Brokedown Cowboy. Maisey Yates

      It was a pretty sad-sack thing, now that he thought about it. A grown man not being able to see to his own household. But Eli had always done that when they were growing up, after their mother had left. And then Connor had married Jessie, and she had handled all of it. It wasn’t a great excuse. He had always expected for it to be taken care of, and it had been. While he had spent his days working himself blind on the ranch.

      He’d intended to change. Because Jessie had asked him to. And because she deserved for him to.

      Only then it had been too late.

      So he’d gone right back to how he’d always been. Because there was no one to be different for. No one to be better for.

      And because of that, he had no clean underwear.

      He opened up the laundry room door and saw two baskets filled with clothes on the floor. He opened up the dryer door, and there was a full load in there, too. Okay, he was bound to come up successful in this pursuit.

      He started to dig through the dryer and realized pretty quickly he wasn’t looking at his own clothes. He grabbed a basket and stuck it underneath the opening to the dryer, pulling the clothes that were inside out and into said basket.

      His hand got caught around something lacy and flimsy, and he looked down and froze. Well, he had found clean underwear. They just weren’t his.

      For a full ten seconds he sat there and looked at the mint-green panties that were in his hand. They were delicate, feminine. And very, very tiny. He had never imagined that Liss wore underwear like this beneath her rather sensible outfits. Well, in fairness, he had never thought about Liss’s underwear before.

      But he was thinking about them now. He couldn’t stop himself from running his thumb over the soft, flat waistband. He swallowed hard, lifting them up so that he could see the shape.

      It was a thong, which was very unexpected. Even more unexpected was the quick image that flashed through his mind of what Liss must look like wearing them. A shadow of copper curls beneath the flimsy lace, and the round, shapely ass that would be displayed to perfection.

      He dropped the panties back into the basket and stood up, taking a step back as if there was a rattlesnake in there amid the clothes. Since when did he imagine Liss in her underwear? More important, since when had he noticed that her ass was shapely?

      He never had, not consciously. It must be something his subconscious had absorbed. Some kind of male instinct he had thought long destroyed busily cataloging desirable feminine attributes even while his conscious mind was shutting it out.

      He reached into the basket next to the one containing Liss’s clothes, stripped off his old underwear and quickly pulled on a new pair, before jerking the laundry room door open and walking out into the kitchen.

      Unfortunately, just as he walked in, so did Liss.

      Her eyes flew wide, and she took two steps backward, her cheeks turning bright pink. “Sorry.” She turned and walked out of the room as quickly as she had just walked in.

      “Dammit,” he growled, stalking back to the staircase and heading back to his room as quickly as possible.

      He put on a pair of tan Carhartt pants and a black T-shirt, before going back downstairs to do some damage control. Although, really, there should be no damage to control. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen him in various states of undress over the years. It just felt more inappropriate, because he had just been handling her panties.

      “Liss?”

      “In here,” she said, her voice sounding muffled.

      He walked toward the living room and into the room, just in time to see Liss scrambling up from the couch, throwing one of the decorative pillows back onto the cushion. She looked at him, her lower lip sucked between her teeth.

      They just sort of stood there, frozen, staring at each other.

      Then a gust of air tried to escape Liss’s mouth, turning into a sound that was somewhere between a growl and a snort.

      He frowned. “Are you laughing at me?”

      Her shoulders shook, her face turning redder. She shook her head, still biting her lower lip.

      “I’m serious, Liss. You just saw me in my underwear, and you’re laughing? I have to figure out if I’m insulted by this or not.”

      She shook her head again, sitting down on the couch, her face getting redder, the shaking in her shoulders getting increasingly violent.

      “Either you’re having a stroke, or you are laughing at the sight of me in my undies.”

      She released her lower lip and heaved in a deep breath, a guffaw escaping a second later. “No! No.”

      “You’re not laughing.”

      “No,” she hooted, “I’m not laughing.”

      “Yes, you are.”

      “Not at the sight of you in your underwear. I mean, not like you think,” she said, breathless. “It was just so absurd. You were looking at me. I was just looking at you. I happened to walk in and you were in the kitchen, and you were pretty much naked.” She was rambling now, but it was a whole lot better than the alternative.

      Because things were kind of jumbled up in his head. And for some reason, he was still picturing her in her underwear, even though he was the one who had been caught in his.

      “I thought you were at work.”

      “I forgot my cell phone, so I came back because I didn’t have any important appointments this morning. I guess this is a part of negotiating the living situation.”

      “I guess.”

      She cleared her throat. “Really, though, it’s nothing I’ve never seen before.”

      He tried not to be offended by that comment. As though any man in his underwear was exactly the same as him. Really, he had no place to be offended by that comment. Because the sight of him mostly naked should not be remarkable to his best friend. And yet, his masculine ego—which along with his nice-ass radar, was not as dormant as he had believed—was slightly dented.

      “True. But then, I’ve seen plenty of women in their underwear—” only one, now two, in person and others in pictures, but Liss didn’t need to know that “—and that does not mean that you’re going to be prancing around in here in a state of undress.” He regretted saying that the moment he did, because it brought to mind those images he was working so hard to banish. “Are you?”

      “No. Would you rather I act completely scandalized? Should I have had you fetch the smelling salts?”

      “I don’t have smelling salts. All I have is barbecue steak rub. I don’t think it’s the same.”

      She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

      “Okay, so here’s the deal. I won’t assume that you’re not in the house anymore. And I won’t come walking downstairs in my underwear.”

      “Deal.”

      “Okay,” he said, taking a step away from her, rubbing the back of his neck. “I suppose you need to get back to work. I know I do.”

      “Yeah, I should.”

      He nodded, a thread of tension stretching between them, and he wanted to banish it. Wanted to do something to get rid of it, because this wasn’t normal. “Great, I’ll see you for dinner.”

      “I might go out with Jeanette,” she said quickly.

      “Okay. I’ll see you later, then.”

      “Yeah, later.”

      Connor turned and walked out of the room. It was probably a good thing Liss was going out tonight. After only a couple of days of cohabitation, he felt as though they could maybe use a little space.