I hadn’t, and I hated that she was pointing it out.
“Next time, just wear a life jacket and don’t drop your camera in the water, okay? Not like your cat here is going to save you.”
She reached over and petted Kyle’s wet head. The cat leaned into her touch.
I wasn’t about to admit I was jealous of the cat… because I wasn’t. But the cat looked pretty pleased with himself as she ran her hand over his wet ears.
I pushed myself to my feet, more stressed than when I’d left work. At least there was some structure at work.
“Where are you going?” she asked, looking up at me, squinting into the sun again.
I looked down at her for a second too long. Her long limbs, the wrinkle in her brow, that teeny little bikini… and then tore my gaze away.
“I’m going to get out of these wet jeans. And then I’m going to start my vacation.”
Chapter Two
Skye
Iwatched Aaron stomp away, water dripping from his jeans and laughed to myself.
He was one of those people.
Uptight to the point it was going to kill him one day. And the fact that I was exactly the opposite drove him nuts.
I was a travel blogger slash influencer slash ‘person who lived out of their van’. That my job didn’t come with a retirement fund was something that gave my brother hives and Aaron probably felt the same.
I had been enjoying the quiet up here, just me and Kyle, but as he walked away, I couldn’t fight the urge to follow.
He was incredibly fun to tease, and having him here had given me an idea.
I shoved my feet into my sandy shoes, grabbed Kyle under my arm and ran after him, catching up as he was getting to the front door of his cabin.
“So what do you plan on doing while you’re up here?”
“Relaxing and avoiding you,” he said over his shoulder.
He fumbled to pull a set of keys from his wet jeans pocket, then took half a dozen tries to get the key in the lock.
“Damn, you really are uptight,” I said. watching him struggle.
Struggling didn’t suit him.
He was someone who was capable in most things he did. He could change a tire the right way, find someone lost in the woods. He knew all those fancy survival tricks. He told me I should know them too since I traveled alone.
I had actually taken his advice, not that he knew that. He seemed to think I lived up to my name, all over the place and constantly changing.
But now he was struggling with just getting this door open and I kind of liked the idea that it was me who had him all riled up.
Finally, he got the door open and pushed into the cabin. I followed behind him, dragging sand in with me. I set Kyle down on the wooden table in the middle of the room and started taking off his life jacket.
Aaron had gone right back out to his truck to grab something and returned a moment later with a cooler in his arms. His biceps strained as he held it, and I mentally mapped their sheer size.
Before Aaron started working for search and rescue with my brother, Cliff, he had dabbled in amateur MMA fighting as well as bodybuilding.
He still looked the part.
Not only did he have huge muscles, but the cauliflower ears and scars that showed he’d taken hits and walked away to tell the tale.
