The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(94)

“What?”

“Any birthday. From this to... To your thirtieth birthday. If you don’t find some nice boy to teach you what it’s all about, come see me. My door’s always open.” And then he got another ill-advised shot, took it down straight, and got up from the counter and left.

And if he had thought about that occasionally on her birthday—and remembered her birthday at all—he didn’t tell anyone. In fact, no one ever talked about that night.

Not his brothers. Not Wolf.

Certainly not him and Nelly.

But here it was. Her birthday.

If he wasn’t mistaken, her thirtieth birthday.

And she was here. At his door.

And then she did something very unexpected. She grabbed the large bag that was slung over her shoulder and lowered it, reaching inside and grabbing a bottle of whiskey. “Did you need this?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

He was still standing in the doorway; she was still standing on his porch, the light illuminating her brown hair, giving it a coppery, halo effect. He would be lying if he’d said he never noticed that Nelly had copper in her hair. He had. His brother Gus had once said that Nelly looked like a small brown mouse, and he argued. Because she didn’t look like a brown mouse. Her hair was not dull or dusty, but quite something in the sun. Her eyes had that same sort of hidden vein of metal in them. You just had to look.

And he looked.

“Did you need whiskey? To remember. To get through it.” She huffed a breath and then shoved past him right into his cabin. At least the place was clean. Not so much because of him, but because he had the cleaner for the main house come by once a week and give it a once-over. He worked too hard on the ranch to do much of any kind of housework. But he lived alone and he was out before dawn and home after dark. So there wasn’t really another person or another time to get it done.

Not that it mattered what Nelly thought of his house. He didn’t think she’d ever been in his house before.

“Honey, most people don’t drink whiskey to remember. They usually drink it to forget.”

Her cheeks went pink. “But we were drinking whiskey when...”

“When?” He knew. Because the memory was sitting sharp on his mind, and then it had been there, right there, the minute he had opened the door to see her standing there. Along with memories of her pigtails and how he found it irresistible to poke at her whenever she was around. How he found... How he found himself drawn to her, regardless of the fact that it didn’t make sense. That they had nothing in common. That she was...

That she was her. And he was him.

“When you made your offer. For my birthday present. And I want it.”

She walked over to his couch and sat. She set the bottle of whiskey down on the floor, folded her hands in her lap and locked her knees together.

And that was when he looked at her. Really looked at her, for the first time. She was wearing a floral dress with a little white collar that went all the way up to the base of her throat. The skirt of the dress fell past her knees even when she was sitting. She had on white socks. Black shoes. He didn’t know why the white socks stuck out like they did. He didn’t know why he found the white socks sexy, but he did. He should find nothing about her or this moment sexy. Because she was clearly having a breakdown of some kind or she wouldn’t be here. And she was dressed like the librarian fantasy he would say he did not have.

Right. Like you haven’t had fantasies about her for years. Sure, he’d tried to keep them half-formed and vague. But sometimes... Sometimes.

And he always felt ashamed about it. Because there were plenty of women—bright, easy women—who really enjoyed a one-night stand. Who enjoyed having a good time with him and then saying goodbye in the morning. Or more accurately, later that same night. Nelly wasn’t one of those women. Never had been. Still, there were times when it was tough for him to remind his body of that.

Right now being one of them.

Especially because she was... Well, hell.

“You want it.”

“Yes,” she said, clipped. She unfolded her hands for a moment, grabbed the top of the whiskey bottle, and scooted it to the side slightly, as if she was reminding him it was there.

“Why the whiskey?”

“Like I said. If you needed to jog your memory, or to blur the moment. Whatever you need to get in the mood.”

“To get in the mood to... To be very clear, Nelly, are you asking me to fuck you?”

She bit her lower lip, her feet flexing, as she brought the toes of her black shoes up off the floor. “I do wish you wouldn’t use such coarse language.”

“The terms of the offer involved coarse language, so I’m not really sure why I would revise it now.”

“I am uncomfortable,” she said.

“There’s no place for being uncomfortable in situations like this, Nelly, and if you are that uncomfortable, I suggest you walk your pretty self right back out the door.”

“I walked all the way up here. I’m not leaving now.”

She had always been stubborn. Stubborn and impenetrable. And the one time she had ever let her guard down was that night they’d done whiskey shots at each other at the bar. And since then it had been nine years of barely saying much of anything to each other. Anytime they had one of the big reunion potlucks at Four Corners over the summer, her mother would come, and Nelly would stand dutifully by. She always made polite conversation, particularly with the Sullivan sisters, who were a shade more civilized than the rest of them, it had to be said. And he would always get that impulse. That impulse to go and badger her. He was never sure why, that was the thing. But then when he got older, he started to understand. Whether it made sense or not, he was attracted to her. You didn’t get the impulse to go over to a woman if it wasn’t rooted in that. At least not in his world.