the smile on his face slipping away as their gazes connected, making her wonder what was wrong. She hated the way he made her feel as if she should check her appearance in a mirror, so much so that she self-consciously scanned the fancy jeans she’d donned for the occasion, the kind with rhinestones on the pockets. She wore a blousy shirt. It concealed her figure and hid her curves. She’d even put her hair into pigtails, for some reason feeling the need to play down her looks around Bren, and yet the way his smile faded made her skin catch fire and wonder what she’d done wrong.
“Today we’re going to work on helping Kyle find his center, if that’s okay with you, Mom.”
A dozen eyes turned in her direction and her face grew even more red. “Of course.”
What was with her? The man just asked a question. So what if he didn’t act all friendly-like while he was teaching. No need to feel as if she’d been put on the witness stand and he was judge and jury.
“Who wants to work the controls today?”
A chorus of “Me! Me!” erupted from the kids. She looked around for these so-called controls, but there weren’t any that she could see. She understood in a second when four of the boys broke apart from the group and headed toward the ropes that suspended a barrel off the ground. It was some sort of...ride. One of them even went into an empty stall and pulled out a mat of some sort, a fabric-covered piece of foam her son would land upon.
Oh, dear goodness.
She took half a step forward before stopping herself. This was her problem, she admitted. This right here. This overwhelming need to protect Kyle all the time. Of course, that was a mother’s job—to keep her child safe from harm. But even she recognized she was a little out of control in that department. She freaked about him wearing a seat belt. She hated when he rode rides at carnivals. She refused to let him play in the ocean. And she wanted to vomit every time they went to the water park and she was forced to watch him slide into one of those little plastic tubes that spat him out on the other end. For some insane reason, she always worried he’d drop into some sort of water-ride black hole and never come out again.
Stupid. But it was because of him.
She didn’t want to think about him. About the man who’d stolen her heart and then broken it into a million pieces.
It’s in the past.
Because Kyle was her future and damned if she’d let Paul ruin her life all over again.
“Climb on aboard here, son.”
Her chin tipped up. She forced herself to lean back again, even crossed her arms and made herself watch, one of her pigtails sliding over a shoulder.
You should leave.
No. She wasn’t ready to do that yet. So she watched as Kyle raced up to the dark green barrel and Bren’s smile slid back on his face. She could tell the man loved her son’s enthusiasm and that he approved of his eagerness to learn. She wondered why he didn’t have any kids of his own. What had stopped a good-looking man—as in a seriously hot older man—from settling down and having children? What was his story? Then again, maybe there was a Mrs. Bren Connelly inside the house. Crap. She hadn’t even thought to ask.
“The first thing I want to see is how you take a wrap,” she heard him say to her son.
And so what if there was a Mrs. Connelly? It wasn’t as if she would ever consider dating the man. Yeah, he was handsome in an older-sexy-ranch-hand kind of way, but that wasn’t her type. She preferred the more bookish type of men, like the men she went to school with—the kind that didn’t like to deal with loaded guns. Besides, it was clear Bren didn’t like her. Every time their gazes connected, his smile faded. Not a big fan of hers, clearly.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” he asked Kyle.
Kyle sat on the barrel even though she didn’t recall him climbing aboard. He smiled up at Bren in a way that flipped her stomach for another reason.
“I watched a video on YouTube,” he announced.
She forced herself to pay attention. He had, indeed, watched videos. Tons of them. That’s how she’d known he was serious about this whole steer-riding thing. It’d taken her weeks to admit to herself that nothing she said to dissuade him from the idea would work. It was her brother who’d stepped in and made her admit the truth. If she couldn’t keep the Bubble Wrap on him his whole life, she might as well embrace his enthusiasm. She needed to let him go. If she kept him off steers, he’d find something else to do, Jax had warned, and he might not ask her permission the next time. That more than anything had scared her. Jax was right. Too tight a rein might push him to bolt, and so here they were.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” she muttered as Bren looked up and caught her eyes again. Something about the way he kept doing that prompted her to move forward, despite telling herself to stay back and give them both some space.
He didn’t like her, or he didn’t like something about her, and darned if she would let that keep her away.
And so she didn’t.
* * *
DON’T COME OVER. Don’t come over. Do not come over.
She pushed away from the back of the house.
Bren tried not to groan. And stare. And gawk.
Damn that George.
He’d been doing just fine at ignoring how gorgeous Lauren was right up until George made a fuss about her looks. Now he couldn’t get her looks off his mind, either. He even had to blink a few times to get her out of his head. What was he saying...?
“The only thing I’d like to see you change is maybe how tight you wrap the rope around your hand.” He glanced up and against his better judgment stared in her direction again. She was, indeed, headed this way.
Focus.
The bull rope—a prickly hemp tool that served as a bull rider’s lifeline—came back into focus. “YouTube can’t teach you the feel for how much pressure to use when you pull tight. It’s like this. Here.” Two of the boys stepped back as he went to work. “Do this.”
He pulled, getting the thing tight around Kyle’s hand. The boy’s eager eyes watched his every move and for a moment he forgot about the kid’s mother and how sexy she looked in her tight jeans and pigtails. Pigtails! They made her seem about twenty years younger than him—and served as a reminder of the age gap between them.
“I get it,” Kyle said. “Not so tight that my hand tingles.”
“Exactly.”
He caught a whiff of her, and she smelled as good as fresh waffles on a Sunday morning. Sweet and with just a hint of vanilla.
“So if you’re ready, I’m going to have the boys here start pulling on the ropes real good. It’s going to get kind of hard to stay on, but that’s okay, right, boys?”
The kids nodded, their faces eager, too. There was nothing they liked better than trying to knock each other off the barrel. He just hoped Lauren didn’t freak out. Once glance at her face told him all he needed to know about how much she liked the idea of her son riding that barrel.
