Hazel snores softly, making little sleep-whiffle sounds, and I pin. I have enough good ideas for thirty home offices, so we’ll have to narrow it down. I reach over and rescue the laptop when she rolls over, stretching like a cat. She looks really good asleep. There’s a smooth expanse of skin where her T-shirt pushes up, and I brush my fingers over it.
“You’ve been busy,” she says, her voice thick with sleep. “I passed out. Sorry.”
I close the laptop and set it to the side. “You were tired.”
“It feels like getting busted by my boss,” she grumbles.
She’s not wrong. Before we hooked up, I’d have given her shit about sleeping on the job. Now I want to scoop her up and carry her to bed because she does work too much and sometimes that means she doesn’t sleep enough.
“You know you don’t have to work 24/7, right? There are health benefits to sleeping.”
“I’m too old to sleep on the floor.” Hazel makes a face and sits up, looking around for her laptop. I nudge it firmly out of reach and pull her onto my lap.
I reach for her shoulders, working my hands over the knots I find beneath her shoulder blades. She feels wound up and tense beneath my palms. “Problems?”
Hazel shakes her head. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember the last time she opened up about something that was bugging her that wasn’t work-related. Maybe when she first pitched me our arrangement and complained about the lack of orgasms in her life?
“We’ve found your backup career,” she groans.
I smile into her hair. “If you’d sit in a proper chair at a proper desk, you wouldn’t fall asleep on the floor and then you wouldn’t have this problem.”
“Nobody likes a smart-ass.”
I distract her by setting my laptop in front of her and pointing to the browser bursting with Pinterest goodness. My top three choices are a hot pink lacquer desk, a white-and-gold number and another desk that’s a rich dark blue. I’m betting she goes for the pink.
She scans the page, her eyes lingering on the pink desk. Knew it. “But picking out furniture together seems—”
“Like what? It’s just some furniture, Hazel.”
She groans, flopping forward. I can’t tell if that’s Despairing Hazel or another yoga pose.
“It feels like a couple thing. Like we’re not just a temporary hookup.”
I wrap my arms around her middle and rest my chin on her head. I can’t see her face, which seems like a disadvantage for this conversation. “We didn’t discuss a time limit.”
“No,” she agrees quietly. “We didn’t. It’s just that we both said we’d look for our forever people. Or, if not The One, at least a relationship.”
“This works for me,” I admit. “I’ve already had my One and Only. That’s not happening again for me.”
She pulls away, folding her body into what I’ve learned is a cat pose. She stretches, her ass shoving up in the air, her shoulders pushing down. It’s sexy and hot as hell. “You really believe love only comes along once?”
I shrug. “I honestly don’t know, but I also can’t imagine looking to get married again. I don’t think I have that in me, Zee. Once you’ve scaled Everest, you’re done, right? Even if you fall down after you summit, you’ve still made the climb. It’s expensive and dangerous and the view at the top is still the same, so why do it again?”
Hazel chews on her lip. “You’re crazy.”
“Pot. Kettle.” I tug on the ends of her hair. It’s a gesture I’ve made a thousand times in the office, but it feels different here. “But I’m not looking for a serious relationship, so if we could just keep doing us, that would be perfect.”
“I like us.” She folds back in some kind of pretzel shape. Wow. Could we do it like that?
“If it works for you and it works for me, we don’t have to stop or change things. But if you decide you want someone different, then no hard feelings. You do what you need to do.”
A Pinterest notification slides across my screen and I read it automatically. Molly Chase has pinned four new cowboy images. Since when has Molly had a thing for cowboys? I’m clicking before I realize it.
Wow.
I should be glad that Molly’s getting on with her own life, but the cowboy thing is weird. There are tons of muscled, boot-wearing guys with cowboy hats. They stand legs apart, thumbs shoved into the pockets of their Wranglers, eyeing bucking horses and some seriously scary-looking cattle. Arms and legs—and entire bodies—fly as the same guys do their damnedest to hang on and ride the livestock, with more than one cowboy biting the sawdust. She’s pinned one cowboy in particular.
The tags beneath the pin read: Real Cowboys. Sexy Cowboys. My Cowboy.
WTF?
“Do you think Molly’s dating a cowboy?”
Hazel says something, but I’m already scrolling through Molly’s Pinterest. Rodeos. Las Vegas. Image after image fills my screen. That’s definitely my ex-wife on vacation in Las Vegas. Buffet shots. I pause on a close-up of a huge bathtub that looks like it could fit a dozen cowboys. Molly always did have a thing for bathrooms. I wish I hadn’t looked. There’s no way this ends well. And then I find the couple shots. Molly at an ice bar with her cowboy. Cuddled up to the cowboy in a helicopter as the sun sets over Las Vegas. Naked cowboy shoulders in the tub.
I get up off the floor, taking my laptop with me, and crash-land in my desk chair. I need to be sure before I make an idiot of myself. I mean, what kind of a name is Evan Wilson? And how the hell did she meet a professional bull rider? She teaches English—I
