Rodeo Christmas at Evergreen Ranch (Gold Valley #13)(101)

“I have school today,” she said quietly. “I’ll see you when I get back in the afternoon. There’s leftover stew in the fridge. I don’t have a microwave, but feel free to heat it up on the stove.”

“Yeah.”

And he purposed then and there that he was going to make sure that today, he found a way to take care of her.





CHAPTER FIVE


SHE HAD THOUGHT about him all day. While she was helping kids with their math, she had been thinking about Clayton. What he was doing, if he was okay. If he had taken his shirt off. Or used her shower.

Oh dear.

She was feeling overwarm in spite of the chill in the air by the time she left school and got into her car, driving on the dirt roads that connected the various dwellings on the ranch. She drove past the Sullivan sisters’ big farmhouse, the expansive green lawn and the idyllic willow trees.

And she didn’t care because she was still thinking about Clayton.

Her heart was fluttering like a trapped bird by the time she pulled up to her cottage. And then she saw him, and her heart hit her sternum with a bump. She put the car in Park and got out quickly, her immediate fear and anger a total overreaction and she knew it.

And even while she knew it, she couldn’t stop herself.

Because there he was, shirt off, swinging an ax down onto a vertically set hunk of wood.

He looked...

She’d seen his body. Right before he’d stitched himself back together, and she’d been aware of the muscle then. But this was something else entirely. Though she was concerned about the homegrown stitches popping open.

But also distracted by his body. But also horrified he might hurt himself. Or be seen.

“I don’t want you bleeding everywhere again!”

He straightened, breathing hard, and she was mesmerized. By his sweat-slicked skin. By the way his muscles shifted with the motion. His abs, his... Everything.

And she felt in that moment every inch what she was.

An odd bird raised in a strange nest. Who had kept all of her weirdness wrapped around her as insulation when she’d gone into the world, because defying the way she’d been raised only felt good to a point, and beyond that she’d been worried.

Worried her mother might be right. Worried at least that she could become distracted from her focus. Worried she might validate what her mom thought about her by messing up, and she had done everything in her power not to mess up.

But here she was now, with her degree, a house, a job, and by some stroke of luck, a very handsome man chopping wood for her, and she had to ask herself what she was really afraid of.

Getting hurt.

Getting hurt really badly.

All that masculinity, because when have you ever been around that?

Also getting hurt.

Well, that was the truth of it. She’d used her childhood as an excuse to hold people at a distance, and here Clayton was. He’d literally crashed into her house, her life. And she felt close to him even though it had been days, and if she felt this much for him now...

“I’m fine,” he said, indicating the line of stitches still holding his side together.

“You could have hurt yourself.”

“But I didn’t.”

The stitches were indeed straight, and he was stunningly beautiful. And all of it was combining to create a situation, a moment that felt out of her grasp. That felt out of her realm of experience. Everything that he was stood completely outside of her life. And yet... Did it? Because he was the kind of man who had questioned what was in front of him, even though he had never been shown another way. And she had questioned what she had seen around her, as well.

They were fugitives from their families, as much as he was a fugitive from the law. And maybe it was abnormal to feel so much of a connection to a man that she had only just met, but nothing about them was normal. And yet, somehow they seemed to have plenty in common with each other.

“Well, you could’ve been seen.”

“And I would have said that I was doing some work for you around the place.”

“Well... Well. Fine. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

She was repeating herself because her real issues were lost in the actuality of being hot for him, and she didn’t know how she was supposed to hide that. Or if she should. Or could.

“I’m actually more than capable of taking care of myself. I know that you caught me at a pretty low moment, but I promise you, I’m not inept.”

“It isn’t that. I don’t think you’re inept. But I think you might have an overinflated idea of what you can handle.”

“Me? Never. I’m nothing if not entirely realistic about the things I can take on.”

“Which is why you brought... What? A knife to a gunfight with your brother?”

“Well, now, that was my mistake. I expected him to act like a brother. And not an enemy.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t say anything about him. I don’t know enough.”

“I made dinner,” he said.

He walked up to her and slung the ax down, the head hitting the ground. Her head only came up to the center of his chest. He was just so large. So strong. She had realized that from the first moment she had seen him, but his strength had been so reduced in that first moment, that she hadn’t fully realized... All of that vitality. Everything he was. That had very nearly been snuffed out, and suddenly it seemed an unspeakable tragedy that it could’ve occurred. That he could have died somewhere out there in the middle of the woods, and she never would’ve met him.