The man guffawed and Lauren sure hoped he was better at raising money than he was at handling social situations.
“I can just drop Kyle off if you want,” Lauren told Bren.
He shook his head. “No, don’t do that.”
She’d planned to leave, but something about the look in George’s eyes made her want to stay, even though a part of her, like, really super-duper wanted to escape.
“The boys are all around back, if you want to join them.”
“Thanks.” She smiled at the men. “Nice meeting you.”
Not you, she telegraphed to George, but he was too busy making faces at Bren. Old fool.
She walked off with her head held high, turning her attention to the boys surrounding her son. They stood in front of a barn that matched the house and they were like cloned images of each other. They all wore jeans and Western shirts—some solid, some stripped—and cowboy hats that were either black or tan. They all wore leather belts, too, some with sparkling new buckles, others without, and dusty old cowboy boots. Most were older than her son, but they seemed welcoming even as they stared at her curiously.
Yes, I’m the overprotective mom, she silently told them.
“Sorry about that,” Brennan said, coming to stand beside her.
“It’s okay,” she said over the sound of trucks starting up out front. “How’s the campaign going, by the way?”
“Pretty good,” he said. “Of course, you never know.” He set off toward the barn. She hung back. “Gather around, boys.” Bren motioned with a hand for the kids to join him inside the barn. “Last week we were working on finding our center. Anyone want to tell Kyle what that is?”
From town sheriff to bull-riding instructor. He handled the transition well.
One of the kids, a young teenager clearly going through puberty judging by the acne on his face, stepped forward. “It’s when you’re the middle and the bull spins around you.” The kid made bucking movements with his hand. “Or beneath you while you stay perfectly center.”
Bren smiled at the boy and Lauren noticed that he had a great smile. The kind that lit up his eyes and made the corners of them wrinkle and sparked the gold.
“That’s right.” That smile landed on her son and she found herself leaning against the back of the house. “Kyle, you need to work on that a little more. I noticed at the rodeo the other day that you came out of the chutes leaning forward. Anyone want to tell Kyle why you don’t do that?”
Another kid raised his hand. “Because once the bull starts moving, it’s hard to get back to center.”
“Exactly.”
Suddenly she was staring into those gorgeous eyes, the smile on his face slipping away as their gazes connected, making her wonder what was wrong. She hated the way he made her feel as if she should check her appearance in a mirror, so much so that she self-consciously scanned the fancy jeans she’d donned for the occasion, the kind with rhinestones on the pockets. She wore a blousy shirt. It concealed her figure and hid her curves. She’d even put her hair into pigtails, for some reason feeling the need to play down her looks around Bren, and yet the way his smile faded made her skin catch fire and wonder what she’d done wrong.
“Today we’re going to work on helping Kyle find his center, if that’s okay with you, Mom.”
A dozen eyes turned in her direction and her face grew even more red. “Of course.”
What was with her? The man just asked a question. So what if he didn’t act all friendly-like while he was teaching. No need to feel as if she’d been put on the witness stand and he was judge and jury.
“Who wants to work the controls today?”
A chorus of “Me! Me!” erupted from the kids. She looked around for these so-called controls, but there weren’t any that she could see. She understood in a second when four of the boys broke apart from the group and headed toward the ropes that suspended a barrel off the ground. It was some sort of...ride. One of them even went into an empty stall and pulled out a mat of some sort, a fabric-covered piece of foam her son would land upon.
Oh, dear goodness.
She took half a step forward before stopping herself. This was her problem, she admitted. This right here. This overwhelming need to protect Kyle all the time. Of course, that was a mother’s job—to keep her child safe from harm. But even she recognized she was a little out of control in that department. She freaked about him wearing a seat belt. She hated when he rode rides at carnivals. She refused to let him play in the ocean. And she wanted to vomit every time they went to the water park and she was forced to watch him slide into one of those little plastic tubes that spat him out on the other end. For some insane reason, she always worried he’d drop into some sort of water-ride black hole and never come out again.
Stupid. But it was because of him.
She didn’t want to think about him. About the man who’d stolen her heart and then broken it into a million pieces.
It’s in the past.
Because Kyle was her future and damned if she’d let Paul ruin her life all over again.
“Climb on aboard here, son.”
Her chin tipped up. She forced herself to lean back again, even crossed her arms and made herself watch, one of her pigtails sliding over a shoulder.
You should leave.
No. She wasn’t ready to do that yet. So she watched as Kyle raced up to the dark green barrel and Bren’s smile slid back on his face. She could tell the man loved her son’s enthusiasm and that he approved of his eagerness to learn. She wondered why he didn’t have any kids of his own. What had stopped a good-looking man—as in a seriously hot older man—from settling down and having children? What was his story? Then again, maybe there was a Mrs. Bren Connelly inside the house. Crap. She hadn’t even thought to ask.
“The first thing I want to see is how you take a wrap,” she heard him say to her son.
And so what if there was a Mrs. Connelly? It wasn’t as if she would ever consider dating the man. Yeah, he was handsome in an older-sexy-ranch-hand kind of way, but that wasn’t her type. She preferred the more bookish type of men, like the men she went to school with—the kind that didn’t like to deal with loaded guns. Besides, it was clear Bren didn’t like her. Every time their gazes connected, his smile faded. Not a big fan of hers, clearly.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” he asked Kyle.
Kyle sat on the barrel even though she didn’t recall him climbing aboard. He smiled up at Bren in a way that flipped her stomach for another reason.
“I watched a video on YouTube,” he announced.
She forced herself to pay attention. He had, indeed, watched videos. Tons of them. That’s how she’d known he was serious about this whole steer-riding thing. It’d taken her weeks to admit to herself that nothing she said to dissuade him from the idea would work. It was her brother who’d stepped in and made her admit the truth. If she couldn’t keep the Bubble Wrap on him his whole life, she might as well embrace his enthusiasm. She needed to let him go. If she kept him off steers, he’d find something else to do, Jax had warned, and he might not ask her permission the next time. That more than anything had scared her. Jax was right. Too tight a rein might push him to bolt, and so here they were.
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” she muttered as Bren looked up and caught her eyes again. Something about the way he kept doing that prompted her to move forward, despite telling herself to stay back and give them both some space.
He didn’t like her, or he didn’t like something about her, and darned if she would let that keep her away.
And so she didn’t.