AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Don’t you need to be monitoring things?”
Her concern brings me to a stop, and I tug her up against me. “You’ve been here for all of thirty minutes, and you’re already worried about how I operate my business…”
“Shit.” She winces. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to overstep.”
I grip her chin and tilt it up. “I’m just messing with you. I appreciate the concern, but I have a really good staff who knows exactly what to do. They don’t need me looking over their shoulder all the time. I’d much rather get to that unfinished business we have.”
Her cheeks pinken even more than they already were from the July heat—and hopefully something else.
If seeing me affected her even half as much as me seeing her did today, it means all these years of wondering what could have been might have all been leading up to something other than nights spent with my cock in my hand, thinking about the one who got away.
I couldn’t help but catch her watching me, feel her eyes on me the moment she stepped up to the fence and started observing the competition. From the moment I heard she was back in town, I’d hoped she’d show up, but I wasn’t about to go chasing her.
It appears I didn’t have to.
And that brings a grin to my lips as I brush my thumb across hers, then step back before I do something publicly I definitely shouldn’t. Like kiss the ever-loving fuck out of her. “Come on.”
She lets me lead her away from the competition grounds and down the cobblestone path into the thick trees. “This was where the old bonfire pit was, right?”
“Yep.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
I grin at her. “You’ll see.”
The shade from the massive trees creating an arch over us helps shade the hot summer sun, but it can’t cool me off—not having my hand wrapped around this woman’s after so long.
We make it to the end of the path and step out into what used to be my little sanctuary growing up, where all the kids from high school would come to gather on Friday and Saturday nights for bonfires to hang out and drink and do things we absolutely should not have been.
But that is long gone.
Raelynn pulls to a stop, her eyes wide as she takes in what occupies the small clearing now. “Where did this come from?”
The log cabin sits directly in the middle, surrounded by towering firs and maples. A picturesque little postcard hidden in the woods. Smack dab on the spot Rae kissed me and broke my heart.
“I built it.”
She gapes at me. “You built it?”
I nod and offer a slight shrug. “After high school, I went to work for my grandfather’s lumber business. Learned some construction skills.”
“I’d say so.”
We approach the cabin, and I reach out with my free hand and twist the knob, swinging open the door to my own private refuge.
Her dark brows rise. “You don’t lock it?”
I chuckle. “You’ve been living in Milwaukee for too long. I don’t need to lock the door to my cabin in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere.”
“Fair point.”
We step inside into the slightly cooled air, and she releases a sigh. “It feels good in here.”
“I put in air conditioning.”
She laughs. “Do you remember growing up how so many of us didn’t have it and how we’d all go hang out at Rocky’s house on those sweltering days because his parents did?”
I laugh as I close the door behind us and lean against it. “I do. And if we weren’t there, we were out here, enjoying those long summer nights…”
