by Katie Cross
The casual sis was a mental tactic I employed the moment after I found out JJ had proposed and she accepted. My reasoning at the time had been sound. If I thought of her as a sister, I couldn't crash hard into the deepening attraction that felt like a freight train. It hadn't worked, but I kept at it so long it was second habit now.
Tonight, with the smell of Stella's shampoo in the air, Lizbeth was the last thing on my mind.
A stretch of silence seemed to make the air hum. I looked up, shocked at the strange quiet in the aftermath of hours of rock music. Were they done?
Were they leaving?
Another tap tap tap came on the door. This time, it was Seiko. She grinned at me, though she appeared tired. When she spoke, her voice sounded hoarse.
“Hey Mark, thanks again. We're all done here. It'll take a while to get the equipment broken down and moved out, probably just a few hours, but the guys and I have to head out to some other things.”
With a quick hug and a wave to the other band members behind her, I shut the door. Justin let out a heavy sigh and rested his head back against the couch. Stella emerged from a steamy shower, her hair wet in sexy strands of blonde and a deeper brown. I blinked.
Stella.
Shower.
Stop.
Before my brain went any further, I shook myself out of it. “They're gone.” I averted my gaze from her. “Well, the music is gone. Her crew is still cleaning up.”
“Great.”
Stella peered out the window as she pulled a comb through her hair. A new problem occurred to me—how did I diplomatically get Justin out of here so I could get my arms around Stella?
A nanosecond before I barked at him to get the hell out, his phone rang with an irritating Dave Matthews cover song, and he grinned. Seconds later, he'd bounded off the couch and said, “Hey Meg” on his way out the back door.
One problem solved.
4,000 to go.
Instead of moving onto the next issue, I drew closer to the siren song reeling me in and stepped behind Stella. She paused as I trapped her wrist, stole her comb, and sank the teeth into her hair. When I pulled it through, the hair gave way like strands of silk.
Stella sighed.
I wanted to trap that sigh on my lips and kiss the rest of it out of her, but settled for the rhythmic whisper of the comb through her wet strands of hair. The motion soothed even me, and not even the HomeBnB zoning question could concern me. Stella watched Seiko's team packing up from the dining hall, winding cords around their arms and hauling amps into the back of a rental van. But I had a feeling her attention wasn't even out of these four walls.
“I just texted Lizbeth.”
The words rushed out of me. She didn't respond but made a little noise in the back of her throat. The expected tightness of her neck had come, however. For some reason, she didn't seem all that comfortable when I spoke about Lizbeth.
Might be the raging crush I had once admitted to that seemed so silly in comparison to Stella.
“I asked her to send me everything she has done for the HomeBnB and to turn the whole thing over to us.”
She turned around, strands of hair dropping out of the comb as she spun to face me. Her face had a faint blush from the warm water. Stella hardly ever wore makeup. Tonight, her skin was scrubbed clean, tinted with the faintest scent of apricot. I took a step back before her warmth could draw me right onto those lips and out of my train of thought.
She smirked. She was onto me these days.
“Why?” she asked.
“I think this is something you and I need to control. Lizbeth is busy and it's not fair to ask her to do so much of it without getting paid.”
The desire to say I told you so seemed to burn right out of her eyes, but I ignored it. She'd mentioned once (or twenty times) over the years we'd worked together that I couldn't run a successful business on free labor from family. I had, at least for a while, but saw her point now.
“Besides.” My hands found their way to her arms. I wanted to put my palms on her face and draw her into me but settled for this instead. “You've been asking a lot of questions that only Lizbeth could answer, and I think it may cripple us. So if you're willing, maybe we can work on it together?”
The slow smile that crossed her lips was all the answer I needed. Since she'd said (or smiled) all she needed to say, I finally crushed her against me and got lost in the feel of her mouth on mine. When she pulled away, I tried to follow, but she laughed and put a hand on my chest to stop me.
“First of all,” she murmured, eyes bright, “yes, it will be much easier for us to do it and I'm happy to help. I need to earn that free rent, right?”
“Right,” I growled, but she wasn't fooled. Her fingers dropped to the top of my collar, where she played with a little tuft of hair that had appeared there. It sent all my thoughts barreling away from Adventura and right back onto her.
“Secondly, we need to—”
“Get another booking.”
She sighed. “Yes.”
I groaned and ran a hand through my hair, her spell broken by the stench of reality. When I forced myself to back away from her, she wisely didn't follow. “I know! None of my leads have come back so . . . we're just going to have to see what we can do on social media. Maybe I'll go into town and accidentally run into people.”
She snorted and glanced outside. Night threatened on the distant horizon. The sun went below the mountains long before sunset here, which cast Adventura in early shadows, and nights had become chilly. A skiff of snow threatened to fall tonight, which meant I'd need to get more firewood.
“I was hoping the next booking would start tomorrow,” she murmured.
The hope on her voice had faded to an almost indiscernible trail and I felt the usual flare of irritation that deadlines gave me. We were something like a week away from needing to make payments. While I had a few aces up the sleeve, they were absolute-disaster-only aces and I had to exhaust every avenue before I even looked that way. All desperate chances aside, we still had a few days to scrounge something up.
“I had some ideas,” I said slowly. That sentence wasn't the kind of thing I could just spring on someone, I'd learned, so I monitored her reaction. She lifted her eyebrows in silent question. Uncertain she really wanted to hear them, I scoured her expression, but saw no evidence to the contrary.
“You ready?” I drawled.
“Hit me.”
“Okay.” I leaned back a little. “What about an RV park?”
She blinked, but no scoff came right away so I went with it. “RV Park?”
“In the winter, for a small fee, RV's can park out here. It's surprisingly hard to find good places to park in the wild.”
“What about hook-ups?”
I scowled. “We couldn't offer too much. I do have a water hook-up for boondocking. I mean, JJ and I lived out of an RV for almost two years before it fell apart. Maybe we could provide electric, but I'd have to see . . .”
“Literally lived in an RV?”
“Oh yeah.” I nodded with a grin. “That was after the bus, so I freaking loved the RV in comparison. Traveled the US, hit every state in a year. We set the RV on fire in a desert in New Mexico and said our farewells once it died. The point is, I think we could carve out some 'private' spaces here.”
She tilted her head to the side, eyes narrowed. “You and JJ were really close, weren't you?”
A pang in my chest took me by surprise when I nodded. “Yeah. Brothers. Twins. That whole shared-a-womb-thing. But more than that. We were the Bailey brothers.”
She hummed low in her throat, then patted my chest. “I don't hate the RV idea, but what would you even charge?”
“Great! And I don’t know. I'll put feelers out. Also, about horses—”
She immediately shook her head. “No horses.”
I threw my hands in the air. “Why is everyone so against horses?”
“It's not the animal, it's the man.”
Before I
could puzzle that one together, she distracted me by touching my bicep and forcing me to look at her. I blinked away the haze that came over my thoughts when I could smell her.
“I trust us to figure it out, Mark.”
The easy words, spoken as a no-doubt-intentionally-sexy whisper in my ear while she slipped behind me toward the kitchen, slammed into me with all the force of a sucker punch.
Well . . . that was a first.
Friends, dates, girlfriends, acquaintances—whatever all those other women had been—had never said the T-word before, and definitely not where my business was concerned. Certainly, there had been no us in the picture. I had so many loose strings of business in my life at any given time, most of the women I dated didn't even try to catch up. They heard the word entrepreneur and dropped interest, or listened politely with a tight smile and glazed eyes that begged to be put out of their misery. When ideas flowed from me, they became anxious, even more bored, or convinced I had ADHD.
Stella's sexy little comment had either helped my confidence, or paralyzed it. At this point, I was just trying to stop my racing mind from reacting to her proximity and get back to the point at hand: saving Adventura.
Blinking, I jerked myself from those thoughts and spun to face her. After the shower, she'd changed into an oversized pair of sweatpants, a pair of fuzzy slippers, and an old shirt. A black jacket covered her arms from the chilly air through the windows. While I'd been lost in thought about my hands on her body again, she'd thrown her hair into a messy barrette that made my stomach do funny things.
The business-professional accountant, Marie, must have been a joke. Stella was all casual ease and smoky glances, like warm honey.
I prowled over to her again with another low growl. She laughed as I buried my face in her neck. Then I stayed there, because it felt entirely too nice to be the one held.
“Say it'll be okay?” I whispered.
She put her arms around me, hands splayed across my back. “It's going to be fine, Mark. We'll make some dinner and get to work on it first thing tonight, okay? Once we have a plan, we'll get to work finding our second booking. Then we'll curl up, pretend to watch 007, and make out.”
My eyelashes brushed her neck when I closed my eyes and let out a long breath.
“I thought you'd never say it.”
The sound of her laugh bounced through the cabin as I pulled in another breath, all wound up in her. Apricots. Lavender. Peach. Each scent wound through my mind and settled the fireworks that exploded like warnings. Technically, her cabin lay empty tonight. She could slip back over and sleep on her own again once we cleaned it, but she hadn't mentioned it and I wasn't about to bring it up.
Stella was right. She had to be right. We'd figure something out.
Because if we didn't figure this out, Maverick would give up on it. He was a friend, but not a fool, and no fool held onto a bad investment.
Then I'd lose everything.
A pair of chattering teeth and a panicked voice woke me out of a dead sleep that night. I bolted up, startled further awake by a wash of bitter cold air.
“M-mark,” Stella whispered. “It's s-so c-cold in here.”
She crouched next to the couch where'd I'd racked out after our movie. My quilt was wrapped around her shoulders and a pair of thick socks on her feet. Her face was little more than shadows in the deep mountain night, illuminated by the dim light of stray appliances in the kitchen area. I rubbed my palm over my eyes, catching a glimpse of snow flurries just outside my window. The sleeping bag fell away from my chest when I sat up, and I almost swore.
It was freaking cold.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “Didn't know it was going to snow.”
A pathetic pillow of coals had died down in the hearth, almost as cold as the room. Stella grabbed some firewood and brought it over while I resurrected what I could from the ashes and tossed some dry kindling on top. Within a few minutes, baby flames crackled around a new, dry log. Stella sat with her back to the fire, eyes bleary with sleep. The tip of her nose appeared to be red.
“Sorry to wake you,” she murmured.
I scoffed. “Yes, I would have much preferred you freeze to death, Stella Marie. How dare you?”
The firelight caught her eyes in a sudden, startled expression that warmed into a smile. Was it because I said her full name? I'd tried to keep it to just Stella as she requested, but there was something easy about the way Stella Marie rolled off my tongue. The goofy grin cut me all the way through the chest as I stared at her, distracted from my intent until a pop startled me back to the moment. With a shake of my head, I turned back to the fire and tossed another log on. Stella shivered next to me while I built it up, huddling close to the warmth.
We sat there in silence, the smell of burnt wood around us, when Atticus’s eerie bark cut through the night. Stella sucked in a sharp breath, her eyes darting to the window. I put a hand on her shoulder.
“He's barking toward the lake,” I murmured, knowing she'd be worried about it being Joshua. “Not the road. Besides, that's a different bark. That's not a person bark. It’s a bit wilder.”
When I stood to peer out the window, there was nothing to see but deep shadows and the occasional flash of a snowflake right next to the window. But the resonance of Atticus's warning, like a low reverb, meant he barked away from us.
“Cougar?” she whispered.
I sincerely hoped not.
“Or he just got twitchy,” I said to play it off. Of course it was the cat. I strained to hear, wondering if the creepy, undeniable sound of a mountain lion interrupted Atticus's deep staccato barks. Nothing that I could tell for certain, nor likely to hear inside. Stella stood and came to my side, a wary glance outside. I wrapped an arm around her, grateful she hadn't gone to her own cabin.
“It's kind of creepy when you can't see anything outside,” she whispered.
I pressed a quick kiss to her forehead and she burrowed closer to me, blanket rustling. “Will Justin be okay?”
“The Gladiator? He's probably the one that'll scare the cat off. It'll take one look at him and scamper.”
Atticus had quieted for a moment. I thought about getting on the radio and calling Justin, but didn't want to increase her concern.
“I don't have many winter clothes,” she whispered suddenly, and I laughed. She sounded so small and tired while she stared at the falling snow.
“C'mon, Stella Marie. It's time for you to go back to bed.”
With a little coaxing, and the fire brightening the room again, she let me guide her to the ladder and nudge her upstairs. The attic felt even colder than the basement. The chimney crept through the attic against the far wall, so it would eventually warm up. But the two windows by my bed kept it chilly on winter nights.
My intention was to tuck her in and give her a lingering kiss to sweeten her dreams—and my own—but when she slipped back under the covers and grabbed the front of my shirt before I could back away, my resolve weakened.
“Stay, please?” she asked quietly. “I don't want anything to happen tonight, I just . . . I'm a little scared.”
The plea in her voice shattered me.
“Of course.”
Stella scooted closer to the wall while I stretched out next to her and arranged the covers over both of us. She'd already layered the bed with the extra blankets I'd stacked at the end just in case. How long had she been shivering up here, alone? She hesitated on the sheets next to me, stiff like a board.
I broke the hesitation in the air by pulling her close. With a relieved sigh, she molded her body into mine. I curled my arm around her back to close the space between us and ran the tip of my fingers in a circle on her shoulder. She splayed a hand on my chest, her hair spilling across my shoulder. The light scent of apricot still rose from her skin and curled in my nose.
“Thank you,” she whispered so softly that I wondered for a moment if I'd just imagined it. She tilted her head, tucked her face into my neck, and her breathing ev
ened out moments later.
For the next hour I stared at the ceiling, paralyzed to the same spot. My heart raced as the thought I fell in love with Stella Marie ran through my mind like a busy ticker tape over and over and over again. I didn't try to stop it, because it was true.
And I knew I couldn't tell her.
Not yet.
Because of whatever amazing thing we had going here, I wasn't willing to break with reality. And in reality, women ran away from me all the time.
But not this one.
This one would stay. So I grabbed my phone, logged into my dating app, navigated to my profile, and closed the account with great relish.
Mark Bailey was finally off the market.
And hopefully for good.
21
Stella
“Marcus Aurelis Bailey!”
The sound of a woman calling up the ladder jerked me out of sleep with a little cry of shock. A warm hand on my arm, followed by a groan, brought me the rest of the way. I blinked, half tangled in dreams with mountain lions and Joshua and Mark before memory served. Mark shuffled next to me, his body radiating heat despite the cool mountain air outside our little cocoon.
Right.
Weird night.
“Go away!” Mark shouted toward the direction of the stairs. He tucked his face back into my neck.
“Mark,” I whispered. “Who is that?”
“My annoying-as-crap little sister.”
My eyes flew open. “What?” I squeaked quietly. “Megan is here?”
“Apparently.”
His hard-as-a-rock body was curled at my back and warmer than a stove. My nose felt nippy with cold, but the rest of me was toasty. An obscure white glow seemed to fill the world outside.
“I haven't even seen my gladiator yet, Mark,” Megan called, sounding closer now. “I came to say hi to you first because Justin says you've been whining about how much attention you're not getting.”
Panic woke me the rest of the way. I tried to shove him off the bed before Megan came up here and found us like this. What a great introduction that would make. When I yanked the covers over my head, Mark chortled.