“Won’t anybody else be looking for you?”

“My mom and dad are long dead. I used to ride in the rodeo, but I just retired this past season.”

“You’re a rodeo cowboy?”

“Yeah. One of these days, I’ll start a ranch of my own. But I’ll wait.”

“It seems unfair that your brother was able to mess your life up like this.”

“That’s family, right? Always happy to come in and fuck everything up.”

“I’m not sure my family has ever done anything quite so interesting. But I can understand feeling like they did their best to make things difficult.”

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll do my best not to make your life any more difficult.”

“Appreciated.”

The coffee finished brewing and she brought him a cup, and when she handed it to him, their fingers brushed and her stomach somersaulted. This was the first time in her life she’d ever been alone with a man. Like this. Alone alone. With no one else around and... No strings or ties or anything that would prevent them from...

He’s a stranger. He was shot. You’re insane.

It was just that she’d never tackled the man thing.

Her mother had made her naturally distrustful of them, and she had given her a lot of strange feelings about sex in her body. Once she had gotten into college, doing well enough to stay on, all of her financial aid had become the most important thing. She had started at a community college, taking entrance exams to get in, because she hadn’t graduated from high school and she didn’t have any test scores.

She had felt like she was on trial the entire time. And then she had managed to do well enough to transfer to another school, but the only thing that mattered was school. And paying for her life. She’d worked full-time and gone to classes. A social life hadn’t even been a thing. Much less dating. She had roommates, and they had been friendly, but even that hadn’t been... Fun, like friendship or anything like that. She had to be too serious. And then right out of school she had landed this job at Four Corners. And it wasn’t conventional. Not the kind of teaching job she had expected, but she had her own classroom, and the pay was great. Especially given that it came with housing. It gave her so much more than she had expected. So much freedom.

And now she was beginning to think about the things that she was missing. Only now that she was secure.

And he was here. And he was so... So handsome. So compelling and dangerous and...

Exactly not the kind of thing a twenty-four-year-old virgin is probably going to be able to handle?

Fine. Maybe. It wasn’t like she wanted to... She’d never even kissed. To jump right from that to... Sex with a stranger. Well that was a little bit crazy. But then he didn’t feel like a stranger. She felt an affinity for him based on what they had shared. About their lives. About their families.