Maisey.
Not the woman who raised me until I couldn’t take living in that house with her and my father for one more minute.
I shake my head, and my temper roars to life.
I donotwant Maisey Spencer.
Correction: I don’t want to want Maisey Spencer.
My body is very clear on the fact that it doesn’t much care what my brain thinks on this matter. “You’re not leaving until I tell you June can be on the soccer team, are you?”
If I thought she was prickly before, I was sorely mistaken.
“Have you even asked the kids on your team how they’d feel about rotating in an extra player every once in a while, since she was too late for tryouts? I haven’t been the best mother the past few years. I’ll own that. But if there’s one thing I’m learning—and quickly, at that—it’sthat teenagers have an innate sense of right, wrong, and fair. But if you don’t even want to ask,fine. Thank you for your bluntness, Mr.Jackson. I’ll make sure the next time I stop by the school to see if there’s anything any of you need, I won’t bother with coming in here.”
She turns, giving me a view of that ass and the blue fabric sliding across the muscle, and stalks out of my classroom without so much as a wobble on her heels.
Maisey Spencer, the woman who once spent an entire episode of her TV show in the hospital after she tripped over her own two boots, stalks out of my classroom like she was born on a runway.
And if that wasn’t enough, when she reaches the doorway, she turns and meets my gaze with hard, unwavering, but shiny blue eyes. “And I hope you think of me when you eat that cherry crisp. It’s thelastthing of mine you’llevereat.”
Every ounce of blood drains from my head to my cock at the images that flood my vision.
I’m hallucinating about eating Maisey Spencer.
And I don’t think it’ll ever stop.
Chapter 8
Maisey
It’s getting dark, so I need to get back to the main house and heat up dinner for my recluse—I mean, my daughter—but there’s something so cathartic about beating the crap out of the half walls between the horse stalls in the barn with a sledgehammer.
“How’s that feel?” I ask the very bad chalk drawing of Dean’s face after I put the sledgehammer through it.
It doesn’t answer.
Obviously.
So I move on to the next chalk drawing, this one of a copper-haired, math-teaching, soccer-coaching cowboy that looks more like a snail wearing a donut on its head.
I let the sledgehammer swing, feeling the burn in my arms and shoulders and lower back at lifting the heavy tool once again. When it lands with a satisfying thwack right between that cowboy snail’s eyeballs, I feel another jolt of satisfaction that’s quickly followed by regret.
“I really want to hate you,” I whisper to the splintered wall. “You break the rules and use the ranch without making sure the liability insurance is there, but you won’t break the rules for my kid and let her on the soccer team. How is that fair?”
“Guy I used to know liked to say nothing’s ever fair,” a deep voice says behind me.
My shoulders bunch, my entire face twitches, and my freaking backstabbing vagina swoons.
I could act surprised and jerk around andaccidentallyswing my sledgehammer at him, but I don’t needthatlawsuit either.
So I put the sledgehammer down and turn to face Flint. I’m nearly done taking out the stalls in the rickety barn that won’t collapse today but definitely shouldnotbe used frequently. The load-bearing walls and support beams seem to be in so-so shape. Definitely need to be replaced. Or the whole barn needs to be rebuilt. There’s splintered wood all over the floor and a cobweb in the doorway lit by the setting sun. If it weren’t for the man blocking the view, I’m pretty sure I’d be gasping in awe at the colors lighting the sky over the bluff in the distance, beyond the trees.
It isso prettyhere. And I feel like I have too much to do to stop and breathe and just enjoy it.
“Can I help you?” I ask him.
If ever a man was born with a more natural mulish expression, I don’t want to meet him either.
