by Selena Scott
Something was off.
She pictured the fun, sexy vibe they’d had in the garage a few hours ago and was sucking her lip as she tried to figure out how to recreate it. Flash forward a few hours and she was on a pretty awkward date. Well, not that this was a date. But it was pretty awkward, whatever it was.
“This is weird,” she told him.
He finally looked at her and the side of his mouth quirked up a little bit.
“Why?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You know why.”
He nodded, eyeing her and leaning back against the couch. “Let’s watch a movie and eat ice cream.”
She blinked at him.
“I’ll even let you put your ice cube feet under my leg.”
He never let her do that. She was instantly grabbing her ice cream and scrambling back to get comfortable, sliding her feet under his warm thigh.
He laughed at her eagerness and started the movie.
He’d chosen Scream. She groaned. Even though she’d seen it a hundred times. All the jump scares still got her every time.
“You’re cruel,” she muttered, snuggling closer to him so that her knees were pressed up against his ribs.
“No,” he told her, dropping an arm around her shoulders. “I’m a genius.”
And just like that, she was comfortable again. She was even comfortable when, twenty minutes into the movie, Raph set their empty ice cream bowls aside and gently pulled her into his side. She was comfortable with her head on his shoulder and his hand in her hair, twisting a lock around and around.
Twenty minutes after that, he shifted them again so that Nat lay flat on his chest and he lay on his back, their legs laced together and her cheek on his sternum. The day caught up to her and Natalie turned her head away from the movie so that she could doze while he finished watching. His hand moved over her back in a long line up and down her spine.
An hour later, he woke her up.
“Nat.”
“Mmm. Yeah?” she blinked sleepily at him.
“You wanna hit the hay? The guest room is made up for you.”
She’d fallen into deep enough sleep that for a minute, she didn’t see anything past the normality of his statement. She’d fallen asleep on his couch a hundred times. Been offered his guest room a hundred times. But then he shifted and she remembered that she wasn’t just sleeping on his couch, she was sleeping on his body.
“Oh no,” she groaned, scrambling up and pulling her knees to her chin. “I fell asleep and we didn’t have sex.”
Raph laughed and hung his head, scraping a hand over his face. “Nat… that’s totally fine. To be honest, I kind of think we needed that, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that last night we just kind of catapulted ourselves into this brand-new world. Maybe we needed a night like this,” he gestured to the couch, “where we could combine all the old things we’ve always done with some of the new things we’re just starting to do.”
She looked at the couch and then at him. “You’re not irritated with me?”
“For falling asleep?” he looked confused and a little horrified. “Nat, you’ve been sleeping with the wrong guys if they’d get mad at you for falling asleep. It’s been a long day. We put a movie on. What else were you supposed to do?”
Ravish him?
Well, she’d failed at that. But she couldn’t help feeling like she’d really succeeded at something else. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something she was excited to try again.
CHAPTER TEN
“I can’t believe I’m married.” Sarah plunked down on Seth’s childhood bed, making Kaya jounce against the mattress.
Kaya, Sarah, and Nat were all piled into Seth and Raph’s old bedroom directly after the wedding ceremony. They were there to help Sarah change her outfit and fix her hair before the reception.
“Regretting it so soon?” Kaya asked, a shit-eating grin on her face.
Sarah laughed and flopped backwards. “Hardly. I just can’t believe it. Married. That’s, like, so grown up.”
“Sarah,” Nat said, reaching out for her friend’s hands and hauling her up. “You’ve won a silver medal in the Olympics, that’s pretty grown up, too. And don’t flop right now. You’re going to mess up your hair and wrinkle your dress.”
“I can wrinkle the skirt. I don’t care about that anymore.” She frowned down at the bottom half of her wedding dress.
Sarah had chosen to wear a rather athletic-looking ivory jumpsuit for her wedding dress and she looked stunning in it. However, to everyone’s surprise at the wedding dress shop, she’d also chosen a large, flouncy, tulle skirt to go over top of it for the actual ceremony. It had turned the jumpsuit into a ball gown and turned Sarah into a straight-up princess. She had waist-length, honey brown hair that tumbled in loose curls all down her back. Seth had been a goner from the moment she’d appeared at the end of the aisle. He hadn’t expected her to wear a dress and from the moment he saw her until the end of the ceremony, two streams of constant tears had leaked down his cheeks.
“You’re done being a princess?” Nat asked, adjusting her own royal blue bridesmaid jumpsuit that Sarah had picked out.
“More than. I just want to go back to being me.”
So, Nat and Kaya attacked the ribbons holding Sarah’s poofy skirt at her waist and when they’d fully pulled it away, there she stood in her halter style, tailored jumpsuit that tapered all the way down to the Nike high tops she wore underneath.
“Sarah!” Kaya laughed when she saw them.
“What?” Sarah shrugged. “I’m tall enough without heels and my Chucks didn’t have enough arch support for all the dancing I want to do. What do you guys think we should do with all my hair? I’m thinking we just put it in a bun.”
Kaya couldn’t help but laugh at Sarah’s irreverence and at Natalie’s nauseated expression.
“We’re not putting your hair in a messy bun for your wedding. At least let me give you a braid crown.”
Sarah shrugged and took a seat on the bed, waiting patiently for Natalie to fix her hair.
Kaya wandered to the window of the bedroom and looked down onto the backyard where the wedding had just happened. It had been beautiful and romantic and really freaking honest. That was one thing that Seth and Sarah always were. Honest.
Kaya wondered how Seth was capable of that kind of honesty considering how long he and his brothers had been forced to keep their shifter secret. She sighed. For both Seth and Raphael, their mandatory secrecy had seemed forced and unnatural.
For Jackson? Not so much.
She didn’t think she’d ever met a more closed-off and confusing man. Her mind flashed back to yesterday. To the moments in his bedroom.
Her palms began to sweat and she pushed her thoughts away. She didn’t mind thinking about Jackson theoretically; in fact, she did it all the time. But reflecting on actual moments with him got her blood pressure up. Made her sweat. Made her heart race. She didn’t think it was particularly good for her.
“All right!” Sarah bounced up from her seat on the bed, all smiles. “I’m ready!”
Sarah looked beautiful with all her hair up in a complicated braid crown. She looked toned and strong and brimming over with life and joy.
There was a knocking on the door. “I’m dying out here.”
Sarah grinned as Seth’s voice sounded through the door. She strode over and flung open the door. “Miss me?”
“I can’t believe you abandoned me to be with your girlfriends in the first twenty minutes of our marriage—holy God, you look beautiful.” Seth tugged her in for a back-bending kiss that had them both breathless when he set her back straight.
Natalie clapped her hands together. “It’s cocktail hour, people. And all your guests are going to want to mingle with you. Let’s give the people what they want.”
Natalie shooed the lovebirds out of the room and Kaya knew it was time to follow after. She took another
deep breath, shoving down her unexplainable melancholy, and left the room.
An hour and a half later, it was starting to get chilly. Which meant that it was time to start dancing. The caterers cleared all the guests’ dinner plates and the bartender was slinging drinks as fast as he could, all while making the most ridiculous eyes at Kaya.
He was attractive, she supposed. With his shaved blond head and bright blue eyes. He was a boarder bro, for sure. She recognized him as a bartender around town. And she’d seen him on the mountain a few times. She knew that at this point in October he was likely to quit his bartender jobs in Boulder and go to work at one of the ski resorts in order to get his maximum time in on the mountain.
She liked snowboarding as much as the next Coloradan, but there was something about the boarder bro culture that really turned her off. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She turned away from the bartender and caught sight of Jackson across the reception. He was holding a beer and pretending to listen to someone talk while he really scowled at something behind her.
She sighed. She’d just figured out why boarder bros turned her off.
Because she already had a type.
Apparently her type was scowly, loner freakazoids who got off on depriving themselves of anything enjoyable in life.
“You have to dance!” Sarah demanded of Kaya out of nowhere, making her jump.
“Um. But, no one is dancing yet.”
“Exactly. Right after our first dance, I want the wedding party out there dancing so that we can encourage everybody to cut a rug. ‘Kay?”
It was her wedding. And Kaya was one of her bridesmaids. So she brightly nodded, with a smile as fake as silicon. “Okay!”
But inside she was ‘oh shit’ing. Because it took her less than two seconds to do the mental math on that one. If it was the wedding party dancing, then that meant that Seth and Sarah were going to dance together, obviously. That left Raph and Nat and Kaya and… Jackson.
And after suffering through a wedding ceremony trying as hard as she possibly could not to stare at Jackson in a dark gray tailored suit, well, the thought of keeping her eyes to herself while he held her on a dance floor, it was way too much for her.
Unless she could convince Nat to dance with Jackson and she could dance with Raph. That’d be totally fine!
The first dance had begun, Sarah and Seth swaying in the middle of the dance floor they’d installed for the wedding in Elizabeth’s backyard. Kaya spared them a wistful glance, but not more than that because she was on a mission. Raph and Nat were on the other side of all the guests. She had to get all the way around the dance floor and to them before they stepped out onto the floor and she was left with no one to dance with but Jackson.
She was fifteen feet away from them when Raph, a huge grin on his face, grabbed Nat by the hand and twirled her onto the floor.
Kaya’s stomach plummeted. There went her last chance.
Wait! Bauer. She was pretty sure she could convince Bauer to circle the dance floor at least once with her. But no.
Sarah’s Aunt Lynn had grabbed Bauer by the hand and the two of them were awkwardly two-stepping down one edge of the floor. Elizabeth was dancing with her brother, Ed, who’d flown in from Jersey for the wedding.
Which left just Kaya and—
“Come on, then.”
Kaya blinked down at the wide-palmed hand that was extended in front of her. That hand was attached to a wrist and attached to a shoulder and attached to the body of a man whom she’d never purposefully touched before. Like, literally never.
Her eyes skittered up his tie and to his face which was not turned toward her. Jackson was still scowling into the distance at whatever he’d been scowling at before. Kaya followed his line of sight and saw that the person he was frowning at was the bartender whom she’d recognized earlier.
She put her hands on her hips. “Are you asking or telling?”
That had him turning to face her. He blinked. “We’re supposed to dance together.”
“Well, don’t look so happy about it, I’m worried you’ll burst a blood vessel.”
She frowned at his frown, her hands still on her hips. After a moment, he didn’t exactly smile, but something lightened in his expression. He wiggled his fingers at her. “Let’s dance, Kaya.”
It wasn’t exactly an invitation, but it was a good bit more friendly than ‘come on, then’, so she figured she’d take what she could get. She slapped her hand into his and tugged him out onto the dance floor, figuring it would be best to just get this over with.
But to her surprise, he tugged right back and she found herself whirling around and suddenly chest to chest with him. Jackson’s eyes were pinned studiously up in the air, away from her, but one of his arms snaked around her waist and the other hand held hers at elbow height.
She’d never danced like this before. It was old-fashioned and charming and completely and utterly throwing her off. She dropped her eyes from his face to his shoulder, which was directly in her eye line. Even with her heels on, she was still a head shorter than he was. She was moving awkwardly at first, and not breathing all that well, but then she felt his hand spread at the small of her back and he gently pressed either his fingers or the heel of his hand into her, guiding her in which direction to step. It didn’t take long for her to give in and let him lead.
They weren’t pressed up against one another but they might as well have been, considering how heated the air was between them. It was positively humming with electricity.
She pinned her eyes to his neck, thinking that was probably a safe place to look.
“You’re friends with Sid?”
She glanced up at him, saw he was looking down at her and they both immediately looked away.
“Who is Sid?”
It might have been her imagination, but she was pretty sure he relaxed just a bit at her words. “The bartender.”
“Oh. Yeah. I recognize him from around town and I’ve seen him on the mountain, I think at Eldora, or maybe Breckenridge, a few times. But I’ve never met him.”
“He’s staring at you.”
She had no idea what to say to that, so she just shrugged her shoulders.
“That happens to you all the time, doesn’t it?”
She just shrugged again and she felt him tense up once more. The song was getting close to the end and Kaya was torn between wanting it to end immediately so that she could wobble off to a table and catch her breath, and never wanting it to end.
Jackson was complicated for her. It was a little like dancing with Darth Vader. You definitely knew that nobody else was going to fuck with you while you were dancing with Darth Vader. But also, it was Darth Freaking Vader, so who knew if he was gonna toss you into space or whatever it was he did in those movies.
“Your hair looks different.”
“Are you a Star Wars fan?”
They spoke at the same time and once again blinked at each other and then immediately looked away.
“What?” he asked.
“Never mind. Yeah, it looks different because Natalie insisted on doing it. She said I couldn’t come to Seth’s wedding looking like I brushed my hair with a porcupine. That’s a direct quote.”
Again, that almost-smile came onto Jackson’s face. Her heart sped up and she knew, she just knew that this dancing moment was going to be one of those moments she wasn’t going to be able to think about without sweating. She was going to have to file it far away in a box called ‘never’ or else she just wouldn’t be able to go on with her life.
“I guess you do often look a little… messy.”
She shrugged again. “It took Nat an hour to get my hair all straight and flat. And I just don’t have that kind of time in my everyday life.”
“A busy woman.”
The word ‘woman’ seemed to rock through both of them. In fact, the moment that he said it, Jackson’s brows dipped together and he glared off into the distance again.
Kaya, for her
part, was still referred to as a girl as often as she was as a woman. She was only twenty-three. And she looked young, besides. But she had had no idea at all that Jackson thought of her as a woman. He’d always looked at her with such boredom and disdain that she automatically figured he’d firmly classified her as a silly girl who was occasionally allowed to crash his family dinners.
“I guess,” she cleared her throat, determined to be normal. “I’ve been working part-time as an administrative assistant but I’ve been busy applying for a nutritionist position.”
“Where?” His brows were furrowed, as if he already knew where she was going to say and didn’t like the answer.
“The Mason West clinic.”
His frown intensified. “That’s in the same complex as my veterinary clinic.”
She cleared her throat and refused to drop her gaze. “Yup. I noticed that.”
He apparently didn’t have anything else to say to that. But when she looked up, she noticed that he was scowling even harder in the direction of the bartender.
Kaya let her eyes drift as well and she saw, a few couples over, Raph and Nat boogying down. The two of them had always been able to cut a rug together. They both had great natural rhythm and often got lost in dance battles designed to make the other one laugh. But tonight there was something a bit different. They were still laughing and twirling and boogying as much as usual, but tonight it almost looked like they were flirting. Yeah. Even as she watched, Raph leaned down and whispered something in Natalie’s ear that had her simultaneously blushing and laughing. She whispered something back that made Raph’s gaze flare.
What the—
Kaya’s thoughts cut off when she felt, rather than heard, a low sort of growl deep in Jackson’s chest. It was a human sound, but it reminded her immediately of the wolf that lived within this man who held her in his arms. She followed his gaze and saw he was still staring bullets at the bartender.
“Is this Sid guy, like, a terrible person or something?”
Jackson transferred that scowl from Sid to her. “What? No. I don’t think so. I barely know him.”