McKettricks of Texas: Austin (25 page)

“I like the way you look, doing that,” Austin said.

“Grooming a horse?”

He grinned. “It's ranch work, and you look right at home doing it.”

“Don't get any bright ideas,” Paige responded with a grin of her own. “I'm doing this because it feels good to Molly, not to impress you.”

“Since when have you ever tried to impress me?” Austin asked good-naturedly.

Only every day that we were together,
Paige thought. But what she actually said was, “You've got a point there. Now that you mention it, I was more interested in running you down with our neighbor's new golf cart.”

Austin chuckled at the memory. Ran a hand through his hair.

He needed a shave and a change of clothes and despite all that, he was so damn sexy Paige almost couldn't stand it.

“This is nice, being out here with the horses,” he said. “Just you and me.”

“The horses are good company,” Paige admitted, a little smile tilting up one side of her mouth as she finished grooming Molly and put the brush back where she'd found it.

That made him laugh. Again.

“Will you come with me?” he asked, blocking Paige's way as she left Molly's stall.

She looked up at him, and her heart raced. “Where?”

Austin raised both eyebrows and waggled them teasingly. “Horseback riding,” he said. “In the morning.”

“Oh,” she said. Around this man, she was a regular conversational genius.

“One way or the other, I'm going for a ride,” he told her. He'd bent his head toward hers, and she felt his breath whisper over her left ear. “Maybe you ought to come along, just to keep me out of trouble. That's what Tate and Garrett pay you for, isn't it?”

Something in his tone raised her hackles, though she wasn't sure what. “Keeping you out of trouble,” she said, slipping past him and striding toward the door at a good clip, “is not part of my job description.”

He caught up, walking beside her. “How about getting me
into
trouble, then?” he joked. “That sounds like a lot more fun.”

“You get
yourself
into plenty of trouble, Austin McKettrick. You certainly don't need my help.”

He moved in front of her, forcing her to stop or try to duck around him again.

She stopped.

“I'm leaving right after breakfast,” Austin said. “Around six-thirty or so. If you want to come along, you're more than welcome. If you don't, I'll see you when I get back.”

“Do you have anything else to say?” Paige asked coolly.

“Yes, ma'am,” Austin replied. “I surely do. You and I are bound to bed down together for real, sooner rather than later. I figure it's inevitable. But you need to know that I won't press the matter—the
when
and the
where
of it all, that's up to you. You have my word on it.”

“How about never?” Paige retorted, her tone sugary sweet.

Austin merely laughed. “You
know
it's going to happen,” he said. “But you'll probably still be denying it when you're yelling my name, clawing at my back with
all ten fingernails and rolling your eyes back in your head.”

Seething inwardly, Paige managed to appear calm. Or, at least, she
hoped
she appeared calm. She set her hands on her hips and glared at him.

“You are one arrogant, pigheaded son-of-a—”

Austin's mouth quirked up in a grin that would have done the devil proud. “Watch it,” he said. “My mama was a good woman.”

Paige gave a strangled cry of pure frustration and stormed toward the open doorway of the barn. This time, he let her pass.

 

“T
HAT WENT WELL
,” Austin told Shep when the back door of the house slammed behind Paige.

Shep gave a sympathetic whimper.

Inside the vast and echoing kitchen, Austin took a can of beer from the fridge and headed, out of habit, for the stairs leading up to his apartment.

His back was okay, but he felt a head-spinning dizziness when he started the climb, and he had to turn around. This did not bode well, he figured, for the horseback ride he planned on taking in the morning, but it would take more than a little light-headedness to keep him from going. He'd been immobilized, cooped up, for too long. He needed, even craved, the feel of a horse under him, hooves flying, gobbling up ground.

Austin put the beer back in the fridge and ran a glass of water instead. Reaching his room, he eased out of his jacket and dutifully swallowed the pills Paige had counted out neatly into a little plastic container with a box for each day of the week.

He hadn't seen one of those since before his granddad died, when Austin was seven.

Shep sank gratefully onto his blanket pile and yawned big.

Leaving the dog behind in the morning would be a wrench, but for Shep's own good, Austin meant to do exactly that.

He was thinking about all these things, and a few more, as he ambled into the bathroom, planning on taking a shower before bed.

He was too far in to go back when he realized that the water was already running in the shower stall, and the flesh-colored shadow behind the frosted glass door was Paige.

It wasn't as if he'd never seen a woman in a shower before.

Hell, if there was a woman in
his
shower, he was generally in there with her.

Until now, that is.

Until Paige.

He turned on one heel, hoping to sneak back out without her seeing him, but he hadn't even crossed the threshold before she gave a little shriek.

Poor old Shep, thinking there was an emergency only a crippled dog could handle, immediately bounded into the room.

“I'm sorry,” Austin said, keeping his back to Paige.

Warm, beautiful, sweetly responsive,
naked
Paige.

Something, probably a wet washcloth, struck him mid-spine, with a soggy plop. His molars clamped together. In all his born days, he had never encountered such a prickly and impossible woman.

He walked away.

 

“I
MIGHT HAVE OVERREACTED
,” Paige said, standing beside Austin's bed, twenty minutes after the shower incident. She was wearing both a nightgown
and
a bathrobe, and she still felt grossly underdressed.

Austin, sprawled on top of the covers in his jeans and his attitude and nothing else, didn't look up from the pages of his paperback Western.

“Ya think?” he asked tartly.

“You walked in on me, Austin. I was startled.”

He touched the tip of his index finger to his tongue, turned the page. And he still didn't look at her. “Sorry about that,” he said, with an utter lack of conviction.

She flung her hands out from her sides, let them fall again. “I tried,” she said. “The shower is all yours, Austin. I'm going to bed.”

“Good night,” he said, and turned another page.

Austin, Paige knew, had always struggled with reading. Unless he was channeling Evelyn Wood, he was faking her out with all that page turning.

She grabbed the book out of his hands.

“That,” he said drily, “was not cool.”

Paige sighed. “You're right,” she said, giving back the book. “It wasn't.”

“What do you want me to say, Paige? I walked in on you. I'm sorry. I think I said so at the time.”

“I didn't believe you,” Paige said.

“That's obvious,” he replied. “And it's discouraging, too, considering that we've known each other since kindergarten and I just made that big speech out there in the barn. All about how it would be
your choice
when we finally make love.”

Paige folded her arms. Old hurts sneaked up and ambushed her. “You've made other speeches in your time,
Austin McKettrick,” she said. And then she turned on one heel and started to walk away.

Only, Austin caught her by the back of her bathrobe and stopped her in her tracks. “Hold it,” he said. “You don't get to make a remark like that and then just walk away, Nurse Remington.”

She turned on him. “You said you loved me!” she cried, and then wished she had the courage to literally bite off her tongue.

Austin sat up, resting his back against the headboard of the antique bed. “I did love you, Paige,” he said very quietly. “That's why I did what I did.”

Paige's eyes stung fiercely, and her breath came in short, rapid gasps. “Liar!”

“We were kids, Paige,” he said. “Things were moving way too fast. We were eighteen and headed hell-bent for a lot of stuff we couldn't possibly have handled. I'd do things differently now, but at the time, I swear to God I didn't know any other way to save either one of us. But I'm sorry I hurt you, really and truly I am.”

The ache that rose within Paige in that moment threatened to split her heart wide open. She couldn't speak, and that was probably a good thing, because anything she said would have been even more painful to hear than it was to say.

She left the room, and Austin let her go.

In Calvin's old room, she threw back the covers, laid herself down and curled into a fetal position.

A whimper behind her made her turn, and there was Shep, with his muzzle resting on the side of the mattress and his eyes luminous with sympathy in the dim moonlight coming in through the window.

That did it. Paige began to cry. In earnest. She rolled over, patting Shep's smooth head, and sobbed.

He waited, that sweet dog, for the storm to pass. Didn't move, didn't make a sound.

After a few minutes of hard grieving for things that might have been and never would be, Paige began to recover some of her composure. She continued to stroke the dog's head, and he kept his vigil, too. He didn't move even once. Just stood there, with his furry chin resting on the bottom sheet and his eyes shining with the hang-in-there kind of love he probably knew a great deal about.

“Thanks,” Paige said, when the worst of the weeping storm was over.

Shep whined once, low in his throat, and then he turned and limped out of the room, no doubt returning to his master's side.

After a very, very long time, Paige slept.

 

“W
AKE UP.”

The voice was Austin's.

Paige struggled toward the surface of a dream. “Wh-what?”

“It's six-fifteen,” Austin said. “Breakfast is ready.”

“B-breakfast?” Paige blinked her eyes rapidly. Sat up. “Austin, what—?”

Then she remembered. The horseback ride.

She sank back into her pillows and pulled the blankets up over her head.

Austin only chuckled. “Go or stay,” he told her, and she knew by the sound of his voice that he was walking away. “That's up to you. You have fifteen minutes, at the outside, and then I'm gone.”

Paige moaned.

He laughed and she listened to the sound of his boot heels grow fainter and then fainter still.

The aroma of fresh coffee reached her, even through the fabric of the bed clothes. She tried hard—maybe
too
hard—to go back to sleep.

But waking life intruded. Paige remembered how it felt to ride a horse through a crisp autumn morning.

She also remembered that, technically, she was Austin's nurse.

There would be no persuading the damn fool to stay home, but what if he was out there all alone and he had a back spasm, or even got thrown from the saddle and reinjured his shoulder?

What if whoever had shot him before tried again?

Sputtering a swear word, Paige flung back the covers and sat up. Ran both hands through her hair and dragged in a deep breath.

After that, she took a very quick shower, dressed warmly in heavy jeans and a wool sweater. She didn't own a pair of boots, so her sneakers would have to do for footwear.

When she reached the kitchen, Austin was still there, rinsing his plate and placing it neatly into the dishwasher, along with the silverware he'd used. He'd brought Shep's blanket-pile bed out and set it down in front of the unlit fireplace, and the dog looked settled there, as though he'd accepted that, this time, he'd have to stay home.

With a twitch of a grin, Austin looked Paige over and then nodded his head in the direction of the middle staircase.

A pair of brown boots waited there, well-worn but still
sturdy, along with two pairs of wool socks, wound up into balls.

“Those were my mom's,” Austin explained. “I think they might be a little big for you, but the extra socks should help.”

A complicated emotion rose inside Paige, and she didn't even
try
to give it a name. It was too damn early and she hadn't even had coffee yet.

She walked over, sat down heavily on the step, kicked off her sneakers and the footies she'd worn beneath them, and donned both pairs of wool socks, then the boots. She stood, walked around a little. The fit was perfect.

The complicated emotion swelled again, then ebbed and faded as Austin held out a cup of hot coffee.

She accepted the cup, took a cautious sip.

Her eyebrows rose. “Did you make this?”

Austin laughed. “Yeah,” he replied. “I have other talents as well.”

“I think it would be better,” Paige allowed, after more coffee, “if we didn't discuss your talents.”

“Your loss.” He grinned, gesturing toward the table. “Sit down. You need to eat before we go.”

Paige shook one foot and then the other, getting used to the boots. “I'm not hungry,” she said.

“Too bad,” Austin replied. He dished up some scrambled eggs, took two thick slices of buttered toast out of the oven and set them on top, and put the whole works on the table. “Eat.”

Paige sighed, but she washed and dried her hands at the sink, she sat down and she ate.

The surprises just kept on coming: it turned out that Austin was a halfway decent cook.