Cowboy Trouble (The McCord Brothers 1.5) by Delores Fossen Page B

staring at her.
    “I wanted to keep them, all right?” Natalie snapped, and she realized she sounded pissed.
    Which in a way she was.
    She didn’t like explaining that it had felt good to keep the ring, in some form or another, close to her. She definitely hadn’t shoved it away in her nightstand drawer so that it was out of sight, out of mind.
    “You wear the pin a lot?” he asked.
    All the time. In fact, she told everyone it was her good-luck charm. “Whenever it matches my outfit,” she said. Thankfully, it matched everything.
    Rico stared at her a moment longer. Then he mumbled some very bad curse words and dropped his head back onto the pillow. “If the ring was important, why didn’t you get in touch with me at least once during the past twelve years?”
    “I did.” Oh. This would lead to another confession. “I called you but would then hang up because I didn’t know what to say.” After all, there really wasn’t much she could say. “I did that for a while, but then you changed your number.”
    “Because I thought I was getting crank calls. Your name wasn’t on the caller ID.”
    “I used one of those disposable phones when I made the calls. My phone is part of the company’s business accounts.”
    “And you didn’t want your dad to see my number and know you’d contacted me,” he finished for her. He cursed.
    “Well, you didn’t exactly call me,” she argued.
    He stayed quiet a moment. “No, but I did go to see you.”
    She practically snapped to attention. “When?”
    A muscle flickered in his jaw. “About a year after you left. I drove to Austin and saw you walking out of your dad’s office building with another guy.”
    Natalie shook her head, clearly not able to remember that specific time. She exited that building at least once a day.
    “The guy was tall, looked like a body builder,” Rico provided. Judging from the slightly narrowed eyes, he remembered it in nth detail. “He was wearing a bright blue suit.”
    “Trent,” she quickly provided. “He’s my assistant, and he’s married with four daughters. Trust me, Trent and I weren’t involved.”
    “He had his arm around you.”
    Natalie didn’t have to think hard to recall why he would have done that. “I was having trouble walking in my heels.” She huffed. “A year after I left, I wasn’t ready to look at another man. I didn’t get involved with Marcus until four years after that, and the truth is, I was never really involved. Sadly, Marcus is just another outfit that my dad wants me to have.”
    There it was. All spelled out. Her life without Rico. Of course, she was never really without him. Not in thought anyway. Since she was just now realizing that, it made her seem more than a little pathetic.
    “Yeah, having sex with you today didn’t muddy the waters at all,” he snarled, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
    “It doesn’t have to,” Natalie threw out there. Like the pin/ring discussion, he was clearly going to want a whole lot more.
    More that she didn’t have. But she did have an idea, one that would probably send his common sense into cardiac arrest.
    “Why can’t we just be sex buddies?” she asked. “We’re obviously good at it. And it’s not as if we’re having sex with anyone else.” Her own common sense stalled a little when she realized that might not be true. “Are you?”
    He gave her the flat-look treatment. “No.” Then huffed. “You really think we can have more sex and not screw up...things?”
    He meant their lives. Their hearts, too.
    Even with the stakes that high, Natalie nodded. Again, her decision was highly influenced by having a naked Rico just a few inches away from her. Those inches were too far, she decided, and she moved in for a kiss.
    There were plenty of nice things about kissing Rico, but the best one was that it caused them to stop thinking. Natalie didn’t want to think right now. She wanted to have him one more time before she had to go home. Rico seemed to