The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge (Gold Valley #14)(96)

She had gone down to the lake with the Sullivan sisters and Breanna Lawson, and they were playing on the rope swing. And then Tag had shown up, along with Wolf Garrett and Landry King. She’d asked her friend Fia if the boys had to be there, but she had explained prosaically that the McClouds’ beach was right next to the Sullivans’, and she couldn’t ask him to leave.

Anyway, they all shared the rope swing. And that was how they had ended up swimming with the older boys. And there was a point where she had ended up shivering on the bank, and Tag had given her that cocky grin of his and sat down next to her. And it had made the hair on her arms stand on end to have them so close. A droplet of water had slid from his hair down the bridge of his nose to his lips, and she’d watched it. And suddenly, everything in her had gone fluttery. Which had never happened before. Not quite like that. And that was when she’d realized that Taggart McCloud was beautiful.

And even worse, that her brain was composing some sort of bad poetry about wanting to be that drop of water on his lips. She’d scrambled up and run away. And she had not let herself read books with romance in them for at least six months, because every time she did, she ended up inserting herself into the scene with Tag. And she knew better.

Still, it had all felt fun and giddy even with all of the dire warnings of her mother in the back of her mind. Her father might have tricked her, might have hidden who he was and gotten it past her that he was a dangerous, evil man.

And then, on her twenty-first birthday she had gotten tipsy for the first time. And she’d been so... So angry and so intoxicated to have him in her sphere. That was the thing about Tag. He always seemed to be there. And it didn’t make any sense, because she was plain-Jane Nelly Foster, and he was... The sex god of Four Corners.

Well, one of them. There was a weirdly high number of hot cowboys there.

But either way, it never made sense that he was there. But he was. Always. And she hadn’t been able to resist the push and pull between them, not with her defenses lowered. But then he’d gone and... Pointed out her virginity, to everyone that was there. And then, on top of that, he had... Basically offered her pity sex. And that had lived in her head rent-free all the years since. And every year on her birthday, when she was faced with a quiet evening at home, dinner at her mother’s house and then a sedate movie before bed or... Asking Tag if the offer was still on the table, she had... She had thought about it. And she had been angry that the thought was even in her head.

And this birthday, this birthday had been looming. Thirty. Never been kissed. Never anything. And Tag was her fantasy.

If she was ever going to change, if she was ever going to... Be something other than she was, the Nelly Foster who had never managed to escape her past pain, no matter how much she wanted to... Well, he felt like a mountain that she needed to climb. And it was mostly because he had essentially given her a box of climbing gear and told her that she could.

And he was kissing her now.

And it was... It was incredible.

Better than fifteen-year-old her could ever have imagined.

She didn’t want to be a waterdrop on his lips. She just wanted to be the woman that was being consumed by him. Because that’s what it was. And it didn’t feel like pity.

He moved away from her, gripping her chin between his thumb and forefinger, and it occurred to her then, ludicrously so, that she had never been so close to another human being before.

“If you hadn’t realized by now, Nelly, I actually do have a high opinion of you. I have always thought that you were a strong, interesting sort of girl that I wished I knew a little bit better, but didn’t know how to.”

She blinked. “What?”

She always thought that he was... A mythical figure. Fascinating. His confidence and swagger were so intimidating she had barely been able to look directly at him. And he found her interesting?

“I’m bookish,” she said.

He chuckled. “And strong enough to stand up to me, to anything I ever dished out to you. And I always wondered why. How. Because yeah, you seem maybe a little bookish, but you also seem a whole lot like a warrior. And I’ve always wondered what all that was about.”

“The world is dangerous,” she said, “and filled with dragons.”

“Dragons, is it?”

“Yes,” she said, not wanting to have a discussion about dragons right now per se. Metaphorical or otherwise. Because she was here for one thing. And it wasn’t to talk things out with Tag. He wasn’t a talker. He would be the first person to say it. He had said it to her before. He was a man of action.

And that was what she wanted from him.

All of the other things that she still had left to process she would do on the other side of this. This wasn’t a night about grief. Not a night about the way she felt shaped by her mother’s anger and haunted by her best friend’s death. This was a night to go back to that moment when she had first wanted to kiss Tag. And be a woman who could. Everything had gotten ruined after that. She had a couple of years of a heady, sweet crush on him, and then it had all gotten destroyed. She had gotten destroyed. And she knew that wasn’t fair.

And that was what she kept coming back to. Breanna was gone. And while she felt a mountain of guilt for the way things had been left with her friend in the end, the fact that there were certain things she just couldn’t bring herself to do, the fact that she felt frozen at a very particular point in time... That was a poor tribute. It just was.