Solid Gold Cowboy

All the things she was always trying to cover up. To be acceptable to that boyfriend and his damn family.
“I’ll sort it out,” she said.
“I can go down to town and get some of your things tomorrow if you want.”
“Would you do that?”
“Yeah. Help me figure it out.”
“Well, maybe he went on our honeymoon. If he did...”
“You think he’d go on your honeymoon by himself?”
“Oh, not down to San Francisco. But to Hawaii, yes. We were flying out of San Francisco because we got a deal. Those tickets aren’t refundable. I bet he’s getting on a plane.”
“Too bad plane tickets aren’t transferable anymore. That’s one of those made-for-TV romance movies waiting to happen. He could grab one of your bridesmaids.”
Jordan laughed. “I don’t have bridesmaids.”
And he should have known that. Because the fact of the matter was that he would call Jordan his best friend and she would call him hers.
“It hurt my feelings that you weren’t there,” she said. She smiled. “You know, somewhere between here and Medford.”
“When you realized?”
“Yes.” The corners of her mouth turned down. “You didn’t come to find me. So I knew you didn’t know. I knew... Laz, I knew you would have come for me.”
His breath stopped. Right there in his lungs.
“We’ll talk about that later.”
She nodded. “Did you just think I wouldn’t do it? Is that what you thought? Did you know that I was going to walk into the bar?”
He wished he could say yes. But the fact was, for him, that would’ve been optimism. And he didn’t traffic in that level of optimism. He was a realist. But then, maybe he was going to have to forget about that. Because it was not realistic that Jordan had come to the bar in her wedding dress at 2:00 a.m. when she was supposed to be Mrs. Dylan Walker.
And was instead Jordan.
His Jordan. At his house.
“Get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning. Eggs and bacon?”
“Please don’t tell me that you cook.”
“I live by myself, Jordan. Of course I know how to cook.”
And with that, he left her. By herself, to change into his gray T-shirt.
Laz had never considered himself a saint. But at this point he was considering applying.

CHAPTER TWO
JORDAN WOKE UP completely disoriented. She was not in San Francisco. That much she knew. She was on a bed buried beneath a flannel comforter, breathing slowly. She moved the blankets down and looked around the room.
Laz’s room. She was at Laz’s house.
Well, this was a predicament.
She sat up, and realized she was still only wearing a T-shirt. But she could also smell bacon, and she was pretty sure her desire for the bacon was going to outdo her need for modesty.
It was Laz after all.
She tried not to think about the first time she’d met him. She had stumbled into his bar thinking that it was open, when in fact it had been past last call. And she’d seen him. Standing behind the bar. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with black hair and dark skin, a chiseled jaw. His mouth was... Well, it was just immediately sensual, and she couldn’t quite figure out why. Because she saw men every day and managed to not think about their mouths.
And all of that stuff entered into her system as an instantaneous thunderclap. Not a series of individual thoughts, but a hot jolt of realization. And along with it the sense that he was somehow meant to be standing there, and so was she. She didn’t typically go into the bar because she had a job at the coffee shop, and it required she get up early. But her insomnia—which she’d been struggling with for six months or so—was starting to bore her to tears, and so she had taken to walking around. She had looked in the bar on a few different occasions, and tonight had decided to go in.
And something had whispered through her soul that sounded a lot like fate and it had terrified her. But instead of running, she had gone to sit at that bar.
She had told herself multiple times over the past ten years that the kind of fate Laz was had been to be her very best friend. And he had been. He had been a pillar to her these last few years. Helping her sort through all manner of different traumas from her past, and God knew she had many.
She had done her very best to shove her attraction down very deep. Because Dylan’s family had always been there for her. Because Dylan was supposed to be the one. He always had been. But when she met him she hadn’t felt a thunderclap. And to be quite honest she never felt one in all the years since.
But she now had a solid seventeen years of being Dylan’s girlfriend, and she wasn’t really sure what came after that. So she had simply stayed. And Laz’s words about habits had echoed in her head, growing increasingly louder. And she just ignored them. Until yesterday.
She groaned, she climbed out of the bed, and was greeted by air that was far too cold for her liking. Plus the shirt rode all the way up her thighs, and she was pretty sure that given the cold, her nipples were absolutely visible, like little Tic Tacs through the top. She grimaced and grabbed the flannel blanket from his bed, wrapped it around her body. And she decided that she was going to take her chances on humiliation and brave her friend this morning.
She walked down the hall, taking in the details of the place. There were framed photos in that hallway, but they were so old she couldn’t imagine that he’d put them up. A little boy that must’ve been him, posed in a portrait studio holding a red ball, wearing overalls to match. And a series of such pictures, all of them likely taken at a school. There was a photograph of a wedding, one that looked to be the early eighties,