Smooth-Talking Cowboy

CHAPTER SIX

LUKE WASN’T SURE what to expect when he went to pick Olivia up that evening after work. He had spent a good portion of the day imagining what Olivia Logan considered to be make-your-ex-jealous clothes.

He was slightly disappointed by the answer to the question.

It was a floral dress and a pair of leggings, accompanied by a tall pair of boots. Fair enough, he supposed, since it was cold as hell frozen over out there. But as far as he was concerned a little bit of skin wouldn’t have gone amiss. Of course, he had never actually seen Olivia showing any skin, and he imagined it had been a little optimistic to expect she would start now.

Not that he needed her to expose any skin for him.

But he was a man, same as any other. Which meant that whatever type of creature he found sexually appealing he enjoyed seeing more of when at all possible.

He put the truck in Park and got out as Olivia whipped down the front steps of her little cottage, her brown hair a tangle around her face, her skirt blowing up around the top of her legging-clad thighs. All right, even though her legs were covered by that textured, gray wool, he could see the shape of them, and he definitely liked what he saw.

“You didn’t have to get out of the truck,” she said, clutching her purse and a cranberry-colored sweater to her chest, tucking a strand of dark hair behind her ear as the wind blew around them, sharp like a knife’s edge.

“Sure I did, ma’am,” he said, sweeping his black hat off his head and treating her to his most charming smile. “We are on a date, after all, and a gentleman always comes to the door to pick up his date, same as he walks to the door to drop her off.”

“But this isn’t a real date,” she said, treating him to a very suspicious glare.

“I have to get into character, kiddo. If you’re going to use me, you need to allow me to be used on my terms. That’s the only way this works.”

“You’re using me, too,” she pointed out. “So that you can offer on that land. Don’t think I haven’t forgotten.”

“I like it when you play ruthless, Liv.”

She sniffed. “Nobody calls me that.”

“Good. Then it will be my pet name for you. I bet it will drive Bennett crazy.” He grinned, and he couldn’t help but notice that he was driving Olivia a little bit crazy, too. At the moment, she had the appearance of a ruffled wren. If she’d had feathers they most certainly would have been standing on end.

“Let’s just go,” she said. “I bet everybody’s at the bar already.”

“Now, here’s a chance for you to learn a little something. Sometimes it’s better to show up late.”

She blinked, her brown eyes almost comically bland. “Why?”

He chuckled. “Because it gives space for the imagination. For Bennett’s imagination. For him to imagine all the things we might have been doing in that time we weren’t in the saloon.”

Her eyes remained blank for a split second, and then suddenly her face turned scarlet. “Oh.”

“Sometimes taking it slow is the best way to take it.”

She swallowed visibly, her fingers curling more tightly around her purse. “Right.” She lifted her chin, attempting to look imperious now, which was especially funny with that blush still lingering on her cheeks. “Oh, I suppose we’ve taken it slow enough. And if not, you can drive slow.”

“No one tells me how to drive my truck,” he said.

“You’re exasperating,” she said.

“Sure. But, if I didn’t exasperate you, who would?” He moved along beside her and pressed his palm against her lower back. She stiffened beneath his touch, her shoulders going rigid. “Relax,” he said, leaning in, ignoring the sparks beneath his fingertips. “You have to look like you like it, remember?”

She nodded wordlessly, and he guided her to the passenger side of his truck, opening the door for her.

“Another thing a gentleman does,” he said, keeping his voice low.

He offered her his arm, but she braced herself on the rest inside the passenger door, hauling herself up into the large vehicle and settling into the seat. Primly. As she had done the first time. If someone had told him a couple of days ago that he would have Olivia Logan sitting in his truck two times in one week he would have said they were crazy. But, here she was. Looking no more comfortable today than she had the other day.

He shook his head and put his hat back on as he took his position in the driver seat, slamming the door hard behind him.

“Bennett always opens the door for me,” she said as he pulled the truck out onto the main highway.

“Well, good for him. I would expect nothing different. In fact, if he didn’t I’d have to have a serious talking-to with him. You know, kind of like an older brother thing.”

“You’re not his brother,” she pointed out.

“No,” Luke said. “But I’m older. Full of wisdom.”

“Ancient,” she said drily.

He took his eyes off the road for a moment, to look at that imperious little profile of hers. Her cheeks were still pink.

He heard a phone notification, and saw Olivia lift her phone up and text quickly.

“Who’s that?”

“Do I owe you an explanation for all of my actions now?” she asked, her tone snippy.

“I’m making conversation, Liv,” he said. “You know, since you’re in my truck and making conversation with someone else instead of with me.”

“It’s my mother,” she said.

“Checking in on you?”

“Yes. She does that. She just wants to know what I’m up to.”

“And what did you tell her?” He was genuinely curious how she was going to spin this story to her parents. He was also fascinated by the fact that her mother checked in.

He’d been an orphan for all intents and purposes by the time he was sixteen, and before that, he had done a lot of the caregiving in his household. His only other real experience with a parent-type relationship was with Quinn Dodge, and while Quinn was definitely an involved father, he didn’t hover.

“I told her I was going out with a friend,” she said.

“That feels like an upgrade,” he said. “Though, you might have told her you had a date.”

“No,” she said, “I mightn’t have. Because then she would want details, and she would want to know what time I was coming home, and she would want to make sure that I didn’t have anything put in my drink.”

He laughed. “A little overprotective?”

“Maybe. But we are close. She just wants to know what’s going on in my life.” He could tell that wasn’t the whole story, but he could also tell that she wasn’t going to give him much more right now. If she’d wanted to, she would have just come out and told him.

And he didn’t do female excavation. He liked easy conversation; he didn’t like to dig. Because that meant getting down to the bits of people they didn’t want to share, which meant that they might want him to do the same in turn. He preferred stripping off layers of clothes to any other kind of stripping off of layers, thank you very much.

And since Olivia wasn’t going to be stripping off any clothes for him—and he wouldn’t ask her to anyway—there wasn’t any point in courting any other type of stripping.

“Well, that’s nice.” Except to him it sounded stifling more than it sounded nice.

“It is. I have great parents. I’m lucky.” Her tone sounded distracted. Distant.

“Sure,” he said.

“You’re very difficult,” she said.

“Yes,” he remarked, making his tone as contrite as possible. “It’s been said. Frequently. Mostly by you.”

She sniffed loudly, and he imagined that there was a very haughty face accompanying that sniff. “It’s just... As far as I can tell you aren’t accountable to anyone or anything. I don’t understand that. I have my parents... I have goals... I have... Bennett.”

“Technically,” Luke pointed out, feeling like an ass even as he said it, “you don’t have Bennett at the moment.”

“You’re mean,” she said.

“Am I wrong?”

“No. But... I feel like a gentleman wouldn’t say that. And you’re so into pointing out what a gentleman does.”

“That’s the trouble,” he said. “I’m playing the part of a gentleman. But don’t for one second confuse me with an actual gentleman.”

At that exact moment, they drove down onto the town’s main street, and Luke spotted an open parking space against the curb across from the Gold Valley Saloon.

He put the truck in Park, then looked at Olivia’s resolute profile. “Ready?”

“Now who’s impatient,” she said, hands pinned firmly to the center of her lap, her eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Not impatient,” he said. Except he felt something. A kind of restlessness rolling through him that left him feeling edgy. And he didn’t do edgy.

He liked irritating Olivia—it was one of his great joys in life. He didn’t so much like it when she managed to poke her own little stick back at him and make contact.

He got out of the truck, and he noticed that she stayed put. Waiting for him to open the door. In spite of himself, his lips curved up into a smile.

He opened it for her, then offered her his hand, which this time she took. The skin-to-skin contact hit him like a knockout punch. She was soft. So damn soft. That didn’t shock him; he had expected her to be soft. What shocked him was the fact that such innocuous contact had him hot and hard in seconds. And maybe that was the reason, in and of itself. The fact that he hadn’t been expecting the impact. Maybe that was why it landed with such accuracy, with such force.

Whatever it was, he’d felt less pleasure from a hand wrapped around more intimate parts of him than from her delicate fingers wrapped around his own.

“Let’s go,” he said, his voice gruffer than he intended. But dammit, he was affected. He wasn’t used to being affected. He was used to doing the affecting. He was used to being the one causing a reaction, not contending with one. Particularly one he didn’t want.

He didn’t have a lot of practice in restraint. Life was pretty easy for him. Everything he had he’d worked for honestly. Everything except that money in the bank from the insurance settlement. And that was why it still sat there, because it occupied a place that was uncomfortable for him. A place he didn’t know what to do with.

He didn’t like things like that. He liked his life simple.

He wanted something, he worked for it. He wanted a woman, he slept with her. He wanted to be done with a woman, he cut things off.

He didn’t do longing. He didn’t do unrequited lust and unquenched desire. He didn’t want things he couldn’t have. Hell, usually he didn’t even want things he had to wait for.

But there was money he’d received from a loss, from a moment in time he resented, and if he did nothing with it, it would be worse than benefiting from it.

And there was Olivia Logan. About to make him lose his mind because her hand had touched his. Like he was a green horse that had never been ridden.

In rebellion to those feelings, he held on to her more tightly, shifted so that his fingers were laced through hers as the two of them walked across the street and toward the saloon. When he looked down at her, he almost laughed. Except that his throat was too tight, and his chest felt like there was a ten-ton weight on it.

Yeah, except for those things, he was tempted to laugh at Olivia, who looked like she was carved out of a particularly lifeless bar of Ivory soap. She’d gone waxen and pale, her expression frozen, her petite little shoulders stiff as they made their way to the front door of the bar.

“You’re going to have to look a little bit less like you want to throw up on my boots, kiddo,” he said.

“I don’t... I don’t know if I can do this,” she said, extricating herself from his hold.

“It’s too late, honey,” he said. “We’re already doing this. People have already seen us out the window. And they’re wondering what the hell you’re doing with the likes of me. But you know who’s going to wonder that most of all? Bennett. Bennett Dodge is going to wonder what the hell you’re doing with me.”

“Is it going to cause trouble?” she asked, her dark brows knitting together, a little crease appearing between them. “Is it going to cause trouble between you and the Dodge family, because I know you’re close...”

“You don’t care,” he said.

“Will you stop telling me I don’t care about things?” she said, frowning deeply.

“When you stop lying about it, sure. You’re worried about what people will think. Because you’re worried that they’ll think you’re slumming it with a guy like me, right? Because I’m a no-account from nowhere and you’re Olivia Logan. But that’s the point, isn’t it?”

“My mother is going to get phone calls.” She scrubbed her hand over her forehead, as if that could remove the worry lines that had appeared there at the mention of her mother.

He shrugged. “So what? Let her get phone calls. There are worse things. You can explain it to her. You can tell her the truth, or you can tell her our lie. Either way. But you’re a grown-up, Olivia. And nobody gets to tell you what to do.”

“Right.” She sighed. “That’s not how life works when you care about people, Luke. You don’t just...do whatever you want and leave someone to worry.”

“Why not?” he asked. “You can’t control what someone else feels.”

She made a frustrated noise. “That’s not...you’re missing the point. And I don’t care if you miss the point. You and I just don’t see eye to eye.”

“We don’t need to see eye to eye. We just need to work together for a bit. Now, do you trust me, or not?”

Her brown eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. “Not as far as I could throw you.”

“Good. You shouldn’t trust me. I’m not a gentleman.” Right now he felt like a particularly hungry fox sniffing around the henhouse. “But, I do have the best idea running for how you can get Bennett’s attention.”

Olivia took a deep breath, shaking those stiff shoulders out, then looking up at him. “Okay.”

“Okay.” He took a step ahead of her and grabbed the handle on the door, pulling it open. “After you.”

She walked in ahead of him, and he was struck by just how small and delicate she was. The top of her head wouldn’t graze the underside of his chin if she walked under it. It made him want to pick her up, carry her over a threshold or some shit. And that was a weird impulse. Except, he supposed not really all that weird. Since what he really wanted was to throw her down on a big bed and spend the rest of the night exploring every inch of her.

Damn. Things were escalating. She had always been an itch to him. From the minute that girl had turned eighteen she’d been a problem.

Pretty. Remote. She’d been far too young. So far off-limits that he’d never allowed his fantasies to get this graphic.

But he’d touched her now. Untouchable Olivia Logan. He’d felt her skin beneath his fingertips and it was like those chains he’d put around himself had dissolved. Now all that resolute control was getting strained.

Which wasn’t a difficult thing to do considering he didn’t have a whole lot of practice with control. Except for with her. With her, he had certainly tried over the years.

This was making it damn difficult.

He walked in behind her, pressing his fingertips against her lower back, again in defiance of that need rocketing through him. He clenched his teeth, wondering silently if he was a masochist and didn’t know it.

“Why don’t you go get us a table?” he asked, scanning the room to see if Bennett, Wyatt and Grant were already in residence.

Bennett and Wyatt were. Grant was unsurprisingly absent.

He wished the guy would get his ass in gear and get out more, he really did. But Grant was like a difficult burrowing animal. Certain times of the year, particularly in the winter, it was tough to get him out to do anything. He seemed to do better later in the year. Some people might attribute that to seasons on sunshine and whatever. Luke figured it had to do with the fact that his wife had died in February. The lead-up to the month was always tough.

He wasn’t the most emotionally enlightened guy, that much was for sure, but he knew a little bit about loss.

About the way dates burned themselves into your brain. The way they seemed to exist in the back of your mind, eternally in your consciousness even when you weren’t trying to be aware of them.

“Hey.” Luke sidled up to the bar and signaled Laz as Olivia looked around the room, bewildered, clearly trying to decide which table to select. She was not good at subterfuge, that much was certain. It was kind of charming to watch her try. “I need a couple shots of whiskey.”

“Olivia doesn’t drink whiskey,” Laz said, picking up a shot glass.

“All right. What does she drink?”

“Diet Coke.”

“I’ll still take the extra shot of whiskey. But, add the Diet Coke to it. In case she wants to mix the two.”

“She won’t,” Laz said.

“She might before the evening is up,” Luke said, confident. “You can just put that on my tab.”

Olivia had finally made a decision, and was sitting at a table near the dartboard, looking lost. Luke acquired their drinks and went to join her. He slid the Diet Coke in front of her as he took his seat, then placed both shots of whiskey in front of him.

“Am I that trying to hang out with?” she asked, looking pointedly at the two glasses of alcohol. There was a hint of humor in her eyes and he found that more surprising than anything.

“The other shot is for you. In case you’re feeling crazy.”

“No. On a very rare day sometimes I feel regular soda crazy, but not so much hard liquor crazy.”

“Do you not drink at all?”

“No, I do. I mean, I have. I just don’t usually.”

“Any particular reason?” he asked.

“I like control,” she said simply.

“Well,” he said, lifting the shot glass to his lips and knocking it back. He grimaced. “That’s a shame. Because so do I.”

She looked at him and blinked slowly, her expression comically bland. “Good thing this isn’t a real date, then.”

“Good thing.” He stood up. “Because then you would be obligated to let me win at darts.”

She huffed out a laugh. “I would do no such thing.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she returned. “Any man who needs to beat a woman at darts to feel good about himself is no kind of man in my book. I would rather see how my date fared in the face of defeat.”

“So confident.”

“With good reason.”

“Okay,” he said, “show me how it’s done.”

* * *

OLIVIA FELT LIKE she’d had alcohol, and she absolutely had not. But she felt bubbly, fizzy, and her blood felt slightly overheated. It was a strange turnaround from a few moments before when she had been certain that she was going to pass out. It was just that when Luke had held her hand like that...

She’d held hands with two men in her life. Which was lame and silly, and probably completely ridiculous to get worked up over, but her level of experience was what it was.

She had very briefly dated one guy before Bennett, and it could hardly even be called dating. They had gone out a couple of times. They hadn’t even kissed.

But she had held his hand. And then she had held Bennett’s. Often, obviously, as they had dated for more than a year.

Holding hands with Luke... It had been unexpected. It had been one thing for him to help her out of the car, although, even that small bit of skin on skin had felt significant. But once he had woven his fingers through hers her entire body had gone tight, like fencing wire, and she had found it almost impossible to breathe.

And it wasn’t like when he shocked her, when he said things that made her blush. No, this was different. It had made her hot, then cold; it had set off a chain reaction that she could hardly figure out even now. It was just... Such intimate contact to make with a man she had known for so long, but never like that.

She had known Luke since she was a kid. Since he had been a kid, too, honestly. Even though he had always seemed like a grown man to her, because that was a child’s perspective on teenage boys. And that had always put him in this other realm, as this other thing, separate to her. But she wasn’t a child anymore; she was a woman. And he was a man. And that was very... Alarming to fully realize. That there was no longer this invisible wall between them, something that kept them on separate sides of that divide. It made this game they were playing feel far too stark. Far too dangerous and real.

It felt like something different all of a sudden than what it had felt like when they had conceived it a bit earlier. Far different than that vague itch that usually rested beneath her skin when she dealt with Luke.

But now they were in the bar trading barbs, and getting ready to play darts, and that felt familiar somehow. And she was ready to jump into it with both feet. To do something to get herself back on balance, because she could not go back to that place she’d been in when his hand had touched hers. No, that, she did not want to contend with. Not at all.

So darts and good-natured banter it would be.

She was far better at darts than she was at banter, but you couldn’t have it all, she supposed.

“Are you really that good, Liv?” he asked, his voice huskier than normal, and strange, the roughness abrading places inside of her she would rather it didn’t.

She was back to feeling slightly dry of throat and out of her comfort zone.

“I’m better,” she said. “Haven’t you seen me play before?”

“Sure,” he said, “but I’ve never played you. For all I know Bennett let you win. Usually, you just play Bennett.”

“Bennett never let me win,” she said. “He didn’t have to.”

“I wonder what he’ll think of another man getting to play with you,” he said.

Okay, this Luke she could deal with. Cocky and arrogant, throwing out innuendo expecting that it would make her blush. And yes, it often did. But at least that was a comfortable pattern. “That’s what we’re here to find out,” she said.

She went over to the dartboard and collected the darts from where they were stuck into the cork, and then she carried them back to the line, steeling herself for her first shot.

“You’re really not a bar girl,” Luke said. “So how is it exactly that you are the most notorious dart player in Gold Valley?”

“I like to have a bit of mystery about me, Luke.”

“Fine. You have to get a bull’s-eye on this next shot, or you have to tell me how you learned to play darts.”

She laughed, then she straightened her posture, cocked her arm back and let the first dart fly, effortlessly sticking it in the center of the bull’s-eye.

“No shit,” he said, slightly annoyed, slightly in awe.

“I told you I was that good,” she said.

She liked darts. She had ever since she’d outgrown the little wooden dollhouse she’d played with when she was young. If there was one thing Olivia had done a lot of, it was playing by herself. Because Vanessa always wanted to push the boundaries, and Olivia never had. So she’d played with dolls. And then when she was a teenager, it had been darts.

She had spent hours fiddling with them down in her dad’s man cave in their house. Countless times when Vanessa had decided that she was too cool for Olivia and all of her rule following, when she had gone out with her other friends. When she had decided that drinking and sex were far more important than having a bond with her sister.