C is for Cowboy (ABCs of Love Sweet Romance Book 3) Read online

  “It’s actually been kind of nice without my phone.” She laid her arm over the one he put back around her waist. “I’m enjoying the quiet.”

  “I guess I was wrong about you not being able to take a break from it.” He couldn’t resist that spot on her neck anymore and nuzzled it with his chin.

  She turned so their cheeks touched. “You weren’t wrong about me needing some time away from it. I just have a hard time slowing down. It’s easy to work all the time when you love what you do. You probably don’t take too many breaks from your horses, do you?”

  “Nope. Taking a vacation from livestock ain’t easy.” He hadn’t thought about their work being similar before. Now that Mr. Early owned the ranch, Cash really could take vacations if he wanted to. There were other hands around who could manage, and Early could always hire a pool rider to cover for him for a few days. But Cash loved being there too much, even if it wasn’t his anymore.

  “I did leave for a while once.” Something inside him opened up, and the emotions he’d been keeping in check for years came charging out of the chute like a roper chasing a calf. “Told my dad I didn’t want anything to do with the ranch and left for LA.”

  “For a girl.” Madi replied, like she already knew. “Lyla told me.”

  “Of course she did. My little sister hasn’t been able to keep her mouth shut since the day she said her first word.”

  “That’s what little sisters are for. To spill all your secrets.” Madi smiled over her shoulder at him giving him a closeup view of her dimples. “You already told me you didn’t like how many people were there, but is there anything you did like about my hometown?”

  He hated to admit there was anything he liked about LA, but with the memory of Lindsey subsiding, he could think of a few things he’d liked. “There were a couple beaches south of LA I really liked. And I miss the smell of the ocean.”

  “Is that it?”

  “The LA library downtown. That place was amazing. And there was a cool bookstore not too far from it.”

  “The Last Bookstore. It’s my favorite. They had a first edition Jane Eyre once. I would have bought it if I’d been rich then.” She nudged him, and he laughed at her joke. He was man enough to appreciate a woman who knew how to make money. He wouldn’t have minded making a little more money doing what he loved. He’d made plenty of it when his dad sold the ranch and gave him a share of the profits, but he hadn’t loved that. He hadn’t touched the money. Didn’t plan to until he found a place of his own to buy.

  “So not everything was bad about it, right?” she asked, and he felt her tense. “You’d be willing to come visit me?”

  He took a deep breath. “I could do that.” Cash considered his next words carefully. It was too soon to say them, he knew that, but they had to be said anyway. “Or you could stick around here a little longer.”

  He hadn’t lied when he’d said he could visit her, but he couldn’t move his life to LA again.

  “Maybe we should take things a day at a time and see where we end up.” She ran her hand down his arm and interlaced her fingers with his.

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Then he did kiss that spot on her neck that had been tempting him. Just a quick kiss. His lips barely brushed her skin, but it was enough.

  “Do that again, and I may never leave.”

  So, of course, he did it again, letting his lips do more than brush her skin, because the idea of her never leaving sounded a lot less scary than it should have, considering they’d only known each other a couple days. But his mother had told him that when lightning struck, he’d know it from the electricity left behind.

  Well, he felt sparks every time they touched and saw fireworks every time he looked at her, and that had never happened to him before. He thought it had with Lindsey, but he was wrong. That had been static electricity. What he felt for Madi, that was lightning.

  Madi reached back and ran her fingers through his hair from the nape of his neck to the base of his hat sending heat down his spine.

  Forget lightning. Cash had a whole electrical storm going on.

  “Do that again, and I may forget Montana even exists,” he whispered.

  Madi laughed and put her hand down. “I don’t want you to forget about Montana. You wouldn’t be the same man.”

  “I appreciate that.” He would have appreciated it even more if he could still feel her fingertips on his scalp.

  When they got close to the river, Cash could tell his horse needed a break and prompted him in that direction with a gentle tap of his heel and nudge with the reins.

  “How do you do that?” Madi asked as the horse turned left.

  “Do what?”

  “Get the horses to do what you want with barely a touch.”

  Cash considered her question and didn’t answer until he’d stopped the horses a few feet from the river and climbed down. “I watched my dad and did the exact opposite,” he said as he helped her off the horse. He untied Brownie and led Madi and both horses to the deer trail leading through the brush to the riverbank. He let Madi take the lead and followed behind. “Careful, it’s a little slippery.”

  “I got it.” She held out her arms to help keep her balance.

  He was sure she did have it, but it didn’t keep him from wanting to protect her from anything bad happening to her. He watched her carefully until they’d made it to the river where the heavy brush opened into a space just big enough for the two of them and the horses. There he knotted the reins and slung them over the horses’ necks so they could graze freely. There wasn’t enough room to run if they got the sudden urge to bolt.

  “My granddad was the only dad I ever had.” Madi said, standing beside him. “I loved him, and he did the best job he could, but I always wished I knew my dad.”

  “Girls need their dads. Lyla gets along with ours better than I ever have. He was never as hard on her as he was on me.” Cash yanked a bunch of alfalfa out of the ground and held it to Brownie’s muzzle.

  “Maybe that was his way of showing you he loved you. My mom always wanted to be my friend, but sometimes I just wanted a mom.” Madi followed Cash’s lead and picked some alfalfa and held it for the other horse to munch on. “Not that she’s not great. She is. I just have a lot of friends and only one mom.”

  “Parents can’t win, can they?”

  “I guess not.” Madi moved closer to Cash to pick more alfalfa. “What about your mom? What’s she like?”

  Cash picked up a stone and skipped it across the river. “She died when I was fifteen. Things got really tough with my dad after that. She’d always run interference between us.” He bent and picked up more stones, then examined them for a flat one to hand to Madi. “Do you know how to skip rocks?”

  She answered by tossing the stone in a perfect line so it hit the water and bounced across the surface four times. She turned to him and raised an eyebrow. “Beat that.”

  The side of his mouth pulled into a smile, and he tossed the stones in his hand into the air and caught them. “Shouldn’t be a problem. You want to make it a contest? Best out of five?”

  “What’s the prize?” She bent to pick up her own stones, searching the ground for the flattest ones. “Keeping in mind I’ve got an entire ocean practically at my feet. I’ve had a lot of practice skipping rocks.”

  When she stood, Cash moved close enough that the tips of their boots touched. He smiled down at her then pushed up her hat. “I get to kiss you again.”

  She looked up at him with her big eyes not quite holding back her dimples. “And what if I win?”

  He ran his tongue along his bottom lip. “You get to kiss me again.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Let’s get to the contest then.”

  “Or we could skip it and get straight to the kissing.” His smile spread across his entire face. He moved to put his arm around her waist, but she pushed him away.

  “I think I’d like to beat you at skipping rocks first.”

  He l
aughed and handed her his flattest stone. “You start.”

  “I’ve got my own, thanks.” She pushed his outstretched hand away, stepped back, took aim and let her rock fly, counting each bounce. “One…two…three…” until she got to six.

  Cash took position, angling his body to the river and pulling his arm back ready to shoot, then dropped his rocks in the river. “You win,” he said as he turned to her and wrapped his arm around her waist. He held her close, but he didn’t have to hold her tight. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  With his other hand he took off his hat and tossed it on the dry grass, then did the same with hers. His lips were on hers before the pink hat landed next to his, and they stayed there for most of the afternoon.

  The hats and his lips.

  Chapter Fourteen

  If everyone else on the ranch—guests and cowboys—didn’t know something was going on with Madi and Cash, they did when the two of them showed up after everyone else had returned from the cattle drive. Lyla took the liberty of pointing out Madi had some grass in her hair and pulled the pieces out for her, not even trying to hold back her grin. Madi didn’t care. Not even when one of the older guests said something about Madi teaching her how to catch a cute, young cowboy.

  Cash, on the other hand, didn’t show his face again for the rest of the night. He’d warned her he might “make himself scarce,” as he put it. It didn’t look good for the cowboys to get involved with guests. If any of the other hands did it, Mr. Early would fire them, Cash had told her before assuring her Early valued him too much to let him go. And so they’d spent another hour laying on the grassy bank—Cash with his arm bent behind his head and Madi lying with her head on his shoulder—talking about anything and everything, watching the horses graze and nuzzle each other, and doing a little nuzzling themselves.

  Maybe even a lot of nuzzling.

  And it was nice. Really nice. Not just because she liked kissing Cash, but also because she didn’t have to worry about when to tell him to stop. He wasn’t going to pressure her into sex or even expect that’s where their kissing was going to lead.

  It was freeing, really.

  Even if she wouldn’t have minded if he’d suddenly changed his mind about waiting until marriage.

  Still, she admired his self-control. He’d obviously had a lot of practice kissing—no one could be that good naturally—but he didn’t go any further than that. When things started getting a little too hot, he’d stop and tell her a story about growing up on the ranch. Like the time he’d tricked Lyla into cleaning the horse stalls for him by telling her he’d give her a prize, which turned out to be a noogie. His dad had made him clean the stalls for a month for that.

  Cash had a million stories, and she could have stayed there all day listening to him, even without the kissing. The life he described was so different from the one she’d had as a kid growing up in LA. She’d had the beach and the ocean where she spent most of her free time, but he’d had freedom that came with doing things that mattered. If he didn’t do his chores, animals went hungry, hay got wet, cows got out, and the ranch lost money. Cash handled big animals and drove tractors long before Madi was allowed to walk the two blocks to the beach by herself. The work sounded hard, but the life sounded happy.

  And she couldn’t remember feeling as happy as she did when she went to bed that night. She lay awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, running her finger across her lips. She’d be spending the next five days with Cash since he’d talked Mr. Early into letting him be the guide for the pack trip that she and a few other guests were going on, but she was still too excited to sleep. The morning couldn’t come fast enough for her to see him again.

  When it finally did, he was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs when she went down for breakfast.

  “You packed light, right?” He asked her, then looked around. When he didn’t see anyone, he grabbed her hand and pulled her to a niche under the stairs. “I missed you,” he said, then kissed her, holding his hat in front of their faces, just in case someone walked by.

  “I missed you too,” she said when he pulled away, then tugged his shirt to pull him close and kiss him again.

  “Whew.” He took his hat off and shook his head. “It’s not going to be easy pretending to care about anyone else on this pack trip.”

  Madi wiped her lipstick off his mouth. “Then don’t. Let’s ditch them and go by ourselves.”

  “I don’t know if I can trust myself alone with you for that long.”

  They heard voices on the stairs, and he pushed her further into the niche while she covered her mouth to keep from laughing. He kept his ear turned to the hallway until they couldn’t hear them anymore.

  “Go get some breakfast,” he whispered and took off her hat to kiss her on the forehead. “And something besides yogurt. You need a meal.” He maneuvered her around him so she could leave first, then hit her on the butt with her hat before putting it back on her head. “I’ll wait here until it’s clear.”

  Madi peeked around the corner to make sure the coast was clear and was about to leave when Cash grabbed her hand and pulled her back for one more kiss. “Now get out of here,” he said and gently pushed her into the hall.

  She would have rather stayed there, but she did what he said and went to the breakfast room for a meal. She’d never had biscuits and gravy before, so she started there. Before she’d finished spooning the gravy over the biscuits, Lyla sidled up beside her.

  “Looking a little flushed there, Miss Keller,” Lyla whispered and dropped a couple biscuits on her plate.

  “Do I?” Madi tried to play it cool, but then she dropped the spoon back in the gravy pan where it slipped all the way under the white sauce. “Ah, I’m sorry.”

  Lyla laughed and grabbed a knife to fish out the spoon. “Flushed and flustered. He must have shown you the nook.”

  Madi faced Lyla. “He’s kissed other girls there?”

  Lyla laughed again. “He’s a virgin, not a monk. He’s kissed girls in every hiding place in this house, but I’ve never seen him as worked up over a girl as he is with you.” Lyla motioned to a table. “Let’s sit.”

  “I guess I’ll take that as a compliment,” Madi said, following Lyla.

  “You should.” Lyla set down her plate and looked Madi in the eye. “Just try not to break his heart. Like I told you, he’s a big softie.” It was a request, not a threat, and she followed it with a smile. “And I’d hate to unfollow you.”

  “If I don’t get my phone soon and some decent service, I may not have any followers left.” Madi sat down and poked at her food. All the excitement over Cash couldn’t keep her mind off of her work forever. Her assistant could only handle things for so long. Once their pack trip was over, she’d have to find a way to get to town for some decent Wi-Fi.

  “You’re going to love this trip. It’s so beautiful.” Lyla dragged a piece of biscuit through gravy and stuck it in her mouth.

  Madi did the same, and as soon as the biscuit was in her mouth, she regretted all the years she’d let the calorie count next to biscuits and gravy on any menu she’d ever seen sway her from trying them. “These are delicious,” she said through her second bite. So delicious they almost took away the sting of knowing she wouldn’t be able to document the pack trip. She took another bite to see if she’d feel any better. And then another.

  By the time she finished her plate, she felt so much better that she followed Lyla to the chafing dishes to get seconds. Madi wanted to scoop up as much as Lyla, but she held back.

  “How do you stay so skinny eating like this every day?” Madi asked her as they walked back to their table.

  “Girl, I’ll work these calories off in an hour and probably won’t eat again until supper.” She sat down and dug in.

  Kissing cowboys and eating biscuits and gravy. Ranch life was looking more and more appealing every day.

  Madi ate quickly. The thought of kissing a cowboy reminded her she had one waiting for her. She did
n’t bother checking her hair and make-up before she headed to the barn to meet him. In LA, she never met a guy without checking a mirror first, but she’d learned already that whatever touchups she did here would be undone within minutes. And she’d noticed Lyla didn’t wear any makeup, but she still looked beautiful every time Madi saw her, even when she was covered in dust.

  Kissing cowboys, eating biscuits and gravy, not worrying about a beauty regimen that involved bimonthly lash touchups, monthly facials and waxing, and spray tanning.

  Score another point for ranch life.

  When Madi got to the corral, the other four guests going on the pack trip were already there, and so was Cash. He kept talking to them as Madi approached, but his eyes drifted to hers. The horses were saddled, ready to go, and he’d made sure Brownie had been re-shod so Madi could ride her. Madi had been dreading this pack trip from the moment she impulsively committed to it, but when Cash held Brownie still for her so she could mount, she felt like she’d made the best decision of her life.

  A few hours over rough terrain made her question that decision again, but when they stopped for the night in a meadow filled with wildflowers, and Cash helped her off her horse, she was back to feeling good about it. Her legs and her butt did not feel good about it, but her heart did.

  The other four guests—a father and his son and a couple of sisters—were in much better shape than she was and knew what they were doing, so she went with Cash to gather firewood. The others went to work putting up their tents and someone said something about a cathole, which Madi assumed was some kind of trap to keep mountain lions or other large cats out of their campground.

  “Why aren’t we gathering bigger pieces of wood?” Madi asked when she brought Cash an armful of wood she thought would make a perfect fire, and he threw half of it back.

  “We only want to build a fire big enough to cook our food, then the wood needs to burn to ash. It’s all about leaving no trace.” He showed her what size to get—not much thicker than her fingers—and told her to only collect dead wood.

  “I’ve only camped at an RV at a campground packed with people. I didn’t feel like I was getting back to nature at all.” Madi was actually enjoying walking through the rustling trees that surrounded the meadow. “But this is peaceful. Except… I really need to know where the bathroom is.”