Nothingmore.
Mallory was outside waiting for me, and the sight of her stopped me in my tracks.
She was wearingthosejeans. The old ones, frayed at the hem and worn thin at the thighs, the ones that had always done something criminal to her figure back when we were younger. They still did.
I used to watch the little hearts on her butt walk away from me every single day at the Hungry Rooster.
They fit her differently now, snug across her hips in a way that made it genuinely difficult to think straight, and she had on at-shirt I hadn’t seen in over a decade that readGirls Are Like Country Roads. The Best Ones Have Curvesacross the chest.
The cotton had gone soft with age, and it was pulling tighter across her breasts than it used to, and I made myself look at the fence line instead of at her while I climbed out of the truck, my dick going hard as I stood up.
“You ready to work?”
I hopped down from the truck bed and grabbed the first post, hefting it over my shoulder. When I glanced back, Mallory was watching me in a way that made my pulse kick up a notch.
She grinned and held up her gloves. “Born ready.”
That was a lie. She may have grown up as a country girl, but Chicago had turned her into a city woman. She was just playing dress-up today.
I knew her hands would be soft and her technique nonexistent. But she was willing, and willing counted for a lot.
I showed her how to create a pilot hole first. That would be her job. Then I showed her what I’d be doing, running the post driver to set each wooden post in place permanently. They’d be there until the wood rotted out.
She listened carefully, her brow furrowed in concentration. Then we got to work.
After her first hole, I stepped in behind Mallory to inspect it, close enough that my thigh brushed the back of her jeans.
She didn’t move away.
“That’s perfect.”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” she sassed with a little butt shake that made me crazy inside. “I’ve still got a little country inside me.”
Maybe she did.
My pulse sped up, and my cock hardened. Mallory had always had that effect on me.
We worked our way down the fence line together, trading off the heavy work at her insistence.
A few times when she brushed past me to grab another post, her shoulder slid against my chest, and I wanted to reach out and grab her, topple us to the ground.
Damn, I was hot for this woman.
While we installed the new fencing, we talked.
Talking to Mallory had always been easy.
The sun kept ducking behind the clouds and coming back out again, and I was having a hard time pretending I was here for the fence and not for the view of her in those jeans.
“I did 4-H all the way through middle school,” she said, tamping dirt around a post while I held it straight. “Goats, chickens, and one very stubborn cow named Loretta.”
“I remember Loretta.”
She laughed. “Everyoneremembers Loretta. She bit the county extension agent.” She paused, pressing her boot against the packed earth. “I always thought I’d go back to it as an adult. Maybe volunteer with a local chapter and work with the kids. But when I looked into the Chicago program, it was all about robotics and STEM competitions. Which is great, genuinely, but it wasn’t what I was picturing. I wanted the experience I’d had. The livestock contests and the county fair projects. Kids learning how to care for something living.”
“That’s still what it is out here,” I rumbled. “The local county chapter still has a full livestock program. Cattle, sheep, goats, and poultry. They do a working farm day every spring where the kids come out and learn fence repair, actually.”
She looked up at me. “You’re joking.”
