A Cowboy in the Kitchen Read Online Free PDF Page B

the morning.”
    Alone with him at his house. At night. She cleared her throat. “Tomorrow after closing will be fine,” she said. “I’ll be over by nine-thirty. We close at nine, but I’ll need to help clean up.”
    He nodded, took his Stetson off the coat hook by the door and left, twenty different thoughts scrambling around Annabel’s head. But the one that stood out was about how she’d feel being over at the Montgomery Ranch. For the second time.
    * * *
    Tuesday afternoon, just an hour after Lucy had come racing off the school bus, waving her “sight words” quiz with 100% and a smiley face at the top, West rushed Lucy to Doc McTuft’s office, cursing himself with what was left of his breath. They’d been in the backyard, Lucy on the low sturdy branch of her favorite climbing tree, calling out words and spelling them, West nailing on the piece of wood for the roof of the new dollhouse he promised to make for her. One minute Lucy had been saying, “Daddy, look how high I am—am, A M !”—and she’d been so high that he called himself an idiot for not watching more closely—and the next, she let out a high-pitched yelp and was on the ground.
    Doc McTufts had assured him that Lucy was fine, no broken bones, and that the doc herself had fallen out of plenty of trees as a kid and lived to tell the tale to worried parents all over town. But of course, as they were settling up at the reception desk, who was giving him the stink eye but the Dunkins’ next-door neighbor, sitting with pursed lips next to her daughter and grandbaby. As West drove home, Lucy in her car seat in the back with her superhero coloring book, he figured the woman had already called Raina to let her know her poor granddaughter had almost been injured and had left the doc’s office with a big bandage over a nasty scrape.
    Lucy was all right. That was what mattered. But he would keep a better eye on her when she was climbing.
    â€œDaddy, can we have ice cream for dinner?” Lucy asked.
    â€œHow about your second favorite for dinner and ice cream for dessert?” he asked, smiling at her in the rearview mirror.
    â€œFrench toast with strawberries for the mouth and blueberries for the eyes?”
    â€œSounds good to me,” he said, feeling pretty confident about his French toast after yesterday’s cooking lesson. Plus, hadn’t Annabel said that she’d often eaten breakfast for dinner in Dallas when she was feeling low or missed her family? Comfort food. The very reason he ate at Hurley’s so often.
    He’d lain awake for hours last night, thinking about the cooking lesson. Annabel was so beautiful with that silky dark red hair caught in the ponytail, her pale, porcelainlike skin free of makeup, her long, lush body in low-slung jeans rolled up at the ankles and a loose white button down shirt tucked in. Her uniform, she’d called it. He called it sexy. She was like summertime, like sunshine, and her nearness, the scent of her, the sight of the swell of her breasts against the cotton shirt, the curve of her hip...it had been all he could do not to grab her against the wall and kiss her, memories of their time in the barn hitting him hard, as he’d shaken confectioners’ sugar on French toast, slid peppers around in the pan.
    And then she’d touched him, her soft hand, her skin electrifying his with the most casual of gestures, moving his hand over on the knife. Her touch had sent a shock through him and brought him back to the barn to forty-five minutes when he thought he’d found his future, when he thought everything made sense.
    Until it didn’t.
    Back then West had been going nowhere fast. Annabel would have joined him there if he’d let something happen between them. After he and Annabel had almost gone too far in the barn, he forced himself to stop for her sake and said he’d better get back to the house.