Page 10 of Forbidden Cowboy

Chapter Five

Sierra

Iwas having more fun than I was willing to admit.

I had to keep my eyes trained on the window in front of me, because when I glanced over at Wyatt, he had his sleeves rolled up, and both hands on the steering wheel. The way the muscles in his arms flexed every time he turned the car made my breath catch in my throat, and I couldn’t let him see it.

I’d done my best since arriving in Gunnison to keep my emotions for him from getting the best of me, but I knew they were always there, simmering softly under the surface and threatening to boil over. One wrong move on my part, and I’d ruin everything. Again.

I stared out of the wide windshield in front of me and did my best not to pull at my clothes self-consciously. I really wished, if only for the sake of appearances that I’d had the time to pack more before I left, or the money to afford a few new items so that I wasn’t thrown back to looking like a kid, swamped in my brother’s clothes.

The last time I had worn Beau’s clothing had probably been while helping out on Wyatt’s ranch as a teenager. I’d gone through a selfish fit of wanting to fit into everything ‘girly’, and had thrown away all the sturdy farming clothes I had acquired over the years… only for Wyatt to ask for help during the calving season. In my desperation to be noticed as someone good and helpful in his life, I had shown up in Beau’s shirt and my oldest pair of jeans, and I still winced at the mental image of how my farmhand brother’s clothes had hung off of my one-hundred-and-some-change frame.

And yet, I was doing exactly that again, even if I had filled out some to make the bagginess alittleless embarrassing.

“What are we doing, anyway?” I asked twenty minutes into the ride, trying to pull myself out of my head.

“I have a couple of errands to run, and then if you’re up for it, there was something else I wanted to do.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Wyatt, youknowI hate surprises,” I moaned, exasperated.

He flicked his eyes over to me before returning them to the road.

“You’ll like this one,” he assured me.

I didn’t feel reassured. “Are you certain? Because you’ve said that before and—”

“And we’re not in grade school anymore,” he cut me off.

I rolled my eyes.

“If I end up knee deep in cow shit, I’m actually going to kill you. I don’t care if it uses the last of my savings, I will hire a hitman if you ruin the only clean clothes I have right now.”

“Oof,” he grunted, his mouth quirking into a smile. “There go my plans for the day then.”

I pushed him for more answers, but he wouldn’t give me any, just telling me to be patient.

We rolled into Crested Butte as the sun was peaking in the sky, and we stepped out onto the main street with it blazing over us, lighting up the colourfully painted shops. A wave of nostalgia stronger than when I had first arrived in Gunny hit me so hard, I thought it would knock me over. I took my place beside Wyatt as he walked with purpose and looked around. A couple of changes popped up here and there—a souvenir shop had shut down, a little hair boutique had opened up, but nothing major. I was reminded of those teenage years I had tried so hard to leave behind, when I would walk with Beau and Wyatt, trying not to let the latter see me looking at him like he had hung the moon.

Now, walking through Downtown Crested Butte with Wyatt was like some kind of torture. If things had been different, if he had felt the same, would we be walking down this street hand in hand? Would we run errands for the ranch together, just to ease the burden of carrying everything? Just to spend a little more time with each other?

I shook myself out of my daydream. That was a dangerous game of ‘what if’ to play. I had to be content with the way things were. It was selfish of me to ask for more, especially when he already had so much going on in his life.

I was itching to ask about the girl he’d had with him a few times—Anna, he had introduced her as—but I didn’t want to overstep.

We weren’t friends anymore, if we ever had been. We were a girl from Denver coping with her brother’s accident, and that brother’s best friend.

We were strangers to each other.

“Here,” Wyatt said, breaking the companionable silence.

We were in front of one of the older stores, a great farming warehouse tucked behind other shops, only connected to the main street by a delivery lane that acted as a through-way.

“I remember this place!” I said, “it’s been a while since I’ve been here, though.”