Page 58 of Risking it for the Cowboy

“I don’t recall asking if I did.” He tore away from her, but she grasped his arm, and he swore a spark sizzled his skin there, because it was the first time she was willingly grabbing him again in two weeks and he might jump out of his skin at the pride it induced, swirling like a cocktail with the adrenaline hitting his blood for a fight.

He looked down at her manicured nails, rose-petal pink, matching her shirt. Picked them up and wove his fingers into them as they trembled. Like the beauty queen she’d once been, so girlie for the woman who liked to dig in the dirt for a living and used plumbing wrenches and still secretly dreamed of Nashville stage lights.

He arched a brow at her. The pounding and barking continued. And miracle of miracles, she didn’t pull away, but squeezed more tightly as he squeezed her, as if he were a lifeline.

“I don’t want you to get hurt.”

A smirk twisted his lips as he chuckled. “You think I’ll get hurt, baby? Shoot. It’s like you don’t even know me. If this is the Jason Thompson I think it is—” He leaned into her ear and whispered, “He won’t be much of a problem.”

“You know him?” She gasped.

“T. Rex,” Daisy said, and those wide, watery blues killed him as he glanced down at her.

He hitched up a smile just for the girl and notched his chin, swinging her up into his arms. Her thin ones came around his neck and he rubbed her back. “I got you, girlie. Ain’t no one gonna bother you on my watch. Take your stubborn momma upstairs with you.”

He didn’t wait to see what daggers his beauty queen would glare at him for that and, instead, set Daisy down and moseyed into the house as Artex shimmied in behind him, flexing his fingers together to crack the knuckles, hearing Charlie haul Daisy up the house’s pocket staircase through the kitchen.

Atta girl.

The old frame reverberated with each bang on the door. The roof rose with Artex’s thunderous barking and bounding back and forth, rattling the windows. Fury lapped like sparks in his blood with each curse lobbed at Charlie, and he willed himself to temper his temper, but his sister, that call, that fateful night, and the worst decision he’d ever made, no matter how valiant, rushed back in a fiery streak of fury.

He popped his neck side to side, rolled out his shoulders, then dragged open the main door and leaned a shoulder casually on the frame and folded his arms.

“Wh … who the hell arrr…?” Jason demanded, words slurred, when realization dawned. “T.R. McClintock.”

T.R. grinned. “Howdy, partner.”

Jason smirked. “You sleeping with that trash?”

Oh, Jesus take the wheel.

He shoved the screen open, nudging Jason off step. Inhaled lilac from that shrub’s downy lavender clusters.

Blond. Blue eyed. A worn Johnny Cash T-shirt stretched over his chest, bootcut Levi’s over an old pair of shitkickers. Chasing cute boys in bands. Charlie had a type, at least, on the surface.

“Be nice,” he growled in lieu of the stream of venom on his tongue, itching to be deployed.

“She’ll trrrap you … screw you too…” Jason slurred. “You’ll finnishhh last being a nice guy to her.”

“Damn straight.” T.R. let the screen swing shut behind him while he made himself a barrier between the deadbeat and the doornail. “Nice guys make sure their women finish first.” T.R.’s grin rose higher, belying his rising fury as he leaned forward and whispered, just to crawl deeper under Jason’s skin, “And I seem to be real talented at comin’ in last.”

“In the sh-same houshe as my little girl?”

T.R.’s jaw clenched so tightly he might crack a tooth. He’d never have rocked Charlie’s world like he had if the girl had been home. But Jason also didn’t get to call Daisy his little girl when his little girl only saw him as a monster. His fists balled beneath each bicep.

“She swoops in and shteals ’er during my weekend with her and gets me arrested so y’all can play happy family together? I didn’t think you kept chicks around long enough for that.”

His jaw tensed at having his reputation flung in his face, to know that Charlie might have heard it through the screen. “I’m gonna give you one second to walk back to your truck and get in, then get gone,” T.R. said low and measured.

“Or what?” Jason balled his fists. “S-sue me again, the dumbass who couldn’t even read the suit properly the first time—”

“Second’s up.”

T.R. whirled the man around, linking his arm through his elbows behind his back, shoving his chin down to his chest and forcing him off the step. Jumping off the porch behind him, he escorted him back down the walk to his beat-up Ford.

The guy thrashed. Smelled of stale liquor. Cursing a storm. He’d gone to jail last night and was already drunk again? And just the look of fear on little Daisy’s face and that ashen sheen that had drained Charlie of all color ignited a fight in him that he hadn’t felt since he’d discovered Charity, his sister, way up in New York City.

Charlie had tried so hard to treat him like a one and done. But maybe, he was starting to see why.