Page 32 of Roping Her In

Jake blinked at the bag of chips, and then Hailey. “That’s not a meal.”

She smiled fully, and even emitted a light laugh. “Lila Mae is having a pasta bar at Feline Friends today,” she said. “I was actually planning to eat there.”

Foolishness swirled through Jake, but he swallowed it back. “Oh, well, you don’t have to stay. We can⁠—”

“I can stay for about fifteen minutes.” Her eyebrows went up, and that measure of challenge that he enjoyed so much entered her eyes. She surveyed the break room. “Are we eating in here, or going back to your office?”

“My office.” The words came out a little bit like a bark, though he didn’t mean them to. He didn’t test his enchiladas to make sure they’d gotten warm in the middle; he simply grabbed the plastic sack they’d been in, which held his fork and a couple of apples, and headed for the exit.

He led the way into his office, and Hailey followed. “Do you want me to close the door?” she asked.

He did and he didn’t, and Jake couldn’t make sense of the warring emotions running through him. In the end, he said, “Yeah, would you?” and rounded his desk and took a seat.

Hailey indeed closed the door, and then she sank into one of the chairs across from him. “What’s going on?” she asked. “I’m getting kind of a weird vibe from you.”

“Are you?” he asked.

She pulled open her bag of chips and simply nodded.

Jake didn’t know how to stop putting off such a vibe. He didn’t know how to tell her he just wanted to see her and hear the sound of her voice, or that he’d been stewing since the moment she’d left on Wednesday evening how to strike up another conversation with her, and get her alone.

“It’s about the arrest, isn’t it?” she asked.

Jake removed the lid from his enchiladas and slid it under the container. “I did want to talk to you about that.” He looked at her from under the brim of his cowboy hat. “But it’s really about Carson. He’s….”

Hailey waited for him to go on, while Jake searched for the right adjective.

“Well, he’s not afraid to say whatever he thinks,” Jake said. “But it can come off as tactless and insensitive.”

“You don’t have to apologize for your brother,” Hailey said. “I grew up in the Glover family, and there’s like, forty of us down there. I understand that every single one of them is their own person, making their own choices.”

Jake nodded, the muscles in his face still too tight.

“So did you look up what I was accused of?” she asked.

He blinked at her, watching as she carefully put another Dorito in her mouth. “No,” he said. “Should I have?”

“I figured you might.”

“I don’t care about that,” Jake said. “You said you didn’t do anything wrong, and I believe you.”

Her eyes latched onto his, and Jake had no idea what she was thinking. He could only feel that vibrant, pulsing energy between them that he’d first attributed to irritation and then finally admitted was attraction.

And if he had to classify it now, he could probably admit that he was downright obsessed with Hailey Winters. She accompanied him everywhere, even when she wasn’t physically on the ranch. She showed up in his thoughts first thing in the morning, and starred in his dreams at night. And while he shouldn’t have gone straight to kissing the woman, he definitely wanted to explore this spark between them.

“I just wanted to let you know that there’s a gossip mill out here at Three Rivers Ranch as well.” He finally cut into one of his enchiladas and took a bite.

Hailey made a small squeaking noise, the chip bag in her hand crumpling as she fisted her fingers. “There is?”

“Oh-ho-yeah.” He chuckled. “And your name has been all over it.”

A fierceness entered her eyes, and she leaned forward. “I hate gossip, Jake. I don’t want to know what anyone is saying about me.”

“This is the good kind.” He grinned at her. “Hartford can’t stop talking about you, and I swear, if that man hadn’t gone on a date the other night with someone else, he’d be asking you out.”

He chuckled and shook his head. “And Leia is married to a man, but she totally has a girl-crush on you. And Beau Peterson told me that he and Charlotte have already been scheming about how they can get you a job in the stables after your internship.”

A few other cowboys that Jake had on-call for the birthing shed had mentioned how pleasant Hailey was, and how capable, but he stopped there, because she looked like he’d hit her with a stun gun.