Free A Cowboy's Christmas Promise by Maggie McGinnis

stay awake.”
    Watching her body as she kept passing him, inhaling the sweet scent she left in her wake was giving him plenty of ideas how to stay awake, but they were completely inappropriate. For Christ’s sake, he’d just met the woman, and for double-Christ’s sake, he didn’t do that crap.
    Not that he hadn’t had plenty of opportunities since Katie’s death. He’d actually found it disgusting how magnetic a recently-widowed single dad was, and he’d gotten scary good at rebuffing subtle—and not-so-subtle—advances in the past two years.
    But Hayley wasn’t making any advances. She was simply his friend’s bridesmaid, out here in Big Sky for two weeks, and then back on a plane. He was one hundred percent sure she had no interest in anything here but the horses, and he needed to stop thinking about her as anything but a casual acquaintance who would be gone before he even knew her.
    “Okay, I’ll help you, Daniel. Say
‘what’s your favorite color?’
”
    An-nd now she wanted to play friggin’ Twenty Questions at four o’clock in the morning. This might be easier if he had any small talk skills whatsoever. He wracked his brain. “I’ll do my own question, thanks. I already know your favorite color’s green.”
    “How’d you—”
    “Am I right?”
    Her eyebrows came together. “Yes. But how?”
    “Lucky guess. Okay, if you could live anywhere in the world, where would you choose?”
Great. Now he sounded like a speed-dating nerd.
    “Australia.”
    “You didn’t even have to think? Why Australia?”
    “Because it is very, very far away from where I
do
live, and there’s no way I could be expected to make it home for Christmas. Plus, koala bears.”
    “Have you ever been there?”
    She shook her head. “Nope. I consider myself lucky if I have time to cross into New Hampshire these days.”
    “So how’d you swing two weeks all the way out here?”
    “I haven’t had a day off since
last
year when we were here, so I figured I’d earned it.”
    He motioned toward Apollo. “And within days, here you are working again. You’re not very good at vacationing, are you?”
    “Are you kidding? This
is
vacation. These are
real
animals. Do you have any idea how nice it is to hang out with an animal bigger than my foot? Hollywood needs to stop glamourizing super tiny pets.”
    “Totally agree.”
    “It’s kind of ironic, since they make such an effort out there to make everything else—bigger.”
    Daniel laughed as she held pretend bowling balls to her chest. “Absolutely.”
    He watched her gaze out the stable door into the quiet darkness. Then she turned toward him. “So where would
you
live, if you could go anywhere?”
    “Right here.”
    “Really? You’re that happy here? You don’t long for tropical white sands? Or the hum of a city? Or koala bears?”
    He laughed. “Koalas just sleep all the time. Kind of boring.” He shrugged. “I’m where I want to be. Good people, good everything. And I prefer grizzlies. They’re big and bad and you’ll never catch
them
sleeping.”
    Hayley did three more laps in silence, and he struggled to keep his eyes on the floor as her delicious backside passed into view each time. Was it the late hour? Lack-of-sleep delirium? Why was he suddenly having visions of her beside him in the hayloft, blankets and clothing in a clumsy heap? He stretched his hands, shaking his head as subtly as possible. Sleep deprivation was obviously taking its toll if he was having literal roll-in-the-hay fantasies about a woman he’d just met.
    She turned toward him again. Her chatter would border on annoying if it didn’t give him an excuse to watch her gorgeous, full lips.
    “Okay,” she said. “Keep talking. Since you’re already freakishly content with where you live, tell me something you wish you could do someday.”
    “Hmm. So many ways I could answer that one.”
    Especially since my brain has apparently gone on autopilot. Or south.
    “Keep it clean,