Cowboy 12 Pack

by Cynthia D’Alba, Paige Tyler, Elle James, Donna Michaels, Shoshanna Evers, Randi Alexander, Cora Seton, Beth Williamson, Sabrina York, Sable Hunter, Lexi Post, Becky McGraw

  No. Kissing her was a bad idea. They had a business to run together. Getting all tangled up in a fling could ruin their working relationship permanently. And that was the only sort of relationship he could ever have…business.

  “You’re beautiful, too,” he told her, barely aware he was speaking out loud. “I don’t know how to act ’round you.”

  A pretty blush colored Allie’s cheeks. “Same as before, I guess. Before we ever saw each other.”

  “But it ain’t the same,” he said, “bein’ with you here.”

  “I like when you’re nice to me.” She gave him a playful tap on the arm. “Sometimes it seems like you’re just being ornery to keep me at arm’s length.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s clearly not workin’.”

  Don’t over-think it, man. just go for it.

  He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close to him. Her body was putty in his arms, so accepting. She looked up at him as if she knew exactly what he was about to do.

  Bill went for it. He kissed her hard, needing to put every ounce of emotion he had into that kiss. It was a kiss that said You are beautiful, and it was a kiss that said I’m glad you’re my partner. It was a kiss that said I can’t do anything at this moment, other than kiss you.

  Her lips opened to receive him, his mouth, and Allie moaned. Their bodies pressed against each other, tightening with unfurling lust. The kiss deepened. She pulled his lower lip into her mouth and gently bit it.

  His body responded readily, and she was right up against him, so she knew it. Yet she wasn’t pulling away… They could hook up right that moment, right there on the floor of the bar, and fulfill every desire he’d had since he first threw her over his saddle. She was up for it, he knew by the way she tangled her small hands in his hair on the back of his head, pushing his hat forward until the rim touched her own hair, too.

  The way she gasped as he kissed her neck made him wish he could simply devour her with his need.

  Yes. She wanted him too. Maybe even as much as he wanted her. He stifled a groan of desire as she shifted her weight, pressing right against the large bulge in his jeans.

  Wait. Don’t do this, not with her.

  Reality hit him. He would be in business with Allie Crawford for a long time. Getting intimate with her was not the best idea, no matter how much he wanted her. It would complicate things.

  And being with her was dangerous. Very dangerous.

  After what happened with Melody, Bill had long-vowed he would never fall in love again.

  Chapter Eight

  ‡

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Allie left the bar in a huff. Bill was so hot and cold. One moment, he’s ready to go, right on the same page with her. The next, he thinks she’s being too radical. Seriously, were they really going to have a gravel parking lot for their customers, when they could just pave it over like a normal bar would have?

  “Gravel ain’t so bad,” he’d kept saying.

  Ugh. Annoying. Especially considering how handsome he looked, even when he pissed her off. Not fair.

  She drove back to Melody Ranch, and wandered over to the far hay fields, where the green John Deere tractor was at work. Looked like the guys were over there.

  Zach turned off the engine on the tractor, and smiled warmly at Allie. “What’s up?”

  “Where’s everyone?” she asked. “I wanted to thank you all.”

  She hefted the six-pack of chilled imported beer, condensation dripping on the outside, the bottles clinking in their cardboard box.

  For whatever reason, somehow she hadn’t expected the rugged young cowboy to be using much in the way of technology out there in the middle of nowhere, but he pulled a smartphone out, his thumbs flying across the screen with well-practiced dexterity. Within a minute, Eric, Chris, and Jay hung onto the west fence. Chris’s hair was wet…maybe she’d interrupted a shower?

  Probably best not to think of the ranchhands in the shower. She’d leave that visual image for some other women to have.

  “Wow, you guys are fast,” she laughed. “Now I know to yell ‘beer’ instead of ‘fire’ in an emergency.”

  “Did you see your bar yet?” Zach asked, and jumped out of the tractor to join them by the fence.

  Eric pushed Zach’s shoulder playfully. “And if she hadn’t?” Eric asked. “You would’ve ruined it.”

  Allie laughed with them. “I just got back from the bar. And I saw yesterday how awesome you guys fixed it up. It looks incredible.”

  She handed each of them a beer from the package, and took one herself. “To new beginnings,” she said, and they clinked bottles.

  “To finally havin’ a place to go after the sun sets,” Zach added, and they clinked again.

  “To havin’ a woman around who can make Bill get off his butt,” Chris said.

  The guys made an “Ohhhh” sound, like Chris had said what the others had been thinking. They clinked again.

  Allie grinned, wiping the cold beer from her lips with the back of her hand. Would it be inappropriate to give each of them a hug? Or should she leave that for other women, as well?

  Nah.

  “Thank you so much for spending time cleaning for me the other night,” she said, hugging each cowboy in turn.

  Their hard, muscular bodies, perfected from the intense labor required on the ranch, felt comforting and warm as they gave her a quick squeeze back. But they didn’t incite the same flutter of excitement she felt when Bill came near her. There was just something about Bill. Something different.

  “It must’ve taken you guys till dawn to clean that whole place up the way you did,” Allie said.

  Zach winked at her. “Nah. With the four of us plus Bill attackin’ somethin’, it gets done fast an’ right. Glad we could help.”

  “Your first round is on me when the bar opens,” Allie said. “In fact, soon as we’re ready, we’ll have a practice run to make sure everything is running perfectly. I hope you’ll be our first guests.”

  “Oh yeah?” Zach asked with interest as he climbed back up onto the tractor, balancing the bottle between his denim-clad thighs. “Think you’ll be able to get this thing pulled together, even with Big Bad Bill breathin’ down your back?”

  “Big Bad Bill isn’t nearly as bad as he thinks he is,” she said, and winked back.

  Or was he?

  *

  ALLIE WENT TO the barn, carrying some carrots from Bill’s vegetable garden. It was pretty cool, digging into the earth and finding something she usually only found on her supermarket shelves in the produce aisle. Maybe she could learn how to garden, too.

  It was still so weird to think about the fact that this was her life now. She lived here, in Idaho, of all places. There was no going back to Miami. No more beaches or humidity or traffic or high crime rate…no more crowds of people. There were definite benefits to being here. And here, she’d have a chance to make a difference. Being the only bar in town created a responsibility, of sorts. She could single-handedly provide some entertainment for everyone. Maybe they should have a senior night, or a girls’ night out, too… the possibilities were exciting.

  She grinned. It had been just like this before she’d moved here, too. She couldn’t get her mind off of the bar, off of all the things she wanted to do with it. And why not? It was finally her turn to run a business, and to make a difference in people’s lives. To make people happy, to bring them together. She was itching to get everything ready so she could open the joint and have a big party.

  If only Bill wouldn’t keep stepping on her toes. He didn’t like her plans for surround-sound speakers, either. But if they were going to have dancing (and they would have dancing, despite how Bill balked at making her a dance floor), the music couldn’t just come from a jukebox in the back, right?

  She approached a gray mare that looked very calm. “Hi there, sweetie,” Allie said brightly. “Want a carrot?”

  The mare sniffed it, chomped it up, and then nuzzled her nose against Allie
’s palm.

  “Now you’re my new best friend?” Allie laughed. “That was easy! I’ll come by and see you later.”

  She moved on down the stalls, talking with the horses, stroking their faces and necks when they were comfortable with her, indulging them with some good scratching, too, like her old horse used to love.

  At the far end of the barn, off by himself, was Pirate. The black stallion stood alone in his stall, asleep on his feet. At least he wasn’t upset, like before. It seemed walking with Bill had done Pirate some good.

  She looked at the last carrot in her hand warily. Should she risk giving it to Pirate? Or would he try to trample her to death again?

  This time, Bill wasn’t around to whisk Allie up onto his horse.

  “Pirate,” she whispered.

  Either he ignored her, or he was still asleep.

  “I don’t want to wake you,” she said. “I have a carrot here, if you’re interested.”

  Pirate’s eyes opened. He sniffed, his huge nostrils seeming to search for her hand.

  “Okay,” she said. Her hands shook as she carefully offered it to the horse. “Here you go.”

  Pirate munched the carrot from her, and looked at her expectantly, as if wanting more.

  “You’re like a different horse,” Allie said. “Maybe you’re starting to like it here?”

  The horse stared at her. She didn’t dare touch Pirate, unlike with the other horses.

  “You like Bill, I think. He isn’t that bad,” she acquiesced. “At least he gives you sugar.”

  “Oh yeah?” a deep voice said from the barn door.

  Allie whirled, embarrassed. Bill stood there, his tall, broad, muscular body silhouetted by the setting sun. He leaned against the doorframe, and tipped his black Stetson in greeting.

  “Sounds like you want some sugar, too,” Bill said with a glint in his eye.

  Allie blushed. If she walked toward the barn to leave, she may as well be heading straight up to him, since he was in the doorway. She couldn’t continue feeling annoyed at him, not with that cute smile on his face.

  Allie meandered toward him, pretending she was aiming for the door, but he blocked her path just as she had blocked his at the bar.

  “Do you really want to go to leave?” he asked, his voice low. He wrapped his arms around her waist, drawing her near. “I can’t get you out of my mind.”

  “I don’t have to leave,” she whispered, tilting her head up toward his handsome face.

  He gazed at her, her face reflecting back in his steel gray eyes. Bill leaned in, and kissed her. The kiss was hot, passionate, and even more intense than the first kiss had been.

  Her body melted into his, and he gathered her up in his arms, holding her against his chest like a man carrying a bride over the threshold.

  Allie squealed in surprise as he lifted her and started walking.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. She grabbed on around his neck to get a better hold, but he was so strong, there was no way he’d ever drop her. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Hay loft,” he said. “Though I gotta say, Zach an’ the guys did more to bring in this year’s hay than I did.”

  He carried her past the horses, to a tall wooden ladder secured at the base and top, leading nearly straight up to what was literally, just a loft with hay on it.

  “That’s a really great hay loft,” she said politely, with a laugh. “I guess I never thought about how much hay you guys actually need to grow and harvest, and store.”

  “Let’s go up an’ talk more about… hay.” Bill smiled, a twinkle in his eyes. “Since you’re so interested.”

  “You’re flirting with me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he agreed.

  “But you were such a pain in the ass before.”

  “So I been told.” Bill grinned at her, holding her against his chest as if she weighed nothing at all.

  Allie had to laugh. Yeah, he was a pain in the ass, but he was…Bill. And she couldn’t get her mind off of him, either.

  Allie stared from the bottom of the ladder all the way up. She grabbed hold of a rung, shook it hard, and it didn’t budge. So it was sturdy, at least. Still, it was so high up.

  “Think you can climb up there?” he asked, and set her on her feet.

  “I’m scared to go up there with you,” she admitted. She felt even shorter than before now that Bill wasn’t holding her up. “We may just have to appreciate your hay from down here on the ground.”

  Bill frowned and wrapped his arm around her in a comforting embrace. “Are you scared to go up there with me,” he asked, “are you scared to go up there, period?”

  Allie laughed. “I think I can handle you,” she said. “I’m not so sure I can handle climbing up the ladder.”

  “No problem,” Bill said.

  He lifted her up from the waist and pressed her torso against his, her legs dangling a good foot off the ground. She wrapped her legs around his waist tightly, with her arms around his neck.

  “Close your eyes,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

  Allie had never put her physical safety into someone else’s hands before. But for some reason, she trusted Bill completely—not just his physical strength, but his desire to keep her safe. She shut her eyes and nuzzled her face against his neck.

  She wasn’t going to look down.

  Bill started climbing, but all she knew was what she could feel—the movement of his shoulders and thighs as he moved. With her eyes tightly shut, she could pretend they weren’t fifteen feet off the ground.

  Suddenly, Allie felt herself being pried off and set down on the scratchy surface of a hay bale. She opened her eyes.

  The hay loft was huge, the square footage of the entire barn downstairs but with no partitions, and stacked from the back of the loft going forward with large wrapped cubes of hay—bales. Well, they were more rectangular-ish than square. Cuboid bales?

  Doesn’t matter. What mattered was she had made it up alive… and she was there all alone, with Bill.

  In the front, where they sat, there was an open bale, with loose hay cushioning the wooden floor of the loft.

  “That ride up wasn’t as terrifying as I thought it would be,” Allie said. Her pulse had begun to slow a bit, back to normal. She looked around the loose hay. “Why is this bale broken?”

  Bill picked up some straws of hay and let them fall back onto the loft. “Easy access. Right now we’ve still got grass, though the morning frosts are comin’ quick. The cows and horses are pretty happy.”

  “You’ve been saying that you haven’t been doing much work on your ranch,” she said carefully, not wanting to offend. “Why do you think that is?”

  Bills sat on the wood, his knees bent in front of him, and rubbed something from the toe of his boot.

  “Bein’ a cattle rancher used to be my whole life,” he said. “After Melody died… I didn’t do anythin’ that first year.”

  Allie put her hand on his shoulder. Having her husband leave her hasn’t been the same, but she’d felt the same way after he was gone. An empty house, an extra empty pillow in bed…

  While she couldn’t know what he’d felt, she couldn’t even imagine how much more suffering he’d gone through. It made her want to comfort him, to wrap her arms around him. To heal his tortured soul, just by giving herself to him, by showing him the love that he’d lost.

  “It took a while… but I’m doin’ better,” he said. “Gettin’ out more this past year.”

  “That’s great. Time heals all wounds, at least that’s what they say.”

  Bill shook his head, as if he didn’t subscribe to the idea of time healing his wounds. “Emailin’ with you got me out of my rut.”

  “Really?”

  Bill nodded, and shrugged, as if it wasn’t a big deal. But it was. “You were excited. An’ you kept askin’ me things, and askin’ about the town. Having you there, on the other side of the country, pingin’ my inbox every day…” He paused. “It’s dumb.�
��

  “No it’s not,” she whispered.

  “It just… it made me feel needed. Like I had someone holdin’ me accountable. I had to answer you, tell you stuff.” He peered into her face. “I should’ve told you more what to expect with the place. I’m a piece of shit for makin’ you feel betrayed.”

  Allie leaned over and hugged him. “Don’t say that,” she said, squeezing him fiercely. “It turned out for the best. Everything’s moving along great. And… I like living with you.”

  He kissed her cheek, pressed against his own, before she let go of him. The gesture was sweet, but it also served to remind her how close they were. Physically close, yes. But he’d also told her more just now than he had since she’d gotten there. It was as if all the intimacy they’d built up from their beginnings online had finally crystallized in him as real.

  They were real. Whatever this relationship was, it existed here, right here in Idaho, and not just online.

  “I been thinkin’ about selling Melody Ranch to the guys,” Bill said. “Zach an’ them should own this place for real.”

  Allie gasped at the revelation. “I don’t know what to say to that,” she said. “Wow.”

  “I’m ready to move forward. Too many bad memories in my house, on the ranch. I can’t shake ’em.”

  “I think it’s a good idea, I guess,” Allie said. “Especially if you feel like you need a fresh start. The guys seemed to have everything handled here. But this was your father’s cattle ranch, and you grandpa’s too, if I remember correctly.”

  He nodded that she was right. “I’ve forgotten all the things I’ve already told you.”

  “Are you worried about giving that legacy up?”

  “Hell, I already renamed it when Melody moved in,” he said. “I shouldn’ta done that.”

  Bill took her hand and pulled her over next to him, leaning up against a bale of hay. He wrapped his arm around her, and pulled her close to him. “I think I want you near me so much ’cause before we met in person, our emails made me feel close to you… But I could never see you or touch you. Now I can, an’ I’m takin’ advantage of that.”