Big Chance Cowboy Page 5

  “That’s okay. I’ll save you a plate if you can’t get here,” Mom called through the slamming screen door. “Be careful!”

  Lizzie unlocked the driver’s side door and got in. Her old cowboy boots looked unfamiliar as she pressed the brake and started her car. Unfamiliar but very right with her favorite jeans. Not that it mattered. She didn’t have to impress anyone today.

  Anyone but Adam Collins, her evil brain pointed out. Would he like her just as well in jeans, or would he prefer her in the fancier stuff she’d worn when she lived in Houston?

  No, he wouldn’t like her in anything, she told herself. That didn’t mean he’d like her in nothing—it meant he wouldn’t be interested. Which was exactly what she wanted.

  Lizzie was glad, too. She was. She really was.

  * * *

  Adam was staring at the cracks in his bedroom ceiling when Lizzie’s tires crunched over the gravel driveway. He wasn’t ready for this. Not for getting out of bed or for dealing with that dog, which had cried for an hour last night after he’d tried to leave it in the barn. He’d finally given up and brought the thing inside to sleep in a crate, but only because the caterwauling was about to give Adam a panic attack—not because he gave a damn about the dog’s feelings, alone out there with no other animals for company.

  He ignored the sound of toenails rattling the metal bottom of the crate as he stumbled to the bathroom.

  The four minutes of sleep he’d managed to get had been populated by explosions and body parts—both human and canine—flying into his face. He could have taken a pill. The VA docs had given him a pharmacy’s worth of choices, but none helped, and some made the nightmares worse. He brushed his teeth, then shoved his head under the faucet to rinse the sweat from his hair. Finally, he grabbed his best threadbare towel and rubbed his head, opened the bathroom door, stepped into the hallway, and crashed right into a warm, soft body.

  Adam jumped back to avoid bulldozing Lizzie and the dog as surprise, which felt too much like fear, shifted into the default emotion, anger, which escaped through his mouth. “Damn it! What are you doing?” His voice was huge in the tight space. D-Day leapt and barked at the end of the leash.

  “I’m sorry,” Lizzie squeaked, eyes wide as she flattened herself against the wall.

  Regret flooded through him, although he told himself that he should feel glad about scaring her. Then maybe she’d stay away.

  He took a long breath, trying to slow his beating heart, and stepped back into the open bathroom doorway. “What are you doing?” His voice was still sharp.

  Something pressed against his leg. Apparently, the dog didn’t have Lizzie’s sense, because it nudged him with its big nose and grinned. The dog rolled to its back, exposing its belly in hopes of a good scratch. Dumb ass. It should have every hair on its body raised in an attempt to look bigger and badder to threaten the asshole who had just yelled at its mistress.

  He gritted his teeth. He didn’t want any dog right now, much less one that didn’t know how to act like a soldier. He reminded himself that he was in a totally different situation—he was home. Not some half-burned-out village teeming with insurgents waiting to blow him up. And this dog was going to be trained to be a loving pet, not a single-minded warrior.

  “Are you okay?” Lizzie had moved closer, laying her hand on his arm. The contact wasn’t unpleasant, and he didn’t flinch, as he did when most people got within touching distance. As a matter of fact, her soft skin against his felt nice, almost cooling his overheated insides. Of course, now that he’d noticed, he stiffened.

  She stepped back as though she’d been burned. Flash frozen, more likely. “I shouldn’t have barged in,” she said, “but I couldn’t find D-Day in the barn. I was afraid he’d escaped, but then I heard him bark inside. When you didn’t answer, I figured it would be okay to come in and get him for breakfast and potty.”

  Speaking of which, the dog had given up on that belly rub and gotten to its feet. It pranced around, looking a little anxious.

  “I had the water on. I didn’t hear anything.” Obviously. “Take him outside. I’ll be there in a minute. After I’m dressed.”

  He knew he was being an ass, and he was also suddenly, uncomfortably aware that he was standing in the hallway outside his bedroom in nothing but his boxers. And Lizzie had noticed, too.

  Great. Both times he’d seen her so far, he’d made a half-naked fool of himself.

  He cleared his throat. “Just so you know, I don’t always run around mostly undressed.” Not that he needed to justify himself. She was the intruder here.

  Her lips tilted up. “That’s good to know. So next time I come over, you’ll be lounging about in your fuzzy footy bunny pajamas?”

  His mouth almost won the fight and cracked a smile, but he managed to only grunt.

  “We’ll wait for you outside,” she said.

  “Good.” He gave her a nod and stepped toward the bedroom but did make a last-second turn to watch her walk down the hall.

  Chapter 5

  Five minutes later, and Adam was dressed, not in footy pajamas, but jeans, boots, and—God help him—one of his granddad’s old plaid flannel shirts. His clean laundry pile was officially gone. The only other clothes he had were military issue and still stinking of desert and other things he didn’t want to think about. He made a mental note to order shirts from Amazon. Hopefully something a little less late-eighties ranch hand.

  When the screen door screeched, Lizzie and the dog both turned their heads to look at him. She smiled, tucking her hair behind her ear with the hand that wasn’t holding the leash. He wondered if her hair still felt as silky as it looked.

  He blinked to clear the thought of his hands pushing her hair back and said, “Let’s get started.”

  At the sound of Adam’s voice, the dog leapt toward him, eager for whatever exciting thing he might have to offer.

  “D-Day, no!” Lizzie said, hauling back on the leash as hard as she could, but the dog kept going and yanked her forward so she had to trot behind him.

  “Damn,” he muttered and then more loudly, “D-Day, stop!” as he moved toward the pair, hand raised to signal the dog to stop.

  Of course, the dog didn’t understand that and decided the hand was a chew toy, but at least Adam managed to grab the leash—and Lizzie—before she was dragged farther through the gravel-strewn yard. She stumbled against him, and the warm heat from her body was a Taser, jolting his libido. He released her as soon as she regained her balance. No touching the nice lady. She might be even hotter now than when they were younger, but she was also even further out of his league now than she’d been back then.

  He focused on the dog trying to drag him anywhere but right there, gave the leash a forceful tug, and said, “Sit.”

  Startled, the dog looked up at Adam, then away. It casually, slowly lowered itself to its haunches as though the motion was its own idea.

  “Good.” He nodded at the dog.

  It started to get up.

  “No,” he said, giving another yank. “Sit.”

  It sighed and sat.

  “Good.”

  It started to rise again, but after another “No!” and a firm pull on the leash, it surrendered and remained sitting.

  “Shouldn’t you give him a cookie or something?” Lizzie asked, arms folded, lips pursed.

  “No,” Adam said, once again reminding the dog to sit when it decided to stand. “You might not always have a treat with you when you need it to obey you, and if you’ve got it trained to work for praise, you’ll be better off.”

  “But that’s harder,” she argued.

  “Maybe a little, at first. But this dog, it just wants attention.”

  She snorted. “And free rein over the earth.”

  “Well, it doesn’t get that. It’s got to learn that you’re the one who provides everything goo
d in the world, and you can take all that away if it doesn’t do what you want.” He noticed she frowned every time he called the dog it, but that was just too damned bad. Granddad had always said the best way to keep emotional distance from a dog was to keep it an it. Adam hated when the old man was right.

  Lizzie raised her chin with determination. “All right, what do I do?”

  “You take this.” He led the dog over to her and handed her the leash. “And practice walking around. Every so often, stop, give a ‘sit’ command, and wait a second. If you don’t get a sit, give that leash a firm pull, say ‘no,’ and repeat ‘sit.’ Don’t move again until you get what you asked for. Then you can say ‘good dog.’ Make sure you say ‘okay’ to release it before the dog’s allowed to get up.”

  She looked down at D-Day, who stood panting expectantly. “This ought to be interesting.”

  He thought so, too, but didn’t tell her that. “I’m gonna work while you practice. I’ll check on you in a few minutes.”

  He escaped to the dim confines of the barn where he found the ladder and dragged it outside. Might as well see what was needed for the roof. It wasn’t going to order its own new shingles.

  He planted the ladder next to the house and climbed up, gazing out beyond the house and barn.

  There were fifty acres, mostly overgrown scrubland, but still space, stretched in a long, narrow rectangle away from the road.

  After she and Todd moved in with Granddad, Emma had tried to keep things cut back, but after Todd died and Granddad got worse, she gave up. The weeds were winning again. It was a pathetic sight.

  The old farmhouse where he and Emma had grown up was nothing special. It wouldn’t even qualify as a farmhouse, at least not in any kind of architectural way. It had started out as a one-level cottage. The second story had been added sometime around when his father had been born and then divided into a master “suite” and two small bedrooms when Adam and Emma had come to live with Granddad.

  There was a poured concrete slab in front of the house, which Emma had insisted should be a real porch. She’d convinced Adam to help her, and they’d spent their weekends building a roof and railings. That roof was now a little saggy, but considering it had been built by a fourteen- and sixteen-year-old with scrap wood scrounged from around town, it didn’t look all that bad.

  The roof itself, however—the whole thing needed to be replaced. That was going to make for fun in the Texas summer sun.

  Adam’s attention was diverted from calculating square footage of shingles by Lizzie’s progress with the dog. It wasn’t going well. She did everything technically right but was still too wishy-washy in her commands, and the dog had her number. It seemed obliged to forget everything it had just learned.

  Meanwhile, Lizzie was being…Lizzie. Determined to get it right, her persistence tinged with good humor.

  She told the dog to sit, turned to see if Adam was watching, and smiled. The dog, knowing her attention was diverted, got to its feet and tried to make a break for it.

  “D-Day, knock it off,” Adam snapped, stepping down from the ladder. The dog looked around…Who, me?…and bolted for him.

  Lizzie squealed as the leash was yanked from her hand.

  “Down!” Adam hollered, as a hundred pounds of brainless exuberance leapt to tackle him. He stepped aside and grabbed the leash. “Damn it, dog, I said down.”

  It looked at him with surprise. You talkin’ to me? It sat down as though that had been its intention all along.

  “Try a little fetch in the paddock,” Adam suggested, pointing Lizzie toward the fenced-in area next to the barn. He led the dog over and let it in through the gate. If this training session didn’t improve, he was going to have to take over, and that wasn’t on his agenda. He’d once taught dozens of young MPs to handle bred-to-be-headstrong Belgian Malinois, but one reasonably mature female and an eager mutt had him ready to scream.

  This had not been a good idea. He still wasn’t exactly sure how he’d gotten roped into this madness.

  Yet he found himself leaning against the fence next to Lizzie while the dog scrambled around the enclosure, chasing after the big rubber Kong toy that they took turns throwing.

  “Thanks again for doing this. I know it’s an inconvenience.” Lizzie’s big brown eyes tempted him to say that he was glad to have her there, in spite of his intentions to stay here alone until he could leave Chance County.

  He shrugged. “Emma would never forgive me if I let a dog get sent to the gas chamber.”

  The corner of her mouth rose as she looked at him, considering. “You’re a good man.”

  No, he wasn’t, but he wanted to believe her. Three deployments, God knew how many explosions, body parts, screams, whimpers—the past ten years almost disappeared when she looked at him like that. He went back to a long-ago summer night, leaning against an old wooden swing that still held the day’s heat, looking at her, bending toward her—No. Not going there.

  He forced his mind back to the present, chalking up his reactions to nostalgia. It made sense—a burnout like him would want to dwell on the rose-colored past. Besides, didn’t she have a boyfriend somewhere nearby?

  “It’s going to take you a lot of work to get that dog in shape to be adoptable,” he told her instead of going down any dangerous roads.

  She nodded, her smile ironic…and kissable. “It’s going to take me a lot of work. I have a feeling you could do it in less than a week.”

  If she kept looking at him like that, he was going to do it in twenty-four hours, just so she wouldn’t have any more reason to come out here and torture him, but then he’d have to break his self-imposed moratorium on dog training. The no dog rule or the no people rule—which one was more important to follow? He’d have to navigate among people soon enough when he sold this place and figured out what to do for a living.

  He supposed that if she was going to be around, he might as well practice interacting with normal folk. He threw out what he hoped was a reasonable change of subject. “Why did you come back to Big Chance? Last I heard, you were living in Houston with some fancy real estate mogul.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Dean. He’s—was—my…boyfriend, fiancé, partner, whatever. The important part of that sentence is was.”

  And there went one reason he had to keep his mind off Lizzie and her kissable lips. He reminded himself there were a few others, like she was out of his league, he was a plane wreck with no little black box, and oh yeah, he was getting the hell out of Big Chance—out of Texas, as soon as he sold this ranch.

  “Anyway, I came back because my dad’s sick and he needs my help. Dean and his king of the universe attitude are what made it easy to leave Houston.”

  “If he was such an asshole, why did you go out with him?” Why was he being nosy? Oh yeah. Trying to interact with normal humans.

  “He wasn’t always a jerk. I mean, he didn’t seem to be at first. We started working together at the same firm right out of college. We hit it off, started flipping houses, and it was like, ‘Housing crash? What housing crash?’ One thing led to another, we started dating, and then—” She shook her head.

  “And then what?”

  “His idea of what constituted a partnership didn’t align with mine. He decided his role should be He Who Only Communicates to Criticize and that mine should be She Who Doesn’t Complain or Eat Popcorn with Butter.”

  “Popcorn with butter?” he asked.

  “Dry without salt if you have to have carbs at all,” she said, holding her arms out from her body and looking down at herself. He looked, too. She was curved in all the right places, as far as he was concerned. Being pressed against those soft thighs, belly, and breasts would be heaven.

  He cleared his throat. “No popcorn would be a deal breaker for me,” he said.

  She laughed. “There were a few other little issues, like infidelity and
excessive prevarication, which put the final nails in the coffin.”

  “‘Excessive prevarication?’ Fancy.”

  “It still makes him a lying jerk.”

  “I know,” he said, and he also knew that her flip explanation hid some serious hurt. Her self-confidence had taken a major tumble. “You want me to go kick his ass for you?” He was only partially joking.

  She shook her head, but he thought he saw a hint of pleasure under her bitter smile. “Nah, there’d probably be a police report, and I’d have to testify on your behalf, and I’d rather not have to see that jerk ever again.”

  Adam once again found himself fighting the urge to smile. “So you ran away and came back here where you can be more successful?”

  She snorted. “I don’t know if success is what I’ll find here.”

  In spite of himself, he asked, “What do you want?”

  She looked at him for a long moment and nodded. “You know what I want? I want to live my life on my own terms. I want cold beer in the afternoon, after a full day of hard work at Vanhook Realty. I want my mom and dad to be proud of me. I want to wear cowboy boots every chance I get, and I want my damned dog to find a good home.”

  Well, that was a mouthful. Adam’s brain buzzed with a connection. “You’re going to work for your dad?”

  “Already am.”

  “That’s, um, that’s great.” He remembered now she’d mentioned that yesterday. It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that she’d be involved in selling the ranch.

  She followed his train of thought. “I get the impression that your sister doesn’t know you’re listing this place?”

  “No, and if you don’t mind, maybe you don’t have to mention it to her just yet?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t she have some say in the matter?”

  “It’s in my name.”

  “Okay, technically, it’s none of my business. If the deed and all the financial statements have your name on them, then you can do whatever you want with the place. But isn’t she taking care of your grandpa?”