Making A Texas Cowboy (Home at Last Texas #1)

Chapter Twenty-Four

I didn’t trigger that, did I?

Nic stared down into the remaining dark, strong coffee in her mug, but all she saw was a replay in her head of that moment when something bright and hot had flashed across Jackson Thorpe’s face.

True, it was gone a moment later, but she was certain she’d seen it. Certain because it matched her own unexpected gut reaction to that moment when she’d realized he was watching her. Watching her with a kind of longing, almost hunger, in those famous, striking dark-blue eyes.

So, what, as soon as she admitted he wasn’t what she’d thought he was, she threw open the gates? Given some sign, some unconscious signal that she would now welcome what she would have recoiled at before?

The realization that she wouldn’t recoil at it now made her set down her coffee mug before the ripples in the dark liquid made it obvious how unsettled she was.

Scrambling for something, anything, to distract her suddenly rowdy mind, she said rather abruptly, “Mom said you’ve never played a bad guy.”

“No. Confused, conflicted, could go bad if pushed, yes. But an actual bad guy, no.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I’d like to say I don’t have it in me, but I think everybody has the potential. That’s just not the portrayal I want to be linked to. Not the emotions I want to channel.”

She tilted her head slightly, studying him. “Is that what it is to you? You channel emotions through the parts you play?”

“Sounds all touchy-feely, I know, but sort of, yeah. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I tell myself there are people out there feeling the same way this guy, this character does, and if I do it right, they’ll know they’re not alone.”

Nic stared at him now. She had never thought of it that way, but it made sense that seeing a character who had become real to you suffer could actually make you relate to them even more.

“Mom said something like that, after she watched a scene where someone in the TV family died. She said she knew the minute she saw it that you’d been there.”

She was almost sorry she’d said it when he winced a little.

“That was just a few months after Leah was killed. I didn’t plan on... using that pain, putting it on public display. But I had to think about how the character would be feeling, and... it just sort of happened.”

“That must have been harrowing.”

He let out a compressed breath. “The minute the director on that one yelled cut, I walked off the set. Told him to get what he needed out of what he had, because I wasn’t doing it again.”

And she guessed from the finality in those last words that he was also through talking about it.

“I don’t know how you did it the first time,” she said quietly, and left it at that.

She took another sip of coffee and looked around, toward the big great room where the fire now crackled happily in the big stone fireplace.

“I always liked this house,” she said, watching the flames, figuring he wouldn’t mind the abrupt change of subject. Judging by the way his tone changed, he didn’t.

“I can see why. It’s the perfect combination of spacious, with the high ceilings, but homey, with the relatively small footprint, the rustic feel, but all the conveniences. And the location’s unbeatable.”

She’d glanced at him when he started to speak, but by the time he’d finished, she was practically gaping at him. He’d verbalized her exact thoughts about the house he now lived in.

The house she’d often thought she’d like to live in herself.

And again, the images slammed into her brain, of them doing just that, living together under this vaulted roof.

A noise broke the flood. It was the sound of Jeremy coming down the ladder. He came running toward them, something in his hand, and with a different kind of shock, it hit her that she was happy, happy in a way she’d never known before, to see the boy acting so... normally. He’d come a long way in the month they’d been here, and it did her heart a new and unfamiliar kind of good to see it. She felt so attached to the child, and not simply because she was teaching him to ride. She felt connected in a kind of way she’d never known before. He mattered to her, a great deal, and when the inevitable moments of sadness swept over him, she felt a physical pain herself.

“I almost forgot. Mrs. B said I should show you this,” Jeremy said as he skidded to a stop beside the table, a sheet of paper in his hand.

Jackson took it, saying in a clearly teasing tone, “She makes you do stuff on paper instead of on a computer?”

Jeremy shrugged. “S’okay. I didn’t have to write something long.”

Jackson looked at the page in his hand. Nic could see it was a paragraph in rather wobbly printed letters that were still quite readable. The green-inked paragraph below it she knew was her mother’s writing, both from the ink color—she always said that she didn’t like using red on children’s papers, she wanted the subtle signal to be go-ahead green, not stoplight red—and the flowing style of the cursive.

She glanced at Jackson’s face as he read her mom’s note. And she knew she hadn’t mistaken the sudden sheen in his eyes. He blinked a couple of times, proving her right.

“Is it bad?” Jeremy asked anxiously, looking at his father. “I don’t read that curvy writing so good.”

“No, it’s not bad.” Jackson’s voice held a husky note she found shiveringly emotional. “Not bad at all. It just reminded me of something we haven’t done in a while.”

“Oh. You mean when you’d read me stories at night? I told her that’s how I knew about that book.”

“Yes.”

There was a moment of silence before Jeremy said, almost shyly, “I miss that.”

“Me too,” Jackson said, his voice still noticeably tight. “How about we start that again? Pick out a book and we’ll do it tonight.”

There was no mistaking the way Jeremy’s face lit up. Without another word, he turned and ran across the great room to the ladder and scrambled up to the loft. He hadn’t needed to speak. The delight on his face was reaction enough. And a glance at Jackson told her he hadn’t missed it. She felt a new kind of emotion at the blatantly obvious love this man had for his son.

He sat, staring down at the paper in his hand for a long, silent moment, and she had the feeling he was trying to rein in his emotions.

“May I?” she asked, gesturing at the single page.

He didn’t answer, but handed it to her without looking up. At the top, in childlike, but clear enough printing, was a paragraph describing his favorite book. She didn’t recognize the title, but to her surprise, the summation of the story of two kids and a dog who find themselves in the middle of nowhere trying to get home was nearly perfect and had her curious about the book itself.

Her mother’s familiar hand, in the green-for-go ink, said much the same thing, but ended with, This is excellent, well above the expected for Jeremy’s age. He told me how you often read stories to him at night, doing all the different voices. He misses that. Now that you have more time of your own, perhaps you could revisit the habit. It might help in other ways too.

“Now there’s something not every kid has. A father who can do all the parts reading stories to him.” He looked at her then, and he was still blinking a little too fast. “And I’d bet it was fun for you too.”

“It was. It is. I should never have let it slip by the wayside.”

“Hard to do when your world’s been turned upside down. Sage Highwater told me that after their father was killed, just getting up in the morning seemed like too much.”

“Sage?”

“Youngest Highwater, and the only girl.” She smiled. “Another case of the oldest brother stepping up. Their flaky mother was long gone by then, and Shane gave up some big dreams to come home and see to his siblings.”

Something different came into his voice then, something warmer and less rattled. “Seems you grow them that way here in Texas.”

“We do,” she said, and she didn’t try to hide her pride in her home state. Then she added, rather pointedly, “But we welcome that same kind from other places, as long as they live up to that mold.” She couldn’t stop herself from giving him a wry smile. “Even if some of us are slower on the uptake.”

He shrugged. “You had your reasons, and they were... understandable assumptions.”

“Just wrong ones.”

A slight smile curved his mouth. That darned mouth. “Thank you. I appreciate that. But... could we maybe put that behind us?”

A bigger smile spread over her face. “Consider it in the rearview mirror.”

He chuckled, and she felt as if she’d accomplished something... nice. For a long moment their gazes locked, and it was as if the entire atmosphere had shifted. As if the air itself had suddenly come alive, crackling with energy. As if whatever had triggered that flash of sudden heat had struck once more, only magnified tenfold. Perhaps because this time it was going both ways. She had this sudden vision of two bolts of lightning colliding and energizing all the air around them.

And she belatedly considered the words she’d spoken. If her misjudgment of him was in the rearview mirror, then where were they headed now?

She pushed the thoughts aside, which, even as she did it, she admitted was unlike her. She was more a “confront the issue now” kind of person, and this wasn’t like her. But here she was burying deep the very thing she should be addressing.

She felt the need to run, to escape, and was mortified by the urge. She wasn’t someone who ran away from her problems. She just wasn’t quite ready for the insanity of wanting to kiss Jackson Thorpe.

She scrambled for another subject, any other subject, and they chatted amiably enough to slow her racing pulse. She kept on until that moment, that electrifying instant, had faded before saying something about having an early lesson in the morning and getting to her feet.

“Say good night to Jeremy for me?”

“Of course.”

She started to take her mug to the kitchen, but he politely told her to leave it, he’d get it. He walked her to the door, as any good host would. Opened it for her. She stepped out onto the porch, noticing with some surprise it was already nearly sunset.

She turned to thank him for the coffee and say good night. In the same instant, he stepped out onto the porch himself, and they collided. He was as solid as she would have expected, if such close contact had ever been allowed into her mind. Okay, other than in the dreams she couldn’t seem to fight off.

His lips parted as if he were about to speak, but no words came. But those lips were suddenly all she could see.

She kissed him.

She kissed him and he tasted so warm, the hint of coffee lingering, his lips firm yet giving, and even though she had to stretch upward to reach, she couldn’t make herself pull away. And for a long, sweet, intense moment, neither did he. In fact, for that moment he kissed her back, as if... as if he’d wanted this too. Or at least had wondered what it would be like.

Had he expected this... deluge of sensation? Or was it just her responding so fiercely? Had it just been too long for her, or had her body been aware of something her mind had shoved aside? Had some part of her known it would be like this?

It was Jackson who finally broke the kiss, who pulled back. She was almost afraid to look at him, afraid she’d see distaste in those famous eyes. But she saw nothing but surprise—that she’d dared?—and... heat. That same heat that had crackled between them before, in that brief, intense moment when their gazes had locked.

The sound of Jeremy’s voice did what her own will had not been able to—jolted her back to reality.

“You leavin’?” the boy asked. And only then did she realize that this was why Jackson had broken the kiss. He must have heard the boy coming down the ladder. If he hadn’t, would he have kept on, made it deeper, sweeter?

She had to swallow before she could speak. “Yes. I would have come up to say good night, but I didn’t want to interrupt your homework. Or”—she glanced at his father—“your book selection.”

“That’s okay. I’m almost done.” He, too, glanced at his father, and added almost shyly, “And I already picked out the book.”

“Good night, then,” she said.

“Go finish,” Jackson told the boy. “Then I’ll be up. Maybe with some hot chocolate, huh?”

“Cool,” Jeremy said, throwing a “’Night,” at her over his shoulder.

“Good night to you too,” she said when the boy had gone.

“Very good,” he said, his voice a little rough, sending a little shiver through her. “Much better than I expected.”

This time he kissed her, leaning in and practically blanking out every rational thought she’d recovered in the last minute. And when she was back home, in front of her wing of the main house, she sat in her car, her forehead resting on the steering wheel, eyes closed, as she relived those moments on his porch.

When she opened her eyes again, it was nearly dark. And she went inside with the certain knowledge that she’d be having one of those dreams tonight.