dining room table. The guesthouse was fully booked for the weekend.
“Everyone went in to see the parade,” Dillon said.
“Right. Why aren’t you two there?”
“Too busy,” Dillon said.
“Too pregnant,” Gloria added, patting her belly. “What about you?”
“Parades aren’t my thing,” Colt said, filling his plate with bacon and eggs and helping himself to coffee. He turned to his brother. “Wish you were riding?” This would be the second year that his brother didn’t ride in the rodeo, and it bothered him. Dillon had always been his idol, living the life of a rodeo cowboy.
But now?
Colton eyed his older brother from across the dining room table. He’d turned into their old man overnight. Giving up the excitement of the road to run a ranch. And seriously, the way he doted on Gloria, it was hard to watch. Finding any excuse to get his hands on his wife’s growing belly.
His brother, the lone wolf Colton had always admired, had turned into a family man.
He never would have believed it.
“What time you heading in?” Dillon asked.
“Probably around noon. I’ll help out with the stock.”
“What time is your ride?”
“Three.”
Dillon reached in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He tossed them across the table to his brother. “Use the trailer if you want. I cleaned it out last year, but the propane tanks are full. You can stay in it for the weekend if you like.”
“Thanks. But don’t you need help around here?”
“Nah. We’ll be good.” Dillon glanced at Gloria before asking, “You seeing Ashley today?”
Holy hell. He’d almost forgotten. He was supposed to be Plain Jane’s boyfriend. “Yeah,” he said dismissively. “I’ll probably grab some lunch with her or something.”
Gloria, glanced at her husband and then set her female sights on Colton.
Oh shit. He knew that look. Let the inquisition begin.
“Ashley Ozark? Isn’t she the nice girl at Heart’s Bouquet, the flower shop?”
Colton had no idea if she worked there. “You know her?”
“Sure,” Gloria said. “She’s been so helpful with the last couple of weddings we’ve hosted.” She carefully set her mug of tea on the table. “So, where’d you two meet?”
“At the Prospectors.” Colton dove into his breakfast.
“She doesn’t seem your type.”
With fork midway to his mouth, he said, “I wasn’t aware I had a type.”
Dillon and Gloria looked at one another and then simultaneously broke into laughter.
“Why isn’t she my type?” Colton asked, not appreciating the laughter in the least.
“Um, she’s an artist. A feminist. A smart girl with a future.”
Okay. What the hell did people take him for? An idiot who wasn’t going anywhere? “You saying she’s too good for me?”
Gloria pushed herself out of her chair, leading with her baby tummy. “I’m just saying that she doesn’t seem like fling type material.”
“Hold on, now,” Dillon called after his wife as she made her way toward the kitchen. “Not to defend my depraved little brother, but it seems to me you tried to break up a fling last Christmas.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, you didn’t call that one correctly.”
Gloria may have waddled like a nearly full-term pregnant woman, but she could still spin around with the grace of a ballerina if the moment called for it. “What did you say?”
“I’m saying you were wrong the last time you tried to break up a fling.”
She raised a single finger in the air and held it there, for effect.
Colton sat back in his chair, enjoying the show, glad the attention was off him.
“I was not wrong.”
“Well, now...”
The finger was now pointed severely at her husband. “Jolie was not looking for a fling. Neither was Thad. Might I remind you, they are still together. By definition a fling would have ended long ago. Therefore, I was right.”
“However you want to spin it, Red. You do that.”
His fiery sister-in-law growled, right up until his brother stalked up to her, pulled her close and whispered loud enough for Colt to hear, “God, I love making you mad.”
Colton blinked. Then he frowned. Then he shook his head.
Just because he liked making the Ozark woman mad didn’t mean he had anything in common with his brother.
What he was doing with Ashley was a stunt. A game.
And if he also got a little turned on by making The Righteous Sister mad, it meant nothing at all.
* * *
ASHLEY WAS PLEASED with the pictures she’d gotten of the parade. She scrolled through them for the third time, the marching bands, the brightly colored floats. The cowboys. She enlarged a few, but Colton wasn’t in any of them. After transferring her favorite images to a folder on her computer’s desktop, she sat back in her chair and rubbed her stomach. It had been feeling funny all day. Probably something she ate.
The doorbell sounded, and she unplugged her camera from her computer and went to the door. Jasmine was standing there, wearing a cute Western-style top that sat low on her shoulders and a denim skirt. Instead of the customary cowboy boots everyone else would be wearing, she was wearing sandals, showing off her professional pedicure.
“You ready?”
“Sure. C’mon in while I grab my stuff.”
Jasmine followed her through her father’s house to her bedroom.
“Seriously,” Jasmine said. “Your room is exactly the same. God, I wish my parents had stayed here in Half Moon. Their place in Denver just doesn’t feel like home when I go there.”
After graduating from college last year, Ash had come back to live with her father. It only made sense while she saved up money to leave again. Glancing around the room she’d grown up in, she now saw it through Jasmine’s eyes. While she hadn’t bothered to change it because she told herself she wasn’t staying long enough to go to the trouble, she now decided it wouldn’t hurt to replace the posters on the wall with some of her own work.
