Cowboy Up (Coming Home #3)

When the three of us are done talking, there isn’t a sober one between us. Quinn came about an hour ago to pick up Tate and Maverick just drove off with Leighton. Judging by him not being able to keep his hands off her when she showed up, I know I can go to bed tonight not worried about my baby brother.

The second their taillights disappear and the sounds of the night meet my ears, I feel the loneliness settle back around me once again. Then I head back to the barn to finish the work I abandoned earlier this afternoon, but my mind is on my family and the apple pie I have waiting in the fridge, thanks to Leighton.

If I was a different man, maybe I’d do something about the deadweight of my solitude that’s getting heavier and heavier to drag around. But I’m not, so I continue my work in silence before going to bed.

Alone.





4


CAROLINE


“I Could Use a Love Song” by Maren Morris

- -

Dusting has become the bane of my existence. However, I do it with a smile because I love every second that I spend inside my bookstore. Even every second I spend outside of it, since my apartment is on top of The Sequel and the scent of books travels up the stairs and into my living space. There’s no better smell on this earth than the pages of a book. Not one thing.

Well, maybe that of a certain dark cowboy . . .

I smile to myself. The memories of that night still hang with a delicious heaviness in my thoughts, even a month later. I always thought I wouldn’t be able to detach the emotion from sex, but when I woke up alone the morning after that glorious night, all I could do was smile and take my well-used body home. I’d needed that night more than I thought. I needed to remember how to feel again without letting someone close. And it’s been the memories from our night that have kept the loneliness I was drowning in at bay and a smile on my face. I think, in a way, my dark cowboy made it possible for me to not have any more lingering fear over the fact that my ex had started contacting me again.

“Thinkin’ about that cowboy again?” Lucy sings with a smile, meeting me in the romance section toward the back of the store with her own duster.

“That obvious, huh?”

“Only on the days that end with y,” she jokes.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You know, all you have to do is ask Luke. I bet he’d give you the stranger’s name and you could enjoy another night of having your world rocked.”

I laugh. “It was special, Luce, but I don’t want to ruin what I got from him by tryin’ to make it somethin’ it isn’t.”

“And how do you know it couldn’t be more?”

“How do you know it could?”

“Oooh, feisty.”

The bell chimes, letting us know there’s a customer, and Lucy takes off with a little skip, the smile still on her face. That girl is perpetually happy, and it doesn’t take much to make her maniacally happy. She’s been riding the same high as me for the past month, although she’s been riding it for an entirely different reason. My best friend is just happy that I’m happy. For her, it’s as simple as that. She’s seen too many times when I wasn’t close to that, been there for me since I met her at eighteen, and I know she’ll be there for me until I die.

I hear her greet our newest customer and I continue dusting, moving through the romance books slowly as I study the spines. Romance is my favorite genre, the hopeless romantic in me still there despite everything my love life has been through, and I can’t help it when my thoughts drift back to him. Our night together was the stuff fantasies are built from. There wasn’t a single second of our coupling that gave me a hint to who he was. Even in the shower, we washed each other in darkness. He took me against the bathroom counter in darkness. We fumbled back to the bed in darkness. Even if a part of me wishes I knew who he was, I wasn’t kidding when I told Lucy that I didn’t want to cheapen the memory of our time together if he turns out to be less than the perfect man that I’ve created in my mind. It has nothing to do with what he might look like, but I’m afraid that if I were to find him and we had another chance at coming together, it’d never live up to the magic of that night.

So I’m almost completely content with never knowing.

Almost.

“Did you move the pregnancy books?” Lucy asks, popping her head around the shelf I was working on tidying up.

“Oh, sorry. I forgot to tell you. They’re toward the front now, over by the self-help books. I didn’t think it was right to have them all the way in the back and on the bottom shelf. Makin’ it a little easier for the mamas-to-be and all, keepin’ them up front.”

“Gotcha!” she says, smile in place and pep in her damn step.

I shake my head and smirk.

“Holy shit! Leigh, it is her!”

I feel my jaw drop and quickly turn with a squeak. No way. I haven’t heard that voice or that name in years.

“Quinn!” I exclaim, placing my duster on the shelf and rushing forward to pull her into a hug about the same time I notice her round belly. “Oh my goodness, congratulations, Quinn!”

She pulls away, smiling and rubbing her swollen and very pregnant belly. “Thank you. I can’t believe it’s you. I thought I recognized your voice.”

“Caroline?!” I hear behind Quinn, and then Leighton James is pulling me into her arms, hugging me just as tight as I am her.

“Holy crap! You too!” I laugh, looking from belly to belly, my laughter growing. “I shouldn’t be surprised you two would be pregnant together. There wasn’t a thing y’all did without the other growin’ up! How close are your due dates?”

They both beam, then, simultaneously, exclaim, “A week!”

“Of course it is,” I say, laughing even harder at the fact that the two childhood best friends, both born within the same week, are pregnant with their babies due a week apart. “It sure is good to see you two.”

“Have you been livin’ in Wire Creek long?” Quinn asks, still stroking her belly. “I thought I heard you were in Houston. Or was it Dallas?” She looks at Leigh in question before focusing back on me.

I shake my head. “Austin, actually. I lived there after college but moved to Wire Creek a few years ago.”

“Never thought I’d see the day. You hightailed it outta here so quick I think you still had your cap and gown on from graduation.” Leighton laughs.

She isn’t wrong: I took it off on the road out of town and tossed it out the window. “What can I say? I was young and foolish.”

“Who was it you were datin’ back then?”

I know Quinn probably means the question as one of those toss-away ones old friends ask when they haven’t seen each other in over ten years, but if she only knew how deep it slices me. I take a deep breath and school my features. It’s in the past: no sense in bringing the details up to two girls whom I haven’t seen in too long—two girls who were my closest friends years ago.

“John Lewis,” I tell her, pretty damn proud of myself for keeping my voice even.

“God, Leigh, you remember John?” Quinn laughs. “You probably would’ve dated him too, had you not been all in love with Maverick back then. Hell, half the girls in school were in love with John, Mr. Quarterback himself.”