Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 143842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 719(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 479(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 143842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 719(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 479(@300wpm)
First thing the ranch manager had told him when signing on was to keep at least a hundred feet between himself and Douglas Wagner’s daughter, and he’d heard the rest of the hands making jokes about the knockout girl that would get you lost in a shallow grave if you dared to even glance her way.
Forbidden fucking fruit.
Sweet fucking fruit, though, he’d bet.
He couldn’t avert the power of her aura, the way it slipped through the air, infiltrating the oxygen.
She kept coming closer, though she wasn’t alone. That chick Brooke he’d hooked up with at the river a few weeks back was at her side.
His stomach fisted.
That was a mistake.
She’d seemed totally on board that night, agreeing she wasn’t looking for any attachments when he’d told her he was a solo-kind of guy, but he’d be game for a good time if she was interested.
He should have heeded the warning that spun at the back of his mind when she’d gone for a kiss as she’d been riding his dick in the bed of his truck. The way she’d pouted when he’d told her no. That he didn’t kiss because it felt too damned intimate.
He’d had instant fucking regret when he’d seen her here on the ranch a couple days later, and she kept coming around, clearly looking for a repeat.
Guilt thickened his throat. He hated to be an asshole. Hurt someone.
But he’d been upfront and clear, and it seemed she was the one who wasn’t being honest. Not with him or herself.
Brooke grabbed the other girl’s hand, tugging at her and whispering something as she giggled, before she came dragging her through the field before they were standing on the other side of the fence he was building.
“Hey, Cody,” Brooke drawled, no doubt trying to come off as sexy. Wearing the tiniest tank that barely covered her tits and didn’t even offer the innuendo of it to her midriff.
She was gorgeous, no question, but something soured in his stomach when he looked at her standing next to Wagner’s daughter.
“Hey, Brooke.” He tried to keep looking at the dark-haired beauty, wondering what the fuck was wrong with him when his attention kept trying to slide to the blonde at her right.
“How’s it going?” he asked, going for cool and casual.
Brooke groaned. “Terrible. I’m being a good sport and going out to the stables with Hailey since she thinks she needs to spend half her life with the beasts.”
Cody took the opportunity to look at Hailey.
He’d never officially met her, only knowing her name by the mumblings of the hands.
“You like horses, huh?” he couldn’t help but ask her.
He already knew she did. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been stupidly tracking her every movement over the last two weeks when she’d been out on the grounds.
He didn’t know what it was about her.
What had him intrigued.
Probably the fact that she was forbidden, which was seriously fucked.
She was clearly innocent and sweet, the way she kept down casting that ice-blue gaze, her cheeks pinked, continually shifting on those dusty cowgirl boots.
He needed to leave it at that.
Hailey let go of a self-deprecating laugh. It was throaty and sounding of something that hit him entirely in the wrong way.
Like a low lash of seduction.
“I think you could say it’s required of me,” she said. “Formed somewhere in my DNA.”
“I can see that,” he told her.
“And I hate horses.” Brooke wound her arm through Hailey’s and tugged her close, trying to win back Cody’s attention.
“You don’t hate them…you’re just scared of them.” Hailey’s voice was encouragement.
“Whatever you want to call it, just know I don’t want to be anywhere near them, so you know I must love you if I’m willing to go out there with you.” Brooke feigned a shudder, though Cody saw there was real affection for her friend. “Which means she has to go with me to the party at the river tonight. Are you going to be there, Cody?”
He’d avoided them since the night he’d hooked up with Brooke there, though he found himself nodding right then. “Yeah, think I’m going to be.”
“Good.” Brooke tucked Hailey’s arm a little closer. “That means we’ll be seeing you there.”
Cody couldn’t help but look at Hailey then. Take her in. The way she blushed and seemed to want to disappear into her friend’s side.
Not a chance.
Because with that energy radiating off her?
She was the only thing Cody could see.
“Ma?” Cody knocked at the screen door just as he was pushing through and stepped into his childhood home.
It was late afternoon, and Dakota was home for the summer from college and would be at work downtown at the bakery, and his youngest sister, Kayla, would be at dance class.
But his mother’s car was parked out front, and he’d wanted to pop by to check on her.