More annoying?
It doesn’t feel fake today. Not forced. Not manipulative.
She just looks like she’s having the best damn day of her life.
“That’s what I’ve heard,” she says. “Everyone says you’re the absolute best with the kids.”
“Are you buttering me up?” I wave a hand in the general direction of her entire person, realizing I’m standing way too close to her, and take a giant step back. “Is that what this is? Did you get all dolled up and put on a dress and pouty lips and bake me my favorite dessert so you can get your kid on my soccer team?”
She rears back. “Are you serious right now?”
I wave a hand at her again. “This—this is—you’re seducing me.”
That lush mouth sets in a grim line, and fuck me if it isn’t even hotter than her smiling.
And when she slides off the edge of my desk, squares her shoulders, and glares at me straight in the eye?
Yeah.
Seriously.
She’s glaring at me straight in the eye.
And I like it.
“Mr. Jackson, has it ever occurred to you that when a woman dresses up, she’s doing it to feel good about herself, and your opinion matters for less than zero? I just divorced a man who had no respect for me or his daughter. What in the actual hell makes you think I’d try to seduce you? What makes you worthy? This?”
She waves a hand at me exactly as I was waving a hand at her a moment ago.
And I shrink.
I shrink.
She doesn’t notice, or if she does, she clearly thinks it’s not enough. “This? You? You come in a very nice package. Ooh, muscles. And floppy bedhead hair. And a beard and tattoos and a glower. So irresistible. Let me be frank, Mr. Jackson. While it was incredibly kind of you to help us with the bear and the cow and my hair, you clearly don’t like me. I’m working very hard on having enough respect for myself to only have people in my life who are willing to appreciate me too. I’m here meeting teachers and handing out cherry crisps for Junie. And that’s it.”
If you’d told me over that dead cow last week that Maisey Spencer would ever reduce me to the size of a flea, I would’ve laughed you all the way out of Wyoming.
But that’s exactly what’s happening now.
Worse?
Watching her stick up for herself is triggering a primal instinct deep inside of me that wants to throw her over my shoulder, march her across the state, and tell her to repeat herself so my mother can hear what a woman who respects herself sounds like, despite the fact that I haven’t talked to my mother in years.
And it makes me want her.
Maisey.
Not the woman who raised me until I couldn’t take living in that house with her and my father for one more minute.
I shake my head, and my temper roars to life.
I do not want Maisey Spencer.
Correction: I don’t want to want Maisey Spencer.
My body is very clear on the fact that it doesn’t much care what my brain thinks on this matter. “You’re not leaving until I tell you June can be on the soccer team, are you?”
If I thought she was prickly before, I was sorely mistaken.
“Have you even asked the kids on your team how they’d feel about rotating in an extra player every once in a while, since she was too late for tryouts? I haven’t been the best mother the past few years. I’ll own that. But if there’s one thing I’m learning—and quickly, at that—it’s that teenagers have an innate sense of right, wrong, and fair. But if you don’t even want to ask, fine. Thank you for your bluntness, Mr. Jackson. I’ll make sure the next time I stop by the school to see if there’s anything any of you need, I won’t bother with coming in here.”
She turns, giving me a view of that ass and the blue fabric sliding across the muscle, and stalks out of my classroom without so much as a wobble on her heels.
Maisey Spencer, the woman who once spent an entire episode of her TV show in the hospital after she tripped over her own two boots, stalks out of my classroom like she was born on a runway.
And if that wasn’t enough, when she reaches the doorway, she turns and meets my gaze with hard, unwavering, but shiny blue eyes. “And I hope you think of me when you eat that cherry crisp. It’s the last thing of mine you’ll ever eat.”
Every ounce of blood drains from my head to my cock at the images that flood my vision.
I’m hallucinating about eating Maisey Spencer.
And I don’t think it’ll ever stop.
Chapter 8
Maisey
It’s getting dark, so I need to get back to the main house and heat up dinner for my recluse—I mean, my daughter—but there’s something so cathartic about beating the crap out of the half walls between the horse stalls in the barn with a sledgehammer.
“How’s that feel?” I ask the very bad chalk drawing of Dean’s face after I put the sledgehammer through it.
It doesn’t answer.
Obviously.
So I move on to the next chalk drawing, this one of a copper-haired, math-teaching, soccer-coaching cowboy that looks more like a snail wearing a donut on its head.
I let the sledgehammer swing, feeling the burn in my arms and shoulders and lower back at lifting the heavy tool once again. When it lands with a satisfying thwack right between that cowboy snail’s eyeballs, I feel another jolt of satisfaction that’s quickly followed by regret.
“I really want to hate you,” I whisper to the splintered wall. “You break the rules and use the ranch without making sure the liability insurance is there, but you won’t break the rules for my kid and let her on the soccer team. How is that fair?”
“Guy I used to know liked to say nothing’s ever fair,” a deep voice says behind me.
My shoulders bunch, my entire face twitches, and my freaking backstabbing vagina swoons.
I could act surprised and jerk around and accidentally swing my sledgehammer at him, but I don’t need that lawsuit either.
So I put the sledgehammer down and turn to face Flint. I’m nearly done taking out the stalls in the rickety barn that won’t collapse today but definitely should not be used frequently. The load-bearing walls and support beams seem to be in so-so shape. Definitely need to be replaced. Or the whole barn needs to be rebuilt. There’s splintered wood all over the floor and a cobweb in the doorway lit by the setting sun. If it weren’t for the man blocking the view, I’m pretty sure I’d be gasping in awe at the colors lighting the sky over the bluff in the distance, beyond the trees.
It is so pretty here. And I feel like I have too much to do to stop and breathe and just enjoy it.
“Can I help you?” I ask him.
If ever a man was born with a more natural mulish expression, I don’t want to meet him either.
I would! my vagina squeals.
And now my face is twitching again.
Flint lifts a quilted bag. “Peace offering,” he grunts.
“Cyanide and local poison berries?”
“Homemade meatloaf, scalloped potatoes, and green beans.”
He cooks!
I give up on discussing with my vagina how This is not happening and also He probably got takeout and then put it in a bag to make it look like he cooked and let her do whatever it is she’s going to do.