“Good.”
“This is weird,” Walker said.
“What is?”
“More people now work for us than ever spoke to us willingly while we were growing up in town. Plus all the people who are here from town to try and make business deals with usbecause now we matter.”
A surge of adrenaline shot through his veins. It was true. And it made him feel… triumphant. Made him feel like he had won something.
Then he turned and saw her walk through the door. It was like being hit with an anvil in the center of his chest. It was like the world, the room, the moment, all just stopped.
Marlowe.
This was why he’d been avoiding her. Goddamn.
Every shred of good intention went right out the window the moment she set foot in that barn. Boss, employee, that didn’t matter.
Man. Woman. That was as advanced as his brain was right now.
No, if that were true, it wouldn’t need to be her. If that were true he could go hook up with any woman, like he’d always done, and it wouldn’t need to be her.
It hit him then that she was one of the few forbidden things he’d ever come across.
The only things that had ever been forbidden to him had to do with his own moral compass, not about anything else. And while his own moral compass certainly wished like hell his dick wasn’t pointed toward the true north of Marlowe, it was. The bigger issue was all the external things it could break. Back when he’d been younger, he’d been trying to break things.
Now he’d actually built something. And keeping it intact mattered.
But she was pretty like a blade. Sharp, shiny, and able to cut him deep without even trying. This lure into forbidden temptation was new. And it was intense.
Her red hair was cascading over her shoulders, parted to the side, with a wave that framed her face. She was wearing a tight burgundy dress that came only midway down her thighs.
He was well familiar with those thighs. He had them wrapped around his waist while he drove deep inside of her.
A lot of the women in town had enjoyed secretly sneaking off and giving him blowjobs back in the day. Because what was hotter than a little bit of danger?
The thing was, he’d always been the danger. Now, Marlowe was the danger, and it lit him on fire.
He could feel Walker looking at him, and he wasn’t sure he cared.
Or rather, he wasn’t sure he could do anything to mitigate the reaction he was having, to make himself give a fuck about hiding it from his brother.
“Wow. Damn. She’s hot, just like you said,” Walker whispered low.
“Thanks,” Cody responded. “Your opinion has been noted now multiple times.”
“As is yours,” Walker said.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” he said.
“Sure, there is, boss,” Walker said, moving away from him and pushing into the middle of the room, where he began to mingle with the guests as easily as he did everything.
Walker was just so annoyingly adept in social situations, something Cody had never picked up, and how would he?
You had to have some kind of natural affinity for it when you lived in a town where half the girls were forbidden from speaking to you.
He had been treated like something scary, not like something to be pitied. A guy from the wrong side of the tracks who might be uncivilized.
But it wasn’t the same as learning to talk to people. Learning how to be in a room. Even winning in the rodeo wasn’t the same as all that.
