It wasn’t as bad as it was yesterday, but it was still…
The flannel shirt was soaked through. Plastered to me, every soft generous curve on full broadcast in wet fabric, exactly like the riverbank, except this time I wasn’t half-drowned and he wasn’t checking my pupils. The water was cold. The evidence of exactly how cold was visible from space.
An old reflex fired — the one that reached for a towel, a crossed arm, a joke to beat him to the punch line. Twenty years of training. Get ahead of the flinch before the flinch gets you.
He didn’t flinch. He looked at me like the hose had done him a personal favor.
He’d gone quiet. When I looked back up, he had come out from under the hood and was standing dead still with a rag forgotten in one hand. He was looking at me the way I’d caught him almost-looking since the river — except he’d stopped hiding it. Heat, open and unapologetic, moving down me slow and coming back up slower, stopping everywhere the wet fabric clung. My nipples… sweet heaven help me, my nipples were tight under the flannel, poking against the wet flannel like nobody’s business and a sweet ache set up shop low in my body and made it known it wasn’t leaving.
He crossed the yard. Took the hose out of my hand. Shut the nozzle off. Stood there, one foot of heated summer air between us, close enough that I could see his pulse in his throat. He reached out and slid a strand of dripping hair off my cheek with one finger, and hooked it behind my ear, letting his knuckles trail down the side of my neck on the way back. Those fingers didn’t stop at my neck. They kept going, tracing my collarbone where the wet flannel gapped, one knuckle dragging slowly downward.
“Drenched again,” I managed. “The water in this state has a vendetta.”
“I’m starting to think the water is on my side.” His voice had dropped into some register that bypassed my ears entirely and reported straight to my girlie parts. His thumb was resting at the hinge of my jaw. His eyes were on my mouth.
“Garrick.”
His hand slid up and cupped my jaw — huge and warm and careful, so careful for so big of a man. He looked at me for onelong second, a second with a question in it, and whatever my face answered must have been yes in every language, because then he kissed me.
And oh.
This was not a first kiss. First kisses are polite. First kisses are handshakes. This was a man kissing me like he’d been resisting since the river and had an unholy number of things to make up for. His fingers slid back into my wet hair and he closed his hand around the nape of my neck, tilting my head exactly where he wanted it. His beard was soft against my chin, his tongue sweeping into my mouth without asking permission. I made a sound into his mouth that I’d deny to my grave and hauled myself into him by the front of his shirt and kissed him back with everything I’d been saving without realizing I’d been saving it.
He pulled me in. Or I climbed. Later accounts would differ. All I know is his arm came around me and gathered me flush against him, soaked cotton and all, my softness pressed to the solid furnace of his chest, and he gripped a handful of my hip. No hesitation, no polite hover, fingers flexing in like he’d been thinking about exactly that handful since the river — and hauled me up onto my toes, and I felt precisely how mutual this situation was. All of it. All of him, hard against my stomach, and enormous, because of course, of course, the man was built to scale, and the whimper that got loose from me at that discovery was frankly nobody’s business.
Men before him had touched my body like a negotiation — hands hovering, editing, choosing the flattering angles. Garrick grabbed what was actually there, owning it. Owning me.
His mouth left mine and went to my jaw. My throat. The cold water on my skin felt like it turned to steam wherever his lips landed, and I tipped my head back and hung onto hisshoulders and said something. Possibly his name. Possibly a religious statement.
“Amy.” Against my throat. Gravel all the way through.
“If you say something responsible right now,” I said against his mouth, “I will drown myself in the garden on principle.”
He pulled back far enough to look at me — wet, wrecked, my hands still full of his shirt. Whatever he saw gave him his answer. He bent, and the world tilted as he picked me up again.
He carried me toward the cabin. Not hurried. The same way he’d chopped the wood this morning. Set, swing, split. The screen door was already in his hand when I recovered enough to be myself.
“You know,” I said, looping my arms around his neck, “at some point we should try getting me wet, umm, the traditional way.”
The sound he made was half growl and half laugh, and it was the hottest thing I’d heard in my adult life.
The screen door banged shut behind us.
CHAPTER SIX
GARRICK
The screen door banged shut behind us, and the sound of it might as well have been a starting gun.
It had been almost two days. Two days of watching her mouth move and thinking about it doing other things. Making other sounds. Two days of her in my clothes, on my couch. In my bed.
Under my damn skin.
All those hours of holding a line I’d drawn for good reasons that I could no longer name a single one of, because Amy was in my arms, soaked through and laughing against my jaw, and she’d just told me to get her wet the traditional way.
Damn the flirty minx.
I was done being careful.
