Free The Cattleman by Angi Morgan Page A

There was a comfortable mattress in the other room, but he’d get stiff from the cold. He took a step toward the rocker, but instead he lifted Beth’s head, deciding on the end of the couch.
    She squirmed a little, settling comfortably in his lap. He draped another blanket over his legs, tucked her blanket up to her chin and closed his eyes, regretting the images of Mac holding a gun and a person with no face pulling the strings.
    The fire had faded and the room had chilled so he must have gotten some sleep. Beth mumbled a couple of indiscernible words.
    Glancing at his watch, he saw it was after midnight. The day he’d dreaded for weeks had arrived. A day to avoid. A day to make decisions. Funny thing was...all he wanted to do was lie down next to the woman who was already halfway in his arms.
    If he could hold on to her, he had a feeling that everything would be fine—at least for a little while.

Chapter Eight
    Beth woke with a blast of thunder. A bolt of lightning flashed, filling the room with a blinding white light, then another loud crash. At some point, Nick had carried her to bed. She was so tired she’d slept through it. Unfortunately. She would have enjoyed his arms around her.
    “You okay?” Nick asked in a whisper of a whisper, so soft she wondered if he was a dream.
    So soft was his voice that if she hadn’t been awake, he wouldn’t have interrupted her sleep. And he wasn’t interrupting it. Not from that far away in the stiff-backed chair. She’d given her word not to push a relationship, but he’d given his to take full advantage of having fun.
    With all the hard work they’d been putting into learning to ride and self-defense, wasn’t it time for some of that fun?
    Another lightning bolt struck. The thunder followed too quickly.
    “That was a little close.”
    “Always seems closer up here.” One of his arms was crooked behind his head, supporting it. He couldn’t be comfortable trying to sleep there. If he was trying to sleep at all.
    Beth pushed into a sitting position, resting her back against the headboard. She was still fully clothed without her boots. “I must have been exhausted to have slept through dinner.”
    “And moving you here. We both fell asleep. You warm enough? I could start another fire.”
    The flash outside the window backlit him again. But she knew what his face looked like. She’d studied it all week and could tell when he was full of concern or teasing her by offering to do something with no real intention of following through. Their week had been full of polite comments and then a jerk of his thumb gesturing where an item was located so she’d get it herself.
    He was lying about him getting any sleep. He rarely did. And she didn’t care about a fire. But she wanted warmth. His warmth.
    “You’ll have a stiff neck in the morning if you stay like that.” The bright light from the storm illuminated her watch. “Oh, gosh, it’s only one o’clock? I feel like I’ve had ten hours of sleep.”
    “Snored like it, too.”
    “Take that back and I’ll let you share this mattress with me.” Great invitation. But she didn’t want to take her words back or lie that she’d misspoken. She actually meant it exactly the way it sounded.
    Nick rubbed the stubble on his chin. She could hear his nails scrape lightly and shivered. She knew what his chin felt like against the softness of her skin.
    “I was just teasing. You don’t snore.” He sat forward, leaning on his knees, hidden by the darkness. “If you’re cold, I guess I could keep you warm.”
    She began to scoot to the opposite side of the bed, but the cold sheets—even through her clothes—brought her to an abrupt stop. “You’ll have to make do with me in the middle. I am not about to freeze my tush off over there. I’ll never get back to sleep.”
    “Do you need more sleep?” He stood and pulled his tan shirt, then the black cold-weather shirt off, leaving the white undershirt in place.
    “Do