Smooth-Talking Cowboy

Laz raised his brows, and then went about pouring Kaylee’s shots. Olivia tried to appear engrossed in drinking her soda. Kaylee looked at her a couple of times, smiling awkwardly, and Olivia attempted to seem serene.

Then Kaylee collected the shots and went to the table everyone was sitting at. She said something to Luke, who cast a glance back at Olivia. Her stomach tightened. If he kept doing that she wasn’t going to be able to take another drink of her soda. There would be nowhere to fit it.

She was afraid he was going to make her look like an idiot. That he was going to say she was crazy and he was of course not meeting her here. Because he had not planned to meet her here. She actually hadn’t spoken to him at all since she’d collected her car. Which was rude, she realized.

But she just didn’t like making overtures to Luke. He was a pain. And he always made her feel like she had an itch beneath her skin.

When he stood, saying something to the Dodge siblings with a big smile on his face, she felt like she’d been kicked in the chest by a horse. And then he was walking over to her. She crossed her legs, then wobbled, because she was up on a stool and it was an impractical position. She braced herself on the counter and blinked, then took a quick drink of her soda. Then set it down. She wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to be doing by the time he got to the counter. And then he was there, so the entire performance was moot.

“I hear we’re meeting? And that you’re buying me a drink?”

She pursed her lips and nodded. Then took another drink of her Diet Coke. “As a thank-you,” she said finally after she swallowed her sip.

“Oh. A thank-you. Funny how I didn’t get one earlier.”

“I thanked you,” she said. “You know. After you picked me up off the side of the road.”

“But not for fixing your tire. And you didn’t text me. I thought you were going to let me know if you had a ride.”

“I thought I was going to let you know if I needed a ride. And my boss gave me one. So I didn’t.” She cleared her throat. “Thank you. For fixing the car. I really do appreciate it. And I do owe you a drink.”

“Is it possible that you were covering your ass, though? Because you didn’t want to tell Kaylee that you were here to stare at Bennett all evening?”

Her face got hot and she had a feeling she was lit up like the damned neon sign that hung outside the saloon. “No... I don’t...”

Her gaze drifted over to the table, to where Kaylee and Bennett sat next to each other. That stomach tightening turned into a twist. A mean, painful twist that sent a metallic taste flooding through her mouth.

“You don’t care.” Luke leveled his gaze on her. “Laz,” he called out. “Can I get a shot? Something really good, because Olivia Logan is paying. And you know she’s good for it.”

Laz nodded and set about to pouring another measure of amber liquid into Luke’s glass.

“Excuse me?” Olivia asked.

“I changed your tire, Olivia,” Luke said. “Don’t go getting me cheap alcohol.”

“No. What do you mean I don’t care?”

Luke sat next to her, his broad shoulder nearly brushing hers as he took his position on the stool. “You don’t care about Bennett.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do. I care about Bennett... A lot. I love him.”

“Why did you break up with him then?”

“It’s complicated,” she said.

“It’s not that complicated. You want to be with him or you don’t.”

Great. She was getting lectured about love and relationships by a man whose longest relationship had been with his pickup truck. “I needed to be sure that he wanted to be with me,” she said stiffly.

“Okay,” he said, arching a brow. “By breaking up with him?”

“Well,” she returned, “it’s informative. I mean... I guess at this point not so informative in the way that I wanted it to be.”

“You wanted him to see what he was missing?” Luke asked.

For all that he pretended not to understand her feelings, he seemed to understand pretty well. Better than she would like, actually. She didn’t like that he could see through her quite so easily because if Luke could, surely everyone could. “Yes,” she answered reluctantly.

He lifted a shoulder. “I still don’t think you care.”

She picked up her soda, and then redirected, brought it down hard on the bar. “I do care.” Her heart was pounding and she was breathing fast. “Stop acting like you know what I want. Or you know what I think. You don’t actually know me.”

“Olivia Logan, I have known you since you were a stuck-up little girl. And I know you now that you’re a stuck-up woman.” Laz slid the tumbler of whiskey down in front of Luke and Luke tipped it up to his lips, downing it in one go.

Luke leveled his gaze at Olivia. “Don’t tell me I don’t know you.”

“I’m not stuck-up,” she said, bristling.

He shifted in his seat and her eyes were drawn to where his hand was wrapped around his glass. He had strong hands. A working man’s hands. Callused and rough, vaguely dirty around the fingernails even when they were clean.

She imagined that they’d be rough to the touch. That they would scrape against her skin.

If she were to shake hands with him, or something. Because there were no circumstances otherwise under which they would ever touch.

She looked away.

“Okay, Olivia.” His tone was so maddeningly placating it made her want to punch him.

“I’m not. Why do you think I’m stuck-up?”

“Because right now you’re looking at me like I’m something you stepped in out in the cow pasture. In fact, you look at a lot of the world that way.”

“I’m in a bar.” She waved her hands around. “Which is not my natural habitat. I don’t think I’m better than the bar, I just don’t feel like I know my place in it. And anyway, you’re not nice to me.”

“Honey, I fixed your flat tire earlier and gave you a ride to work. What do you mean I’m not nice to you?”

She trawled back through her memory, trying to come up with the example of a time when Luke had been mean to her. Well, not mean, but maybe unkind. All she knew was that she felt upset after being with him often enough that she was certain he had to be.

“You know. You are... Provocative.” He was. He provoked her. That was the word. Not mean, maybe, but she always left interactions with him feeling like she’d been poked with a stick.

He lifted one brow. “Provocative? Well. That has several connotations to it, sweet thing.”

There he was. Provoking. “Do not call me that.”

“Don’t call you what?” He lifted his glass and indicated the empty state to Laz. “Honey or sweet thing?”

“Both. Neither. I am nothing remotely sugar-based to you.”

“Well. My mistake.”

Laz refilled Luke’s glass and Olivia shot him the evil eye. “I’m not paying for two drinks.”

“You’re a peach, Olivia,” Luke said. “I’m real sorry about that stuck-up comment.”

She looked out of the corner of her eye and saw that Bennett was watching her closely. That Bennett was watching Luke and herself. She turned back quickly, focusing her attention on Luke.

“I’m not your peach, either.” She sniffed.

For some reason she couldn’t quite pin down, she settled into her seat a little more firmly and listed a bit to the side, her shoulder brushing up against Luke’s.

He paused with his glass up against his lips, his green eyes turning sharp enough to cut straight through her. Her eyes lowered, resting on those lips, still pressed against the whiskey tumbler. He had just a bit of gold scruff right there around his mouth, spreading over his square jaw, the beginnings of a beard or just the end of a long workday. For some reason, she found herself captivated by it. And by the shape of his mouth.

Quickly, she raised her gaze back to his, and found it wasn’t any more comforting.

Then his eyes narrowed and he tilted his head slightly to the side, looking quickly over his shoulder and back at the table of Dodges behind them.

“Don’t play games with me, Olivia,” he said, his voice low, rough. “You’re not going to win any of them.”

She swiveled her head to look at him, keeping her face blank. Keeping her mind blank. “What do you mean?”

“You leaning in like that. Because he’s watching. You think you’re gonna make him jealous?”

She reeled back, moving herself away from Luke. As far away as possible. “No. I wasn’t doing anything.”

He chuckled. “Yes, you were.”

She hated him. She really did. He seemed to put the pieces of her motivation together faster than she did and it wasn’t fair.

“No one would believe it,” she said. “Nobody would believe that I...”

The words froze in her throat. Not just because she could hear how bitchy they sounded, but because suddenly she couldn’t remember what she had been about to say anyway. Because he was looking at her with that steady green gaze, that glass still poised just below his lips and the overhead lights of the bar were highlighting that scruff on his face. Suddenly, she was thinking about the texture of that, too. She wondered if it would be rough, like she imagined his hands would be. He was a very rough sort of creature.

She was not a rough sort of creature.

“Oh, they’d believe it,” he said, his lips tipping upward into a cocky smile. “Even good girls do something stupid every now and again.” He took a swallow of his whiskey. “Might as well be me.”

There was that itch, the one that bloomed beneath her skin whenever he was close. That felt like a cross between having a match struck against her flesh and stepping on a star thistle.

“I don’t do stupid things,” she said.

“Except for maybe break up with the boyfriend you claim you don’t want to be broken up with?”

“I don’t want to be broken up with him.” She tapped the side of her glass. “I want to get back together with him.”

“So you say. I don’t buy it.”

“I didn’t ask you to buy it. I’m not trying to sell it to you.”

“True enough. But, maybe we can try to sell something to him.” He reached out and that hand she had just been pondering made contact with her skin. He squeezed her chin between his thumb and the curve of the knuckle on his forefinger. And it was rough. Just like she had thought it might be. Then he winked. “I’ll see you around, kiddo.”

Then he knocked back the rest of his whiskey and reached into his wallet, putting a twenty on the counter and walking back to where the Dodges were sitting.

She just sat there, staring at him like she had been clubbed in the head.

He had touched her.

And he had winked at her.

And he had called her kiddo, which for some reason felt a million times more offensive and slightly more disconcerting than honey or sweet thing had.

He was an annoyance. A constant annoyance.

She looked back into her Diet Coke, feeling flushed and prickly and isolated. Because nobody was sitting at the bar with her. She wasn’t welcome at the table over there. Or anywhere the Dodges were. That hurt in a variety of strange and sharp ways. She had been friends with that family for most of her life and now she just wasn’t welcome.

She had to believe it was because the breakup had hurt Bennett. And as much as she didn’t want him hurt, she did want to know that he cared.

She sneaked another glance back toward the table, and saw that Bennett was looking at her again. Then she looked at Luke. At his broad back. Broad shoulders. He was not looking at her. And she could still feel the impression of his touch against her chin.

Her gaze darted back to Bennett and she noticed that his expression was speculative. So she offered him that enigmatic smile she had been practicing earlier. Because she was working on being an enigma rather than a broadcast system.

Then she finished the rest of her Diet Coke and started to fish in her purse for some money.

Laz walked over to the bar and picked up the twenty Luke had left behind. “That actually covers everything, Olivia,” he said.

And all she could do was stand there and stare, feeling light-headed. Because somehow, Luke Hollister had ended up buying her a drink, and that had not been the plan.

Olivia didn’t like it when things didn’t go to plan. But unfortunately, that seemed to be the story of her life at the moment.

She got up off the stool and walked slowly across the scarred-up wooden floor, looking down and shoving her hands in her coat pockets, careful not to look at anyone in the saloon. She edged the door open with her shoulder and walked out onto the street. It was dark out, and chilly.

The kind of cold that efficiently sliced through nice, sleek wool coats and penetrated down beneath the skin. But apparently not the kind of cold that could eradicate the heat left behind by Luke Hollister’s hand.

She focused on putting one foot in front of the other as she walked down the uneven sidewalk, her each and every step bathed by the golden glow of the old-fashioned streetlights that lined the street.

Today had been weird. And it had contained far too much Luke for her liking.

Tomorrow would be different. It would be better. It would not begin with a flat tire. And it would not end with Luke Hollister’s thumb pressed against her chin.

At this point in her life she was certain of very few things. But that was one of them.

CHAPTER FOUR

LUKE HAD NO clue what the hell he’d been thinking. But then, that was the theme with Olivia. She brought out the devil in him, and he had no interest in holding it back.

Still, touching her like that to get a rise out of Bennett was not the smartest. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel, tension crawling over his shoulders and down his back. Damn. He was wound tighter than he could remember being in a long time. It was because last night he’d ended up talking to Olivia instead of hooking up with someone, counter to his plan.

He let out a long slow breath as he watched the scenery fly by. It was clear out, sunny, though he knew that the air was as cold as—if not colder than—it would’ve been if it had been cloudy. Those crystal clear mornings had a way of cutting straight through you with no mercy. Maybe they were just worse because you could see the sun, and you expected that it might offer some warmth. But no.

Still, it looked nice. And if he pushed thoughts of Olivia Logan aside, it was almost soothing.

A shaft of golden light cut through the dense trees as he rounded the bend in the two-lane road, right at the spot where the property was. The property that was currently for sale by owner.

For sale by Cole Logan.

The Logans owned a fair amount of land in town. After all, they had been the first family to settle the area and large swathes of the countryside still belonged to them. And this one had famously been for sale for a very long time. Cole Logan had no need to sell it to just anyone, and he was particularly choosy about who he wanted settling, and what he wanted settled there.

Clearly, the man was much like his daughter. A control freak.

Without thinking, Luke pulled off to the side of the road, his truck idling. And he stared at the sign. That sign that he looked at every morning on his way to the Dodge ranch.

He was happy with his life working on the ranch. Although, with the changes, the focus returning to taking in guests and all of that, he questioned his place. And he hadn’t done that since he was sixteen years old.

At the same time, sometimes that money felt like it was eating its way through his bank account like acid. Just sitting there. Sitting there for nearly twenty years useless and dead.

He knew why she’d taken out that life insurance policy. Because if anything happened to her, she had wanted to make sure he had a future. He could make something of himself.

But with the way it had happened...

It had to be the right thing. It had to be the right moment.

He stared at the sign, red and white and sticking up out of the ground, with a damn sunbeam shining on it.

He shook his head, putting the truck back in Drive and pulling back out onto the highway.

He turned the radio up, blaring a country song about being back roads legit, which turned his thoughts to things he liked. To drinking. Ranching. Women. Everything that made life worthwhile.

That carried him the rest of the way down the road and all the way to the Dodge ranch.

He parked his truck in the gravel lot that Wyatt was considering having paved over, and looked around. It was bare now, but he knew that Wyatt had landscape plans. Knew that Wyatt had a whole host of modernization schemes up his sleeve. He supported them. He did. He just wasn’t sure anymore if he wanted to be an active part of it.

He frowned, killing the engine on the truck and getting out, walking slowly down the path toward the house, where he had a feeling he would find Wyatt sitting at the table in the dining area, his makeshift office, even though he had a real office. He claimed he preferred the one by the coffeemaker.

He opened up the front door without knocking, as was his habit. He had lived on the property for so many years, the entire place had eventually been opened up to him like a home. Quinn Dodge had been more of a father to him than anyone else ever had been. Surely more than the man who had been responsible for knocking his mom up and leaving her depressed and fragile, never to fully recover.

“Morning,” he said, knocking his boots against the welcome mat and stepping inside, calling out the greeting to whichever of the Dodge brothers—or sister—might currently be in residence.

He found Bennett and Wyatt at the small kitchen table that sat in the corner of the modest room. A large thermos of coffee sitting at the middle of the table, both of them with full mugs in front of them.

“Good morning,” Wyatt said, not looking up from the paperwork in front of him.

“What do you have there?” he asked.

“Looking over some different opportunities. Gabe Dalton has been doing some work with retired rodeo horses. And as crazy as it sounds, he swears that they would be perfect for the trail rides here. He has a few animals for us to look at.”

The Daltons were another big ranching family in the area, and Luke knew that Gabe and Wyatt were pretty tight from their days riding on the rodeo circuit. Gabe had spent a fair amount of time hanging around the ranch too, and as far as Luke could see he was a stand-up guy, honest and definitely trustworthy when it came to his opinion on animals.

“Sounds good,” Luke said.

“I’ll definitely want to take a close look at them,” Bennett said.

“Look under the hood?” Luke asked, moving through the kitchen and grabbing a mug out of one of the cabinets. “Kick the tires.”

“Hey,” Bennett said, “you wouldn’t buy a used car without a mechanic having a look. Might as well have the resident vet take a look at your used horses.”

Wyatt chuckled. “Fair enough.”

“What else are you looking into?” Luke asked.

“Well, I had a talk with Dane Parker about the potential of doing some joint venture stuff with Grassroots Winery. I’m not sure. It might all be a little bit fussy.”

Bennett shrugged a shoulder. “People like to drink.”

“I’m not sure this is a wine place.”

“People staying here might want to go on wine-tasting tours,” Luke pointed out, even though he agreed that wine was a hell of a lot fussier than anything he wanted to deal in. He preferred beer for casual drinking and hard stuff for serious drinking.

Wine didn’t fall anywhere on that spectrum.

“I don’t know,” Wyatt said. “I like Dane. But might be a lot of drama to step in the middle of. You know, seeing as Damien Leighton’s ex-wife now owns the winery. I was pretty good buddies with him when we used to ride bulls.”

“Sounds like you have a lot of options,” Luke said.

And frankly, he wasn’t really all that interested in any of them. He had liked the place the way that it was. Simple. Rustic. Appealing to the kind of people who wanted simple and rustic. At the same time, he also understood that you were going to catch a much broader base of people if you expanded the amenities.

But he wanted to get back to ranch work. Real ranch work. He wanted to dig postholes for fences. Wanted to wrangle cattle and ride horses.

He wanted a place of his own. His own land to work as he saw fit.

“How was Olivia?” Bennett’s question jerked Luke out of his thoughts. “You talked to her at the bar.”

“Yeah. I helped her out with her car, remember?”

Bennett nodded slowly. “Right. So you said.”

“If you want to talk to her, go talk to her. She asked me about you, too. But I’m not a carrier pigeon for the lovelorn. So, if you guys have something to work out, go work it out.”

Bennett’s jaw firmed, a stubborn expression crossing over his face. “She’s frustrating the hell out of me, because she’s manipulating me. I don’t understand why she doesn’t get that I just want to wait until I have some things in order before I marry her. I didn’t say I wouldn’t marry her. I said not yet.”

“Not a carrier pigeon,” Luke said. “I’m not giving this information back to her.”

Luke couldn’t understand why the hell either of them were being so stubborn. If they wanted to be together, they should just be together. He didn’t understand why Olivia felt like she needed a ring so badly, or why Bennett felt like he needed to wait. But, he wasn’t going to get into the discussion. Because it wasn’t his fucking problem.

He poured himself a measure of coffee, left it black and decided that he was going to get to work. “See you both later,” he said.

“You just came in here to steal coffee and pass judgment?” Bennett asked.

“Yep.”

He walked back out of the kitchen, across the stone floor that led to the front door of the large ranch house. He heard Bennett’s footsteps behind him. Luke kept on walking and shut the front door behind him just to be difficult. He heard it open just a couple of seconds later.

“Something going on between you two?”

Luke turned around. “Me and this coffee? Yeah. Seriously red-hot love affair. I crave it. It’s all I think about. I need it to survive.”

“You and Olivia,” Bennett said, his tone stiff. “I don’t know how...”

“No,” Luke said. “But, she’s a grown-ass woman and apparently single.”

“She wants a commitment,” Bennett said. “And we both know you’re not the guy to give that to her.”

Luke’s stomach tightened, and he chuckled past it. “Yes. We do both know that. I’m not giving a commitment to anyone. But you’re apparently not giving one to her, either.”

“It’s complicated,” Bennett said.

“How is it complicated? Either you love her or you don’t.”

“None of it’s about love.”

Luke stared at him. “Then what’s it about?”

“I care about her. But sometimes she looks at me like...” Bennett shook his head. “I told her father that I would take care of her. After he had his heart attack, I promised I’d look out for her.”

“Does Olivia know that?”

“She knows that her father wants us together. Hell, the whole town wants us together.”

Luke couldn’t deny that. They were definitely the golden couple of Gold Valley. The entire town took great delight in the idea that they would someday get married.

Like they were watching a favorite soap opera, using real people as characters.

“True enough,” Luke said. “So why aren’t you with her?”

“She wants things I don’t think I can give. I’m not sure I can put her through any of that.”

“Bennett Dodge, I’ve known you since you were ten years old. I don’t know why the hell you wouldn’t be able to give Olivia exactly what she wants. Exactly what she needs. You’re perfect for her.” For some reason the words burned a little bit on their way out. But they were true.

“You don’t know everything about me, Luke,” Bennett said, shaking his head and walking past him.