Cold Heart, Warm Cowboy by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

12

Hannah would have sworn up and down that there was no earthly way anything with Ty could possibly feel routine. He was too elemental. Too much, too electric, too … Ty.

But as the days slipped by, one week turning into the next—and that hollow, Jack-less place inside her blooming from an ache into a kind of agony—they built up a rhythm. Or a habit, anyway.

He might not have known the difference, but she did.

They had never had habits, before. Their rhythms had been stolen glances, hoarded nights, or whispered telephone conversations from two parts of the same crowded room. They had never had mornings. Maybe a glimpse of a sunrise here or there, but never one after the next.

Hannah discovered that no matter how much careful space she and Ty left between them on the big bed that took up most of the bedroom in this tiny house, they always ended up wrapped around each other before dawn.

That first morning, Ty’s godawful alarm had jolted them both wide awake and into a confused rush of heat and touch, because Hannah was wrapped all around him. And there was no pretending that both of them didn’t feel both his response and hers.

He’d muttered something gruff about helping herself to any coffee she found and anything else that took her fancy. He’d been up, dressed, and out the door in under five minutes. But Hannah had stayed awake in the bed that grew less and less warm the longer he was out of it, unable to fall back asleep or keep all her tangled emotions from spilling down her cheeks, until the sun came up hours later.

Every morning it was the same thing. The shrill of the alarm, then the jolt of sleepy awareness. Until slowly, day after day, they stopped reacting like scalded cats. Hannah didn’t gasp and fling herself away from him. Ty didn’t mutter apologies. They woke up, tangled like a knot, and he rolled her off him. So gently it made her stomach flip over, every time. Then he eased himself out of the bed and headed out to handle his first round of chores.

They didn’t talk about any of that.

There were a lot of things they didn’t talk about. And unless Hannah wanted to start coming clean about all the things she was keeping hidden—particularly the baby boy she called every day after Ty left their bed, with his sweet laughter on their video calls and the babbling that sounded more and more like real words every day—she needed to find a way to be okay with that.

She told herself she was more than okay with it. This was an experiment. She was dipping her toe into intimacy with this man instead of flinging herself headlong into passion and pain. And more, she told herself piously, she was doing it as much for Jack as for herself.

The first morning, after she’d laid there wide awake and filled with too many emotions—most of them unflattering and ugly—she’d rolled herself out of the bed, wondering if she smelled like him.

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