“It’s like a whole other world out here.”
He let out a deep breath. Maybe that was it. It was the ranch and the stars that had gotten to him, not the woman beside him who he couldn’t stop thinking about. “I can’t disagree.”
“A first for us,” she said with a laugh. “Come on.”
They walked back to the cabin under those endless stars, anticipation wrapped around them like a blanket. Once there, Hadley hurried up the steps to the front porch and started looking around the window, testing it to see if it was open. The light spilling out from it was enough that it outlined her, giving him a perfect view of her every curve. She was hot enough to make a drowning man thirsty, and he wasn’t even close to going under the water.
“Checking to see if Lightning is lurking?” he asked, trying—and failing—not to notice the way her ass looked in her jeans.
She shook her head. “Trying to figure out how he got in.”
“The door was closed.” He’d opened it himself, and the latch had definitely been engaged.
“And the front window is shut tight.” She twisted up her mouth and drummed her fingertips on the window frame. “I mean, they can get through even if it’s only open a little, but that’s not the case here.”
Realization smacked him across both cheeks, and he let out a groan. “Lightning could get in through a window?”
She turned, her eyes narrowing. “What did you do, Will?”
He gave her his most charming smile, the one that usually left women a little dazed. Hadley just lifted an eyebrow in a silent demand for the truth.
He braced himself. “I might have left the window in the bedroom open when I changed in there yesterday.”
She let out a groan and hurried inside. Because there wasn’t another choice, he followed behind and caught up to her just inside the bedroom. What had been slightly organized chaos was now a raging disaster. Boxes were overturned. Tools were scattered all over the floor. Claw marks were scratched into the wood. A can of paint balanced precariously on the edge of a workbench.
“Okay, I’m realizing now that I should have shut the window,” he said, each word coming out as rusty as a person would expect, considering he rarely, if ever, admitted to fucking up or apologizing. “I’m sorry.”
She looked so shocked at his admission of being wrong that for a second she just stared at him wide-eyed before coming back to herself. “Out here, if you leave the windows open, something will come wandering in.”
He nodded. “Duly noted.”
Some kind of weird truce being silently agreed to, they went back into the living room—all the more spacious now that the chair, also known as the extra bed, was gone. Shit. What in the hell were they going to do now? Sleeping in the bed with her was not an option. Last night had nearly killed him. A man wasn’t supposed to have a hard-on for as long as he had, trying to fall asleep next to her. At one point she’d rolled over and snuggled up next to him, twisting one leg around his. He’d almost come in his underwear. Going through that again would be agony.
“I’ll take the floor,” he said, glancing down at the hardwood that looked like it might put him in traction.
She shook her head. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Are you sure?” Did that sound hopeful? It shouldn’t. It couldn’t. Aw fuck, he was so screwed.
“If you don’t get any sleep and we end up losing Monopoly tomorrow night, PawPaw will kill me, so this is a better alternative.” She took off one of the couch cushions and set it down on the floor where the chair had been as she began to make up their bed. Their bed. “I’ll try my best not to disturb you with my snoring.”
Yeah. Snoring. That was pretty much the least of his worries when it came to sharing a bed with Hadley.
…
Hadley stared up at the ceiling, more awake than she’d been before she’d crawled under the blanket and then tossed it off before she melted. Lying down next to Will was like cuddling with a space heater set on inferno, even though he was wearing only a pair of low-hanging basketball shorts. She would have thought that it would help when he flung off the covers almost as soon as he’d gotten into bed, making a little blanket mountain between them.
It hadn’t.
And the fact that there was just enough light from the full moon coming in through the window to give her a good view of almost every part of him she hadn’t gotten to look her fill of last night—which was pretty much all of him—wasn’t helping. Thank God her sense of self-preservation saved her from staring.
Instead, she pulled the blanket back over her and just baked under it with one foot uncovered and the rest of her roasting as she noticed everything about Will, from the steady cadence of his deep breaths to the way he was only inches from her, temptingly close. Not that she was thinking about it. “Obsessing” would be more correct, which was why she hadn’t been able to close her eyes for longer than a few seconds.
If being ultra-aware of him while staring at the ceiling was bad, having her dirty mind fill in the blanks when she closed her eyes was even worse.
“Do you think that crack on the ceiling means it’s going to fall in on us?” he asked, his voice a low rumble in the dark.
Her pulse picked up as her body, already way too attuned to him, buzzed with anticipation, and she took in a shaky breath. Okay, nothing to do now that she’d been busted but play it out. “Probably not but, if it did, we’d have a great view of the stars.”
“They really are something.” He rolled over—the move making the middle of the bed dip toward him—and propped his head up on his hand. “Don’t you miss seeing them in Harbor City?”
Even if she wasn’t doing everything she could at the moment to fight gravity and roll into him, she wouldn’t have been sure how to answer that. When it came to home and family, things were always mixed-up and messy.
“Looking up at all those stars used to make me so frustrated,” she said, turning to face him, mirroring his pose. “It was like I could see there was so much more than just this ranch, but it was so far away that I couldn’t ever be a part of it.”
That always-on-the-outside feeling lingered even all these years later, like a cold that she just couldn’t quit. That’s why she fought so hard to make her place in Harbor City, to prove she belonged there.
For the most part, it worked, but there were always exceptions, people who pointed out every single thing about her that still screamed country despite her attempts to hide them—one of whom was lying next to her in the dark.
“That’s why I was so determined to move to Harbor City, but even there I’m still someone who’s an outsider, different, other…and people aren’t afraid to let me know.”
Wow. She would not have put “confessing her biggest insecurities to her nemesis” on her bingo card for weird things that would happen during her sister’s wedding week.
“I’m guessing I’m on that list,” he said, giving her an apologetic smile that in this light looked genuine. “I admit it, I can be an asshole, but I have my reasons.”
“Because of Mia.” It wasn’t a question. He’d covered it up well enough at dinner the other night, but an ex-fiancée would sting even for someone like Will Holt. “What happened?” The question popped out before she realized it was bubbling up inside her. “Wait!” She reached out, her hand brushing his chest before she pulled it away, fingers tingling. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s not like we’re friends.”
“Just two people in the foxhole together,” he said with a wry chuckle.
“Yeah,” she said. “Something like that.”
Something like a whole lot of losing my mind.
She rolled onto her back, wondering if it was socially acceptable to pull the covers over her head and scream silently. Not only did she not need to be in his business, she didn’t want to be in his business. She wasn’t going to be fooled by fake cowboy Will, who she happened to have had sex with in PawPaw’s bathroom! Oh God, she was never going to be able to use that bathroom again. Good thing she only visited a few times a year.
You. Are. So. Naive.
She had no clue how to break the awkward, heavy silence that enveloped them, punctuated only by the creepy coyote calls that sounded like babies crying for help, so she opted for staring at the ceiling. Maybe she’d get lucky and a chunk of plaster would come crumbling down and put her out of her misery.
“She refused to sign the prenup after telling me she was pregnant—which I found out later she most definitely was not,” Will said, his voice an unexpected boom in the dark. “That wouldn’t have been a big deal, but she let it slip that this was basically going to be an arranged marriage anyway, so she should get one thing out of it. Turns out our engagement was a scheme cooked up by her family and my grandmother as some kind of melding of two old-money Harbor City families—only one of whom still had cash—and all the relevant parties knew it for what it was except, of course, me.” He grimaced and went quiet for a second, working his jaw back and forth as if he were chewing on the distasteful realization that he’d ever believed it. “I thought the whole thing was real.”