“So?” he asked when she didn’t moan and roll her eyes and tell him it was the best bite of food she’d ever put in her mouth.
“It’s good,” she admitted, though she didn’t even want to give him that. Why, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps her own attraction to him irritated her and put her in a bad mood, because he’d literally never done anything to her to warrant her dislike of him.
Other than life is so easy for him,she thought. The cowboy didn’t even have a job, so of course, he could take cooking classes, and learn how to properly season vegetables, and look up all the new places that existed in Dog Valley that hadn’t when she’d grown up here.
“I didn’t know you’d be coming in today,” Cash said.
“I didn’t know I owed you an itinerary.”
He chuckled and took another bite of his pizza. A stab of guilt moved through Lark, and she sighed as she took a bite too. Cash watched her, those dark eyes missing nothing.
The man had ridden bulls for a living, and blast him all the way back to Texas, Lark had looked him up online. He’d been really good, and he’d been Pro for five years, right at the top of the listings. The man knew how to work hard, and in fact, he seemed to be in better shape now than he’d been in August.
She’d come for a brief weekend in October after ending things with Danny for good. She’d simply needed to get away, and her parents’ house only stood three hours from campus. She’d put up with Cash while watching movies on her tablet in bed, but she’d had classes and responsibilities to return to. Lark told herself that she didn’t like Danny all that much anyway. As a friend, sure, but not a boyfriend.
“Who were you talking about earlier?” she asked as Cash picked up a second piece of pizza and bit off the tip. An errant floret of broccoli fell to the box, and he picked it up and put it back on his slice.
“What now?”
“You were saying something about someone who doesn’t even like you.” She cocked her eyebrows at him, practically daring him to deny it.
His face reddened, and he shook his head. “Ain’t no one.”
“Yeah, sure seems like it.”
He grinned, chuckled, and took another bite of pizza. Nothing she did ever seemed to unsettle him, and that only made her want to try harder. What would it take to irritate him, to make him snap back at her the way he had the first time they’d met? For some reason, she really wanted to push his buttons the way he pushed hers. She just hadn’t found a way yet.
“What about you?” he asked. “It’s the holidays. You didn’t get an invite to your boyfriend’s house? Or want to bring him here?”His tone suggested so much more, and Lark wanted to make up a fake boyfriend on the spot. Anything to not have to tell him that she didn’t have anyone in her life.
Besides, that’s not true,she told herself.You have Jet and Wade, and Momma and Daddy, and Sylvie and Ella.She had good roommates in Idaho, and yes, she could have gone to Sylvie’s grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving, but she’d wanted to come home, despite her parents not being here.
“I don’t have to tell you anything about him,” she said.
Cash chuckled and finished his second piece of pizza. Lark still had her first, and she bit off one of the chewy ends, appreciating a good bite of bread.
“Yeah, I know what that means,” he said, reaching into the box for his third piece.
“What does it mean?” she asked around her mouthful of garlicky, buttery bread.
“It means you broke up,” he said, pinning her with that black-eyed look.
How did a person come to be so dark anyway?she wondered. He didn’t wear his cowboy hat indoors, but his midnight black hair looked like it’d been professionally styled for a pro bull rider photo shoot that would happen in the next minute. It swept to the side and sat just a little bit long in the back so that it almost touched his collar, and Lark wanted to run her fingers through it more than anything she’d ever wanted before.
She fisted them and got up to put some distance between them. “Do you have anything to drink in this place?”
“Yeah,” he said, and she felt the weight of his eyes on her as she moved over to the fridge and opened it.
Lark once again found herself trying to get her eyes to stop lying to her. The fridge sat full of food, and not just leftovers inStyrofoam containers and doggie bags, butreal food. Where did he even get fresh corn in the winter, and a cantaloupe?
Did he peel that and de-seed it and eat it? Lark couldn’t imagine him doing so, though now she fantasized about being that cantaloupe and letting him handleherwith those big hands of his.
Lark’s body turned hot, and she leaned further into the fridge in an attempt to cool herself down. “This is ridiculous,” she muttered to herself.
“The root beer is my favorite,” he said. “But I’d be willing to let you have one.”
Her eyes finally landed on the drinks on the top shelf. “I’ll just have water, thanks.” She pulled out a bottle, surprised that Cash had put bottled, filtered water in the fridge.
She closed the fridge and twisted off the top of the bottle. “Do you cook?” In the next moment, her eyes landed on an open binder on the island.
