Page 4 of Tangled Up With You

As soon as I shut the door behind me, I let go of all pretenses that I was fine and hobbled over to the bed, plopping down on the edge and straightening out my leg so I could rub at the pain in my knee. “Sorry, man. Looks like you lose this time.”

“Damn it. She’s never gonna let me live this down.”

I faked another laugh while my insides churned like the ocean in the middle of a hurricane. I hated that Ivy had seen that. It was just another thing to add to the list of reasons why I was the world’s biggest asshole. There were a million betterways I could have handled things after our night together, but I’d freaked out. She’d made me feel things I swore to myself I was never going to feel again. As I moved inside her, looking down at her writhing body beneath mine, there had been a moment—a flash, there and gone in the blink of an eye—where I could have sworn I’d seen my forever shimmering in her sapphire eyes, and I lost it.

I was sure Ivy already hated me for how I’d bailed on her, and I couldn’t fault her one damn bit. But if she didn’t, seeing that chick clinging to me like a spider monkey during that interview would most definitely be the final nail in the coffin. Not that it mattered. That one night was all we were ever going to have. I left for a reason. I couldn’t give that woman what she deserved. She was too damn good for me in every single way, and I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that she knew that now.

We were better off like this.Shewas better off. And hopefully, if I repeated that in my head enough, I would finally start to believe it. Maybe then I would quit thinking about her. I would stop drafting and deleting text messages to her every damn day.

“Well, I guess I should let you go. Let you get back to your night. I’m sure you have better things to do than talk to me,” Zach said after we shot the shit for a few more minutes, catching each other up on our lives. Sad thing was, talking to him was the most enjoyment I’d had in way too damn long. It made me miss Hope Valley and Safe Haven Ranch. Made me miss the months I’d spent there.

It made me missher.

I preferred talking to him than the silence of my motel room, but instead of saying as much, I made sure my tone was light and casual as I said, “Yeah, for sure. But I’ll be seein’ you in just a few weeks. Can’t get married without your best man, right?”

The smile in his voice was clear as a bell. “Christ, I can’t believe the wedding’s almost here.”

“You get cold feet, I’ve got you covered,” I teased.

He let out a short chuckle. “Not a chance in hell. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to make that woman mine. I would have married her a million times by now if she hadn’t insisted on goin’ all out. I can’t fuckin’ wait.”

“I’m really happy for you, brother,” I said, a genuine smile pulling at the corners of my mouth. “Really happy. Rae’s great. And there’s no one better equipped to deal with your grumpy ass.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said jovially. “Well, I’ll let you go. See you soon, man. In the meantime, keep kickin’ ass out there.”

“Will do.”

I hung up and dropped the phone onto the bed, falling backward onto the mattress as the silence surrounded me. There were only a few weeks until I’d see Ivy again, and something told me I needed every minute of the time between now and then to prepare to face her.

Chapter Three

Ivy

My mother always warned me never to get involved with a bull rider.

Okay, not really. But she should have. It was sound advice.

Of course, she’d never known any bull riders, but if she hadshe most certainly would have warned me against getting involved with one.Especiallyif that bull rider was ConnorfreakingBennett. Not that her warnings would have mattered much. After all, I’d always had a bit of a taste for trouble.

In the back of my mind I’d known a man who had as much charm and swagger as Connor did would end up being nothing but trouble. I smelled it on him the very first time we met, but instead of seeing him for what he was—a walking, talking red flag with a great, dimpled smile and an even better ass—I played right into his hand. In my defense, he really had pulled out all the stops to win me over.

My cellphone chimed with a text, pulling me out of my head and the memory from a few nights ago when I saw that womanlaunch herself at him on camera and try to fish his tonsils out with her tongue. And that son of a bitch just lapped it up.

I let out a frustrated groan at having gotten lost in thoughts of that assholeagain.It seemed like no matter how many mornings I woke up and told myself I was not going to think about Connor Bennett, he would somehow manage to niggle his way into my mind whenever I wasn’t paying attention. The littlest thing would spark a memory, and I’d fall right back down that rabbit hole without even realizing.

I did my best to push the latest thoughts of Connor Bennett to the back of my mind, shoving them down into the deepest, darkest cobwebbed corner, and focused on the breathing exercises I learned from the meditation app my friend Holly talked me into downloading a couple weeks back. So far I wasn’t very good at it. Meditating required clearing the mind and being still in the present for an extended period of time, something I had never been good at.

I could handle yoga, thanks to the lessons my mom’s great aunt Silvia had started giving me back when I was still a toddler, but that was only because by the time I started getting bored in one position, we were moving on to the next one. I was an active kid. I spent most of my early years covered in dirt and mud from hours and hours spent outside. I always managed to get into something, and not much had changed since growing up.

I liked to stay busy. I tended to get bored easily, and when that happened, it usually resulted in me getting into some kind of trouble.

I was the child whose parents were always getting calls from the school because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut during class. Bedtime was a nightmare for my poor mom. Unless she managed to run me ragged in the evenings, I was a little terror who would climb out of bed a million times for a milliondifferent reasons before finally passing out a good three hoursafterI was supposed to be asleep.

On top of being busy, I had also been a little wild. Although most of what I got up to was relatively harmless, I had driven my mom and stepdad up the wall, seeing as more than once I had been escorted home by the cops after one of my many stunts.

There was that time when I was sixteen and got caught skinny dipping in the creek that ran along old Tolliver Mill Road. A couple years later, after binging all theFast and Furiousmovies, I convinced myself I would be a natural at drag racing and challenged a couple of the guys on the football team to a race. My mom had screamed at me for at least an hour about the dangers I had put myself in, but once she stormed off after burning herself out, her husband, Micah, asked if I at least won, high-fiving me when I told him I’d smoked those losers.

Then I went through a minor anarchist phase where I convinced the entire senior class to stage a walkout in protest of the dress code the district was trying to enforce that would strip everyone of their individuality and was created to make the girls feel like it was our fault if boys popped a boner and could no longer concentrate because, Lord forbid, we wore shorts or a skirt that didn’t come all the way down to our knees.