Free Always a Cowboy by Linda Lael Miller Page A

chose when and where we’d go—just to be sure I’d intrude on your brother’s evening with his friends.”
    His mouth twitched. “Not a ton of restaurant choices in Mustang Creek.”
    â€œWhatever lucky woman’s out there waiting for you, she should be warned that you’re a smooth liar.”
    He didn’t even pretend to dissemble. “You think she’s lucky, huh? I’m honored.”
    Luce watched him over the rim of her wineglass. Of the three Carson men, he was perhaps the most complicated. Slater was brilliant and driven. Drake was the pragmatic, down-to-earth type who dealt with life head-on. Mace was harder to figure out. All she knew with certainty was that he liked to needle his older brothers and would’ve been disappointed if they hadn’t returned the favor.
    Luce liked him. There wasn’t the same pull she felt with Drake, but chemistry was an unpredictable thing. “Hmm. She’d need to be sassy. Sophisticated. Smart. And she has to be able to handle you.”
    â€œYou fit the bill.” His smile was flirtatious.
    â€œI’m not sophisticated.” She wasn’t particularly; she’d always been more of an academic than the polished type she pictured at his side. He was equally aware that they weren’t well suited in a romantic sense. And he obviously had some intuition about her and Drake—or at least her attraction to Drake—since he was pressuring his brother. She liked him all the better for his matchmaking because she found it both funny and touching. “I’m all about hiking boots and skinny-dipping in the river. You want someone who can pick up a wine list and recognize every single label.”
    â€œI don’t like snooty women.”
    â€œThat’s not what I said, is it?”
    â€œNo.” Mace was drinking one of his own red wines, and apparently enjoying the conversation. “I’ll wait for her to come along. In the meantime, you and my brother?”
    She had no idea what to say. She raised her shoulders in a helpless shrug. “I don’t think he even likes me.”
    â€œThink again. I recognized that scowl on his face when I walked through the door. It wasn’t because you were here. It was because you were here with me .”
    She regarded him dubiously.
    With a cheeky grin, he added, “Trust me on this one, Ms. Hale. He just doesn’t know what to do with you. Whoops, badly put. He knows what he’d like to do with you, but the thought of being part of a research project affronts his desire for solitude. You could put Drake in a time machine and take him back about a hundred and fifty years, drop him anywhere in the American West, and he’d fit right in. Even when we were younger, he hardly ever watched TV or played any video games. When we got home from school, he did his homework as fast as possible so he could saddle his horse and ride out. Harry used to get on him because he missed supper so often.”
    As Luce took another sip of wine, she was tucking this information away for reasons that weren’t really connected to her graduate thesis. The hum of the restaurant had faded into the background. “Yet he went to college, even played a collegiate sport.”
    Mace leaned his forearms on the edge of the old wooden table, which had seen years of use. “Not going to college wasn’t an option. Our father made that clear very early in our lives. What we did after college was our decision, but we were going to college, all three of us. And yeah, Drake is one hell of a tennis player. Think about it, though. Unless you play doubles, that’s not a team sport. Slater played football and I ran track, but you should see Drake rope a calf. He’s got incredible aim, so that’s why he chose tennis. If I was drowning and needed someone to toss me a flotation device, I’d sure hope he was around.”
    Fascinating. And not what she