“And currently trying to eat someone’s truck,” Boone interrupts, pointing toward the parking lot.
We all turn to see Rita, who has somehow escaped from my truck bed again, now attempting to chew on the rubber mud flap of a Ford F-150.
“Dammit,” I mutter, abandoning my cart to sprint toward the parking lot, very aware that all three brothers are watching my ass as I run.
“Smart and loyal,” Wyatt calls after me, and I can hear the smirk in his voice. The rough edge to it makes me shiver despite the heat.
“Shut up!” I yell back without turning around, because if I look at him right now, I might do something stupid. Like notice how good he looks when he’s being an asshole.
By the time I reach Rita, she’s moved on from the mud flap to the truck’s antenna, thanks to her ability to jump on the hoods of cars.
“Rita, no!” I grab her collar and pull her away from her latest victim. “Bad goat. Very bad goat.”
She looks at me with those innocent brown eyes, and bleats.
“Don’t give me that look. You know what you did.”
I glance back toward my truck to see all three McCoy brothers watching. Jesse’s grinning with heat in his eyes, Boone’s doubled over laughing in a way that shows off his back muscles, and Wyatt looks like someone just proved his point about goats being weeds with legs. But there’s something else in his expression too. Something hungry that makes my skin flush.
“That’s it,” I announce to Rita as I lead her back to my truck, trying to ignore the way my body throbs with unwanted awareness. “No more feed store trips for you. From now on, you’re staying home.”
Rita bleats again.
As I secure her more carefully in the truck bed, I catch sight of Wyatt shaking his head and saying something to his brothers that makes Jesse punch his shoulder. The casual violence between them, the easy physicality, sends an unexpected rush of heat through me.
I don’t need to hear the words to know he’s probably making another crack about goats and weeds and the general chaos that follows me everywhere.
“Come on, girl,” I mutter to Rita, climbing into the driver’s seat and trying to ignore how my hands shake. “Let’s go home before you give them any more ammunition.”
But as I drive away, I can’t stop thinking about the way Jesse looked when he was asking about Rita’s diet, like he genuinely wanted to know. Like he wanted any excuse to keep talking to me, to keep standing close enough that I could feel his intention.
And I can’t stop thinking about the way Wyatt dismissed her, like she doesn’t matter because she’s not one of his precious dogs. The intensity in his eyes that said he was thinking about something completely different than goats.
Most of all, I can’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to prove him wrong. To push his buttons. To make him lose that iron control.
Which is exactly the kind of thinking that’s going to get me in trouble.
The wet, aching kind of trouble that my body is suddenly craving.
Two hours later,I’m mucking out Rita’s pen when I hear the telltale sound of her gate creaking open. My body’s still thrumming from the encounter at the feed store, and I’ve changed shirts twice because I kept imagining I could smell those guys on me.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I say, spinning around with the pitchfork still in my hands.
But Rita’s already halfway across the yard, trottingtoward the property line with the determined gait of someone on a mission.
“Rita! Get back here!”
She ignores me completely, her usual response to my commands.
I drop the pitchfork and take off after her, but Rita’s got a head start and four legs to my two. By the time I catch up, she’s crossed onto McCoy land and is heading straight for their water trough. As if our water is not good enough.
Of course. Of course she’d head straight for McCoy territory, like she knows exactly how on edge I already am.
“Rita, no,” I pant, catching her collar just as she’s about to dive in. “If you have to escape, couldn’t you at least pick a different direction? Like toward town? Or Mars? Anywhere that doesn’t involve me seeing those three again while I’m still...”
Still what? Still turned on from earlier? Still replaying the way Jesse’s fingers would have felt in my hair? Still imagining what Wyatt’s hands would feel like on my bare…
She bleats and pulls away from me.
