Page 7 of Rope Me, Cowboys

“Thank you,” I said, emotion welling in my chest. Why was he being so nice? A guy had never even asked me to stay the night with him before, let alone given me free reign of his apartment. This guy was giving me the ranch.

“From what our dad said, I got the feeling you didn’t exactly come here willingly. But for what it’s worth, I’m glad you came.”

“Me, too,” I said, avoiding his gentle brown eyes. I was afraid I’d start crying if he didn’t quit giving me so much sympathy.

“Don’t look so sad,” he said, stepping closer and brushing my blond hair away from my cheek. “I’m glad you came to us to keep you out of trouble. I can’t imagine how many temptations wait around every corner in a big city. But don’t worry. No harm in the whole world will reach you here—not before it goes through the three of us.”

If only he knew. The temptations in the city might be plenty, but here, I was dealing with a whole new kind of temptation.

7

Sawyer

Now

I could tell by the silence at breakfast that Waylon hadn’t gotten over his anger at our father for sending us a glorified babysitting job. Amber’s confusion at the airport the night before replayed in my mind, and I smiled to myself as I tossed a dozen eggs into the spitting skillet on the woodstove. That made two people who thought this was a babysitting job.

Holden stepped inside, wiped his boots on the mat, and dumped a towering armload of wood into the wood box. “Frost is coming soon,” he said, opening the door to feed the stove. Usually, we’d let it burn down when we went out to do chores, but all of us were thrown off by the presence of a woman in the house. It had been a long time since we had one of those.

I slid a pile of eggs onto each of our plates, and we all dug in.

“You gonna make me ask?” Waylon grumbled after a few minutes.

“What’s to say?” I answered. “She’ll be gone in three months.”

“She’s beautiful,” Holden said, not looking up from his eggs.

“So she’s just what Dad said she’d be,” Waylon said, pushing his chair back. “A spoiled socialite. Whatever that is.”

“She’s a city girl,” I said. “We knew that.”

“And we’re saddled with her because she can’t get her shit together on her own.”

“It’s three months,” I said. “She didn’t murder someone. She just got a little wild. We’ve all done as much after a night of too many whiskeys.”

“If Dad’s happy, we should be happy,” Holden said.

“Three months,” Waylon said, rising from the table. “That’s too damn long. Anything can happen in three months.”

I wondered if he was thinking about Maria, and how quickly things had gone south after she’d moved in.

“Three months isn’t much,” Holden said, finishing up his eggs. “But it’s an eternity.”

We were probably all thinking about Maria, and the mess it had caused when she turned tail and ran. We were finally all back to good with each other, brothers until the end. We couldn’t make the mistake of letting a woman come between us again, no matter what role she played in our lives.

After we washed up and stacked our plates in the drying rack with last night’s dinner dishes, we headed out to do the morning chores.

I stopped Waylon at the barn door. “You okay, brother?” I asked. “I thought we talked it out and agreed on this. We can call Dad and tell him the deal’s off if you aren’t on board.”

Waylon grunted. “I’m on board,” he said. “We need that loan to save the ranch. That doesn’t mean I gotta like it.”

“Oh, you’ll like her, all right,” I said.

“If you give her a fair chance, that is,” Holden added.

Waylon pushed past me with a scowl that would scare the cows up from the pasture. He opened the barn door and strode off towards the side-by-side, calling back over his shoulder as he went. “I have no intention of giving her a chance or liking her. She may be our stepsister forever, but she’s only our problem for a few months.”

I wasn’t quite so sure.