by Amelia Wilde
Only it’s not an anger issue. It’s a Sam issue. It’s a loss issue. It’s everything that’s seething in my gut right now. When I feel like this, it reminds me of hearing the gunshot ring out at the hunting camp, seeing my dad fall, the sick, helpless feeling when I couldn’t find his cell phone in any of the pockets in his vest, while he bled out in front of me because I didn’t have the presence of mind to find a fucking phone and dial 9-1-1. I feel that out of control now. I feel like I’m watching something slip through my fingers, and all I’m trying to do is protect it.
Protect her.
Inside, I slam the door behind me and stalk into the living room, dropping heavily onto the couch.
What the fuck was I thinking, dropping her off like that?
I wasn’t thinking. That’s the truth of the fucking matter. I was just reacting to the sinking feeling in the pit of my gut, like driving her back to my house was the end of everything instead of the beginning.
It can’t end like this, her fuming at me in a parking lot and avoiding me at the plant for the rest of her stay. It can’t.
It already ended badly enough once, and we’re just starting to get through it. I can’t waste a chance like this.
I fish my phone out of my pocket and open the text conversation we started earlier. It was deep as hell.
I’m downstairs
Coming!
Hot.
I have to say something. I can’t just leave it like this, a cold silence between us like there has been for so many years. Then my only chance of fixing this is to run into her at Cerberus, and it’s easy enough to avoid the employee parking lot in the back when you’re only visiting the front office.
I meant it, if that makes me look like less of an asshole
It’s like Sam is sitting there, staring at her phone in the Holiday Inn Express, because there’s hardly any delay before she replies.
It’s not that you look like an asshole. It’s that you’re acting like an asshole.
Damn, that girl can bring a smile to my face.
I’m serious. I don’t want to fuck things up between us.
By literally not screwing me?
Are you just looking for a quickie?
A little pause.
No. I wanted more than a quickie.
I did too.
And you drove away because…?
I type the words I couldn’t say to her outside the hotel.
I didn’t want to sleep with you and have it be the end.
How do you know it was going to be the end?
I just had a feeling.
I had one too. A feeling like…we should sleep together.
The Sam I met in the hallway that first day would never have the guts to say these things, but the time we’ve spent together since then have awakened a spark of the old confidence I remember in her from those first college days, when she was a fireball that I was lucky to be near in the first place. The anger is dissipating, fading into thin air, and it’s replaced with an aching need for her.
It’s not too late.
A beat goes by, then two.
Oh? Isn’t it?
Not for me. What about you?
I don’t know. Sex after the first date?
Really?!
Really. It’s not seemly for a woman of my status.
So what are you saying?
I’m saying, let’s go on a second date.
More like…two hundred and second.
Who’s counting?
Me.
Fine. Where at?
You pick the place, tough guy.
I’ve already taken her to the brewing company, and that didn’t end well. But now my heart is racing with possibility. I almost want to suggest that we just meet up in her hotel room right now. I’d drive back, if that’s what she wanted.
No. I shake my head, even though there’s nobody around to see it. We both need to cool off, to put things in perspective, before we go racing into…whatever this is. Even if I want to dive in headfirst right the hell now.
I know a place.
When?
I run through my schedule in my head.
Wednesday, when you’re done with work.
Okay. What should I wear?
Whatever you’d wear for a hike in the woods.
Is “hike in the woods” a euphemism?
I smile before I send it.
Guess you’ll find out…
Chapter Nineteen
Samantha
“That’s what you wear for hiking in the woods?”
Beck’s voice has a smile in it. I try to make my turn as graceful as possible, because I’ve been shifting my weight back and forth next to a decrepit wooden bench near the trailhead at the cleverly named Lockton Woods Natural Area.
“Hi. And yeah, this is what I wear.” The smile on his face is a thousand times more smoldering than it sounded, and a thousand times sweeter. He’s a living contradiction. I give him one right back, and the rough edges from dinner smooth themselves out a little bit more.
I don’t tell him that I agonized like an idiot over this outfit for half an hour last night, going between black capris or black capris with a pink stripe down the side that match the pink tank that’s perfect for the warm September weather. I couldn’t decide if the pink stripe made me look like I was obsessed with matching workout outfits, but thirty minutes later, with both the pairs of capris laid out on my bed, I could no longer deny that I still have a ridiculous crush on Beck Taylor and it’s going straight to my head.
I wore the ones with pink stripes, matching be damned. That’s why I bought them anyway, and as a grown woman I can wear coordinated workout wear if I want to.
Beck, of course, is not wearing anything remotely this coordinated. In fact, he’s wearing the jeans he’s usually wearing and a fitted hunter green t-shirt that sets off his biceps in a way that makes me think I’ll never get over those arms.
He doesn’t laugh. “Nice.”
“It is nice. Thank you.”
“You ready to hike?”
“Yes. I’m…ready to hike.”
He steps closer to me, so close I think he might lean in for a kiss, but then sidesteps me and starts to head down the main trail.
I fall in beside him, the golden afternoon sun filtering through the leaves on the trees.
“The leaves are changing.”
“Yeah. It’s that time of year.”
He turns down a side trail, this one narrower, and I have to walk a little closer to him. I keep my eyes on the ground ahead of us, watching for the thick, nasty roots that are always waiting to grab you by the shoe and body slam you to the ground in front of the man you might be a little bit in love with.
The silence runs thick between us, and I’m not entirely sure Beck is going to break it. So I do.
“I’ve always hated trails.”
Beck laughs out loud, the sound rich and smooth. “But you’re hiking right now.”
“I don’t mind hiking. Running—that’s what I hate.”
“Oh, yeah. You’re asking for a broken ankle if you run on these trails. I see idiots out here all the time limping back to their cars.”
“You do not.”
“I really do.”
“How often do you come here?”
“A few days every week, less if we’re working overtime.”
“Do you get lots of extra hours?”
“Me? Yeah.” Beck cuts his gaze over to me, a sarcastic smile playing over his lips. “I’m a real standout at Cerberus.”
I laugh, but it reminds me that he’s here, doing this, when he could be doing anything else. I turn the thought over in my head for a long moment, our footfalls quiet on the trail, before I ask the question.
“Do you ever think about going anywhere else?”
His sigh is so quick, so quiet, that I almost miss it. “No.”
“Not ever?”
Beck starts walking a little faster, and I match his pace. His eyes ar
e fixed on the trail ahead of us. “Sometimes I think about whether I’d deserve more out of this if I hadn’t…” He presses his lips together in a thin line. “This is what I’m cut out for.”
“You don’t have to play dumb with me, Beck,” I say, making my tone as light as possible.
He lets out a barking laugh. “I wish I was that stupid. Life would be simpler.”
“You’ve seriously never thought about getting a job in your field?”
“What’s my field, fucking up people’s lives?”
I shake my head, giving him a look. “You have a degree in—what is it, journalism?”
Beck nods, his gaze far away. “Yes. I do have a degree in journalism.”
Things are falling into place, little pieces of the truth clicking their edges together in my mind like a puzzle that I haven’t been able to solve since I got back to Lockton. “And you don’t think you deserve a career in journalism.”
“Not after what happened.”
I can’t let this go on any longer. I was pretty clear at dinner, but maybe—
I reach out and catch Beck by the elbow, stopping him in the middle of the trail and turning to face him. “You mean what happened between us, don’t you?”
He looks me straight in the eye, and I see the wounded heart behind the muscles and the tough talk. “What happened with my dad. What happened with you.”
“Your dad died in a hunting accident, Beck. That’s not—”
He clenches his jaw. “My dad died because I couldn’t think it through fast enough to take the cell phone out of his pocket and dial 9-1-1.”
My stomach turns over. “I thought you said—” We haven’t talked about this much—he hates to talk about it—but this detail has never come up before.
“Who wants to admit that they’re responsible for—” He straightens up, running a hand through his hair. “What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?”
I step back a little, but even though he’s irritated, his eyes are making the core of me go hot and liquid. “No. I just—I wanted to talk. I want to understand everything that’s happened to you since we—since we broke up.”
“Nothing good. That’s it, Sam. Nothing good.”
The line of his jaw, the muscles of his arms flexing underneath his shirt—it all makes me wish we were back in my hotel room. When I speak, my voice comes out as a whisper. “This is good.”
Beck closes the space between us. “This is good?”
“Running into you again.”
“How the hell is this good?”
I swallow hard. “Aren’t you—aren’t you glad we’re here right now?”
Something changes in his face, a spark coming into his eyes. “Right now, I wish I was somewhere…private, where I could end this conversation with something a little more…”
This is us. This is how it’s always been, running from serious to sheer, blazing heat in an instant. My breath comes hard in my chest. But Beck’s not the only one who can kick things into a higher gear.
“Something more like…this?”
Chapter Twenty
Beckett
Sam wraps her hands around the back of my neck, pulling me down toward those hot, full lips. I don’t know what the hell was going on in that conversation—I don’t know why she wants to keep going back to that place, keep going back to the past, keep digging it out of me like she’s waiting for me to give her an answer to a question she’s not willing to ask.
But when my lips meet hers, none of that matters.
This pattern is so familiar it’s like being at home in my parents’ house in Lockton, before my dad died, before everything was a mess. Sam has always been like this. She’ll get intense about some topic, needling it to death, and something about it turns her on.
She presses her body against mine, the softness of her breasts separated from my chest by only a few thin layers of clothing. My hands go to the gentle curve of her waist. She’s more defined than she was back in college—more of a woman—and I fucking love it. I always thought she was damn perfect. She still is.
I want to get lost in her, in the sweet taste of her, in the scent of her hair, in the tiny moans escaping into my mouth—but something is nagging at me, tugging at my elbow, keeping me on the surface level.
It takes everything I have to break the kiss.
“What do I have to say?”
Sam blinks at me, her hands still on my neck. “About what?”
“About what happened. What do I have to say to put it behind us?”
She bites her lip, her eyes narrowing. “It’s—” She takes a big breath in, one that hitches on the intake. “It’s behind me, Beck. But it doesn’t seem like it’s behind you.”
“No?”
“No.” Sam shrugs a little, her big blue eyes fixed on mine. “You’re in Lockton, working in a factory, and from everything you’ve said…it seems like you’re doing this to make up for what happened. But you don’t have to do that. You don’t.”
I can feel my jaw tightening. This is the opposite direction from where I wanted to go. Instead of getting lost, I’m under the harsh spotlight of Sam’s judgment.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone else, okay?” There’s an edge to my voice that I can’t leave behind. “And this—being here, working at Cerberus—this is the best way to do that.”
Sam shakes her head. “It’s not.”
“Okay. I hear you. Is that what you want me to say?”
“Beck—”
“Is it? Just tell me, so we can go back to what we were doing before.”
“Living hours apart and never seeing each other?”
“No. This.”
I lean down and kiss her again, my grip tightening around her waist, and her body melts in my hands, muscles going soft and pliant. She parts her lips, letting my tongue in, and I don’t fucking care about the consequences. I don’t care what happens. I have to get her somewhere alone, somewhere we won’t be interrupted, so we can take this to its logical conclusion.
Only in order to do that, I have to take my mouth off hers, and I don’t want to do that. I do not fucking want to do that.
It’s Sam who breaks the kiss, just when I’m about to tear the tank top from her shoulders right here in the middle of the trail.
“I never wanted you to go,” she cries, and for the first time I see that there are tears in her eyes, threatening at the corners. “What happened—it was terrible, it was awful. But being away from you has been worse. It’s been a thousand times worse.”
“I didn’t want to go, either.”
Those are the magic words, the ones she’s been searching for, because Sam bursts into tears. It’s the sexiest cry I’ve ever seen on anyone, but she hides it as quickly as she can, burying her face into my shoulder.
I wrap her in my arms, pulling her in, murmuring comforting words into her ear. She shudders in the embrace, silencing her sobs between lips pressed into a thin line, and something cracks wide open in my chest. What the fuck are we doing, playing around like this? Unless we’re going to be together, this is just needless torture.
But now isn’t the time to talk about that.
“Let’s go.”
Sam straightens up, wiping at her eyes. “Go where?”
“To my place.”
“Do you mean…my hotel?”
“No. I mean, I want to take you back to my place. Right now.”
She laughs, her voice throaty with tears. “We have to be, I don’t know, a mile from your car. We can’t go right now.”
“How fast can you run?”
“Are you serious?”
“I’ve never been more serious in my damn life.”
“Faster than you.”
It takes me a full three seconds to register what Sam has said, and by then she’s already sprinting down the trail ahead of me, her blonde ponytail swinging behind her with the rhythm of her steps. She disappears around the first curve and that snaps me out of the delighted, fucking con
flicted haze I’m in.
“Sam! Wait!”
“Run faster!”
Her voice echoes through the trees, back along the trail, and my muscles fall in line, carrying me toward her as fast as my legs will carry me.
“You think I can’t catch you?”
Her laugh is a sweet cadence in my ears, and it spurs me onward, picking up the pace until I can see her again, that luscious ass working as she runs full-tilt along the trail back to the parking lot. When she hears my footsteps behind her, she runs faster, another laugh tearing from her throat, a wild sound, unrestrained by office hallways and lost years.
“Beck, stop!” She’s always hated being chased. I’ve seen home videos of her at age two or three, shrieking with terror at some cousin or other coming after her at even the slowest speeds.
“Never!” I cry, and it’s the truest thing I’ve ever said. “Never!”
Chapter Twenty-One
Samantha
I reach Beck’s car a fraction of a second before he does, and he comes to a sudden stop, one arm wrapping around my waist, both of us breathing hard. The adrenaline thrums in my veins, making me bounce up on my toes. I can’t stop laughing.
Beck can, but I think it’s only because he’s become focused on something else. He leans down to my neck and plants hot, wet kisses there, then licks at the glow that’s risen on my skin from the run back to the car.
“You taste so fucking good.”
I give him a half-hearted push, my back pressed against the passenger door, but I don’t really want him to let go. I just want to feel him hold on tighter.
Then one of his hands is at my jawline, holding my head in place so that he can kiss me, hard and fast and hot, so hard it feels like my lips might be bruised. His green eyes are lit with desire, and they bore into mine with a new intensity.