Run To You

thick with testosterone and Stella joked to break the man-tension, “So, if I hit one of you, does the other feel it?”
    They both turned their attention to her. “No,” Beau answered.
    “Hold up.” Blake raised a hand, palm out. “We’ve never tested it. Why don’t you go ahead and kick my brother in the balls and if I double over, you know I felt it.”
    She expected Beau to say something equally rude. Instead the boys chuckled like Blake was really funny. And Beau thought she had a weird sense of humor?
    “Vince said you and Sadie had a few tequila shots last night.” Beau changed the subject from his balls.
    “Too many.”
    The corners of his lips dipped in an upside-down sympathetic smile and his smooth voice slid down her spine. “Are you hungover, Boots?”
    “Not anymore.” Down her spine to the backs of her knees. “Slept it off.”
    “Boots?” Blake’s brow wrinkled. “Are you a new recruit?”
    “She cycled out,” Beau answered for her.
    Stella didn’t know what that meant and didn’t care. Not when she felt all tingly.
    “Obviously not.”
    Beau’s upside-down smile turned into a real frown. “Let it go.”
    Blake shook his head and the tension settled between the two of them again. Only stronger this time. “It wasn’t all business and music.”
    Beau pointed at his brother, then to himself. “You and I aren’t going to talk about it.”
    “It’s like that?”
    Like what? What was it like? Were they speaking in super-secret twin code?
    “Yeah,” Beau answered. “It’s like that.”

Chapter Thirteen
    “P ull!”
    Stella gave the nylon rope a hard tug and two neon-orange clay pigeons sailed through the air. To her left, Beau raised the barrel of a gun and fired. The shot cracked the air and Stella flinched as a pigeon shattered. In one fluid move, he pulled the pump handle and a spent red shell flew out of the side of the gun. He shot again, and the second pigeon broke apart and fell to the dry ground and prairie grass. Stella flinched once more, but at least she didn’t scream this time.
    “Good shot,” Vince congratulated him.
    Beau grinned and handed Sadie’s fiancé the gun. “I got a toolbox full of mad skills.”
    Yes. Yes he did. Stella could attest to some of those skills.
    “You winged it,” Blake said, and raised a can of Lone Star to his lips.
    “Mortally wounded counts.”
    Stella turned to her job and pulled back the arm of the flinger thing. She bent over to load two orange clay pigeons in the machine, and the shadow from the straw cowboy hat she’d borrowed from Sadie slid down her chin, shading her face from the evening sun. Before they’d all headed out for the skeet field, she’d changed out of her flip-flops and into her old black boots. Sadie had offered her shoes, but Sadie’s feet were a size and a half bigger than Stella’s.
    “Pull!”
    Stella yanked the rope and looked over at the shooters about twenty feet away. Vince and Blake watched the sky and shattering orange clay while Sadie stood at a table covered in ammo and kept score in a notebook. The evening sun shone on the concho band around Sadie’s cowboy hat and settled in the blond braid hanging down her back.
    Sadie had wisely volunteered as scorekeeper rather than participate against three highly competitive special ops warriors.
    From behind mirrored sunglasses, she felt Beau watching her. His features were stony, giving nothing away. Since he and Blake had shared some sort of twin telepathy beneath the antler chandelier, he’d grown . . . she didn’t know. Distant, maybe.
    They’d all laughed and talked while they’d eaten in the kitchen, but even as Beau joked around, she felt the change. She felt it as they grabbed coolers filled with beer and water and drove the half mile to the skeet field hidden from the view of the house by a windbreak of elm and cottonwood. It felt as if they were nothing more than casual friends. As if they hadn’t kissed and touched each other—all over. As if he hadn’t reached for her hand or held her while she freaked out on the side of a Louisiana highway. As if they hadn’t grown close.
    Okay, maybe he didn’t know her favorite color, and maybe she didn’t know his favorite food, but she knew him. She felt connected to him. More connected than she’d ever felt toward another man. She trusted him. Felt like she could sink into him and stay there. The rest was just conversation.
    He moved toward her, fluid and smooth, and reached