lot of time on the lake, down by the river and on the beach. Copper Ridge was surrounded by water and they, like most of the other residents, made the most of it.

But somehow, seeing him in his underwear was different. Because it wasn’t just his perfectly muscular chest, with a very perfect amount of chest hair sprinkled over it. Or his washboard flat abs and the tattoo that was starting to drive her crazy. No, it was combined with the full scope of his very muscular thighs, compliments of years in the saddle, and, it just...well, and...the very prominent bulge at the apex of said muscular thighs. There. She’d admitted it.

It was burned into her brain now. The image of him standing in his kitchen nearly naked, looking as if he’d just been slapped upside the head with a two-by-four.

She rolled over onto her stomach and buried her head beneath her pillow. She had to be adult about this.

She snorted and rolled back over, uncovering her face. That was the problem. She was being adult about this. Very adult. With lots of adult thoughts and desires and needs.

What were you supposed to do when your adult needs were for your best friend and roommate? Where was her handbook?

“Ignore it,” she said out loud, “like always.”

It was the only thing to do. They would have to go on as though undiegate had never happened. She was just having a little Connor relapse due to the close proximity. Probably not aided at all by the recent amount of time she’d been spending taking care of him. And definitely not helped by her extremely long bout of celibacy and singledom. When things settled down she would have to focus on getting a date. Yes, that would help. A little bit of normalcy, a man who wasn’t Connor filling her time.

Yes, that would help. And if in the meantime, she spent just a little bit of time thinking about how Connor had looked in his underwear, well, she was only human. It didn’t mean anything. Just a little healthy female-to-male appreciation.

That was her story, and she was sticking to it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE MORNING THE INSURANCE settlement money went into Connor’s bank account he felt as if there was a timer ticking down. And there was a part of him—a much larger part of him than he might have imagined—that wanted to take the money and go down to Cancun. Just disappear from all this for a while, from Copper Ridge, from responsibility.

But he couldn’t do that. Because of the ranch, because of his family, because Eli’s election was coming up, and he had to be there for that.

Damn responsibilities. He would rather have a margarita.

But his family needed him here, and if there was one thing he wouldn’t do, it was abandon them. Their mother had walked out when things had gotten tough, and Connor wasn’t going to do the same.

No, he wasn’t his mother in this little play. He was the one who was left behind.

He was a lot closer to being his father.

He gritted his teeth. No, he wasn’t. He saw to his responsibilities.

Like getting the barn built?

Yeah, he had to get the barn built. He had enough money to hire a crew to come out and get it done, which meant he needed to get started as soon as possible. There was no excuse. Maybe that was something else Liss could help him with.

Liss. That was also feeling slightly difficult at the moment.

And it was his fault. Because she had seemed fine after their little mostly naked run-in a few days ago. But his brain had latched on to the vivid image of what she might look like in the mint-colored thong and hadn’t let go. It was starting to drive him crazy.

On the long list of things he never wanted to talk to anyone about was the effect grief had on his sex drive. It just wasn’t something anyone needed to know about. Yes, they all had a fair idea he wasn’t getting any, if only because it was a small town, and they all lived in each other’s pockets.

Okay, the town at large didn’t know, but Eli knew that he didn’t see women coming back to the property, and Jack knew that when he left the bar with a woman, Connor always left alone.

They wouldn’t have to ponder his actions too hard to figure that out. Plus, he had admitted as much to Eli during the world’s most horrific conversation a few months back. But what he hadn’t admitted was that it was more than not feeling like engaging in a flirtation or a hookup.

It was that his give-a-damn was busted on such a bone-deep level that he didn’t even fantasize about hooking up. It was pretty easy to abstain when you didn’t even feel like jacking off to deal with a morning erection.

A morning erection that had become a lot more insistent since Liss’s thong had come into his life.

Connor groaned and scooped up a pitchfork full of manure from his horse’s stall and chucked it into the back of the truck. He was going to deal with this the way he had dealt with it back in high school. Hard work. That was, in his experience, the world’s most effective boner killer. Except for the obvious. And he wasn’t going to do either obvious thing. For equally obvious reasons.

“Hey, Connor, did that pitchfork do something terrible to you?”

Connor turned and saw Eli standing at the entrance to the stalls. “I’m shoveling shit, Eli. How excited am I supposed to look?”

“All right, fair enough. You just don’t normally look actively angry while doing it.”

Connor stuck the pitchfork into the shavings and leaned against it. “I got my insurance money today.”

“Well, damn,” Eli said, monotone. “Those bastards. Finally settling the score with you. I have half a mind to go and slap handcuffs on them.”

“I didn’t ask for your sarcasm.”

“I don’t know why you’re standing there looking so upset about finally getting what you’ve been working toward for the past few months.”

Connor winced internally. But he was not about to have the same argument with Eli that he had already had with Liss. “I guess it’s just time to rebuild. And I have a hard time feeling very enthusiastic about rebuilding. I don’t have a great track record, Eli. I don’t know if you’ve noticed.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I tried to do the best I could by this ranch. By the family. But every time I try to make something better, nature finds a way to burn it to the ground, for lack of a less obvious metaphor.”

Eli frowned. “I know things have been hard, but everything that’s happened...do you really think that’s all about you?”

“Sure, or I have a lightning rod above my head. It’s either that or it’s random, Eli. Tell me which one is supposed to make me feel better.”

Eli rubbed his hand over his forehead. “I doubt anything I could say would make you feel better. Except that no matter the answer, you have to keep doing things.”

“Sometimes I’d rather not.”

“That was what Dad did,” Eli said. The total lack of judgment in Eli’s voice made the statement even worse. As though he couldn’t blame their dad, and wouldn’t blame Connor, either. But Connor would. Connor did.

“Yeah, well, it’s not what I’m going to do. I work, don’t I? I work the ranch every day. Not leaving it to my kids to do, not that I have any, but you get the point.” Connor let out a long, slow breath. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that anything new I bring onto this ranch seems to die.” He met his younger brother’s gaze. “Tell me that’s not true.”

“I can’t,” Eli said, his voice strained. “Connor, you’re probably the only person on this earth more connected to Jessie’s death than I am. I was there. I was the one who had to tell you. I feel it. The brutality of it, the suddenness of it. I feel it down to my bones. Please know that I don’t take what you’ve been through lightly. And when I tell you I think you need to move on, when I tell you that I want to see you happy, it’s not because I don’t realize what you went through. Because I was there, Connor.”

Connor knew Eli was talking about his reaction to his wife’s death. Eli was the only witness to that moment, and he was probably the only one who remembered it with any real clarity. Connor could hardly piece together the memory, and it was probably all for the best. The moments after the words had left Eli’s mouth had been a blur.

* * *

IT WAS LATE, and the only person he’d been expecting was Jessie, so the knock at the door was a surprise. Connor opened the door, and his brother turned to face him, something in his expression strange. Wrong. The porch light was on, a ring of gold surrounding Eli’s frame.

Eli stepped inside, not saying a word. Another thing that seemed wrong.

“Connor, go on and sit down.”

He complied, because he’d never seen his brother look quite so desolate. Not even when their mother had left. Not even after their father had died.

“There was an accident tonight,” he said, his voice breaking.

And he didn’t even have to finish the sentence, because right then Connor knew. His whole body went cold, and something in his gut turned, and he knew. He knew it wasn’t Eli, his brother, just paying a visit, but a sheriff’s deputy doing his duty. A brother doing his duty.

“Jessie died tonight, Connor.”

* * *

THERE HAD BEEN nothing after that. Just a kind of strange buzzing in his head that wouldn’t go away. And he was aware of saying things, but not of what he’d said. He couldn’t remember anything that had happened after Eli spoke those words. He couldn’t remember the rest of the night or the whole next day. A full twenty-four hours that were gone forever.