How to Rope a Real Man Read Online Free Page A

moms.
    Tonight, fear won out over longing.
    He smoothed a fingertip along her jaw, wishing he could be what she needed, knowing it was hopeless. But how could he turn her away? This soft, clever woman who’d done nothing wrong except try to get closer to him. He rested his cheek against hers and tried to find the words.
    They were standing close enough together that he felt her phone vibrate in a pocket hidden in her dress. It was the out he needed.
    “Your phone,” he said lamely, cringing at the rawness of his voice.
    She opened her eyes and backed her face up to regard him with disbelief. “What?”
    “Your phone’s vibrating. I think you should answer it.”
    Her jaw tightened and in her eyes he read pain. Hell.
    “You do?”
    “What if it’s important?”
    She pulled her lower lip into her mouth and bit down, nodding. A ripple went through her body like she was resetting herself. “Silly me. I thought something important was going on right here.”
    Giving him a look that told him exactly how much he’d hurt her, she turned on her heel and stalked across the middle of the dance floor, fishing her phone out as she went.
    He stepped back, out of the way of the dancers, and inhaled sharply.
    Stupid, stupid jackass.
    His first instinct was to leave. He could settle the bill, say good-bye to Kellan and Amy, and get in his car. But all that was waiting for him at the end of the drive was a lonely hotel room, and besides that, he wasn’t the walk-away kind.
    True, he was the leading-a-good-woman-on-and-causing-her-undue-pain kind, but running and hiding was a shade more cowardly than he was willing to stoop.
    What he really needed to do was cowboy up and talk to Jenna tonight so things weren’t weird between them at the wedding. To make that happen, he needed to figure out a way to explain why they couldn’t get involved without telling her the whole, hideous truth.
    A little liquid courage first wouldn’t hurt either.
    He started for the bar. Halfway there, a man clapped him on the back. “Where I come from, we call dance moves like yours skirt flippers.”
    He turned to face Kellan, all six-foot-something of bulky rancher build, grinning from ear to ear as any dopey-in-love man should be.
    Kellan’s smile was infectious. Matt found himself following suit despite his lingering frustration from disappointing Jenna. “Something tells me you’ve never made a girl want to flip up her skirt because of your killer dance moves.”
    Kellan swigged on his beer, then hid a belch behind his hand. “The only way my dance moves would be killer is if a girl could die from squashed toes. Lucky for me, my intended bride forgives me of my shortcomings.”
    “Does that mean for your first dance as husband and wife you’ll be doing the prom hang?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jenna slip in from the patio. If he and Kellan didn’t move fast, she was going to walk right into them and he was nowhere near ready to face her yet. “I was headed to the bar. Join me?”
    “Sounds good. I missed my prom, but if you’re implying that Amy and I are going to rock back and forth while bear hugging, that’s exactly what I had in mind.”
    The casual acquaintance he and Kellan had struck up a decade earlier had strengthened into a solid friendship over time, thanks in large part to the massive oil deposit sitting under Catcher Creek and Kellan’s family ties to big oil. Over the years, Kellan had called on Matt a lot to help home owners negotiate fair contracts with his uncle’s less-than-altruistic oil corporation.
    Matt loved practicing the kind of law that helped ordinary, hardworking people. The royalties he negotiated on behalf of the people with the oil sitting beneath their properties paid mortgages, sent kids to college, and kept struggling farms in the black.
    It had been Kellan who’d hooked him up with Jenna’s family last December. The contract he’d negotiated for the sisters had saved the farm that’d