I want to hit him! But I also want to hug him. How could any woman resist him?
She whacked at her slightly muddy butt as she rose from the dirty fender and led him around to the rear of the horse trailer. After unlocking the security gate, she revealed the tools, and the spares. Her dad had given her extras just in case.
Chris peered at the tires and frowned. “Two of these are already flat.”
“I changed those while on the road.”
He glanced at her hands, disapproval clear in his eyes. “You want to tell me why you’re traveling all on your own, and why you’re not driving the fancy rig Julián told me about?”
She bristled at his proprietary tone and attitude. “Long story, and—it’s really none of your damned business.”
“Okay, little prickly pear,” he murmured as he lifted the good spare and the jack from the horse trailer. “Angel will be here any minute. He’ll want to get you somewhere warm and I imagine that Teresa is already cooking something for you.”
She stifled a smile, thinking that he might just know her friends well. “How do you know them?”
“If you’d been listening instead of ogling this fine body, you’d know that, sugar britches.” He bit his lip, unsuccessfully stifling a laugh as he drug the jack around to the flat tire.
Oh, you asshole! Her cheeks went red-hot because he was right. He’d caught her eyeing him up and down, including the rather substantial bulge at his groin.
“It’s not often I meet someone of such height. You’re rather intimidating.”
He squatted next to the trailer, sliding the heavy jack in place as though it was a toy. Her arms still ached from lugging it out of the trailer twice in the last two days. He cast his warm brown gaze up at her. “I don’t mean to be intimidating, darlin’.”
He turned his attention to the task at hand and she watched his profile, and the way his shoulders and arms rippled and bulged as he operated the jack. He was a teaser, which she found irritating as hell in a man, but she thought she could put up with watching him move for a long time.
She shook her head to clear it. “So tell me what I missed before.”
“I work out at the Cook Ranch, with Julián. We’re also close friends.”
“I’ve never met you in all the times I’ve visited Divine. Why is that?”
Chris shrugged and lowered his gaze to the wheel as he began loosening the lug nuts with a wrench. “Not much on nightlife I guess.”
“I see. And you know Teresa and Angel?”
Chris smiled, evidently sensing that she wasn’t assuming that he was aware of their polyamorous relationship. “And Joaquin. Yes, I do.”
“The Warners?”
He nodded. “Yes, including Adam and Ethan.”
She was surprised by how relieved she felt that he knew them well. He was a big flirt and acted single, but she checked his hands for a ring anyway. Men could be real dogs sometimes.
“So, has Grace been matchmaking for you?”
Soft laughter rumbled in his chest. “She’s tried.”
“She has a gift for it, or so I hear.” She stifled a giggle, thinking of Grace’s matchmaking efforts on her cousin Jayne’s behalf. On a visit to Divine earlier in the year, she’d been surprised to see Julián and Seth Carter looking about ready to go at it in The Dancing Pony. Seth had acted every bit the territorial alpha male as he took his thoroughly soused girlfriend from Julián’s arms and carried her out of the nightclub.
Gwen had done her best to ignore the pit that had temporarily opened in her chest at the sight of Julián holding another woman protectively like that. He’d explained the circumstances to her a bit later, but the surge of possessiveness had been disturbing, nonetheless. Seth and Jayne had been married early in November so Grace had counted them as a solid matchmaking “win.”
Chris said, “I’ve heard that she has a gift for matching people up too. I guess that wasn’t the case with me.”
“No? Not your type?”
He shrugged again, and she noticed a slight change in his teasing demeanor. “More like I wasn’t her type.”
Her heart went out to this gentle giant, who didn’t make eye contact with her again as he continued working. Something inside her reached out to him for the briefest—
Don’t you dare! You’re not staying. You shouldn’t have even learned his name, damn it! Should’ve kept it at “Cowboy”!
Attachments just made it harder to leave. As it was, she missed Julián dreadfully every time she left Divine after a visit. This guy was getting under her skin way way too easily. And she was in Divine, after all. Ménage Central.