Tempt Me, Cowboy (Copper Mountain Rodeo)

  Some people, it went without saying, were less supportive.

  “How many times do I have to ask you to stop calling me that?” she mused aloud. She leaned down and scooped the tube of lip balm from the floor, then slapped it back on its shelf. “That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m honestly curious. Do you not hear me when I ask you to stop or do you think I’m kidding? I can’t figure it out.”

  He was frowning at her when she stopped talking, his boyish looks not striking her as at all charming any longer. Not when she’d experienced what it was like to spend time with an actual, grown man. One who had yet to lie to her, about anything, because he claimed he liked her. A lot. It was astonishing how good that honesty made her feel, she realized then, no matter where this thing between them was or wasn’t going. No matter how temporary it was.

  “You’re making a fool of yourself,” Tod informed her. In that friendly way of his she no longer believed was particularly friendly at all.

  She stared at him. “By picking up a prescription? How do you figure?”

  “Don’t play games with me.”

  “That’s actually hilarious, coming from you.”

  “Listen,” he said, magnanimously. “I know I was harsh with you the other day in the office. I know that must have hurt. I’m not proud of myself. You walked straight into this guy’s clutches, and I get it, I do. This is my fault.”

  For the first time in months, Chelsea looked at Tod and realized she found him nothing but entertaining.

  “I can’t stand watching you do this to yourself,” he said in the same ponderous tone, and she believed he meant that. The jerk.

  “And by ‘this,’ you mean trading up?” she asked innocently.

  Well. Kind of innocently.

  “You’re Chelsea Collier,” he said flatly, once again voicing her fears. This time, she liked it even less. “You have a certain reputation in this town, and you know that. You can’t start dressing like a barfly and hanging all over the first single man to look in your direction without people talking. What did you think would happen?”

  “Oh,” she said, aware she was adopting little bit of that lazy drawl Jasper used so well, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. “You know. Nothing. Like what happened to you when I caught you with Leona.”

  “I knew you were still holding on to that.”

  He was less entertaining when she wanted to punch him, she found.

  “I wouldn’t say I was holding on so much as it’s burned into my memory forever whether I like it or not, in a post-traumatic stress sort of way.”

  She pointed at herself, then swept her hand up and down, taking in what Tod apparently felt constituted a ‘barfly’ outfit. A pair of trousers she’d worn to work which, yes, fit her. And a long sleeved t-shirt that also fit her, not too tightly but not too loosely, either, beneath a pretty blue scarf. Hardly Mata Hari’s first choice of vamping attire.

  “But this? Is called shopping from my own closet.” It was true; she hadn’t bought a single new item of clothing. She’d simply stopped hiding herself away in the ones she had. “And the rest is called moving on. I would have thought you, of all people, would be thrilled.”

  “I care about you, Chelsea,” Tod said, and though he used that pompous tone, the fact he also actually used her name struck her as something of a victory. “I don’t like to see you sink down to this level.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said. And she tried to, she really did.

  But it was the first time in memory that she’d been relieved to hear nosy Carol Bingley call her name.

  She paid for Mama’s pills and stood there pretending she didn’t notice the way Carol was staring at her, until the other woman let out one of her trademark sniffs.

  “Your poor mother,” Carol said, her voice dripping with censure while Chelsea reminded herself that this was a lonely old woman, not a monster. That this was what sadness looked like unchecked. “To see the Crawford name come to this.”

  “Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?” Chelsea quoted theatrically, carrying on with the theme—and could see by Carol’s frown that she was not up on her Jane Austen. Not a great surprise. Chelsea smiled instead, though it was starting to feel a lot more like a grimace. “My mother is fine, thank you. I’ll tell her you said hello.”

  And still, she found herself knocking on Jasper’s door as soon as she could make it back down into town after another painfully silent meal with her mother, and she left her car parked right there in front of the depot like the red flag it was, announcing her scandalous whereabouts to anyone who drove by.

  “You look a little…” Jasper paused, standing in his open door in nothing but the kind of cargo pants that hung low on his narrow hips and still made it clear he was the richest man in town. “Intense.”

  “You look clothed,” she retorted, and his hazel eyes went from that gleam of amusement to pure gold in a single hot instant.

  “Easily remedied,” he muttered, reaching out and yanking her inside.

  And this was what mattered, she told herself as they succumbed to that wildness again, to the soaring fire and the shattering passion, right there on the other side of the door, up against his wall. These moments of the purest happiness were what she collected and what she’d hold close to her heart, like treasures, when all of this madness burned itself out.

  Because she wasn’t the naïve fool people idiots like Tod seemed to think. It didn’t matter what Jasper had said about labels or restrictions. She hadn’t had to look at those intrusive pictures of the house he’d owned in Dallas that were splashed all over the Internet—or the woman he’d shared it with and called his wife, trophy or not—to understand that they came from completely different worlds.

  She knew that better than anyone. She was the one who tasted this man, lost herself in him, knew every last inch of his glorious body. She knew what it was to hold him and what it was to be held down by him. She knew that heartbreaking smile and she knew his roguish grin. That delicious drawl, still as thick and smooth as honey when he wanted it to be. That clever mouth, and that shrewd intelligence he hid behind his Texan routine. The way he could take her in his hands and make her mindlessly and entirely his, every time.

  She knew.

  This was the last, best stretch of fall in Montana. Rich golden days, endlessly clear nights, a last gasp of perfect weather before the bleak cold and endless dark ahead. Something to dream about when the snow started. Something to hold on to while the storms hurled themselves over the Rockies and reminded them why not everyone lived in a place like this, dreaming of the summers while winter did its worst. She knew.

  Just like the poem said, better than she ever could:

  Nothing gold could stay.

  8.

  Chelsea was eating her usual school day breakfast of steel cut oats with a dash of milk and honey, staring out the windows of the breakfast nook off the kitchen that Mama liked to call her morning room, not seeing the tall pines or the town clustered along the river below or the white-tipped mountains in the distance. She was thinking about Jasper, lost in a cascade of extremely carnal images from the night before. His deep, hot kiss when she’d knocked on his door, his hands fisted in her hair. The way she’d knelt before him. The look in his eyes when she’d taken him deep in her mouth—

  Mama, who had been maintaining her affronted, chilly silence for more than a week, even through the wedding and its aftermath, cleared her throat. Pointedly. Making Chelsea jump and flush hot, as if she’d been broadcasting the images in her head all over the kitchen wall.

  “The rodeo is coming to town,” Mama observed from her usual place at the table, the paper opened before her, though her eyes were on Chelsea. “The streets will be filled with all the usual carrying on. Bad decisions and public embarrassments from here to Bozeman, just like every other year.” She stared at Chelsea, who had gone still in her seat, her oatmeal forgotten. “But then everything will get back to normal. You’ll still be
a rural schoolteacher with a quiet little life. And he’ll still be a billionaire and the man responsible for destroying this family’s legacy. What then, Chelsea?”

  “What do you mean, what then?” Her voice was light, thank goodness. Not as wary as she felt. Not tinged with the darkness of all the things she feared. “What do you think is going to happen?”

  “I think he’s going to smash your heart into pieces, shame you and this family even more than he already has, and then disappear.”

  Her mother’s voice wasn’t cold then, or furious—both of which Chelsea could have handled. Instead, it was soft. Something like wistful. And impossibly, unutterably sad.

  “Mama,” Chelsea murmured, trying hard to be gentle, to keep her tone respectful. To keep her confusion and panic at bay. “You don’t even know him.”

  “You think I’m an old, silly fool,” her mother said then. “And I won’t pretend I don’t give you cause. But you’re not the first girl in the world to have your head turned by the wrong man, Chelsea. Look at what happened to that friend of yours. Men come and go. They mean what they say when they whisper it in your ear, but then something else comes along and it turns out they mean that, too. Usually more.” She lifted her hands, encompassing the sunny kitchen they sat in. The house. The view of Chelsea’s whole world right there outside the windows, like a finely-rendered painting she could see in all its perfect detail even with her eyes closed. “This is what matters. This is what endures. Your family name. Your history. Your place in the march of time, no matter what you did with your individual days. No matter what they whispered about you.”

  She wasn’t talking about Chelsea, or even Jenny’s wedding. It came like a flash, that understanding, and it was profoundly dislocating. It was easier to think of her mother as a cantankerous old character she had to work around, to placate, to care for. It was something else entirely to think of her as a person in her own right, possessed of her own, complicated history. And perhaps far lonelier than Chelsea had imagined.

  It wasn’t an understanding she particularly wanted, Chelsea realized, and that made her deeply ashamed of herself.

  “You’ve made your mark here,” she said after a moment. “Whether there’s ever a Crawford Museum or not, you have been a tireless volunteer for every single cause I can think of, Mama. The library, the school board, the new hospital. Isn’t that enough of a legacy?”

  “I understand my place,” Mama said after another long moment, and it felt to Chelsea like there were too many things unsaid in the air between them, thick like smoke and far more treacherous. “Oh, I dreamed of other things, other places. Who doesn’t? I wanted to go to Ireland and live a while in all that green. I wanted to be a dancer.”

  “I didn’t know you danced,” Chelsea said, absurdly charmed at the notion.

  “I don’t,” Mama replied evenly. “And I’ve never been to Ireland, either.”

  She reached over and slid a hand over Chelsea’s, and when Chelsea looked down, it was like looking at some kind of time-lapse photograph. Her mother’s knuckles were a bit larger, thanks to the Crawford family curse of arthritis, and the veins more pronounced, but their hands were the same. The same narrow fingers, the same shaped backs of their palms. The same size, even.

  “You’re kinder than I’ve ever been,” Mama said in a low voice. “Smarter, too, and I would have killed for that hair when I was young. But beneath that, we’re the same, Chelsea. You’re meant for this place, this town. Your brother and your sister were restless spirits, always looking for whatever lay on the other side of the horizon, but not you.”

  “Mama…” She didn’t know what she meant to say, but there was a great pressure on her chest then, like a band tightening around her ribs, and she knew only that she didn’t want to hear this. Whatever it was.

  But her mother didn’t stop. “When they looked up at the stars, you were sinking your feet deep in the ground where you stood. From the time you were a baby.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Chelsea whispered, stricken.

  “Yes,” Mama said, matter-of-factly. She squeezed Chelsea’s hand once, hard. “You do.”

  She found him in the lower level of the depot late that afternoon, after she’d finished with another day of teaching and then a good hour or so of sitting in her classroom, putting off the inevitable. Chelsea walked inside, taking a moment to appreciate the graceful old lines of the building, the little flourishes that whispered of the lost Old West, and the light still streaming in from outside.

  She wanted to do anything but this.

  Jasper had his cellphone clamped to his ear while he leaned over a drafting table in the far corner of the great room, making notes on the blueprints he’d showed her before. He was talking about his taproom and tasting room, his brewing tanks and the complicated state laws that governed beer production, and Chelsea tuned out the words as she stood there.

  It was that voice of his she loved, that deep, raspy drawl. It was the hard perfection of his very male form, packed into jeans and a tight-fitting Henley, that made her mouth water involuntarily. It was the way he shoved his hand into his hair and raked it back, and that sexy crook of his mouth when he looked up and saw her standing there.

  “I didn’t expect you until later,” he said when he finished his call, tossing his phone carelessly on to the table.

  She wanted to stand there forever. She wanted to soak him in, drown in him, until she couldn’t tell the difference between the two of them any longer. The way she felt when he drove her to that edge and held her there, before hurling them both over the side and into oblivion. She wanted to stay right here, right now, right in this moment, like nothing else existed or ever could.

  But Mama had been right. No matter how Chelsea had tried to rationalize it away. Mama might be a snob. She might have been huffy and quick to take offense. She might even have caused more than her share of trouble, because she’d always been a character. But that didn’t make her wrong about Chelsea.

  Roots and history. Marietta down into her bones. That was who Chelsea was, who she’d chosen to be. That was who she’d stay. She’d become her mother because she was already like her mother, and maybe, deep inside, she’d always known that. Maybe that was why no matter how hard she’d dreamed and plotted and pretended, she’d never tried very hard to get away from Marietta. Maybe this was her own little half-hearted rebellion about the inevitable.

  But if Jenny’s wedding had taught her anything, it was that she liked the inevitable. She liked her small town. She liked all the characters she shared it with. She liked being part of their story. That wasn’t going to change. She wasn’t going to leave.

  And Jasper Flint was like those stars her brother and sister had hungered for throughout their youth, a brilliant mess of light against the dark Montana skies, and much too far away no matter how close he seemed. Never hers. Not really.

  She wasn’t sure he knew that, but she did. And she also knew that she’d fallen heedlessly and foolishly in love with this man, practically from the first moment she’d set eyes on him. If she didn’t walk away now, she never would.

  Mama was right about that, too: he’d crush her when he left.

  And Chelsea had no doubt that he’d leave. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. That was what men like him did. Like Charles Monmouth had done on his wedding day to Jenny, like winter followed fall. It was who Jasper was. She could no more begrudge that than she could damn the stars above her head for their shine.

  But he was walking toward her in that same low, confident way he’d done the morning they’d met, and she knew that if she let him touch her, she’d lose the will to do this. And she had to do this.

  “I’m not coming later,” she said, blurting it out before she could convince herself not to do it, to wait, to think, to put it off a while longer. “I only came now to say goodbye.”

  He stopped walking all of two strides away, and then went still.

  Too still.

&nb
sp; “Are you going on a trip?” His tone was too even, too polite. She knew better than to believe it.

  “This can’t work,” she said, screwing up her courage and tipping her chin back as she threw it out there. “We both know that. I think it’s time we ended it, before anyone gets hurt.”

  “I think someone always gets hurt, Triple C. That’s the game.”

  “I don’t want to play games.” She cleared her throat, tried not to melt at that look in his eyes. “I don’t want to play at all.”

  “What’s this about?” he asked softly, and she wanted nothing more than to close the distance between them, melt into him, let him hold her. But she couldn’t let that happen. She didn’t want to lose herself any more than she already had. “The gossip?”

  “I don’t care about gossip,” she bit out, holding herself tight and still, like she didn’t know what she’d do if she eased up on her own grip.

  “Of course you do,” he contradicted her. “You live here.”

  She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised they’d come such a long way in so short a time, that the two of them should switch positions like that. But then again, if they hadn’t come so far, this wouldn’t hurt.

  She couldn’t let herself think about how much it hurt.

  “I’ll come and have a beer in the spring,” she told him. “When you open.”

  “Is that supposed to be my consolation prize?” His drawl was more pronounced, his eyes narrowed and bright with temper, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “Lucky me.”

  “Please don’t make this hard.”

  “Did you think I’d take it well?” He laughed, short and unhappy. “I spent most of last night so deep inside you I forgot my name. I know how you taste. I’m not okay with this, Chelsea.”

  “You don’t have to be okay with it,” she said quickly, ignoring the images he’d thrown into her head. Ignoring her body’s reaction to it, to him, like clockwork. “Though I suspect you’re just unused to someone else making a decision for you.” She smiled at him then, and making that smile look real was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, but she managed it. “You don’t want me, Jasper. When the novelty wears off, you won’t remember why you ever did.”