Page 80 of Slow Hands Cowboy

He didn’t like that he had been vulnerable on main, and he wished that he could take it back, but something about sex with Addison had left him feeling raw, and willing to exist in that space.

Until it had all felt like a little bit too much.

Which was why he had decided to take her into the shower.

And there, he had explored her body, every inch of it. All slick and wet and glorious and the epitome of every fantasy he’d ever had.

It was good, and so was she.

Worth all of the pent-up longing and angst that he had felt all this time.

By the time they had finished there, they were both panting and ready for another round, and he had torn open another condom and thrust inside of her just in time for both of them to come in a rush.

She had fallen asleep in his bed, and he had gotten up and gone into his office, checked a few messages, responded to some media inquiries, and fallen asleep on his couch before getting up at the ass crack of dawn and heading out to the resort hub to try and connect with Cody and see how everything was going.

The resort hub was really just one of the barns that they had remodeled. They had their horses for the trail rides stowed in there, and at the beginning of the day, that was where everyone who worked on the resort side met up.

This morning, Lila, Nolan, and Cody were out there, engaged in what looked like a rigorous debate.

“Because of the zip line, we’re attracting more extreme athletes,” Lila was saying.

“Yeah, I get that, but mostly we get people from the city coming and staying here.”

“I know that,” Lila said. “I quite literally manage all of the staff, I talk to everybody, I know who our usual audience is, but I think that we could expand our offerings to appeal more to those who like a more extreme sport.”

“What are we doing?”

“Lila is asking for funds because she wants to invest in more hardcore adventure tourism.”

Lila looked over at Walker and lifted a brow. “The hotel has been at capacity for a couple of weeks now. It’s not showing any sign of slowing down.”

“But that’s just it. We have to figure out how to appeal to people seasonally. We need to get the skiers and the snowboarders who want to go to Bachelor to stop by here and spend some time as well. We’re not going to be able to compete with Bend or Sun River for proximity, but we can offer other things. I haven’t gotten as far as figuring winter out yet, but I know that we could set up some campsites and I think that if we had an endurance ride rather than just trail rides, we would bring in more people with that sort of spirit.”

Walker looked over at Nolan, who was generally Lila’s biggest hater. And vice versa.

“She’s right,” Nolan said. “We can’t only appeal to the people with aspirations of sitting around doing nothing and taking just light trail rides. We need to try to hit a different demographic. And thanks to Walker and his lightning-fast roping skills, we’ve been more talked about than we could ever have hoped to be. We’ve had a fuller capacity than we could have ever hoped. But you know, most businesses fail at points of growth.”

“Yeah,” Cody said. “Because they try to grow too much. My concern is we need to consolidate and focus in on what’s working.”

“I think that’s a mistake,” Lila insisted.

Cody sighed, sounding exasperated. “Lila,” he said. “Businesses aren’t run on vibes. I get that you feel this way, but you don’t have data to back it up.”

“I’m not going to provide you with data,” Lila said. “You might have had data for starting this ranch, but we didn’t demand it from you. We trusted you.”

Walker could see that Lila was upset, and he also knew Cody well enough to know when his older brother wasn’t going to budge. Lila was spirited, and sometimes she did speak before she thought, but everything she did was carefully considered. She was smart as hell. Cody didn’t recognize their similarities, he thought, because Lila’s personality was so different. She was spikier than Cody. She was quick to speak.

But at the end of the day, she was bright, and she didn’t take unnecessary risks. In many ways, Walker had always felt like he was floating above his family, observing them.

It was part of his whole shtick, he supposed. That laid-back, laconic thing that he projected. What it actually allowed him to do was put distance between himself and other people, take in information while avoiding giving any information about himself. It worked for him.

But sometimes, he did it a little bit with his family.

He clenched his teeth, his stomach going tight as he realized that he had told Addison Carey that David Reynolds wasn’t his father.

Why had he done that? It was like peeling a layer of his own skin off, and he wasn’t into that.

For a moment, he had the panicked thought that she would tell somebody, and he hated that for two reasons. That it panicked him, and that it mattered.