The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(17)

Before her, he had been pretty sure he would never be interested in anything that might make you feel good. Ever again. And the thing was, he was eager to get back to his penance. Work on the ranch. Go home. Drink. Sleep. Repeat. That was it.

He didn’t drink to excess, though, not anymore. Just enough to dull the aches and pains of the workday. Just enough.

He had sworn off excess.

Because one thing he couldn’t shake was that this kid that had meant so much to him had been on the fast path to hell this whole time, and Colt had been driving the train. He’d been the one Trent looked up to. The one he wanted to emulate.

And Colt had thought that was great.

He’d lost his own father, and... There was something about having someone look up to him. Something about having that kind of connection that had made him feel... Rooted to the earth, the way he had before. And then it had crashed and burned. Gone in a puff of smoke.

That kid had been moving fast, headed for a young death, and it was clear. If you went back, looked at the evidence and paid attention. It was the only way that things were going to end. He drank too much and didn’t take his safety precautions as seriously as he should. Didn’t pay attention to whether or not he should be riding on a given day. But it was Colt who had taught him that.

Because it was Colt who had spent the better part of his life thumbing his nose at death. But death hadn’t come to collect him. Yet again, it had come for the wrong person.

Let Mallory think otherwise. Let her think that he was still the Colt Daniels that he’d once been. He was certain when he was around her he would be able to put that on. That he would be able to cast himself back into that role. Because it was easy enough. Should be, anyway.

“Great. Great.” She said the word twice, sounding less sincere upon the repeat than she had upon the first utterance. Then she smiled. It was a fake smile, but pretty all the same, because everything she did was pretty.

“Once upon a time,” he said.

Her cheeks turn the delicate shade of pink, and he could’ve sworn that she stopped herself from licking her lips.

“Pie sounds nice.”

“Sure does.”

“Let’s go have some pie.”

Yeah, the fact that this woman was related to his cousin’s husband was weird, but it was surmountable. It wasn’t like he was going to see an obscure relation all that often anyway.

And it was fate. Because this kind of attraction had to be. It just did. It wasn’t any kind of natural, or any kind of typical. And it had something to do with how crazy he’d been over the last few months—that he was sure of. It had to. It had something to do with the fact that he got a little bit unhinged when Trent had died, and it was now attaching itself to her.

“Before we go in,” he said. “I’m Colt Daniels. I’m Iris’s cousin. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Mallory Chance,” she said. “Griffin’s younger sister. Nice to meet you.”

She got it. She understood. This would be a fresh start. It would be something new. Something different than it was before. They would put away the fact that they spent one night together burning off demons. At least, he assumed that’s what she was doing. They could leave the demons there. They didn’t have to bring them here. It wouldn’t be that difficult.

And as he sat down, he tried to remind himself of a time when he’d imagined that one woman was pretty much like the next and it wouldn’t matter if he’d slept with her by the time he saw her next.

Sex was only sex.

And this sex had been no different.



CHAPTER FOUR


MALLORY WAS STILL wholly and completely rattled by the appearance of Colt Daniels—her mystery man—at dinner last night. She hadn’t been expecting that. Of all the things.

She’d had that very near miss with him at the coffeehouse that next morning. She had been sure that was some kind of small-town anomaly. Something that happened once, but would never happen again. But now... Well, now he was sort of, by extension, part of her family.

“Oh gosh,” she said, folding herself forward in her car and pressing her face against the steering wheel. She had to go out to the rental house today, but she was still feeling... Unsettled. The whole situation was just... An inauspicious start to her new beginning. She knew how she wanted to go. She knew how it was supposed to go. He was supposed to be a Declaration of Independence, who would then fade away into the annals of her personal history, not become some sort of Revolutionary War that she had to stand and fight in. She had no interest in that. Quite the opposite.

She’d had her fill of complicated. Of feeling wound up, tangled up in a relationship that was woven through every facet of her life to the point where she didn’t feel like she could tug too far in any one direction because it was all connected.

Her life in California was inescapably bound up in her relationship with Jared, and her most real, crushing heartbreak. The fact that he knew her in a way no one else did and that no matter how much she loved her parents, she was still—in so many ways—a teenage girl desperately trying to be the perfect daughter in front of them when it was just all a lie.

And in that moment when she’d seen that man, the father of a baby about to be born, more attentive to his phone than the moment... When the other woman had asked: Why does she stay with him?