Not Just a Cowboy. Caro Carson
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to the world. He sat down beside her. She was sitting properly, knees together, facing the table like she’d fallen asleep saying grace over her dinner plate. He sat facing the opposite way, leaning back against the table and stretching his legs out. The wooden bench gave a little under his weight, disturbing her.
“Good evening, Miss Patricia.”
That startled her awake the rest of the way. Her head snapped up, and she blinked and glanced around, looking adorably disoriented for a woman who carried a clipboard everywhere she went. When she recognized him, her eyes opened wide.
“Oh.”
“It’s me. Luke Waterson. The firefighter who barged in on you today.”
“Yes, I remember you.” She looked at the watch on her wrist and frowned.
Luke figured she couldn’t read it in the faint light. “You’ve only been out a minute or two.”
She hit a button on her watch and it lit up. Of course. He should have known she’d be prepared. She touched her hair, using her fingertips to smooth one wayward strand back into place. She touched the corner of each eye with her pinky finger, then put both hands in her lap and took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m awake. Did you need something?”
This was what her life was like, he realized. Everyone came to her when they needed something. She didn’t expect Luke to be there for any other reason. Did no one seek her out just to talk during a work shift? To play a game of cards in the shade when they were off duty? To share a meal?
He didn’t feel like smiling at the moment, but he did, anyway. She’d asked if he needed anything. “Nope. Nothing.”
She tilted her head and looked at him, those eyes that had opened so wide now narrowing skeptically. “Then what are you doing here?”
I can’t stop thinking about you. I want to feel you fall against me again.
His mother had always told him when in doubt, tell the truth, but he wasn’t going to tell Patricia that particular truth. He settled for a more boring—but true—explanation. “I left a work glove in your tent. I was coming to get it when I saw you walking off into the dark. I was worried about you, so I followed.”
“You were worried about me?” She gave a surprised bit of a chuckle, as if the idea were so outlandish it struck her funny. She got up from the table, then picked up her walkie-talkie and her clipboard, and held them to her chest.
Luke stood, too. As if he were handling a nervous Thoroughbred, he moved slowly. He stood a little too close, but unlike this afternoon, she didn’t back away.
He hadn’t imagined that chemistry. It was still there, in spades. Looking into her face by the light of the stars, he wanted to hold her again, deliberately this time. To kiss her lips, to satisfy a curiosity to know how she tasted.
But he wouldn’t. Standing this close, he could also see how tired she was, a woman who’d undoubtedly been handling one issue after another since the first storm warnings had put Texas Rescue on alert. A woman so tired, she’d fallen asleep while sitting at a wooden table.
“Let’s go back to the hospital,” he said, when he would rather have said a dozen different things.
He took the clipboard and the radio out of her hand, then offered her his arm. She slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow immediately, and he suspected she did it without thinking. Her debutante ways and his cowboy etiquette meshed with ease for a second. Then she seemed to realize what she’d done and started to drop her hand.
He pressed her hand to his side with his arm. “It’s dark. This way you can catch me if I trip.”
“This way you can drag me down with you, more likely.” But she left her hand where it was as they walked in silence.
When he started to pass her office tent, she pulled him to a stop. “You need to get your glove.”
He turned to face her, and now it was easy to see every detail of her face in the light that glowed through the white walls of the hospital’s tents. She was so very beautiful, and so very tired.
“I thought that was what I needed when I first followed you out into the dark, but now I know I need something else much, much more.”
He moved an inch closer to her, and he felt her catch her breath as she held her ground. “What is that?” she whispered.
“I need to get you into bed. Now.”
He wants to take me to bed?
What a stupid, stupid suggestion. They were in the middle of a mission, in the middle of a storm-damaged town, not to mention that Patricia felt gritty and hungry and so very damned tired. How could any man think of sex when all she could think of was—
Bed.
Oh.
“You’re trying to be funny, aren’t you?” she accused.
That lopsided grin on his face should have been infuriating instead of charming. She drew herself up a bit straighter. It was infuriating. It was.
Luke had the nerve to give her hand a squeeze before she pulled it away. “There, for a few seconds, the look on your face was priceless.”
“I hope you enjoyed yourself. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
He didn’t let go of her clipboard when she reached for it.
“Nope,” he said. “You go where this clipboard goes, so you’ll just have to follow me if you want it back.” He took off walking.
She was so stunned, he was several yards away before she realized he really expected her to follow. He turned at the corner of her tent and disappeared—but not before he looked over his shoulder and waved her own damned walkie-talkie at her.
Shock gave way to anger. Anger gave her energy. She caught up to him within a few seconds, her angry strides matching his slower but longer ones as they headed down the aisle between tents.
She snatched her walkie-talkie out of his hand. “You’re being childish.”
“I am.” He nodded, and kept walking.
“This isn’t summer camp. People are relying on me. On all of us. They rely on you, too.”
“And yet, I can still respond to a fire if I hear the signal while I’m enjoying this romantic walk with you. It’s okay, Patricia.”
She yanked her clipboard out of his hand and turned back toward the admin tent. He blocked her way just by standing in her path, being the ridiculous, giant mass of muscle that he was. She felt twenty-two again. Less. Make that nineteen, handing a slightly altered ID to a bouncer who was no fool.
“It’s not okay,” she said, and her jaw hurt from clenching her teeth so hard. “I cannot do my job if I can’t get to my headquarters. Now move.”
Instead, Luke gestured toward the tent they’d stopped next to. “This is the women’s sleeping quarters. Recognize it? I didn’t think so. You were first on scene, weren’t you? You decided where the first tent spike should be driven into the ground, I’ll bet. So, you’ve been here forty-eight hours, at least. You were supposed to have gotten sixteen hours of sleep, then, at a minimum. You’ve taken how many?”
Patricia spoke through clenched teeth. “You’re being patronizing.”
The last bit of a grin left his face, and he suddenly looked very serious. “I just watched you fall asleep sitting up on a piece of wood. Forty-eight hours is a long time to keep running. Take your break, Patricia.”
Patronizing, and giving her orders. She didn’t know him from Adam, but like every other man in her life, he seemed to think he knew best. She was so mad she could have spit. She wanted to shove him out