Page 15 of Until You

“Oh,” Jules says. “That sounds murdery.”

A key slides into the lock and then the front doorknob turns.

“Jules.”

“Yeah?”

“Someone’s coming in the house. People don’t get off of cruise ships early, do they?”

“Well, grab a knife!”

The front door swings open.

And there he is.

Cowboy.

No hat this time.

Dark hair a little longer than before, those curls I remember now falling across his forehead, unruly without the brim to hold them back. Broad shoulders filling the doorway like he was built to stand in frames. Jeans, boots, black T-shirt stretched across a chest I unfortunately remember very well—the hard planes of it under my palms.

He stops dead.

I stop breathing.

The world shrinks to the size of this doorway. Every sound falls away… Jules’s voice, the mockingbird, the distant sprinkler. Now there is only the blood rushing in my ears and the impossible, gut-punching fact of him, standing in this house.

His gaze lands on me, drops to my bare feet on hardwood, then rises to take in the towel clutched against my chest, my hair still dripping down my shoulders. I must look like a drowned rat.

I watch recognition hit him in real time. It moves through his face like weather. Confusion first, then a flicker of something raw and unguarded, then a sharpening. Those not-quite-brown, not-quite-hazel eyes narrow, and I feel the look all the way to the base of my spine.

“You,” he says. His voice is exactly the way I remember it—low and unhurried, like each word has to earn its way out of his mouth. But there’s an edge to it now. Something hard.

“Uh,” Jules says, tinny through the speakerphone. “Is that the penis?”

I blindly slap the phone to mute, my face going hot.

Cowboy’s jaw tightens. That jaw. The one that could ruin a girl’s entire life. It’s doing some very aggressive things right now, the muscle flexing beneath stubble that’s thicker than the last time I saw him. He looks like he slept about four hours and spent the other twenty doing something physical and punishing.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he growls.

I blink at him. My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth.

“What am I doing here?”

He takes two long strides inside, shutting the door behind him with a firmness that’s one notch below a slam. The room, which had felt too big and too quiet for the last few days, is suddenly far too small. He brings the outside in with him; the smell of morning air and hay and something warm and woodsy underneath, something that triggers a full-body sense memory so vivid I have to lock my knees.

His eyes narrow further. “What did you do, track me down?”

I laugh once—sharp, disbelieving—because surely he cannot be serious. My fingers are trembling where they grip the towel and I hate that, hate that my body is betraying me with all these inconvenient reactions when I need to be sharp.

“Track you down?” I clutch the towel tighter against my chest, painfully aware of how exposed I am, and not just physically. “I don’t even know your name.”

“If you’re standing in this house, I’m pretty sure you must. Unless you broke in.”

I scoff. “I’m not even going to dignify that accusation with an answer. You truly think I hunted you across central Texas with nothing but your face and a nickname I whispered in the dark?”

“Pretty sure you screamed it, sweetheart.” His eyes flash with a spark of something in that shifting hazel, and for one fraction of a second, I see it: the same look he gave me across that bar. The one that said I see you in a way that made my blood hum. It’s gone so fast I almost convince myself I imagined it.