Cowboy Take Me Away by Soraya Lane Page B

it, I’ll just have the plain one.”
    If only she could just relax instead of being a jangling ball of nerves, but the simple fact that they liked the same bagels only made her feel worse than she already did.
    â€œWas my mom out with you last night?” Harrison asked as he munched, almost impossible to understand. She wasn’t going to call him out on talking with his mouth full, he’d only get embarrassed and he was having fun chatting.
    â€œYeah, she was,” Chase replied, turning around again and putting her coffee on the counter.
    She mouthed thank you as she slid it down toward her. He grinned back, way too at ease in her kitchen for her to be comfortable.
    â€œCan I go with you next time?”
    â€œHarrison,” she interrupted before Chase had a chance to answer, “how about you and I go out for pizza tonight? It just so happens I’ve heard about a great place.”
    â€œWe’ve only just moved here, you know,” her son announced, completely ignoring her, all his attention on Chase. “We come from Canada, but Mom got a new job here.”
    â€œYou’ve got a lot to say, little man,” Chase said with a chuckle as he turned again, this time with his coffee cup in his hands. “I think you and I are gonna be good friends.”
    Hope’s heart started its rapid-pounding-then-stutter thing, making her feel sick to her stomach. Taking the job here had been a no-brainer, but ending up reconnected with Chase was just downright dangerous. She took a sip of her coffee, grimacing as it burned the tip of her tongue.
    She needed to get Chase out of her house, and, like the big bad wolf he was, not let him back in.
    *   *   *
    Chase finished his coffee and set the cup on the counter. He watched Hope as she bent down to wipe a smudge of cream cheese off the corner of her son’s mouth, dropping a kiss into his hair before standing back up.
    â€œSo what’s your plan for the day?” he asked, taking both their cups to the sink and rinsing them out. He checked the dishwasher and put them in when he saw it had a dirty load.
    â€œI’m heading into work soon,” she said, nodding to Harrison that he could run off. “I need to go and get the little man ready.”
    â€œDo you have a nanny during the week?”
    â€œHe goes to pre-K for a few hours each day. I drop him there in the morning, then he has a nanny in the afternoons. She collects him and has him until I come home.”
    â€œThat must be tough,” Chase said, noticing the flicker in her gaze when she talked about her nanny. “You guys seem pretty close.”
    â€œWe are.” She busied herself squaring up a pile of magazines, clearly not wanting to make eye contact with him. He knew her too well though, could see straight through it. “I guess I never expected to be a working mom. Not like this, anyway.”
    He nodded, taking a few steps back toward her now that there were only the two of them in the room again. “You thought you’d be chilling on your ranch, making homemade lemonade and enjoying a brood of children by now, right?”
    She laughed, finally looking at him again. “Maybe not an entire brood, and I always wanted to help run the ranch, but yeah. I didn’t expect to be a working single mom with a trail of debt in my wake, that’s for sure.” She turned to glance out the window, needing to gather her thoughts. “The dreams I had seemed realistic a few years ago, and now everything’s just turned to dust.”
    â€œYou ever gonna tell me exactly what happened?”
    She shrugged. “One day. Right now I’d rather forget it.”
    Chase wanted to push her, but he knew the more he pushed the more she’d pull back, even though it was on the tip of his tongue to just ask her to tell him what the hell had happened and get on with it. Maybe she was afraid he’d go and hunt down her