“That was impressive, Irish!” Ashton calls out between breaths as he crosses the street toward us. Reagan looks up at him in surprise—as if she hadn’t noticed him running this way. I watch as her eyes drop slightly and widen. Exactly. How on earth could you not have noticed that running down the street, Reagan! She fixes me with a knowing stare, telling me that her dirty little sex-in-the-library mind has connected the dots that led to my tumble. “Hi, Ashton,” she offers with a playful lilt, still looking at me.
He gives her a quick nod before crouching down on one knee. While he inspects my ankle, I listen to his ragged pants and swallow the sudden pooling saliva in my mouth. How is there pooling saliva in my mouth? A minute ago I was parched! The pressure from his fingers, though gentle, makes me flinch, bringing me back to reality.
“Can you stand?” he asks, those gorgeous brown eyes full of concern.
“I don’t know,” I mumble, and struggle to get to my feet. His hands are at my waist in an instant to help me. It’s immediately obvious that I’m not going to be jogging or even walking home. “I think it’s sprained.” I’ve sprained my ankle enough times to know the feeling.
“I’m calling Grant,” Reagan announces, holding up her phone.
Suddenly I’m off the ground, cradled in Ashton’s strong arms, and he’s walking down the street, his hands somehow searing my skin through my clothes. “I’m not standing out here in the rain, waiting for Cleaver to show up,” Ashton throws back.
“Where are we going?” I ask, knowing that our dorm is a mile back in the opposite direction.
Focusing straight ahead, he murmurs, “I’m taking you back to my place, Irish.” By his crooked lip, I know that the innuendo is intentional. But it quickly slides away and he murmurs in a softer tone, “Put your arm around my shoulder. It’ll make this easier.”
I obediently lift my arm and drape it around the back of Ashton’s neck, resting my hand on his shoulder, my thumb settling next to a tear in his collar. I can feel his muscles strain under my weight. I wonder how long they can hold me.
Reagan must too because she runs up beside us to exclaim, “It’s far, though!”
“Half a mile, tops. Go.” He jerks his chin forward and then winks at her. “You don’t want Grant seeing that ass get fat again, do you?”
Mentioning the legendary fat ass is motivation enough. Sticking her tongue out at him and shooting me a pointed look, she takes off down the street at an even faster speed than before. Leaving me alone with Ashton.
“Sorry about the sweat, Irish. You caught me in the middle of a long run,” he murmurs, brown eyes darting to me before shifting back to the road.
“That’s okay. I don’t mind,” I say, my voice cracking. And I don’t, I realize, even though his body is drenched head to toe. I’m not sure if it’s from rain or sweat. His hair is plastered to his head and face, but it still manages to wisp out at the ends in that sexy way. I see a droplet of water running down his cheek and I feel the urge to reach up and wipe it away but I’m not sure if that’s too intimate, so I don’t. But my heart still starts pounding harder than it ever was while I was running.
“Stop staring, Irish.”
“I wasn’t.” I turn to look down the street, my cheeks burning, embarrassed to be caught. Yet again.
He jostles my shoulders slightly as he adjusts his grip.
“Do you need to put me down?”
He smirks. “Eight years of rowing makes carrying you pretty easy, Irish.”
“I guess.” Eight years. That definitely explains his ridiculously fit upper body. “You must really enjoy it.”
With a sigh, he murmurs, “Yeah, it’s relaxing, being out on the water, focused on an end goal. It’s easy to shut everything else out.”
Ashton’s head jerks to the side. I see another raindrop running along his cheek and realize that he’s trying to shake if off since he can’t brush it away.
“Here,” I murmur, reaching up to help him. Dark eyes flash to me with a scowl and my hand instantly recoils. I must have misread that. I shouldn’t have . . . But he’s not scowling at me, I soon recognize. He’s scowling at the nasty red scrape across my palm that I earned with my fall. Distracted by my ankle and by Ashton, I had forgotten about it.
“You should really think about never running again, Irish,” he mutters.
“And you should think about wearing more clothes while you run,” I snap back, my anger flaring without warning, followed quickly by heat crawling up to my hairline.
“And why is that, Irish?”
Running my tongue over my teeth to buy myself time, I decide to ignore his question. “I could have waited for Grant.”
“And died from pneumonia,” he retorts in exasperation, adjusting his grip once again. The movement shakes my leg, which shakes my foot, which shoots a pain up my leg. But I fight the urge to wince because I don’t want to make him feel bad.
Ashton settles into a quiet, fast-paced walk with his eyes straight ahead, and so I assume all conversation is over.
“I’m sorry about your parents.” It’s so quiet I almost miss it.
I peek at him from the corner of my eye to see him staring straight ahead, his face a mask.
I’m sorry about your mom, too.
It’s on the tip of my tongue but I bite it back. Reagan was eavesdropping, after all. She’s not supposed to know. I’m not supposed to know. Not unless he tells me.
So I don’t say anything. I simply nod and wait in silence for him to make the next move. He doesn’t, though. There’s another extremely long, awkward pause, where neither of us talks. Where Ashton stares straight ahead as he walks, and my eyes shift back and forth between his face and the turning colors of the trees. Where I soak up his body heat, acutely aware that I’m covered in his sweat. Where I feel his heartbeat and try to synchronize my own heartbeat against it. And then acknowledge that that is utterly ridiculous.
I can’t handle this silence.
“I can’t believe Reagan’s dad knew them,” I say casually, adding, “and that he recognized my mother in me. I didn’t know that we looked that much alike.”
Ashton’s brow furrows deeply. “You remember what she looks like, don’t you?”
“Yeah. But my parents lost all of their childhood and college pictures in a flood one year, so I never got to see her at the age I am now.”
I sense my fingertips rubbing across warm skin and realize that at some point in my reverie, my hand staged a mutiny against my common sense and slid under the collar of Ashton’s shirt. I watch my fingers still drawing little circles as if of their own free will. And, seeing as I’m feeling all kinds of brave today and seeing as it’s a fairly innocuous question that a person who didn’t know the answer would ask, I decide to ask it, keeping my voice casual and light. “What about your parents?”
There’s a pause. “What about them?” He tries to sound bored but by the way his arms constrict around me, the way the muscles in his neck spasm, I know immediately that I’ve hit a nerve.
“I don’t know . . .” Turning to look out on the road, I murmur casually, “Tell me about them.”
“There’s not much to tell.” The bored tone has switched to annoyed. “Why? What has Reagan heard?”