I groan and lean my head back against the chair, closing my eyes and wishing I could close my ears. “I need you to stop talking now, Casey. You’re getting a little too good at dirty talk.”

She chuckles, and I can hear the creaking of her chair as she rolls over onto her back.

Chapter 19

Casey

Tenn on a motorcycle? Very hot.

Tenn on a horse? No words in the English language can describe.

I took Alyssa up on her offer to let Tenn and Zoey ride her horse, Sasquatch. He’s an Appaloosa gelding that she rescued a few months ago. After she rehabbed him, she’d grown way too attached and decided to keep him. This necessitated her hiring Gabby to expand the current barn outward to add another stall.

Not knowing much about horses, I kept my distance as Alyssa and Zoey got him saddled. He seems to be a relatively calm horse, but his size intimidates me a bit. Not Zoey, though. She hopped right up and took off after Alyssa pointed her to a riding trail she and Brody had cleared out last year.

While we waited for her, Alyssa put Tenn and me to work helping to bathe some of the dogs. This is, of course, one of my favorite things to do when I volunteer at The Haven. It’s the perfect thing to do on a hot summer day too, and it doesn’t hurt to have a gorgeous man by your side doing it.

We got a grand total of five of the dogs done when Zoey came trotting back up to the back of the kennel, easily swinging her tiny frame off the big horse.

And looking like he’d just won the lottery, Tenn’s eyes shined with excitement as he took the reins and hauled himself up in the saddle. One would think a tall man wearing faded jeans, a Harley t-shirt, and black biker boots would look odd in the saddle, but my damn mouth watered as I looked up at him. He had pulled a beaten-up University of Wyoming ball cap out of his back pocket—courtesy of his brother, Woolf, who he had told me graduated there—stuck it on his head, and cantered off.

It was only when the dog that I was bathing decided to shake the wet soap off, spraying me in the face, did I turn my gaze from Tenn as he rode away on the horse.

“You really like my dad, huh?” Zoey asked as she squatted down beside me at the large, metal tub.

“Yeah,” I say with another glance at his retreating form in the distance. “I really kind of do.”

“He says you have commitment issues but he’s working on fixing that,” Zoey says innocently, now sticking her hands into the soapy water to help scrub down the Springer Spaniel who looks at us with morose eyes.

Shaking my head with a smile on my lips, I can only let Zoey’s words roll over me. Over the last week she’s been here, I’ve learned that fourteen-year-old girls don’t have much of a filter over their mouths. Zoey, in particular, says whatever is on her mind, never with any ill will or malice, but with a brutal honesty. It’s why I give her a pass, because true enough… I do have commitment issues.

“What do you think of my dad moving here?” she asks, and when I cut my eyes to her, I see a little bit of overprotectiveness in her gaze.

And damn… that’s sweet. She’s checking me out on behalf of her dad.

Taking the spaniel by the collar, I help urge him to hop out of the tub so I can rinse him down. He’s only too happy to comply as this dog clearly doesn’t like “bath time”.

“You want my honest thoughts?”

“No sense in lying,” she says with a grin. “I can smell a liar a mile away.”

Laughing, I tell her, “Here… come hold his collar as he’s likely to jet away when I turn the water on.”

When Zoey has the pup in her control, I grab the hose and start running the stream over his back, using my hands to push out the soap as I go along.

“So… your dad is pretty amazing,” I tell her candidly. “He’s made me look at things a bit differently.”

“He’s good at that,” Zoey says with a nod.

“Yeah, well, I can be pretty pigheaded about certain things, so he’s like really good at it,” I say with a chuckle. Continuing to rinse the dog, who intermittently tries to shake out the water of his coat, I tell her, “Without telling you the details, some guy messed up my head a long time ago. Hurt me pretty bad and then I sort of used that as an excuse to close myself off from relationships.”

“Because you didn’t want to get hurt again?”

“Exactly. I was protecting myself,” I confirm as I step away from the dog and turn the water off. He gives a vigorous shake, spraying Zoey down nicely.

She just laughs and turns her face away until he’s done, then looks back over him at me. “Good thing my dad came along and set you straight.”

“I’m sort of a work in progress,” I tell her truthfully. “Still scared but because your dad is so amazing, I’m really trying to push past that.”

She considers that for a moment and then with a voice that borders on almost pleading, she says, “Please don’t hurt him. I think you have the ability to do that.”

Ouch. That hurt.

Letting the hose drop to the concrete, I step over to Zoey and squat down so I’m eye level with her. “I promise you that I will never intentionally hurt him. And I also promise I will continue to work hard at moving past my insecurities. Your dad is extremely good at pushing me nicely but also giving me room to falter. That’s how people learn the best.”

“Good enough,” she says, and then with a completely unfiltered mouth adds on, “because it would be awesome if y’all got married.”

I shake my head at her as I stand up and give her an admonishing smile. “Your dad and I have known each other going on four weeks now. I don’t think marriage is something we should be talking about at this point in our relationship.”

“But he loves you,” Zoey says with innocent candor as she stands up, keeping her hand on the spaniel’s collar.

Her words… so simple, said with somewhat of a child’s view on the world, and yet they slam into me like a nuclear punch. My voice actually shakes when I ask her, “Why do you say that?”

She gives me a sly smile and leads the dog over to a hook on the wall that has a leash. Taking it, she snaps it to his collar. “He looks at you the way he looks at me. That’s how I know.”

An overload of emotion swarms through me, making my chest ache and feel warm at the same time. Only one man has ever said he loved me and that was a man who absolutely lied about it. Other men have come close, but I never let them get the words out of their mouths, the thought of hearing it almost sending me into a full-blown panic.

Which begs the question… does Tenn really love me and if so, how do I feel about it?

Little bursts of panic that recede just as quickly as they exploded, then a nice feeling of comfort settles over me. A secure feeling. Peace, maybe?

The thought of Tenn loving me is… actually okay, I think.

Now I just have to figure out what my feelings are for him, because as much as I’ve learned over the many years I’ve played at being a seductress, the one thing I know absolutely nothing about is what it really means to love a man.

“Are you sure you’re okay walking up there by yourself?” Tenn asks Zoey for the third time as he hands her over a twenty-dollar bill.

Typical Zoey, she shoots him the old teenage eye roll. “Yes, Dad. You can see the pier from here. It’s not like I’m traveling to Mozambique.”

I snicker and start walking up the stairs to my house. We just got back from The Haven, and I have to get ready for work. Zoey asked if she could go up to the pier because some of the friends she had made on the beach over the last week will be up there hanging out. Tenn is about ready to freak out about his daughter wandering off, and I think it’s adorable.