Too Close For Comfort (Sweetrock Cowboy Romance Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

affection.”
    “No kidding. It was getting embarrassing.”
    “I’m deliriously happy for them...”
    “Me, too.” Rena’s eyes shone, and she didn’t have to say more. Tessa knew exactly how she felt. “I just don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get to that level.”
    “I know what you mean. It’s not like I haven’t dated other guys since Derek. But it’s just not the same. I just don’t feel anything.”
    Rena studied her. “Maybe you’re just not letting yourself feel anything.”
    Was she purposely pushing guys away? Now that she thought about it, any time a relationship got serious, she came up with an excuse to break up. Was that her way of protecting her own heart?
    “That may be it. But still, I just don’t know if I can trust anyone. When you get hurt like that, it’s hard to trust,” she said.
    Rena glanced at Amy, a spark of love lighting her face. “Oh I know, but sometimes trusting is worth it.”
    “Good Lord, you two are whining like a bunch of old ladies.” The voice came from the next stall over.
    Was someone else in here?
    Tessa hadn’t heard anyone else come in, and she exchanged a look with Rena before peeking over the shoulder-high wall to find Beulah Grady on the other side.
    Beulah was one of Sweetrock’s oldest residents and the hostess at The Chuckwagon. She couldn’t be more than five feet tall, but there she was dressed in riding gear and fixing to throw a saddle on a small palimino.
    “Do you need help with that?” Tessa offered.
    “Help? No. Why, I was saddling horses before you were even born.” She heaved the saddle and, to Tessa’s surprise, it landed perfectly on the horses back. She watched as Beulah moved around the horse, cinching and straightening.
    Beulah looked over at them with sparkling eyes, her wrinkled face puckering. “Now what are you ladies going on about?”
    “Nothing, really. We’re just cautious about getting into a relationship is all,” Rena said.
    “Huh. Well, you gals ain’t getting any younger, and that little girl of yours needs a proper daddy. Not that jackwad that fathered her. What are you waiting for anyway?”
    “The right guy?” Tessa ventured.
    Beulah waved her hand in the air. “Posh. You can’t find him if you don’t try some on for size. You think I didn’t get my heart broken a million times before I met Duke?”
    Tessa didn’t know what to say. Beulah was about a hundred years old, and it was hard to think of the wrinkled old lady with the tight brown bun on the top of her head as having had any type of romantic relationships. But then Tessa remembered the old pictures that decorated almost every inch of wall space at The Chuckwagon. Some of those showed Beulah as a rodeo rider in the 1950s. She had been quite a beauty in her day.
    “Yeah, but you’re tough and resilient,” Rena said to Beulah.
    “You just think I am because that’s what I want people to think.” Beulah tapped her chest with her index finger. “But my heart is just as fragile as anyone else’s.”
    “I don’t know, Beulah. I think you were the one breaking the hearts, not the other way around,” Tessa said.
    Beulah laughed and winked. “Well, mostly it was that way. But you girls got to get over it. Finding that special person that you love is what life’s all about. Look at Nick and Sam. Don’t you want that kind of happiness for yourself?”
    Tessa thought she did, but not if that happiness came with the heartbreak she’d already experienced.
    Beulah swung up into the saddle with an ease that belied her age. Once seated, she peered down at them. “You know, girls, when you fall off a horse, sometimes you just got to get back in the saddle.”
    And then she flicked the reins and walked off.
    As she watched Beulah leave, Tessa wondered maybe if the old lady had a point. She did want the happiness Nick and Sam had but wasn’t sure she was brave enough to open herself up to it.
    But being on the ranch with Cash that morning had