Page 97 of Risking it for the Cowboy

She climbed into his driver seat. “So glad I always get first dibs on you,” she teased.

And he, never able to tell her no, hitched up his grin in spite of his worry about Charlie, and shut the door to take her to his house.

*

A shiny Silverado and horse trailer were parked at the main house as Charlie crossed onto Dixon-McClintock land and wound around the farmyard and outbuildings, up the escarpment to his cabin.

Thaddeus’s truck was parked—haphazardly?—in front of his single garage. She and Daisy got out and stepped up the porch to the front door. No one answered when she knocked, when the sound of a woman laughing filtered out from behind the house.

Her pulse quickened. Her feet stalled…

A woman. The comments on the social post still swirled illness in her. Her suspicions from earlier she’d done her best to stamp out raced anew. Thad’s cageyness, his abrupt departure. The certified letter still clenched in her grip, crumpled, as she’d tried to cling to some shred of reality to keep her mind from reeling, and Daisy—who’d fallen silent in the back seat—from suspecting something wrong.

The laughter continued. Her feet picked up again, anger now swirling with the distrust and the helplessness from what she knew had been Jason’s anonymous post. Harassing her. He hadn’t humiliated her in public in a long time. But he liked to do those things when he felt cornered. And he knew Thad was in her life now. What better way to silence her, scare her off, than to drag her name through the mud! It would threaten her career, too, if the university caught wind of it. They didn’t like bad press.

She and Daisy circumvented the porch to the back steps that led down to Thad’s firepit and yard, anxiousness to see him, to not be affirmed of the worst about him, and her eyes landed on…

His back, sitting on the steps gazing out onto the cold firepit in the sunlight blinking through the trees.

Arm around a woman tucked beside him who was hugging his waist, all curves, tight denim, and long, golden-brown waves over her shoulder. The woman laughed again, looking up at him adoringly, and he hooked his arm around her neck and planted a kiss to her head, chuckling about something.

“Naw, I’m just a hopeless romantic,” he replied to whatever it was the woman had said. “The thing is, she actually trusts me.”

“Well, you’re breaking more than a few hearts on the McClintock Alumni page,” the woman teased, knocking him playfully in the arm, coming back together again.

“Thanks for the reminder,” he grumbled sarcastically. “God why the hell do I love you?”

Charlie’s stomach fell to the decking.

This was the final straw. She couldn’t handle anything else landing on her shoulders. The weight of it all was crushing her. She didn’t want to see Tyler, either. Resented being embroiled in this family.

Her eyes watered. Her feet slowed and pounding thudded hard in her ears. Or maybe it was her heart thumping out of her chest.

Daisy let go to run to him.

“Daisy come,” she clipped sharply.

Thad’s head snapped around and looked up.

Daisy, for the first time in her life, listened and stopped.

Thad’s brow furrowed as he unhooked his arm from the woman and pushed to standing, turning on the stairs to face up at them. “Hey girlie, you’re, uh, early.”

And a good thing they had been too. Her blood roared in her ears and humiliation flooded up her neck. Her feet felt stuck in concrete.

“Momma, what’s wrong?” Daisy asked as she took her daughter’s hand.

The woman turned and stood now, too and … God, the woman whose face she’d seen on his screen! She was gorgeous! Ropers and bright blue eyes and … oh, this heat, this sickening pulse twisting her stomach in knots…

Why had she given him the benefit of the doubt? Why had she let herself start to fall for the blue-eyed charmer in the band all over again? He might say all the right things when she needed to hear them, he might not use his hands to do his talking when he was angry, but there’d still been warning signs, and she’d been so desperate to believe he was good, that this honest pull between them was something she shouldn’t let her past define.

Honest? She nearly snorted, as her eyes stung and her throat tightened so hard she couldn’t swallow.

“Charlie?” Thad called, as the other woman’s brow furrowed and darted from her to Daisy, then to her again.

Oh man, Daisy. Exactly what she’d been afraid of. By taking a chance on him, Charlie’d embroiled her daughter in the wreckage.

The social media comments, the flirts, the flashing of chests at that concert. Jason’s humiliations. Silencing her. It was easier to give up. It was easier to go back to her quiet tunnel and put the dream of music back in the box where it should have stayed. Daisy didn’t deserve this.